Season 10 - Days 330 to 355

Broadcast Dates: 30th December 1972 - 23rd June 1973

Relative Dates: 17th October 2012 - 11th November 2012

So here I was in the tenth year of Doctor Who. It felt like quite the milestone. But I don't have time to dwell on that now, I need to get cracking with this blog in order that I can catch up with where I was when I finally started writing it. My head hurts from thinking about that sentence alone.

The Three Doctors

All three Doctors in one story! How exciting!

Unfortunately as with the later Five Doctors we find that the name of the story is a little bit of a lie. Don't get me wrong, it's true that all three Doctors are in it, but William Hartnell's role is greatly reduced as we very ill at the time and therefore he simply acts as an adviser from the TARDIS monitor. Patrick Troughton plays a substantial part however.

Pretty much every scene with the second and third Doctors interacting is brilliant. Their characters are so different that they tend to squabble quite a bit which is pretty funny when you think that the Doctor is effectively arguing with himself!

I also like how Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee kept up this relationship in real life. They were actually very good friends but whenever they appeared together on interview shows or conventions they kept up the pretence of two people who simply rubbed each other up the wrong way. This was further exacerbated by the fact that Jon Pertwee was a stickler for the script. He would made sure he got every line exactly right. Patrick on the other hand would deliver a rough approximation of the line which would often throw Jon off.

It's also nice to see the Brigadier and Benton have some scenes with the second Doctor again, a call back to the Invasion and The Web of Fear. Plus the Brigadier gets his first sight of the inside of the TARDIS!

The villain of the story is a pretty iconic one (and I don't use that term loosely like the BBC seem to be doing at the moment "look at this iconic poster/trailer/actor!!". It's Omega. The Time Lord who created the black hole giving the Time Lords the power needed to travel through time. He's fantastic!
His ravings through the story get more and more extreme and yet you can't help feel sorry for him, having been trapped for so long in the world of anti matter with only the creatures he can summon from his own mind as company.

At the end of the story we also see the Time Lords finally forgive the Doctor and give him back his knowledge of how to pilot the TARDIS. The Doctor's exile was finally over. But it seems now he was pretty settled on Earth as he still made sure to return there often and still had his laboratory at UNIT headquarters to see to.

Carnival Of Monsters

I love love love love Carnival Of Monsters!! If I had to introduce someone to the third Doctor era by choosing one story to show them then this would be a strong contender. I like Inferno just as much but that is 7 episodes and this is only 4 so I would hope it would be easier to tempt someone into sitting down and watching it with me.

It has one of those themes that I love where the TARDIS lands somewhere that seems perfectly normal (in this case a ship in the middle of the Indian Ocean) but which we soon come to realise is not quite as it seems. Here we see the crew repeating the same actions over and over again as they are repeatedly attacked by a huge sea creature. Each time they completely forget who the Doctor and Jo are and inevitably end up locking them away as stowaways. The Doctor identifies the vessel as the SS Bernice, a ship which mysteriously disappeared during a voyage across the Indian Ocean.

When a huge hand reaches down to pick up the TARDIS, the Doctor realises that all of this is going on inside a miniscope where creatures have been shrunk and imprisoned as a form of amusement for people to observe.

The miniscope is the property of Vorg, pictured above, and the action nicely swaps back and forth between the plight of the Doctor and Jo trapped in the machine to the plight of Vorg who is having problems of his own being accepted by the coldly political aliens he is trying to entertain.

As if this was all fantastic enough, we then have the plotting of these aliens to allow the deadly creatures to escape the machine in order to overthrow their current leader by blaming him for allowing people like Vorg to visit their planet.

The idea of the miniscope from this story was re-used in the brilliant Doctor Who Live that I was fortunate to attend at Liverpool. This time the scope was being controlled by Vorgenson (an ancestor of Vorg from this story, possibly his son, I can't quite remember)

Honestly this story is brilliant, give it a go if you want to watch any third Doctor story!

Frontier In Space

The basic idea of this story is that Humans and Draconians have a peace treaty that the Master is trying to break by convincing each party that the other one is attacking their ships.. I can't quite remember why he is doing it, probably so that he can achieve the mutual destruction of the two races.

This is a good story because it moves around a lot, from a human space ship to Earth, then on to a prison on the moon.

The Draconians are a brilliantly conceived alien too. Their make up is excellent which is something you can say about many of the "monsters" in this period of the shows history. I say "monsters" as you can't really refer to the Draconians as that as they are not the bad guys. Sure they are attacking humans but that is only because they believe the humans to be attacking them. It's always good when you can see both points of view.

The story ends with the shocking arrival of the Daleks! A link to the next story.

One sad point however is that this story marks Roger Delgado's last appearance as the Master before his tragic death in a car accident in Turkey. For me, Delgado is the ultimate Master. He plays both the charming side and menacing side of the character beautifully.

From one particular documentary I saw that was a look back at his life, it was clear that Roger was an amazing man and incredibly nice. It seems a cliche to say that these people who play absolute bastards are incredibly nice in real life but it seems this time it was true. It's a testament to how great the guy was that some of his friends actually have to choke back the tears when talking about him today 40 years after his death.

Planet Of The Daleks

In which the Daleks are attempting to discover the secret of invisibility from the Spirodons. It seems the Daleks' schemes get more and more bizarre as the years go by. Unfortunately Terry Nation was already running out of ideas for his creations and resorts to repeating some of the old ideas from his previous stories. It is cool to see the Thals again at least.

One interesting point about this story is that for such a long time episode 3 only existed in black and white as the original colour copy had been junked. This black and white copy was a copy of the previous colour version (I think. I may be getting this completely wrong) and some clever sod discovered that by inspecting the dots that the black and white pictures were made up of then the information could be extracted to identify what colours everything should be and as such the episode could be re-colourised! It's like magic!

Not much more I have to say about this one unfortunately. I think Jo has some romantic moments with one of the Thals who ends up asking her to stay with him. She turns him down however. Which is a relief because I love Jo and don't want to see her leave. Her time was coming to an end however.

Pretty crap this one I'm afraid. Not a patch on Day Of The Daleks.

The Green Death

or "the one with the giant maggots" as this story is sometimes known by.

Instead of delving into the story there are just two aspects I want to focus on.

First of all this was Jo Grant's last episode and her leaving scene is heart breaking. Throughout the story she has been working closely with the young Professor Clifford Jones and it soon becomes clear that they are falling for one another. As such at the end of the story when Prof. Jones proposes and offers to take her up the Amazon (not a euphemism!) then it seems quite natural for it to happen. Other companions would leave for love but it would quite often seem rushed and unbelievable but not here. Also as a 6 episode story shown one episode a week then the public would have seen these two characters together for just over a month so this makes it all the more real.

Jo shares a few brief words with the Doctor before joining the rest of her celebrations. We then see the Doctor quietly toast Jo before slipping out of the room. He doesn't like goodbyes. And as he drove away into the night, alone in his little yellow car, I did shed a few tears.

The second thing I wanted to touch on was this was the story that nearly ended the quest! Not because it was a bad story, far from it, it's excellent. Let me share with you the story:

So Skyfall had just come out so I decided to go to see it with my mates Matt and Hannah. The showing we were going to see was on at 8 o'clock and I managed to watch about half of Episode 2 of The Green Death before I had to leave for the cinema. I knew I'd be home before midnight to finish it off so all was well. Now...far be it from me to pass the blame on to anyone else (seriously Matt! Can you be on time for once in your life!!!!!) but when Hannah got us to the cinema the 8 o'clock showing had just filled up but there was another one on at 9 so we got tickets for that one. The problem being that that meant I was very unlikely to be home before midnight.

The panic was small at first. I was with people and didn't want to seem like I was making a big deal out of this but soon I could feel the hysteria gripping me. Aside from demanding Hannah drive me home there was very little I could do. As we whiled away the next hour perusing the various arcade machines in the bowling alley next door to the cinema I managed to sneak off and desperately started searching YouTube. Thankfully some kind soul had uploaded the whole story so I was able to watch it then. Hiding in the quietest corner I could find. Disaster had been averted

And that was that! A complete decade of Doctor Who was complete!

Days 569 to 572 - Kinda

It's a giant snake! Again I was faced with the decision of watching the "as shown" version of the story or the new CGI effects. For the most part the story is unaffected by which option you choose, the main difference is that the rather crappy looking snake shown above is replaced by this one:

which looks a tad more threatening. The snake version of the Mara (the main villain of this story) doesn't really appear to right near the end of episode 4 so it has limited screen time anyway.

Meanwhile it's Nyssa's turn to take a break from companion duties when she disappears for literally the whole story, having a nice sleep in the TARDIS. Clearly the writers were starting to struggle to come up with ideas for so many companions and were trying to come up with ways to write them out from time to time. It wouldn't be long till this group of three companions would be reduced to two in the most tragic way possible, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

The natives of the planet the Doctor arrives on, the Kinda, are being observed by a group of visiting humans from inside their base. One of these, Todd played by Nerys Hughes, becomes the Doctor's main companion for this story and she's actually a pretty great character. It's just a shame that the TARDIS was so bloody crowded that there wasn't really room for her to join the Doctor on his travels. Not to be harsh on her but I'm sure the Doctor would have much preferred travel with Todd than Tegan.

Speaking of Tegan, she falls asleep in the first episode allowing the Mara to possess her via her dreams. This has got to be one of the scariest parts of Doctor Who ever. The dream sequences are very well executed and give the very real feeling of that fear and confusion that we all suffer from time to time during a nightmare.

Meanwhile the other two human occupants of the base go completely bat shit crazy after being inflicted by a message the Kinda have tried to send to them and the "would-be leader" Hindle spends the rest of the story acting like a mad spoilt child. Except this spoilt child has the ability to blow up the base and kill everyone. There are some really fun scenes here with Hindle convincing Sanders and Adric to help him build a model city out of piece of cardboard and metal lying around the base, just for fun. The extent to which Hindle is unhinged is demonstrated when the Doctor accidentally stands on one of the cardboard people that Hindle has made causing it's head to be ripped off. Sanders tries to reassure him that a bit of glue will sort out right out to which Hindle screams back "DON'T BE SILLY! YOU CAN'T FIX PEOPLE CAN YOU???? YOU CAN'T FIX PEOPLE!!!!!!!" It's brilliantly done.

I enjoyed this story much more than I expected to and I have to say that it's mainly due to the bizarre goings on in the base than anything happening with the Kinda and the Mara.

Days 565 to 568 - Four To Doomsday

Four to Doomsday...what the hell does that title even mean??

Adric shows his willingness once again to side with the bad guys. Poor deluded Adric. I also like how Tegan shows some "real life" reactions to the horrific situation unfolding in front of her when she twats Adric around the head and scarpers back to the TARDIS. To be honest I think I may have done the same.

To back to that moment when Tegan knocks Adric out, it was at this point that I turned to my brother and declared (untruthfully) that Adric was now dead. My brother has only been half watching these stories (by virtue of the fact that he just happens to be in the room at the same time that I am watching them) but the look of sheer excitement on his face at the news of Adric's demise says a lot for the general consensus of Adric's character. I don't know what everyone's problem is! I like him!

This is a classic example of a fairly good story that just drags on a little too long. It would have been much better as three episodes instead of four.

The basic premise of the story is an called Monarch has been visiting Earth every so often for thousands of years kidnapping representatives from the various cultures of the planet. This time he is returning for good to conquer the planet. The extent of Monarch's narcissism is revealed when we discover that his ultimate goal is to develop time travel capabilities in order to travel back in time to the creation of the universe where he believes he will meet himself. He believes he is God. Now that's a serious ego!

There are some cool effects in this story. Tegan manages to strand herself in the TARDIS floating alongside Monarch's ship so it is left to the Doctor to go on a little space walk in order to reach her. When his security line breaks, stranding him between ships, his solution is rather clever, taking a cricket ball out of his pocket and throwing it at Monarch's ship so that when he catches it on the rebound the resulting momentum propels him towards the TARDIS. I'm not sure the physics are completely accurate but it's a neat idea.

So Adric is siding with the enemy again and Tegan is running away. This just leaves Nyssa to be the hero of the story, saving the Doctor from being beheaded! I've always thought the character of Nyssa to be a little bland but I've listed to a few really good audio adventures with her in recently and so I have a renewed appreciation for the character.

Oh and one more thing before I finish this entry. I once heard a group of fans jokingly trying to make the longest Doctor Who title ever by combining existing titles and Four To Doomsday was involved in the longest one I heard. I thought it was quite clever. The title was "The Greatest Show In The Galaxy Four To Doomsday Of The Daleks' Master Plan which is made up of the following five story titles:

The Greatest Show In The Galaxy
Galaxy Four
Four To Doomsday
Day Of The Daleks
The Daleks' Master Plan

There you go! Amaze your friends!

Season 9 - Days 304 to 329

Broadcast Dates: 1st January 1972 - 24th June 1972

Relative Dates: 21st September 2012 - 16th October 2012

Day Of The Daleks

 

 

Finally, the Daleks were back in Doctor Who! After being pretty much written out of the series in season 4 it was another 5 years until they were finally revived. It’s difficult to imagine that now, when the Daleks crop up nearly every year, that viewers had to wait so long to see them again.

 

I have a confession to make here also. The DVD of this story has two versions. It has the original version as was broadcast in 1972 and also a special edition which includes some newly filmed scenes, new effects and new Dalek voices as voiced by Nicholas Briggs who voices the modern Daleks. I had an internal debate as to which version to watch. In the end I decided to go for the special edition as I hadn’t seen this version yet and I was excited to see what it was like. This felt like a little bit of a cheat as I wasn’t watching the original version but by this point I was taking every opportunity I could to inject more excitement into my quest.

 

Secondly it has to be said that this is a bloody brilliant story! James Cameron completely ripped it off for The Terminator as the plot is very similar. In the future, the Daleks rule the Earth so a group of rebels travel back in time in order to kill the guy who they believe crippled the Earth and allowed the Daleks to take over.

 

It has to be said that the original Dalek voices were a bit pants so watching the special edition removed this problem. It seemed that because the Daleks had been out of the series for so long that the production team had somehow forgotten how their voices sounded.

 

Another strange thing happens at the start of episodes 2, 3 and 4 which might be hard to explain but I’ll do my best. At the end of every episode, as we see the cliff hanger there is a musical “sting” which leads you into the end credits. The director, for some bizaare reason, kept this sting at the recap of the previous episodes cliffhangers. So the episode would start, for example, with a group of Daleks ranting about extermination etc when suddenly it would sound like the closing credits were about to kick in again only for the episode to continue. It’s very strange and I’m not sure why they didn’t take it out for the special edition version as it does take you out of the story a little.

 

The Daleks have new henchmen too which will be seen in a few later stories, the Ogrons. These are pretty much your standard mute henchman (although they do grunt a bit) but they are quite scary with their large size and looks. They remind me quite a lot of the Orcs from The Lord Of The Rings actually. So that’s James Cameron AND Peter Jackson who have ripped this story off!

 

One of the most interesting human characters is the Controller from the future as played by Aubrey Woods. When I first saw this story I remember getting really annoyed about where I had seen the actor before. It turned out he was the guy who owned the candy store where Charlie bought his golden ticket in the original Willy Wonka film. Here he is working for the Daleks, but it’s clear he’s not all bad and his final stance against the Daleks at the end of the story is one of the highlights.

 

It’s so much easier to find things to write about the stories I enjoy!

The Curse Of Peladon

 

 

This story was the very first old Doctor Who that I ever watched. Back when the Paul McGann tv movie was released in 1997 and I first got interested in Doctor Who, I tried to snap up some of the few VHS tapes that were available to me at the time and this was the first one. As such, watching this story again, I got a lovely feeling of nostalgia. This is something I imagine that older Doctor Who fans have a lot but I was growing up during a time when the show wasn’t on so I don’t have many opportunities to get nostalgic over it.

 

The Doctor and Jo take another visit to an alien planet, in this case Peladon (you never would have guessed would you?). I’m not quite sure how the TARDIS takes them here actually as at this point the Doctor is still meant to be exiled to Earth. Im sure they explain it away somehow.

 

Peladon is very much like medieval England in its look and feel. The king of Peladon is about to sign an agreement to enter the Galactic Federation. I believe this was an attempt to mirror the real life events of Britain joining the European Union but I know very little about politics so I’ll steer clear of that!

 

The king is very keen that Peladon should join the Galactic Federation but his high preist Hepesh warns that doing so will bring the curse of Aggedor upon the world. The Doctor and Jo, enter the city whilst pretending to be the delagates from Earth which is not the wisest of moves as pretty soon the delagates are being killed off one by one. Two of the delegates are from Mars (i.e they are Ice Warriors! Seen for the first time in colour...they’re green! Who knew??)

 

One of the other delegates is Alpha Centuri. Never has a character cried out for an action figure than this guy. Neither a male, nor a female but a hermaphrodite hexapod, this character is hilarious and has a very “unique” look that in no way resembles a penis wearing a shower curtain!

 

The Doctor’s suspicions fall on the Ice Warriors but, proving himself to slightly prejudiced, the Ice Warriors turn out to be the good guys. It’s nice to see a nice bad guy for a change. I can’t imagine meeting a friendly Cyberman.

The Sea Devils

 

The Master is back and this time I was quite pleased to see him! The Doctor and Jo go to visit him in his jail (which I think may have been on an island..possibly). The facility recruits only those people who can withstand the Master's hypnosis, which is a pretty good idea! The Master promises that he has turned over a new leaf and it is testamont to the performance of Delgado that no matter how many times I see this story I still believe that he really has turned to the good side.

Unfortunately the head of the prison soon succumbs to the charms of the Master and is helping him to contact the Sea Devils. The Sea Devils basically have the same back story as the Silurians, i.e they are a race that lived on this planet before the evolution of humans. I think they look a bit cooler than the Silurians and to see them rise out of the water is a chilling moment.

Not much else I can say about this really (as I desparately race to catch up with this blog) apart from the Master and the Doctor have a nice little race in some boats, getting very wet! And of course the Master escapes at the end of the story.

The Mutants

I was seeing this story for the very first time when I watched this one. It was one I had had for a while on DVD but never seemed to get round to watching and when I started this challenge it seemed to make sense that I should just wait until it's turn came around.

The Doctor is given another mission by the Time Lords, to deliver a message to someone. I can't remember who. I've only seen this once! Don't judge me! Bad fan!

There is some bloody awful acting in this one. I mean really really bad! I can't remember the actors name or character and I could look them up but to be honest that's more effort than I'm willing to go into right now.

The Time Monster

Yes...I know what you're thinking; Is that penis with a radar dish at the end?? Nope it's the Doctor's timey wimey detector that he uses in this story to locate the Master who is meddling in time to bring a monster into this world..I think. Again, I've only seen this two times and it's been horrible each time.

In the later half of the story we end up in the lost city of Atlantis. Again. (The second Doctor visits Atlantis in The Underwater Menace).

It's mainly crap but there are some nice scenes including the Doctor relating some childhood stories to Jo. We also see Seargent Benton reduced to the age of a baby and then brought back to his grown up self without any clothes on to much hilarity *sigh*

So that was season 9. My God! That took me ages to finish. I've got another 6 seasons to cover before I catch up with myself on this blog. I would say "come back soon for season 10" but it will probably take me another month to do so don't hold your breath!

 

 

 

 

Days 561 to 564 - Castrovalva

It could be argued that the fifth Doctor has possibly one of the worst regeneration traumas of any of the Doctors. In a way I guess this could be a reflection of how the viewing public must have been feeling at the time. Tom Baker had been in the role for 7 years and therefore for many children he was the Doctor and they had no memory of any other. Therefore seeing the regeneration must have been as much a shock to their system as it was to the Doctor's.

 

Not only this, but during his trauma, Peter Davison unravels Tom Baker's scarf!!! That's like blasphemy! 

 

Fortunately the Doctor soon locates the Zero Room in the TARDIS which blocks all external interference from the universe allowing his mind time to heal. There have been a many a time when I've been hungover that I've prayed for a Zero Room!

 

Adric is captured by the Master and his mind is used to construct the fictional city of Castrovalva in an attempt to trap the Doctor and his companions in a space/time trap. Adric is being held in place by a sort of metal web and I've heard rumour that there is one scene where you can see Adric has an erection... I looked really hard but I'm afraid I couldn't spot it.

 

At this point it's still to early to judge Peter Davision's portrayal of the Doctor as it takes him till around episode 4 to settle down and realise who he is. His new costume consists of mainly cricketing attire and bizarrely a stick of celery on his lapel. Apparently Peter Davison only agreed to the celery on the provision that it was at least explained at some point why the Doctor wore it. They would do this eventually in his very last story but I won't spoil it now!

 

The Master displays his ever growing fondness for getting dressed up in strange disguises. Unfortunately it never seems to work as Anthony Ainley has such a unique way of delivering lines that you can always tell it's him even under all the make up.

 

Overall this is a fairly strong story for a new Doctor. And I'm so excited to be starting a whole new era! 

Day 560 - K9 and Company

And so it had come to this. For the first time in 560 days I was NOT going to watch a Doctor Who episode!

 

When I first decided to begin this challenge I made the somewhat foolish decision to include the spin off series. I felt that this was needed as they do sometime intertwine with the main show and therefore it would feel wrong to not include them. As such I decided to include Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures.

 

This led to another small problem. If I were to watch the Sarah Jane Adventures then I would also have to watch this attempted spin off from the 1980s, K9 and Company. This was essential as it explains how K9 comes to be living with Sarah Jane Smith as seen in The Sarah Jane Adventures.

 

Therefore having my plan in mind I set off on my Doctor Who quest in 2011. To be honest I never dreamed of actually reaching this far without a single failure and so when it came to sit down to watch K9 and company I did so with some reluctance. Even though this was the plan from the start I felt like I was failing. I technically can no longer say I’ve watched a Doctor Who episode every day now as there was this one day of watching the spin off and that bothers me a little.

 

However it has at least given me something vaguely interesting to talk about. I’m becoming concerned that this blog was becoming too much about me simply reciting back what happened in the story which isn’t what I want from it. As such I’ve hardly mentioned the actual story here as this is the sort of blog entry I want to do. More about how I’m getting on in the quest rather than the stories themselves.

 

The story itself is ok I guess. K9 is given to Sarah Jane by the Doctor (off screen, he leaves it at her house) and soon they are investigating a strange cult. Joining them is a young boy called Brendon who was actually a fairly good actor I thought. It seems a shame therefore that he was cast in this one off story rather than Adric in the main show. He would have made a good Adric.

 

It also seems strange that John Nathan Turner, the producer of both this and the main show, hated K9 so much that he had him written out of virtually every Doctor Who story but then goes on to create a spin off series for him!

 

Despite the fact the show is called K9 and Company, it feels more like Sarah Jane is the main character. This would then lead on to The Sarah Jane Adventures many, many years down the line!

 

One last thing I have to say..BEST....THEME....TUNE....EVER!!

Days 556 to 559 - Logopolis

It's the end but the moment has been prepared for.

So the fourth Doctor's era finally comes to an end. Having been watching Tom Baker every day since December 2012 it actually feels like a fairly big moment.

Anthony Ainley's Master gets his first proper outing, after being a little elusive for the first couple of episodes. He's good but his performance can be a little over the top and as such he doesn't quite achieve the sinister nature of Delgado's Master from the era of the third Doctor.

We also meet a new companion, Tegan. An Australian air stewardess who wanders inside the TARDIS, after her car has a flat tyre and she mistakes the TARDIS for a real police box. She's a little whiny when she discovers that her journey to work has been ruined by stumbling into a machine that can take her anywhere in time and space! Is she out of her mind??

Nyssa from Traken also returns as a full time companion. Here she is searching for her father and some emotional scenes play out as she discovers that her father has been killed by the Master and he is now effectively walking around in his corpse. Now that's got to piss you off! On top of this, the Master's plans end up destroying Nyssa's home planet of Traken when his plans back fire and he ends up destroying a good chunk of the universe. Everyone has an off day I guess.

Throughout this story the Doctor is haunted by a man dressed in white who seems to follow him wherever he goes. After having a conversation with this mysterious watching (a conversation that we don't hear) the Doctor seems to realise that his days are numbered. This, combined with some real sombre music gives the story a very grave feel about it.

When the Doctor's time finally came to an end, plummeting to his death, I couldn't help but feel a little emotional. This was further exacerbated when the Doctor receives visions of all his previous companions calling out his name. I had to hold back a little tear! It's at this point that we realise that the Watcher is in fact a future shadow of the Doctor himself as the spectral form merges with the dying Doctor and the fifth Doctor is born!

Days 552 to 555 - The Keeper Of Traken

Argh! I'm getting so far behind with this blog!

First of all let me say that I love this story! And coming after the diabolical Warriors' Gate then it's such a relief to see something decent again.

This feels like a dark story and a great build up to Tom Baker's exit from the show. Adric is no where near as annoying now which is good considering he is now the primary companion after the departure of Romana and K9.

The idea of the Traken empire being an empire held together by people "just being terribly nice to one another" is a lovely idea, although I'm sure some people more politically aware than me would have something sinister to say about it.

I also like the idea of when evil visits the planet of Traken it becomes trapped like a fly in amber.

This is what happens to the mysterious Melkur who materialises on the planet and over the course of years slowly pollutes the mind of Kassia. The Melkur has a wonderfully creepy voice.

This story also marks Anthony Ainley's first appearance in the series. Here he plays Tremas but would go on to play a much more sinister role (I'll give you a clue, it's an anagram of Tremas)

Soon the Doctor realises that the Melkur is more than it seems and when he discovers it to be a disguised TARDIS then his worst fears of confirmed and the rotting, and yet still alive, final incarnation of the Master resides inside!

Believing the Master defeated, the Doctor leaves Traken, only for the Master to take over the body of the kindly Tremas and be reborn! "A new body at last!"