This was undoubtedly the most portentous DW story I had ever seen (pretentious even? Surely not!), featuring mathematics, physics, entropy and Aldous Huxley - all things I knew nothing about. So much of this story went over my head, but even then I thought it was good. The Doctor had changed from a clown to a sombre, craggy faced figure in a wonderful burgundy costume - was this the same person who had had such dire adventures as the Invasion of Time and Underworld, who had hammed it up shamelessly in stories like the Horns of Nimon. Now he is a dignified time traveller once again, but a little too late....

The background music sets a nice sombre tone, especially when Logopolis starts to fall down around the main cast, and the sets look superb. The real attraction of the story, however, is the Master. I love having old baddies come back on the show and who better, really, to cause the fourth Doctor's downfall - though I did think the Black Guardian might have made an appearance. Actually he does but, well, you know what I mean.

After taking over Tremas in the shock ending to Traken, we don't actually see the Master in the first two episodes here. He kills people, chuckles quite a bit, but is not seen. This is good, brings out the tension. But his eventual appearance in part three - dear oh dear! Okay, he looked the part - beard, gloves, dressed in black, etc, I even liked the penguin suit and his voice was chilling in a toneless sort of way. Not unlike the War Lord's voice, another excellent baddie. But the Master just keeps laughing and chuckling, when the Tardis is shrunk and when he is controlling the CVE - it is way over the top and you just want someone to jab him with a sharp stick. But, that aside, he is a true villain and I loved his TCE gun - he shrunk people, humans and Logopolitans alike, with cheerful indifference although his motives were a tad baffling at first. I didn't know about the Numbers, or suchlike.

So, a wonderful swan song for a Doctor I had grown up with for so long I couldn't remember the last one. And thank heavens the Tardis interiors looked like the console room - no more YMCA type sports centres!

God help me, and please don't run in the other direction when I tell you this, I'm the world's biggest fan of Nightmare of Eden. Unabashedly, unapologetically so. It's my favorite Doctor Who story, and when I say that to people who know me, even the ones who have known this fact for a long time, they usually turn their noses and scoff and shake their heads. How on earth could I love such a story that features monsters with flairs? One with such a hammy acting job with a terrible accent? Or, here's the big one, a story that features the immortal line, "Oh, my arms, my legs, my everything!"

It's rather difficult to explain, until you look at the facts. Nightmare of Eden is a quintessential science fiction story -- high concept (the CET machine), a morality play (the dangers of drug abuse), set in familiar trappings (in this case, on a space cruise liner), with plenty of action and adventure and subterfuge, not to mention comedy and drama in equal measures. There is some wonderful work by Tom Baker and Lalla Ward here, perhaps some of the best work they ever offered in Doctor Who. Case in point: the Doctor's justification to Captain Rigg (the delightful David Daker), in which he argues that he does indeed work for Galactic Salvage and Casualty despite their going out of business many years before -- "I wondered why I hadn't been paid." Compare that to the wonderful sequence at the end where the Doctor tells Tryst (Lewis Fiander, and yes, I agree his accent's more than a bit over the top) to get out of his sight; you can tell how truly pissed off the Doctor is at that moment, how sad and angry and bitter and furious and despondent the whole thing has made him feel. Lalla Ward equally exercises her acting chops with some terrific one liners -- I absolutely adore the "I'll need a screwdriver" line... contrary to some opinions that it's simply bad writing, I feel it's a tremendous send-up of Doctor Who writers who so often used the deus ex machina (the sonic screwdriver, K-9, the Time Lords) to get our heroes out of trouble. But far more often, Romana looks like she feels equally interested and bored, sometimes at the same time. "Oh, don't mind him, he just likes to irritate people"; has there ever been a more fundamentally truthful word out of the mouth of a Doctor Who companion? I think not.

The plot, if you haven't ever seen the story (in which case, you're really missing a treat) is quite complex for a Doctor Who story: a luxury cruise liner is sidelined when it collides with a cargo vessel. While the Doctor and Romana help to separate the ships, the Doctor uncovers a sinister link between a possible drug smuggling ring and a brilliant professor's newest project: the Continuous Event Transmuter, a device that studies and catalogues alien life by storing hologrammatic images on crystal recordings. However, it appears that the C.E.T. does far more than that, and may be responsible when hideous monsters start attacking the passengers and crew. Can the Doctor and Romana stop the bloodshed, find the man who keeps peering out at them from the projection, and stop the drug trade all at the same time? It's a lovely story about morality -- not only the dangers of drug addiction but also the rights of life, however savage and misunderstood, to continue its own existence. Even if they evolve into hideous bug-eyed beasts with flairs. Oh, my arms, my legs, my trousers...

Sure, there are lots of corridors -- all of them yellow. Yes, the passengers of the Empress seem to be wearing coveralls and goggles for no apparent reason, and all seem to be confined to one cramped room. (Maybe they're steerage, and the first class passengers are all having a brandy? Who knows?) Yes, it does seem that the Doctor embarks on his mission to separate the ships... four... different... times. It ultimately doesn't matter, because if you can get past some of the more dodgy aspects of its production (and let's face it, if you care about cheap yellow corridors, what the hell are you doing being a Doctor Who fan?), you can see this story for what it is: high adventure, filled with twists and turns. Even after you think you've got everything sorted, along comes this guy looking out at you through the C.E.T. projection. And we think he's bad, until we find out he's not. And his girlfriend's aboard. And... well, the bad guys turn out to be the good guys, and the good guy we like at the beginning isn't so good anymore. What is amazing is that at the end of the story, we honestly feel that while Tryst is a bad guy, HE doesn't feel he's done anything wrong. And so we're presented with a final morality issue, Tryst sacrificing human scruples (in this case, addiction to vraxoin) for the sake of preserving the Mandrels. 

Nightmare of Eden has just the right amount of comedy and pathos to make it a winner. I don't know why it's so misunderstood; maybe it's the flair monsters, the yellow walls, or the over-the-top Tryst performance. It does, however, boast a superb screenplay, some nifty acting on the part of regulars and guest actors alike, and holds up after repeated viewings. And I love it to pieces.

I bet there must be at least a few people reading this wondering what I'm doing reviewing a release that's over four years old. Well, I can give you two for starters: One, nobody else has bothered to review it; Two, I think it's an absolute gem, and I feel duty-bound to tell everyone else what a good adventure this is.

To enjoy Nightmare of Eden, the viewer needs to get rid of a few preconceptions- Firstly, pretend it's not a Season 17 story. Secondly, it does require a kind eye. If you like your Doctor Who to be glossy and place style over substance, then nothing I will say here will convince you that it's anything but cheap pap. But, if it's the little things like a good, engaging plot that you want, then this is for you.

Bob Baker, along with his long-time writing partner Dave Martin, wrote numerous stories for Doctor Who throughout the 1970's, some of which had the most zany plots ever to grace the show. So anyone expecting an outlandish adventure will be pleasantly surprised to find that Eden has it's plot pretty much rooted to the ground- well, as rooted as a story set on a spaceship can be, anyway. The story centres on a collision between a hyperspace collision between a passenger spaceliner and a privateer vessel, which leaves the two ships stranded in orbit around the planet Azure, with the passengers' lives in peril. Posing as Galactic Salvage and Insurance, the Doctor and Romana answer the distress call, and attempt to separate the two ships, only to discover that the passenger ship is infested with a deadly race of creatures, the Mandrells. As if that wasn't enough, one of the Mandrell's victims is found to be taking the deadly drug Vraxoin- thought to have been stamped out long ago. Naturally, as the Doctor tries to identify who has discovered a new source of the drug, he finds himself under suspicion from the authorities.

All the interconnected threads of the story fit together nicely. In the 1970's, I imagine there can't have been too many mainstream shows in Britain that would have been prepared to tackle the issue of drugs, as much a current affairs hot potato then as it ever was, head-on like this. So, it's the show's credit that the drug-smuggling plot is so well handled. This is no small part down David Daker; whose performance as the drug addicted Captain Rigg is chilling. If it had been Robert Holmes writing the story, we'd be applauding it, and it also proves Season 17 wasn't just about witty one-liners. Of particular note are two scenes in episode Three: the first sees Rigg laughing as he watches, via the ship's the monitors, the Mandrells on a murdering rampage. When questioned, he quips; 'What does it matter, they're only economy class?!' The second sees him beg a shocked Romana, 'I need something for this feeling,' as the effects of his addiction take hold. Daker's delivery is superb, and thoroughly convincing.

It's a pity, then, that he doesn't get better support from the rest of the guest cast. Barry Andrews puts in a good turn as the undercover agent Stott, but is given little to do except shoot at Mandrells, and explain the odd plot development. The two actors in more central roles are a bit more disappointing- particularly Lewis Fiander as the scientist Tryst, whose European accent is atrocious- it even varies between German, French and Italian as the story goes on! (On that note, why is it that Doctor Who could never have a mad scientist speaking in an English accent?) Whilst Geoffrey Bateman as Dymond shows less life than the scenery. Speaking of which…

Oh the spaceship sets look awfully cheap. There are probably worse examples knocking around, but that doesn't mean that these sets are good. Which is a shame, as the forest scenery is, for the second story in succession, actually rather good. It's not quite up there with the one they managed for 'Creature from the Pit' but it's a good effort nonetheless, and a rare positive for the design team in a serial where the production values have hit the floor. The Mandrells are supposed to induce shock when they make their appearance at the end of Episode One- instead; you're more likely to piss yourself laughing! And the costumes are terrible too, but more of that later.

So again, it's down to Tom and Lalla to bring some credibility to the story. So much of their success as a team was down to their terrific on-screen chemistry, so it's nice to watch a story that gives them the opportunity to show off as individuals. This story finds Tom Baker, in one of his more jovial moods, which won't be to everyone's liking. Of all the stories of Season 17, this is probably the one that got the least input from Douglas Adams. There's humour there alright, but to my mind it doesn't posses the trademark subtleness and intelligence of Adams, making me believe that Tom himself made a few amendments to his dialogue in an attempt to wring a bit more humour from the script. As this probably implies, it threatens to get very silly at times. If his 'Pied Piper' trick isn't taking things too far, then the infamous 'My arms, my legs, my everything!' line certainly is. That said, it's difficult to criticise Tom too much- his mere presence seems to transcend every scene he's in, and at least he's curbed his once-worrying tendency to overact when the situation least needed him to. Lalla Ward comes out with real credit, though she's helped by a storyline that doesn't involve her having to follow the Doctor's every move. It's just a pity that the awful costume she's wearing makes her look pregnant. Why on earth couldn't they have just given her the great 'Doctor' costume she wore for Destiny of the Daleks? This is a relatively minor quibble as by now, Lalla has well and truly hit her stride, and has made the role of Romana her own.

So there you have it. How much enjoyment you get from this story depends very much on what put in, so to speak. The production as a whole has some very obvious flaws, and I can't pretend otherwise. How you react to this will basically depend on whether you see your glass as half-empty or half-full. The fact is that Nightmare of Eden could have been, perhaps should have been, a lot better than it is, certainly from a production point of view. But then again, it could have been a whole lot worse, and if you're prepared to look past some of the negatives, or at least accept them, and go into the story looking to be entertained, then you will be. Fans of Tom's more madcap adventures will love this, and it's worth a watch, if only for it's plot. Give it a whirl.

A truly amazing episode, with a mixed emotional ending. Following the light-hearted episode Black Orchid, it has changed to a totally dark episode. This show brings back the Doctor's old enemies, the Cybermen. It begins with researchers/miners on Earth in a cave, and two black androids appear every once in awhile and kill some of these miners, and they die in a rather gruesome manner. 

Soon, the TARDIS materializes in the same cave, and Adric and the Doctor have fought.Adric asks to be taken back to E-Space, and the Doctor refuses,storming off to take a walk. Tegan goes off to talk to the Doctor, while Nyssa talks to Adric. The rapport between Nyssa and Adric have always been very good, so it is understandable why she should be the one to talk to him. Later Nyssa joins up with Tegan and the Doctor while Adric is left to do mathematical calculations to prove himself to the Doctor, which he always seems to do. 

We find out these androids are from the Cybermen and they have been spying on the Doctor and his companions. Adric saves the day by creeping up and finishing off the androids.

Soon the crew with a few of the miners leave Earth in the TARDIS and end up on the sapceship which is housing the Cybermen (unknowing to the ship's crew). Later we see Tegan out with a few of the men from the mining team armed with weapons, and suddenly Cybermen appear. The group splits up and Tegan takes off and bravely kills a Cyberman and mortally wounds another.

The Doctor finds out about the Cybermen and to his horror he comes face to face with them. Peter Davison is great in this scene where he has to choose to save Tegan's life or let the Cybermen kill her, and making the best decision, he rushes over and protects her. Adric comforts Tegan, it's one of those rare moments where they aren't bickering.

Nyssa however is in the TARDIS with one of the female miners and to her shock and horror, she watches the Cybermen break into the TARDIS, and they kill the woman right in front of Nyssa. Soon after, they start searching the TARDIS. Great performance by Sarah Sutton is done in this scene, although for the most part she is cast aside in the TARDIS and doesn't see anything but the few halls near the TARDIS.

The Cybermen had set the spaceship to collide with Earth to destroy it once and for all, and Adric bravely decides to stay and try to stop it from happening. This is when Matthew's final scenes really shine! He tell's the Doctor and Tegan that he'll see them soon, but from the tone in his voice, you can tell he is uncertain. Tegan is saddened by his decision and has to be taken out by the Doctor.

The ship crew help Adric all they can while he starts punching in mathematical numbers. The ships crew realizes that they have an escape pod and they all go to it and have to literally pull Adric away, saying there is nothing he can do. But Adric, after a moment of being in the escape pode knows the sequence to the final section of the Cybermen's device and he runs out bravely to finish it and the escape pod leaves. So there is no way out for him. He is too busy punching out the numbers to notice the mortally wounded Cybermen Tegan had shot, crawling into the room. The Cybermen, before dying, destroys the device and Adric then realizes he is going to die.

Matthew's performance is outstanding in this episode, he has always had a rocky time in the Davison era, but he finally brings back the great performance that he had given from E-Space to Keeper of Traken in his last show. In the TARDIS, Cyberman are taunting Tegan about destroying Earth, and she gets upset, which she has every right to be, considering they are planning on destroying her planet. The Doctor gets one of the guns and begins firing at the cybermen, hitting the console, so that there was no way to get Adric back.The Doctor kills the Cyberleader by smashing Adrics mathematical badge of excellence, a gold star, into the chest of the Cyberleader. Since Cybermen are allergic to gold, he dies fairly quickly.

Once the Cybermen are finished off, great performances are done by all. Janet Fielding, glossy-eyed, watches the ship fade in and out, Sarah Sutton screams out Adric's name in what seems like great sadness, Peter Davison looks up wide-eyed in sorrow as they watch what is coming to their friend, who is sacrificing his life for them. The camera zooms slowly up to Matthew as he watches and prepares to face what is coming to him, and he clutches the rope that had belonged to his brother Varsh, who had also sacrificed his life for the Doctor and Adric.

We see the TARDIS crew mourning for the loss of their friend, Nyssa crying on Tegan's shoulder, Tegan holding Nyssa, looking completely bewildered and sad and the Doctor just standing in the background. The end credits have no sound and it shows the image of Adric's smashed star. For many fans they gleefully rejoice at this destruction of Adric. But to many others, such as myself, we find it extremely sad. For a true friend, no matter how annoying they are, will sacrifice their lives for their friends if need be, and that's exactly what Adric did. And he proves he was a great friend to all of them.

“At last, the future of Gallifrey is assured.”

I have a confession to make. The Deadly Assassin has been my favourite story from the moment it was broadcast, and when I was younger, the Sontarans were my favourite monsters. I thought The Invasion of Time was fantastic, and played the big gun battles at school. I’d been waiting for such a long time for a decent copy on tape, and was terribly excited when they finally released it. 

Watching it recently episode by episode, I realised the gulf from how I loved it as a kid to it scraping about five out of ten for me now. It seems to have suddenly fallen in my Who story ‘likes’ from about number 50 to, ooh, past number 100. Why? The story is much more traditional than The Deadly Assassin, and blatantly trying both to pull back from it and to be an epic to outmatch it. It ends up as a glittery and hollow pile of padding which doesn't have the force to carry off the 'Doctor turning bad' plot with which it begins, alternately entertaining and infuriating, then at the end dull – except for the Doctor *really* turning bad in a lazy way they don’t even notice. In short, it suffers from the curse of the sequel, and helps make Gallifrey dull for ever after.

OK, so that’s the short review. Now come with me, and I’ll take you through each episode, the highs and the lows, and spoilers abound… To start with the context, Season 15 is perhaps the most disappointing year Doctor Who ever produced, with nosediving production values not yet being salvaged by the Williams wit finding its feet. Almost every story ends with something being blown up; almost every set and costume looks cheap. You might call it ‘Boom and Bust’, or ‘The Year They Got Lazy’. There are worse seasons, certainly, but never have expectations built up by steadily rising standards of brilliance over the preceding three years been so cruelly dashed. Scripts and acting are falling back into familiar, obvious patterns; Leela is going downhill faster than any other companion. It just looks so flat, so dull, so slipshod – and Tom has gone off the rails in a way that he will avoid for most of the following, far superior year. 

Unfortunately, in many more ways than being the climax of the steadily increasing mentions of the Time Lords in every story, The Invasion of Time is an appropriate summation of Season 15. From the beginning of episode One, you can see the problems. K9 has now settled into his forever-after mix of C3PO and R2D2 (bitchy pedant meets cute little robot), with a big gun added on, and the Doctor is now relying on him to shoot things altogether too much. Added to this laziness, he gains every fan’s undying hatred when he demands the TARDIS speak, then retorts, “You are a very stupid machine.” Die, tin can, die! ;-)

The Vardans start well, with cool high-backed chairs and froody multi-squared computer screens. Unusually, it’s very clear that a fair while has gone by between Underworld and this story, for the Doctor to have laid all his Vardan plans. Oh, and for Leela to have got herself a giant frog to play with in the exploitation shots in the pool. Landing on Gallifrey is an immense relief – for the first time in the entire season, we have a set that looks grand and impressive, the more so when the Panopticon has clearly been redesigned (a bit) rather than broken out of storage. The ghastly plastic floor level blue and green chairs are a let-down, but generally it’s interesting and believable again.

Tom Baker is arrestingly abrupt as the Doctor declares himself – and rather worryingly, Andred immediately sides with him and starts ordering around the most senior Time Lords at gunpoint! I mean, it seems a rather gun-ready society, doesn’t it? Shame that Borusa’s best comeback line now is “Then let him rot in a black star,” or trying to lock him up – John Arnatt gives a great performance to disguise it, but, really, Borusa’s character is already suffering from poorer scripting and much poorer lines.

The ceremony at the end isn’t badly done, but suffers from having far fewer Time Lords milling around than last time… At least Borusa doesn’t put on his frock until it’s playtime, even if he does then utter the grisly error “Their *elected* President.” Call me a Deadly Assassin pedant, but the whole point of that story is that Goth, who would blatantly have won an election, wasn’t going to get the job because the President makes the choice instead of a popular vote – hence the need for a *deadly assassin* to trigger the unprecedented step of an election. Sigh. With this, the ‘Rod’ blatantly being the ‘Great Key’ from last time, albeit presented on a hideous inflatable cushion, the Supreme Council rather than the High Council, and the Great Key business with the Chancellor’s secret (so why did everyone think Goth would be President, if it’s an alternate career summit and they can’t become President? Admittedly, the ‘balance of power’ is quite nice, and perhaps the Matrix wipes the knowledge from Chancellors-turned-President, but couldn’t they write it down?) you wonder if only the designers watched Assassin, and the authors didn’t listen at all. Still, episode one has considerable style, and blessed relief in the production values department. Gomer and Savar even have a nice bit of banter in much the same way as the two old coves in the Assassin dressing room.

Part Two is much less interesting, and with so much padding on view, it’s clear that this story has nothing like the ideas of Assassin. Rather entertainingly, a very similar cliffhanger (white-clad President collapses on Panopticon dais) is followed by a similar resolution, with guards milling around and escorting the Doctor away, though this time it’s the cruder Borusa who’s trying to have him locked up, while the clever one complained about the crude Chancellor. Mind you, it’s still just about working as a character piece for the Doctor, and Tom is still remembering to act just enough to pull it off. It’s a nice touch that Leela is ordered to the enquiry by Borusa – having failed with the Doctor, he’s still looking for public scapegoats, and the alien’s a prime target (though he blatantly knows she didn’t do it, having switched his story from “The Matrix rejects the candidate!” to “She attacked him”). 

When the Doctor comes round and startles us by turning on Leela, the story is still firing on all cylinders (which is more than the guards’ stasers do. Half the time they have no effect at all, but occasionally they have a white ‘diamond’, as last time. It’s, er, almost as if they did it in a hurry and didn’t finish putting all the effects). However, the lead is already becoming erratic. “This is rather more than a student prank,” says Borusa, calling our attention to Tom’s increasingly studenty performance of late. He ranges from the sudden roars (“Get out! Get out! Get out!” he cries near the end) to the hammy overplayed scene where he’s trying to find Borusa’s voice print, and he’s no longer entirely convincing. The episode ending has a considerable power, though, despite the Vardans already looking like a bit of scrunched-up plastic…

Episode Three is full of political intrigue and the threat of the Vardans – but unfortunately it doesn’t come off. Kelner is too silly, Andred is too callow, and the Vardans simply don’t work. They move very badly and are too blatant a matte, even ignoring their unspectacular appearance. Kelner plots with his pet guard to take over as President *later*, but protect the Doctor until then; so when did the Castellan bump up, illegally and unratified by a president, to become a High – er, Supreme – Councillor? And a really high-ranking one at that? While Kelner plots risibly, last week’s instant fascist Andred now goes for instant, insipid resistance, and unfortunately enthuses no-one. 

Leela deciding to banish herself because the Doctor wanted her banished, and he always has a plan, is rather a nice touch – the faithless one from her first story has found a faith she can believe in. At least she’s given a bit more to do than her comedy part in the last episode, where lines like the stage-whispered “I’m with him,” or the ‘posh’ echo “One does,” made it almost impossible to believe she’s not an average Twentieth Century woman. “I can survive anywhere,” she declares, and runs smack into Nesbin and the Outsiders, a last chance for her character to reassert itself.

Meanwhile, Tom gets very smug (K9 suggested lots of people call him that an episode ago – but this is the first time he’s really looked it) when Borusa learns from him. For this alone, you could forgive Andred for planning his assassination, but as for appointing Kelner ‘acting Vice President’ (since when did the Time Lords have them? It’s a different structure entirely, surely, with the Chancellor as deputy)… Borusa is locked up (for the next episode!) after rather a great scene where he faces down the Vardans and is zapped by one. Again, you’re almost persuaded that this story could be great. Unfortunately, Andred’s assassination plot is a bit crap. His plotters are unconvincing, and seem more human than Time Lord - Gomer is an old Time Lord (claiming his 10th regeneration makes him less vigorous), played by an old man; Andred’s callow youths are played by young men. Old actors playing ‘young’ Time Lords would have shown more thought. Then Andred’s rallying cry of ‘In the name of liberty and honour’ is just so limply delivered that you want to scream.

Into the fourth episode, and as with all undramatic ‘Doctor about to be shot’ cliffhangers, we’re amazed that, um, he isn’t. The excuse this time is especially weedy - the Doctor has apparently set up K9’s Earth blaster so it fires inside TARDISes, while Gallifreyan stasers don’t. Convinced? The Doctor has some relatively good barbs to Andred about his ineffectual palace revolution (“What can you pull off?” indeed), but it’s getting more and more stretched, and constant balancing acts of Gallifrey’s ‘crown jewels’ on K9 were probably funny in the studio. Andred using a calculator so K9 can show off and do the sums faster looks, ah, rather dated now. And probably then.

On the other hand, the Vardans have a much better episode, even though they suddenly laugh unconvincingly and tell Kelner they’ve suspected the Doctor all along (just as their voiceovers at the beginning – er – disprove). The life-size Vardan talking to Kelner, with a minimum of movement, doesn’t look too bad – and the one sitting at Kelner’s chair is mildly entertaining. Of course, once they appear in their little soldier suits, they make the cardinal dramatic error of having the leader being by far the smallest and slightest of the three, and not much of an actor to boot, which rather undermines his authority as he stands there shouting. As the Doctor observes, “Disappointing, aren’t they?” At least one of the others is fairly cute…

The Doctor enters the Matrix to get some ideas on dismantling the Quantum Forcefield (doesn’t sound as cool as the Transduction Barriers, so we never hear of that again from anyone, huh?). He gets some nice shots on location with lots of mechanics and a Vardan, which is different padding from usual. The Outsiders run through the sandpit several times to build up tension for their approach, rather less successfully. Oh well, Leela had fun hamming it up with her target practice before her band of six go off to conquer New York (at least, we assume it’s a city of similar density, and a similarly implausible idea). Shame that she just gets to be the butt of the stupid “What does proficient mean?” joke instead, and that K9 is also reduced to ‘nodding dog’ comic relief. At this point, the episode seems to have been a bit of a letdown, without even an appearance from Borusa to cheer it.

But then there’s the gorgeously blobby electronic music underscoring *that* cliffhanger…

Yes, Episode Five starts with fantastic oomph, and it’s a pleasant surprise to find that it keeps moves along at a fair old lick, largely helped by the mix of waspish Chancellor Borusa and some cool fx gunfights for the kids. Yes, it’s more running around, but it’s less tedious with it. Borusa is certainly a big pull this time, talking to himself as he listens to the Doctor, then forming a great double act that pulls some acting out of Tom (and even Tom’s ‘alliteration’ quip to Stor is done with his old grimness). His placing of the Great Key *not* in a forest of them, but in his desk drawer, is fabulous – even if the whole Chancellor / Key thing is a bit silly. For some reason never specified we get the idea that the Sontarans cannot ‘conquer time’ “Not while I -“ – er, why? What does the Chancellor do with the Key that would stop them? And if it’s not been used for 10 million years…? At least we don’t get Terrance Dicks’ ‘a lesser Key was stolen by the Master’ line (yeah, right, like the Eye of Harmony’s not important). Perhaps the Chancellor must use it to ‘switch all the TARDISes on’ as part of his duties, but it’s not something the script bothers to justify.

OK, Stor’s asthmatic East End sound is a bit peculiar, and the eye-holes don’t look vacuum-safe, but the Sontarans are generally fairly effective (still constantly helmeted so far; strange we didn’t get that as the cliffhanger!). They also have three fingers again - and their gun effects, with blast fields shifting and wobbling around, definitely look much better than K9’s thin red line (which at one stage shoots a Sontarans in the groin, only to see it carry on. It’s difficult not to jump to the conclusion that they have no nadgers). Is this the first ‘K9’s magic blaster has no effect’ scene? Kelner oils over the Sontarans to a ludicrous extent immediately, but when required to do some technical work (largely on film!) for the Sontarans, suddenly becomes more confidently evil and an impressive expert, rather than a weaselly cipher. He says that taking over the defence systems is only possible using the TARDIS – “and the Doctor’s capsule is the only one operational,” oddly (unless the Great Key has switched them all off). Still, Part Five has been something of a success.

Oh dear.

In Episode Six, the wheels come off so fast they fly out of the screen at you.

Like Episode Five, this involves lots of running around and blatant padding, but it stands much less well as an episode on its own, and ends up even worse as a climax. The plot doesn’t have enough to go on for a third of the time, and it makes very little use of what there is. For a start, Part Five was largely enlivened by the Chancellor, but this time it’s ten minutes in before Borusa appears, and he has precious little screen time. Other characters fare worse. Leela is roundly humiliated. It’s really only the last couple of stories that her character has really collapsed, but collapsed it suddenly has. It starts with the “You got lost” / “How do you know?” comedy routine, then her kissing K9 (demob happy), and closes with her staying with Captain Dull of the Guard. Strewth. Kelner is back to cipher again, claiming “I’m not an engineer, sir,” which is a blatant lie considering his accomplishments in these last two episodes, and poor Rodan spends most of her time hypnotised!

The TARDIS interiors must be greeted with some sympathy, given their unfortunate background in industrial disputes, and don’t seem that bad, though occasionally poor (you sort of get used to it). Showing a ‘brick and pipes’ corridor leading straight out of the console room is a good touch, and the lounger area where Borusa relaxes with news of the Titanic and a blue drink through a curly straw with the potplants and giant roundels on the wall works surprisingly well. Going round and round the same large area is very tedious, however, as is Tom constantly ‘stumbling’ on the same point of the ramp in the corridor approaching it – and the jumps between film and video are very obvious. “I’m a Time Lord, not a painter and decorator,” cries the Doctor, “I’m preoccupied with Sontarans, Daleks and Cybermen.” When Tom acts up, we know the script is falling down. At least the ancillary power station is quite pretty.

I feel obliged to note that Stor has his trooper drag in a large gun-like beamer to burn through the blocking bar across the TARDIS internal door… And, wouldn’t you know? It works! It seems Gallifreyans are the only race in the universe who can’t build guns that fire inside their own ships. Stor has much bigger vacuum-unsafe eye holes – all the better to fail to convince you with – and mostly just stalks up and down brick corridors, glowering, taking his helmet off and putting it back on again for want of anything else to do. 

Again, Borusa is cool and entertaining, and manages good acting even in scenes like the ‘Doctor’s lost his memory’ one, with a slight smile, but there’s too little of him to disguise the paucity of everything else. How does he instantly recognise the Demat Gun (or even know to look for it)? It’s just a great big gun! The ultimate weapon (again), eh? “I could rule the Universe with this gun, Chancellor.” Oh, please. “It’ll throw us back to the darkest age,” cries Borusa, desperately trying to make us believe. Some have theorised that, as it’s powered by the Great Key, it’s either a Time Destructor or it erases your timeline (which erases the Doctor’s memory, but people in the TARDIS are shielded from changes in reality). Unfortunately, nothing we see on screen gives us more than ‘It’s a bigger, clumsier Ogron disintegrator.’ It’s just dull, and why on earth has he built it? It doesn’t serve a more interesting plot function than a pistol. Or a club. Or even a net. The Doctor catches up with Stor awfully quickly, then Stor threatens to explode a grenade (very slowly) – “You’ll destroy this entire galaxy,” pleads the Doctor. Er, why? How? Yes, I know a fan might work it out that it's because he's stood on top of the Eye of Harmony, but for 'average' viewers, that was explained briefly 18 months ago! It’s a very confused, very rushed (inexcusable after all the padding) and very poor conclusion. It’s rather sad that the whole thing is, again, resolved by the Doctor and a big gun. Particularly a big gun whose rather nice whiteout effect has no explanation behind it, and which the Doctor has – uniquely for the series so far – designed and planned with lots of alternative equipment to hand, rather than just finding or cobbling together in desperation.

So, by the end of it, the Doctor has built the (albeit unconvincing) ultimate weapon. And he uses it, unhesitatingly. And he doesn’t even resist the temptation not to *keep* using it – that decision is made for him by a handy deus ex machina. Do we ever see the Doctor more out of character until he blows up Skaro? In retrospect, we can perhaps see the whole plot and resolution of the Key to Time as a remake of The Invasion of Time, but getting it right. Yes, the wheels still fall off a bit in the last two stories, but at least the Doctor is recognisably Doctorish and not Rambo at the end!

The Doctor, of course, then handily loses his memory. So how did he know which TARDIS room to look for his friends in? Oh, and we’re to presume that, when Borusa took the Sash off the Doctor and the Doctor let him, that was the Doctor’s resignation as President, too! At least Arnatt is good enough for us to infer Borusa’s wiles when the script fails to fill them in. Incidentally, although the Doctor may have had his own memory wiped, Rodan built the key under unconscious hypnosis and instruction from… K9. So, the dog knows how to build one! And it’s staying with Borusa. Hmm… Then all we’re left with is the worst exit for a companion since Dodo.

So, in the end, The Invasion of Time is a disappointment. There are much worse stories, but most of those have much less promise to go so wrong. I’ve really got back into watching Who stories episodically again rather than all in a lump, but cutting up some stories episode by episode (as they were intended to be watched but with the deadly ability to dwell on the dodgy bits) is clearly a killer. Worse, it’s the end that lets it down most badly, as the Doctor’s behaviour is actually more worrying than at the beginning, but it hasn’t occurred to the production team that he’s other than ‘heroic’. I liked big guns and this story when I was six. It’s difficult to be as enthusiastic about them these days, when I’m not convinced either make very good Doctor Who.

I think ‘Inside the Spaceship’ (editor’s note: alternate name for ‘Edge of Destruction’) tends to be overlooked or taken for granted by fans; itВ’s a two parter shoved between the first Dalek story and the first (and now legendary due its missing status) historical, it was written to use up spare episodes in the season, the TARDIS nearly gets destroyed because a spring gets stuck etc. Despite all this, ‘Inside the Spaceship’ is a crucial story. Since I only saw it for the first time about two years ago, I haven’t had cause to reassess it as I have the first two Doctor Who stories, and I've long been familiar with the story since the novelisation was published, but it still stood up well to a repeated viewing, especially in context. As I've noted previously, the two previous stories have presented us with a selfish Doctor, willing to use others and even kill to get his own way; they have also shown him having to deal with two new reluctant companions and their challenges of his decisions. Here we see the final stage of the DoctorВ’s early development. When the TARDIS is on the verge of destruction, the Doctor is both paranoid and selfish В– he assumes that Ian and Barbara have sabotaged his ship, even though they almost certainly wouldn’t know how and tries to throw them off the ship regardless of what might be outside. He ignores their suggestions and ideas and continues to distrust them even before he suddenly comes to this conclusion, and seems to blame them partly because doing so offers the path of least resistance; it hides the fact that he doesn’t fully understand his ship and allows him to avoid more frightening possibilities such as an alien invader. Despite his closeness with Susan, her defense of the teachers, or at least pleas not to throw them off the ship, go unheeded В– he counters her assertion that they can’t be responsible for the events in the TARDIS by patronizing her or brushing off her arguments with a wave of the hand. It is only when the truth of the matter starts to become clear that he realises his mistake, and I think it hits him a lot harder than most people realize; initially, as in the Cave of Skulls and on Skaro, fear makes companions of them all once again, the Doctor even asking Ian to face the end alongside him. The four of them work together in frenzy, desperately piecing together the clues, until they release the Fast Return switch and the central column starts its regular rise and fall. After this, the Doctor is forced to apologize and admit that he his wrong, and whilst Ian accepts this graciously, Barbara, who was instrumental in saving their lives, is less forgiving. Already, the Doctor has been forced to accept that his new companions have been instrumental in saving his life and SusanВ’s, and he has had to admit to even less knowledge about the TARDIS than his inability to pilot it has already suggested, and I think that despite already having Susan with him, it is story in which he comes to really appreciate the company of others on his travels. But in addition to this, his obvious embarrassment and shame at his treatment of them in this story is brought out by Barbara, who forces him to make a proper apology – the line “as we learn about others, so we learn about ourselves” I think signifies an acceptance of his less noble qualities and a desire to be rid of them. From this story on, the Doctor is increasingly willing to become involved, and most significantly, he increasingly endangers himself to fight evil. This is a result of the trials of the first three stories, and is one of his most enduring character traits – a far cry from his attempt to kill Za or his casual willingness to let the Thals sort their own problems out until he needs their help to retrieve the fluid link. 

Susan, who I have criticized when discussing the two previous stories, does well here – the scene with the scissors is both disturbing and dramatic and is well-acted by Ford; she has never seemed so unearthly. Her paranoia is more unsettling than the Doctor’s, precisely because she has been so trusting of Ian and Barbara up until this point and it is interesting that she seems more sensitive to the TARDIS than he does at this point – possibly part of the same theme developed further in ‘The Keys of Marinus’ and ‘The Sensorites’. She is also generally surprisingly likeable (so perhaps I have, after all, reassessed this story) and is instrumental in cementing this first TARDIS crew together, as the natural link between her grandfather and her teachers (it is she, remember, who prompts the Doctor to apologize properly to Barbara, and he always seems more stung by her disapproval than that of others). Ian and Barbara also get important roles, especially Barbara who proves that she doesn't need Ian to solve a problem – she is the first to realize that the TARDIS is trying to warn them of danger and she sticks to her argument even in the face of withering scorn from the Doctor. 

The TARDIS of course is the final thing worthy of note В– despite glimpses in ‘The Dead Planet’, it is here that we first get an idea of just how big it is and of course, that it is far more than just a machine. This idea will of course develop with the series, but seeing for it the first time it does make the old girl even more fantastical and much more than just a vehicle. It is also interesting seeing parts of the TARDIS later disposed of – the food machine pretty much vanishes after this point, as does the fault locator. The console room itself looks better at this stage in the showВ’s history than at any other, in terms of size, furniture and overall layout, beside which the versions to come in the colour era look positively tiny. 

So overall, 'Inside the Spaceship’ exists simply to complete the development of the TARDIS crew from reluctant strangers into a group of friends with mutual respect for each other. It does it well and is claustrophobically directed, all of which add up to an overlooked but crucial story.