A pleasing - albeit solid, rather than spectacular - conclusion to the first two-parter of Series 3. The pattern in the previous two series has been for the later two-parters in the season to be generally perceived by fans to be superior to the first - that was certainly my view - and I suspect that will prove the case this time round.

There was plenty to like about Evolution, particularly from the Daleks themselves and The Doctor, but not much to suggest it was anything out of the ordinary. I would stop short of calling it "predictable" but, if there was a disappointment in the adventure, it was a lack of the "wow" factor - there wasn't much there to take even the casual viewer by surprise.

However, what was on view was delivered extremely efficiently from script to screen, and made for another enjoyable watch to continue the high standard maintained by the season to date.

The episode began with the human Dalek Sec appreciating his new form in the sewers under New York, and looking forward to the creation of a new race of hybrid Daleks - though the rest of The Cult Of Skaro are quick to privately express doubts about their leader's plans.

The Doctor leads Martha, Talullah and Frank back to Hooverville, but they're pursued by the pig slaves and two of the Daleks, who callously exterminate Hooverville's leader, Soloman, despite his pleas for clemency. Sec orders them to spare the rest of the humans in exchange for The Doctor's assistance in helping him to create his new race - he already has the "husks" of 1000 humans awaiting implementation of Dalek DNA - and take them to another planet.

The Doctor believes Sec has been influenced by humanity, and agrees to help, but the other Daleks have made alternative plans. They foil Sec and The Doctor's plans by instilling pure Dalek ideals into the human bodies, which will come to life when the Daleks' genetic laboratory is powered up via an energy conductor containing Dalekanium at the top of the Empire State Building.

The Doctor escapes (again) with the help of Talullah's boyfriend, Laszlo, a half-converted pig slave, and heads for the Empire State. Martha is already at the top, with Talullah and Frank, having worked out that is where The Doctor wanted her to head.

When lightning strikes the Daleks' conductor at the top of the Empire State, The Doctor is there and, although he isn't able to stop the new human Daleks coming to life, his own DNA is infused into them as a result.

The Doctor and his companions confront two of the Daleks in Talullah's theatre. The Daleks exterminate Sec, and invite their new human recruits to do the same to The Doctor. However, the human Daleks question the need to kill, and a battle between them and the Daleks ensue. The latter are eliminated, and Dalek Caan, monitoring events back in the laboratory, destroys the human Daleks, to The Doctor's horror.

The Doctor confronts Caan - now the last of the Daleks - who uses the Emergency Temporal Shift to escape . . .

The ailing Laszlo is saved by The Doctor, who is determined no-one else will die, and given a home in the Hooverville camp.

As we know, "they (the Daleks) always survive" but is The Doctor's closing confirmation to Martha that he will meet Dalek Caan again "one day" an indication that we will see Caan again later in this season? And was another apparently-innocuous line mentioning the Daleks' creator (albeit not by name) mean that a Davros return could also be the cards? That would certainly give another dimension to a Dalek episode.

That was achieved here - the interaction between members of The Cult Of Skaro was particularly fascinating. You didn't have to be a nuclear scientist to work out the other Daleks weren't going to tolerate their leader's plans for evolution, and there was even room for sympathy towards the hybrid Dalek, chained up and ultimately exterminated.

Another highlight was Soloman's speech to the airborne Daleks falling on deaf eyestalks, and being met with instant extermination - underlining that, ability to think for themselves or not, Daleks' core instincts are to destroy anything which is not like them.

But it's always a thrill to see a Dalek adventure and, though it's my view this was the weakest story of the four to feature them since the series came back, that had plenty to do with the quality of the other stories. We have done "the last Dalek" story with Rob Shearman's Series 1 tale, so one would assume Caan's return wouldn't replicate that.

Helen Raynor did an excellent job on by far her biggest TV writing assignment, but she isn't Russell T Davies or Steven Moffat. Although Raynor's script-editing experience on the show would have been a major help in the structuring of the episode - and the plot was certainly sound and very easy to follow - there was a lack of that little bit of additional sparkle which those two great, seasoned writers bring to their characters. Having said that, Raynor's script was assisted by David Tennant in particular being absolutely brilliant. You could give this guy the phone book to read, and he'd have you captivated. He had a good script here, with a lot of material, but lifted it up a level with his delivery, energy - and sheer quality. Tennant is arguably now Doctor Who's biggest single asset, and I would be very surprised if the list of his doubters weren't disintegrating by the episode.

Freema Agyeman continues to impress alongside, and Martha Jones had more of a role here than last week. In fact, she was very Rose-like when split from The Doctor and had to use her initiative to help with the foiling of the Daleks' plans. Although The Doctor is now clearly appreciating her intelligence and usefulness, it is still apparent that she doesn't exist to him in any romantic form. Not so much as a casual glance. Martha, on the other hand, evidently has the serious hots for her travelling companion, which I'm sure will be expanded upon when they return to present-day Earth next week. Martha's sadness at her unrequited feelings is making her a character easily empathised with.

It's going to be difficult for guest artistes to catch the eye with such focus - rightly - on the show's stars and sadly, Miranda Raison, who made a good impression as Talullah in the previous episode, was more of a bit-part player here.

A couple of impressive - and expensive - battle scenes were well realised by director James Strong and the various effects teams, particularly in the Hooverville camp, and I love Murray Gold's anthemic Dalek music.

No real complaints here - more Day Of The Daleks than Genesis probably, but that's no shame, and a steady seven and a half out of 10 for both episodes combined.

Sadly, that was a bit of a disappointment after last week's slightly flawed but impressively atmospheric build up. Instead of an homage to 'The Island Of Doctor Moreau' this episode seemed to take a very surreal and cliched journey into 'The Dalek Horror Picture Show' and I was half expecting to see the hybrid Sec break into a rendition of 'Let's Do The Time Warp Again'. Nice spats, shame about the face.

And just as I thought I was getting involved in the plot, various story and directing decisions kept lifting me out of the episode. The locked off camera shots of the Daleks gliding about the sewer tunnels, whilst an attempt to give us something different visually, didn't quite work for me. They had an artificial quality to them that perhaps underlined the schizophrenia of the episode for me. A kind of bizarre artifice that kept cropping up ? the repetitive sequences of the Doctor and the Daleks in confrontation and their continual threat/avoidance to kill him; Solomon's speech to the Dalek ('War Of The Worlds' anyone or was that a nod to the assassination of Martin Luther King?) that seemed like an attempt at Oscar nomination and didn't really have any truth in it as a scene bar for the long awaited extermination; those odd dissolves of the marching human Daleks that tried to convince you an army was on the march; the curing of Laszlo that seemed to happen off screen after the Doctor has stirred up a few phials of something?I just found these choices a bit bizarre.

What you expected to happen?did happen, right down to the inevitable 'emergency temporal shift' of Caan at the conclusion of the story. For me it committed the cardinal sin of relying on the 'reset button' mode of storytelling. Tie up all the loose ends in the last ten minutes and bring the overall narrative back to square one as if the events over the last two episodes didn't really have any major effect on any of the characters lives or situations. I don't mind that kind of storytelling as long as it's an engaging and interesting journey back to the beginning. Here we get mass exterminations and genetic experimentation and the Doctor and Martha making a crass joke about 'the pig and the showgirl' as they nip off to pastures new.

The ultimate 'Rocky Horror' moment for me was the confrontation in the theatre. All of a sudden, the Daleks arrive on stage, bathed in smoke and bad lighting, and they cease being fascist xenophobes and just look like something out of 'Seven Keys To Doomsday'. All that careful build up in the first part of the story, with the flashes of 'Evil Of The Daleks', just dissipated away by reducing them to vaudeville props. It seemed such a 'small' scene to conclude what was originally something conceived as, and looking like, an epic. And logically it didn't make sense for Caan to order the two Daleks to kill all the slaves and then wait until they're blown up to decide to self-destruct the slaves anyway!

The best scenes in the episode were the attack on Hooverville and the 'Frankenstein' laboratory pastiche of the resurrection of the human Daleks. Both were epic, thrilling scenes and visually engaging. The destruction of Hooverville was especially spectacular. The story was also full of good ideas and humour. The two Daleks in the tunnel having a bit of a gossip about the hybrid and looking behind them to see if they're being overheard and the pig guards going up in the lift with their obvious impatience were amusing scenes. The nod to 'Are You Being Served?' with the Doctor's 'first floor?perfumery' quip and Tallulah's 'gammon strike' comment also managed to raise a laugh.

What also might have been better dramatically was perhaps to have had the Doctor's attempt to evolve the Daleks be thwarted not by the other Daleks, but by Martha sabotaging the mast (with the best intentions, as she'd be unaware of what was going on and would end up maintaining the Daleks original nature). But instead it fell back into the clich? of the other Daleks putting a spanner in the works which was crudely, if humourously, set up earlier.

Freema also got a bit more to get her teeth into this time and to see Martha putting together a plan to electrocute the pig guards (despite being a bit iffy on the science) was a great opportunity to show how resourceful the character can be. However, I think it's time the series moved on from the Rose references now and didn't keep resorting to using Martha's unrequited love in the face of the Doctor's emotional fragility as development. It's getting repetitive and isn't moving the dynamic between the characters forward enough.

This week, I'm afraid David Tennant turned into the 'shouty' version of the Doctor that I seemed to have trouble with in Series 2. On the occasions where he's here confronting hybrid Sec and/or the Daleks his indignation with them just gets played too broadly which is a shame as in the first three episodes of this year's series he's been pretty much on the mark and has provided a more contained display of anger and righteousness. I'm also slightly troubled by the Doctor's moral position here. In 'Genesis Of The Daleks' he doesn't commit genocide because he realises he'd be just as bad as the Daleks and that a greater good will come from their existence. Here, he merrily sides with hybrid Sec to change the entire 'raison d'etre' of the Dalek species without a qualm. A tad na?ve of him surely? Here, for Sec, it would seem humanity equals goodness but humans are also capable of evil, destruction and war.

Overall, it looked spectacular but the illogic of some of the plotting, some of the odd directorial choices and an over-repetition of Doctor/Dalek confrontation clich? made it a less effective episode than the first part. Its plunge into surreal 'Rocky Horror' B movie territory, whilst a template that is suitable to the material and its themes of mad science and 1930s Gothic noir, doesn't do any favours to the emotional power needed for the characters to operate in the scale of this story. It felt flat despite all the best efforts.

The Daleks are a triumph of design, a futurist alien vehicle that quickly became a pop culture emblem of swinging Britain, and from that point on a little piece of everyone's childhood. As an alien race, however, they're pretty bog-standard. Survivors of a dying planet stripped of their humanity and emotion and encased inside a powerful metal body: conceptually, you could barely get a cigarette paper between Daleks and Cybermen. Personality wise, all they ever really do is plot, kill, gripe about the Doctor and want to dominate the universe, just like 70% of Doctor Who aliens.

For this reason, I wasn't up in arms when Daleks In Manhattan tinkered a little with the mythology of the Daleks last week ? they're a decidedly limited concept anyway, so anything to make them a tad more interesting is always welcome. On the flip side, this week's attempt to spend 45 minutes delving into the psychology of what are essentially little tanks with laser guns for me resulted in crushing boredom.

Daleks In Manhattan was an entertaining Old Who style romp, maybe the closest in spirit and feel to the classic series as we've seen so far. By contrast, Evolution Of The Daleks was perhaps the flattest and most dispiriting slice of Doctor Who since Battlefield. It seems to be tradition now that Dalek/Cybermen two-parters consist of a fascinating first episode followed by an ineffectual run-around in place of a satisfying pay-off. I enjoyed both Rise Of The Cybermen and especially Army Of Ghosts, but was unimpressed by Age Of Steel and especially Doomsday.

Like the 'Cartmel Masterplan' episodes of the late 1980s, there was too much crammed clumsily into the limited running time, and what started in episode 1 as an interesting and satirical period piece degenerated into a hokey mishmash of Frankenstein, King Kong, Back To The Future, Ghostbusters and the 1930s Saturday matinee serials. This in itself wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, but the pacing was so off that it all came across as a joyless series of misfiring set pieces with no one coming out of it particularly well.

The Doctor fared particularly badly, despite David Tennant's typically sterling work. Twice he offered himself for up extermination? once is careless, twice is just tiresome and dramatically flat. Quite what he hoped to achieve is beyond me, blind self-sacrifice being something of an unDoctorly trait. Since he constantly champions himself as the Daleks' worst nightmare, quite what good he would be to anyone dead is a mystery. Admittedly, the second time he was prompting the Dalek hybrids to rebel, but it was something of a leap of faith that they would, and an even bigger leap of faith that the real Daleks wouldn't just go right ahead and exterminate him anyway. And why was he so enraged and indignant when the Daleks killed all the pigmen and human hybrids? Was he expecting them not to? All things considered, it was pretty much par for the Dalek course. To make it a hat-trick of bad Doctoring, he stood back and allowed poor misguided Solomon to be exterminated. If anyone knows you can't appeal to the good in a Dalek it should be our Doc, so I have no idea what he was playing at.

The Daleks themselves sadly have regressed back to Remembrance Of The Daleks standards (albeit not so wobbly on their feet): lots of shouting about exterminating, but rarely actually getting around to doing any of it. The only reason the Doctor survived this episode was that the old fellahs have become such chronic procrastinators.

Not a great episode for Martha either, I'm afraid. She had been growing on me as a companion, but in this episode Freema Agyeman seemed to be struggling to convince with the dialogue she'd been lumbered with (both she and Miranda Raison as Tallulah wresting with diction problems during their scenes together). Her girlie chat about Rose was toe-curling.

Special mention must also go to the baffling moment in which the Doctor retrieves his sonic screwdriver ? apparently, unless I misheard the dialogue, Martha somehow managed to catch it half way down the Empire State Building. Really?

Another big up for humans here, yay for us! Apparently, if you give a Dalek a dose of humanity, it'll start questioning orders and being all nice and conscientious. All well and good, but if history has taught us anything, it's that there's nothing humans like doing more than following orders and committing atrocities. (The Doctor puts the disobedience of the robomen down to a shot of Time Lord DNA, but as that would have been impossible to achieve through mere electrical conductivity, we have to assume he's talking baloney).

In a better episode, this would all be nit-picking. Unfortunately, as dramatic television, it was terribly flaccid and unoriginal, with the Doctor yet again scaling a mast in a thunderstorm (see The Idiot Box) and a major landmark lighting up (see pretty much everything). Packed with ideas and plot threads, none of them were given sufficient room to breathe, resulting in one long 45-minute soggy squib.

Mind you, I did like the perfumery line.

Season seven is just extraordinary, especially when you consider how uncomfortable with the exiled-to-Earth format Terrance Dicks and Barry Letts were, and how difficult seven parters are to work with. Theoretically then this should have been a disaster, such were the odds against it; instead, rather than being merely good, it’s possibly the strongest season of them all, pound-for-pound. And after three great stories the season is concluded with Inferno, arguably the programme’s most daring and uncompromising story. There’s a danger that if I start gushing like I want to I’ll just tie myself up in knots with rhetoric and run out of things to say, so to get started I’ll keep it simple: Inferno is, quite simply, awe-inspiring. There’s just no other word.

Like a handful of stories before it Inferno has its own specially designed titles that run after the main title sequence, and they really serve to remind me that while I might have watched it all in one go original viewers would have seen twenty-five minutes a week; in that circumstance these titles, where the credits appear over rolling lava, would have seemed dramatic and exciting. To me, as usual, they began to grate a bit after the sixth time I’d seen them. But these don’t affect the episodes themselves.

What’s immediately obvious is how fresh and lively Jon Pertwee is in his first season; by season eleven the strains of the format he loved slipping away (not to mention the death of one of his best friends) were all too obvious in his performance, but in his early years he fully justifies his iconic status. He is aided here by some great location shooting from the programme’s best ever director, the outstanding Douglas Camfield; his illness meant that a large part of the story was actually helmed by Barry Letts, but Camfield’s work on the location scenes helps to propel the story throughout its length.

Even before the plot has been introduced to the viewer there’s a real feeling of portent, a calm before a storm; Olaf Pooley as Stahlman and Christopher Benjamin as Sir Keith both put in great performances as two philanthropists with very different methods – he might have named Stahlman’s Gas after himself, but there’s no suggestion that Stahlman’s ultimate motive of genuinely providing endless energy is ever questionable. Shelia Dunn isn’t quite so good (that’s nepotism for you, just ask Francis Ford Coppola) but she still puts in a serviceable performance.

Because this is a Camfield episode we don’t have any of Dudley Simpson’s music, and while Simpson’s scores for the rest of season seven are in general very good it does make a refreshing change to have Delia Derbyshire’s atmospheric electronic music on the soundtrack. The swirling, dreamlike sounds seem more appropriate to the programme’s more space-age episodes and seem a little odd in the studio scenes, but on location they add to what is one of the most atmospheric episodes of all. The example I can think of is Slocum’s murder of the technician with the hammer; the sudden cut to Sergeant Benton can be in part credited to Martyn Day, who was also responsible for the superb second cliffhanger to The Mind Robber.

The semi-converted humans (in other words, Primords without the full make-up) are scary, mainly due to the sheer mania in the eyes of Walter Randall and Ian Fairbairn. Derek Newark is also good as Greg Sutton: although his first scene belts the audience with a massive infodump it’s still unusual to have an essentially villainless piece (the Brigade Leader is a villain in one sense, but is unusual in that he has no part in creating the events and merely reacts to them like everyone else) that is about an extreme natural disaster brought on by well-intentioned but naпve people. Greg’s get-yer-coat-love attitude to Petra is less effective though as the moral centre (in this case the “I’m not just a pretty face” kind) is laid on very thickly.

The Doctor’s remote control door-opener seems very twee now that they’re a staple of middle-class garages, but his first scene with Liz is a good one; she’s a much underrated companion (she certainly wipes the floor with Jo) and the production team’s usual excuse that exposition requires someone for the Doctor to talk down to doesn’t bear out on screen. That and she’s got the best legs of any Cambridge academic I can mention. Together Caroline John and Jon Pertwee bring poignancy to the scene (with the Doctor being trapped) and also darkness, with the Doctor’s ominous line “a terrible thing, a murder without a motive.” Slocum’s subsequent attack on Bromley is effective again for being left unseen, as the scene cuts away at a crucial moment.

The trip-out void scene where the TARDIS malfunctions is well done but very dated, although it retains a certain sense of the grotesque. The drill emergency is dramatic as it happens in the background, and the details are relayed through the characters – moments like this serve to advance the characters as much as they do the plot.

There is a very tense scene as the transforming Slocum is found, and the violence as he strangles Wyatt is actually quite brutal. The scorched wall is an engaging effect, and the effect he has on Wyatt and Bromley is nicely mysterious. The Doctor discussing the Krakatoa eruption on top of the silo is atmospheric in both visual and conceptual senses, and shows Camfield’s skill in using location and camera work to add an extra layer to what is already a well-written piece by Don Houghton. It is followed by a well-made chase sequence over the silos that ends with a good stunt fall from Derek Ware, although Pertwee’s vertigo is all too obvious on his face.

The computer is still giving out warnings – the episode’s slow pace doesn’t detract from the quality, but adds to the tension. Lines like “you, sir, are a nit-wit” demonstrate that the Doctor definitely works better as an aloof eccentric rather than the down-with-the-kids version of David Tennant. Stahlman softens up around Petra: he comes across as a pathetic, tragic figure who drives his project hard in order to compensate for basic loneliness, so that his eventual death in part seven retains a certain poignancy even though it comes after the shattering events of the sixth episode.

The Doctor’s transportation into the parallel universe requires a completely new set of introductions as late as the third episode, which helps fill this story’s impressive running time. The alternate Earth is very strongly defined; the fascist state is hardly original, but it is at least utterly convincing here and far more effective than the bit of everything approach favoured by Rise Of The Cybermen.

There’s more great action scenes in the third episode, a combination of the aforementioned location work, good stunts and Pertwee’s skilful driving. The Doctor defeating the mutating Bromley with a fire extinguisher feels like a lucky strike though, and a certain degree of logical reasoning has been omitted here. It’s all blown away though by what is possibly the best stunt in the show’s history, where Private Wyatt falls from the top of the silo, a height of nearly ninety feet. The only problem is that it’s obviously a jump rather than a fall, but it’s hardly something that detracts. 

Caroline John puts in a good performance as the alternate Liz, although her wig looks a bit silly. Nicholas Courtney’s eye patch is nicely iconic now, and in fact all of the regulars put in good performances as their alternate selves, even given John Levene’s relative inexperience. The only minor problem is Pooley, who isn’t in any way different to his counterpart. The Doctor hits a realistic impasse in trying to explain his situation to the security forces, which takes some time but is skilfully done and never allows the tension to flag. 

Things really heat up (no pun intended) in the fourth episode, but as yet the situation is not hopeless; there’s still a feeling of possibility which makes the alternative Earth’s fate all the more devastating. The relationship between Petra and Greg is improved slightly by the tenser situation of the parallel universe, and Liz’s softening is very well played.

The interrogation scene is well played out, with the Brigade Leader’s mock questions (he has the answers he wants in his own imagination) and good camera work which belies Camfield’s absence. The fascists’ fractured relationships with each other are great to see, as antagonists that hate each other as much as the sympathy characters are always more interesting. Suddenly back in “our” universe, it seems peculiar to see everyone again as they normally are, so earnestly are the parallel versions drawn.

Things crank up yet further when the crust is finally penetrated; the assertion that the world is doomed and nothing can save it is nothing new, but the fact that this actually happens makes Inferno one of the Doctor Who’s most daring and risky episodes. The characters begin to soften (apart from the Brigade Leader, as the narrative still requires a villain to bring the other characters together) to the extent that we almost forget about the regular version of them, and care about these new ones just as much.

With a growing sense of desperation and the omnipresent rumbling adding to the ambience, this story does more than just engage the viewer: it actively draws them into its Kafkaesque setting and makes them feel like they stand to lose as well, which is something that I can only say about the very best episodes.

“Greg, I’m frightened!” The trouble with being so serious though is that the touchy-feely approach to romance (never something the show did well, on the rare occasions it attempted it at all) simply doesn’t come off and the characters lose some of their dynamism as a consequence, albeit only temporarily. A similar problem affects the Primords when we see them in full make-up for the first time: they aren’t particularly convincing and while they aren’t any worse than the average monster this story is so uncompromising that it doesn’t make any allowance for anything less than absolute perfection. Benton’s transformation is a well-done scene, although I don’t quite know why it has to be followed with Sir Keith’s car accident. It only serves to demonstrate Stahlman’s ruthlessness, which has already been recorded.

The red tint on the location scenes helps create a sense of a planet tearing itself apart, still demonstrating Camfield’s skill long after he stopped tackling the studio scenes. The characters become more sympathetic the closer they come to the ultimate sacrifice; this story is about humanity surviving under immense pressure, and there is something genuinely life-affirming amidst the doom. Unfortunately, the fight at the end of the episode between Greg and the Brigade Leader is poor, as Barry Letts lacks Camfield’s magic touch in the studio when it comes to action. The cliffhanger though is devastating, and the cliffhangers have actually been rather lacking this story. The reprise improves it if anything, cutting away at the crucial moment. We never get to see the alternative Earth destroyed, and the Doctor’s quietly heartbroken line of “terrible things are happening there” is far more evocative than the most expensive special effects.

If episode seven has a problem though it’s that it goes over the same ground that the fourth episode does, complete with yet another chase over the silos with a character who’s already been killed off once in the story, and has been brought back to be killed again. Filler, anyone? However, it should be noted that part four was several weeks previously from the point of view of the original audience, and the Doctor’s excited notion that “the pattern can be changed” keeps the levels of dynamism on a high. I’m so drained after the sixth episode though that I almost don’t feel the defuse-the-bomb style ending – is that a good thing?

The only major problem with this story is its ending, with the slapstick scene of the Doctor materialising himself in a rubbish tip clashing badly with the grim tone of the rest of the story; his joviality seems inappropriate to the grim tone of the story and the horrors he has witnessed. However, it doesn’t hit the story as a whole particularly badly.

Inferno is a top five story, there’s no doubt about that. It is ambitious in a way that few other episodes are, and while ambition always creates a risk of undershooting this manages to achieve its lofty aims through a sense of grim, brutal realism and is never compromised by illusion-shattering comedy. Put simply, it’s astonishing television.

I shouldn't care about these people. They're loathsome. The only one who's not complete slime is Chellak and he's the least interesting character, a sheep among wolves. He's not really a bad guy underneath, but he gets pushed around by everyone else, he's happy to execute the Doctor and Peri for no good reason and basically he's a loser. Everyone else is slime and you're looking forward to their deaths, hopefully in humiliating and painful ways.

The Caves of Androzani arguably shouldn't work. On first broadcast, when I saw it as a child, for me to an extent it didn't. It's bleak and unpleasant, like bathing in used engine oil. It certainly shouldn't have been taken as any kind of template. This is the kind of story that works in the hands of Peter Davison, Robert Holmes and Graeme Harper, but in the hands of Steve Cole or Trevor Baxendale makes you want to plant bombs in bookshops. Nevertheless in 1984 it worked like crazy. As so often 'twas Robert Holmes, the grand old man of Doctor Who, who could break the rules. His characters aren't just bastards. They're unbelievable screaming motherfuckers. Holmes hit a roll, a momentum with which he created a cast any one of whom could on their own have been the "unmatched throughout the series" highlight of another story. Sharaz Jek = work of genius. Stotz = has me backing away from the television. Morgus = makes the above look like Disney heroines. "Have the lift maintenance engineer shot." It's profoundly satisfying to see him get what he deserves, from Krau Timmin and then from Jek. I'm not sure what that glowing special effect did to him in episode four, but I'm happy to assume that it wasn't nice.

I could talk about these people for hours. Best of all, they're all completely different. It's no identikit parade of faceless macho mannequins, but a rich mix of villains that in that department outdoes just about any other work of fiction I can think of. Stotz is fascinating even before we see horrors like his terrifying scene with Krelper and the pill. He's a genuinely clever psychopath.

Then of course there's Jek. I discussed the others first to get them out of the way, since here there's so much to say. I'll be here a while. Everyone knows that Christopher Gable went in to read for another part, but on seeing the script fell in love with Sharaz Jek and went to Graeme Harper to ask for him instead. Forget the script for a moment. I've already discussed how astonishing it is that Robert Holmes pulled off what he did here, but I'm about to address the nuts and bolts of TV production. For Graeme Harper, the most script's terrifying line must have been: "You think bullets could stop me now?" That's the acid test. A bad actor or half-hearted direction could have sunk it like a stone and basically killed the whole story, which had all been building up to that confrontation. Why don't Morgus and Stotz just blast down Jek on the spot? Think about it. The guy should be Swiss cheese. In any other story, we'd be rolling our eyes and hooting at the TV... but the televised production doesn't even let you blink. You believe Jek! One truly feels that mere bullets wouldn't do the job. Admittedly the script has already made it clear that he's extremely hard to kill, but by that point our guts are screaming that this man is practically superhuman.

A further point of interest is that Sharaz Jek is an operatic character in a grittily realistic production. In a perverse way John Normington plays up Morgus by playing him down, with that psychotically tight self-control, but the world of Androzani is a million miles away from the plastic BBC corridors of much eighties Doctor Who. It has bullets, not laser beams. Its tough guys feel like tough guys, not ballet dancers and RADA graduates. Nevertheless amidst all this is a richly theatrical creation, using language as flamboyant as anything Holmes ever wrote. "You have the mouth of a prattling jackanapes." I'd kill to hear a Hollywood action hero say that. You can roll it around your tongue like wine, but furthermore it characterises Jek. It's horror as poetry, with luscious descriptions of grossness. When Jek says he wants Morgus's head, that's no metaphor. "Congealed in its own evil blood." "The flesh boiled, hanging from the bone." Jek's obsessed with physicality. He's besotted with Peri's beauty, mentally shattered by his own deformity and speaking a language of blood. It's perfect that he ended up being played by a professional dancer.

Eventually of course Jek becomes the only sympathetic character! He's acting from pure motives rather than greed. Love, or at least his twisted version, and hatred. They're beautiful in their clarity and he's dominated by them. He's like a terrifying child.

Then there's his best line. "I am mad."

I can't believe I'm reviewing a Davison story and I haven't talked about Peter Davison yet. This is one of those rare stories which you couldn't quite do with any other Doctor. The 5th Doctor, especially in Season 21, was the last good man in a bleak universe, which ultimately ended with him giving his life to become Colin Baker. Seasons 21 and 22 are twin epitomes of grossness, but in opposite ways. Colin Baker's era had a flamboyance, a larger than life quality that at its best gave us the likes of Vengeance on Varos. A Davison story on the other hand was always more human and real, as was exemplified in this final farewell. He's a hero in the fullest sense. For the Doctor as a character, I think this remains his finest hour in all his lives since 1963.

The Colin Baker era's stabs at tragedy (Lytton, Oscar Botcherby) were always fumbling and awkward. In contrast there's something uncomfortable about Resurrection of the Daleks and Caves of Androzani that few eras ever attained. Plus of course this story shows Davison's dark sense of humour, letting him stand up to the psychos with deliciously dry sarcasm that's flippant but always purposeful. Watch his first scene with Chellak. That line where he asks for a chair. He's deliberately testing the general. Then in the detention cell in episode one he's asking all the right questions, having already basically worked out the truth about both Salateen and Morgus. This is my 5th Doctor, the one who had Turlough pegged almost from the beginning but never said a word.

His finest moment in this finest moment is of course part three's cliffhanger. Obviously it ends with Davison's toe-tingling "not going to let you stop me now" speech, but personally I love the whole scene all the way from "Ah, Stotzy, have you had a good rest?" and "Sorry, seems to be locked".

Even his relationship with Peri is interesting. She's just as sarcastic, whiny and unenthusiastic as she would be in Season 22, but Davison lets it all roll off him. He's so much more tolerant than in his early days with Adric, Nyssa and Tegan. In fairness he didn't choose any of them; they're miscellaneous orphans who stowed away or got dumped on him, and it's already the end of Castrovalva before he's in a position to do anything about it. (Note that he spends the entirety of Season Nineteen trying to get rid of Tegan, albeit at her request, and he's not exactly reluctant to lose her when they finally reach Heathrow in Time-Flight.) Peri on the other hand was offered her place on the TARDIS.

Plus of course she has the right idea. Androzani really is horrible. Anyone with a brain would want to get away. The Doctor is the hero, but she's the ordinary girl trapped in a nightmare. She's terrified by Sharaz Jek, to the point where she jumps at the Doctor's hand hitting her shoulder.

The regeneration is different too. Everyone knows about the fan theory about the episode three cliffhanger, with the Doctor feeling woozy just when Harper reused the regeneration special effect. He pulls himself together and we get on with the scene. However there's a further regeneration foreshadowing when the Doctor goes down for the milk of the Queen Bat and hears voices, a multiple echo of Sharaz Jek saying, "She's dying, Doctor." Eventually the old faces parade works surprisingly well, trumping the similar idea at the end of Logopolis by bringing the actors into the studio to record new lines. We'd never seen a regeneration like this before, a slow poisoning in which the Doctor basically spends four episodes dying by degrees. Even he says, "It feels different this time."

Continuity menks might surmise that Androzani's backstory is similar to that of Robots of Death. "Where are you from, Earth?" "As they used to say on Earth, every cloud has a strontium lining." There's also the fact that Jek's androids get confused by the Doctor's alien physiology, making it look like a fairly human-centric universe.

Oh, and Morgus's asides to camera. What the hell? As soon as your attention's been drawn to them, they're unbelievable. I love them.

I like the plot. It's hardly an original observation, but I'll say it again... The Caves of Androzani is an SF historical. There aren't any diabolical menaces or plans to destroy the universe, but simply the passion and violence of the characters. We don't need aliens. Everyone's quite enough of a threat to each other. Okay, there's the Magma Beast, but it's little more than a lava flow on legs. There's nothing intelligent or consciously antagonistic about it. Meanwhile for once the Doctor isn't trying to beat the bad guy or save the world, but simply wants to get back to the TARDIS.

I'd always vaguely approved of Robert Holmes, but rewatching all these old stories has heightened my appreciation of him. He's a storyteller, a wit and a wordsmith, but moreover time after time he does things with Doctor Who that no one before or since has thought to do. The Caves of Androzani is unique. It's spiky, uncomfortable and I didn't particularly enjoy it when I was eleven, but it's a breathtaking achievement.

In my opinion, a classic in the truest sense of the word.

In many other "classic" Doctor Who stories, the term oftentimes gets attached to that particular tale partly because it is relavant to mythos of the series. For example, "Deadly Assassin" is a great story and it also features the first time we spend an entire adventure on Gallifrey. Or, in the case of "Genesis of the Daleks", it's not such a good story that is still considered by many to be a classic because it reveals the origins of the Doctor's greatest foe. Both these stories deal with very pivotal moments in the show's history and this helps them to earn their "classic" status. 

Not so the case with "Inferno". This is just a really great story. Period. And that's what makes it even more impressive than a lot of other classics. It doesn't depend on being momentous in some sort of way, it just depends on being so damned good in its own right that you have to label it a classic. 

Season Seven, to me, was what the Pertwee era should've been about for its entire five years. Most of the stuff that was produced after this season that featured the Third Doctor doesn't usually rank all that highly in my book (with a few notable exceptions, of course). But even as we look at earlier episodes in this season, we see that the stories are still "trying to find their feet" sometimes. It's still magnificent stuff, overall, but with the occasional gaping flaw rearing its head. But by "Inferno", all the creases have been smoothed out and we can truly present a masterpiece of first season Pertwee. With all the elements that made this such a good season acting in perfect harmony with one another. 

Firstly, we still have a nice rebellious Pertwee - something that gets really watered down as Season Eight begins. But in Inferno, he's still got a bit of that Troughton anarchism that we loved so much. Except that, in this case, he's a lot more irritable and outspoken than Troughton was. His verbal sparring with Stahlman ("It's not your liver, it's your disposition!") is in excellent form and gets us to see very quickly where this story is headed. Project Inferno is being run by a self-obcessed madman. And if it doesn't stop soon, there's bound to be trouble. That anti-establishment mentality flares up even more, of course, as the Doctor "slips sideways" and must deal with the parallel-reality fascist regime ("Read any good prison reports lately?"). This is the stuff of Pertwee that I love. And it's best displayed in this compelling little yarn. 

Next we have a great villain. Why is he so great? Cause, in many ways, he's really not all that villainous. No plans to dominate or destroy the Earth. His real intent is to help it. What he doesn't realise is that he's being blinded by his obsession and huberous and can't see that his desire to help the Earth will actually lead to its destruction. A very unique, "Malcolm Hulkesque" approach to creating the story's antagonist (even though the great Malcolm didn't write it). And very realistic. At the risk of getting a bit philosophical (and even a tad "corny") most villains aren't truly evil, just painfully misguided. This "villain who isn't truly a villain" concept was a great feature in most of Season Seven, but is brought to its ultimate culmination in the character of Stahlman. 

Counterpointing this character was the equally-well-realised Sir Keith. A bit ineffectual against Stalman's stubborness, but this is part what helps propel the plot. The fights between them present more excellent foreshadowing too.

Of course, the biggest appeal of this story is its portrayal of a parallel reality. Not only do the regulars like Brigadier, Liz Shaw and Benton get to toy with their portrayals a bit - but the guest actors also get to strut their stuff. Differences in the two sets of characters are sometimes harsh (Brigadier and Liz Shaw) and sometimes subtle (Greg Sutton and Petra) and that makes the telling of the story all the more impressive. It's not like that silly episode of Classic Trek where they explore the same premise and everyone is just over-the-top evil. Some excellent work goes into the crafting of these two universes. The production team goes to great lengths to make these two realities similar or dissimilar in all that right places. 

Probably the most impressive aspect of this story is that, even with its seven episodes, there's barely a sense of "sag" going on like there are in so many other of the longer Who stories. In episode six as they run back and forth to the reactor - we get a bit of a sense of padding. Otherwise, the story remains compelling throughout. Even the chase sequence as the Doctor first enters the parallel reality goes on for a bit, but ends before it starts reaching "Planet of Spiders" proportions!

Of course, the Primords in their full form are quite silly-looking (but still quite scary in concept). This is the only other real flaw to this story. But, as many other have mentioned in their reviews, until the final transformation, they are quite horrific. Particularly with the sound effects added to the grunts they made. Some truly chilling and downright disturbing stuff. Particularly the rooftop chases. 

Of course, our greatest moment of triumph in this tale is the very classic "So, free will isn't an illusion after all" line that is delivered upon seeing that Sir Keith is still alive in the Doctor's world. You wouldn't think such a line could have such power behind it but, after seeing what the Doctor has gone through to see its truth being revealed, it packs a very beautiful "punch" just before the story ends. 

Finally, Inferno shines so brightly in my memory because it is not just a very exciting adventure story - it's also a very compelling drama. With vivid characterisations, intense seriousness and even a bit of romance. It shows, very firmly, that even with men running around in silly werewolf outfits, the show can take itself very seriously. In doing so, it touches an adult audience as effectively as it does the wild imaginations of youth. Possibly, one of the most "mature" stories ever produced. Which is just one more magnificent trait that compels me to slap on that "classic" label on without batting an eyelash!

This is, easily, Who at its best.