Colony in Space Episode Four

The one where the Adjudicator turns up and is revealed to be...

Isn't it great how the Adjudicator's spaceship looks like it's being flown by a seven-year-old boy playing with his toys? It wobbles toward the surface of Uxarieus on a wavering trajectory, then turns from a spaceship into a rocket to flip up and land upright! Elon Musk would be proud!

Meanwhile, aboard the IMC ship, the colonists have taken control and set about gathering vital evidence against Dent to present to the Adjudicator. Winton finds a machine which projects giant images of lizards (complete with sound effects!), as well as the polystyrene claws that Morgan fitted to the servo robot's arms. The colonists must feel really stupid to have fallen for this kind of mummery! Even more frustrating is Winton's swift loss of control when he lets Morgan reach for a pistol in Dent's "secret compartment", and they tumble all the way back to square one.

Colony in Space Episode Three

The one where Jo gets chained to a bomb...

I've already mentioned the fact the colonists don't seem to own a razor between them (I think every single one of the men has facial shrubbery of some sort!), but I've only just noticed that the IMC staff seem to have a particular way of brushing their hair. All of them have their hair brushed forward, often into a kind of widow's peak if they don't have enough hair to go round. The colonists don't have this hairstyle, so maybe make-up supervisor Jan Harrison decided that the IMC crew would be trendier because they'd more recently come from Earth?

I also love the fact the IMC spaceship has a noticeboard. Despite it being 2472, it seems people still read memos printed on sheets of A4 paper pinned to cork boards!

Colony in Space Episode Two

The one where we meet some murderous mineralogists...

Uxarieus is a bloody grim planet, isn't it? I know it was actually a Cornish clay pit in dampest February, but it's hard to understand why the colonists ever thought they'd be able to thrive in this most depressing of environments. Ashe may have done his homework, but it's virtually impossible to believe that the land would be suitable for farming (which reminds me: we're never actually shown the colonists' farmland, we're just told about it - maybe because director Michael Briant knew it'd look silly sticking a couple of wilting runner beans into a patch of wet clay soil!). Nevertheless, the location allows for some quite impressive, sweeping shots of the "planet" when the Doctor's driving around in his little golfing kart.

The arrival of the mysterious Norton at the colony has really thrown the cat among the pigeons. As Jo sagely observes, he makes a "remarkable recovery" for saying he's been living on roots for 12 months (but looks suspiciously healthy for it), and he wastes little time in genning up on the hows and wherefores of the colony thanks to the dashing Winton's informative tour (do the men in this colony not possess razors? They're all as hairy as a Primord!). Norton seems particularly interested in the colony's power source, and when he asks whether Jim Holden is their only "electrician engineer", my suspicions were raised immediately.

Colony in Space Episode One

The one where the Third Doctor visits another planet for the first time...

The opening scene of this story is both marvellous and frustrating. We zoom through space and home in on what would appear to be the Doctor's homeworld (yet to be named) where we meet three Time Lords in splendid robes. This is theoretically very exciting, because we all know how terrifying the Time Lords are (except for that bumbling bowler-hatted chap in Terror of the Autons). It's quite a refreshing revelation to have them send the exiled Doctor on a mission for them ("We must restore his freedom, as long as it serves our purpose"), but they reveal too much plot, and needlessly.

The fault can only be writer Malcolm Hulke's, who basically tells the viewer that Roger Delgado's going to turn up as the Master again, and that he has plans for something called a "doomsday weapon" (in fact, the very first words of the story are: "The Master..."). After this scene ends, there is no further reference to the doomsday weapon, and the Master does not appear. Why oh why didn't the production team hold back the involvement of the Master until his actual appearance later in the story? And why mention something that then becomes totally irrelevant to the rest of the episode? It all seems a bit ham-fisted to me.

The Claws of Axos Episode Four

The one where the Doctor pretends to betray the entire Earth...

"The claws of Axos are already deeply embedded in the Earth's carcass!" says the Doctor at one point. It's always great to hear a story title spoken by a character in the fiction, even if it is in a rather contrived way such as this!

At the top of the episode the Doctor and Jo are struggling to escape Axos, and Jo appears to have the mother of all panic attacks as the confusion floods her mind. She's hysterical, and there was a moment where I really did think the Doctor was going to give her one of those classic Hollywood slaps across the face to "knock some sense into her". But no, not even the Third Doctor would do that. Such unnecessary violence is largely confined to the 21st century series, where it seems to be a rule that every companion gets to slap the Doctor at some point (except when the Doctor's a lady).

The Claws of Axos Episode Three

The one where Jo is almost aged to death, and the Master breaks into the Doctor's TARDIS...

This is a surprisingly Doctor-lite episode considering the Axons' invasion of Earth is underway and things are spiralling out of control. Right from the start, the Doctor and Jo are taken back to Axos as prisoners, and the Doctor spends most of the episode being questioned. Poor old Katy Manning, meanwhile, barely gets anything to say or do, although the scene where Axos ages Jo is quite startling (older actress Mildred Brown looks thoroughly browned off!).

To save his friend from being aged to death by Axos, the Doctor agrees to provide the secret of time travel. Axos is able to unlock the block that the Time Lords put on the Doctor's memory, and so he can project the correct equation and power applications for them. If any budding quantum scientist wants to try and invent time travel for real, they need look no further than The Claws of Axos episode 3 - it's all there! But why does Axos need the Doctor to do its calculations for it? Surely as soon as it knows the equation and power application, it can work out the effect the full output of the Nuton complex would have for itself?

The Claws of Axos Episode Two

The one where the Doctor makes things ten times worse...

Chinn really is very annoying, isn't he? For some reason he has become the face of the British Government, who otherwise show very little interest in what's going on, despite the obvious enormous repercussions. An alien spaceship has landed on British shores and is offering a miraculous deal which may completely change the course of progress on planet Earth, but all HM Government does is give self-important pen-pusher Chinn "special powers" and leave him to it.

Granted, the minister who speaks to Chinn on the phone warns him that he is their "man on the spot", but to invest so much responsibility and importance in one civil servant is both bonkers and unrealistic. Writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin are really stretching credulity here! Also, Chinn's "special powers" (under the Emergency Powers Act) appear to give him the right to command the regular British Army and get them to arrest the Brigadier and UNIT's men, and subsequently prohibit them from contacting the outside world, or indeed UNIT HQ in Geneva! It's utterly preposterous.

The Claws of Axos Episode One

The one where a gibbering tramp makes first contact with an alien species...

The episode opens very similarly to Spearhead from Space, with an unidentified mass approaching Earth and being picked up by UNIT technicians on radar. Although he's a pretty poor actor, Michael Walker (as Harry, according to the novelisation) is very easy on the eye and manages to make it past this first scene to feature in two entire episodes. Was there an effort to introduce a wider "UNIT family" in Season 8 to back up the Brigadier, Captain and Sergeant, what with the introduction of Corporal Bell in The Mind of Evil, who also features here? I like Harry: he can stay...

It's a damn good opening to the story actually, showing a weird alien mass (ship?) approaching Earth like some giant galactic puffer fish (it even seems to have breathing "gills"). The glimpse we get inside the ship is a nightmarish collage of cross-fades and superimpositions of various strange organic beings. It's truly alien and I love it.

The Mind of Evil Episode Six

The one where a pure mind saves the day...

"Thank you, Brigadier. But do you think that for once in your life you could manage to arrive before the nick of time?" What an arse! The Doctor continues to be an ungrateful so-and-so, despite having his life saved by the Brigadier (who shoots Mailer dead). The Doctor was similarly ungrateful when Jo saved his life earlier in the story, and here he goes on to mock the Brigadier for losing the Master and the missile. If ever there was a Doctor I'd like to slap, this is the one.

The Master's plan is taking full form, as he threatens to blow up the world peace conference in London using the Thunderbolt missile, thus leading to a world war which will leave the planet in ruins. "Then I will take over," adds the Master. But why would he want to rule over a devastated planet, where most of the inhabitants have probably been destroyed? What fun is there in sitting on a throne and overseeing a globe of post-apocalyptic devastation? The Master really is a total psychopath.

The Mind of Evil Episode Five

The one where UNIT storms HMP Stangmoor...

Dudley Simpson's score for The Mind of Evil gets on my nerves a bit. It manages to swing from quite pleasantly melodic passages, to outright cacophonous assault. There were moments in earlier episodes where the music sounded like a demented trimphone, it's often so shrill and "parpy". I remember particularly disliking his score for a couple of the Troughtons (The Underwater Menace), but while his work isn't quite as nails-down-a-blackboard as Tristram Cary's score for Doctor Who and the Silurians, Simpson's best work is definitely ahead of him, I feel. I realise it's quite experimental, but it's also pretty mental.

My personal star of this episode is Major Cosworth, played by Patrick Godfrey with a splash of wit which gives the Major and the Brigadier quite an amusing double act routine. It's lovely when Cosworth appears to get quite excited about Stangmoor's dungeons ("Rather like making a film, isn't it, sir?") and the Brigadier shoots him an astonished glare! Cosworth also congratulates his superior on his plan to attack the prison, which puts the Brig's back up a bit too. Lovely little repartee. Cosworth should have stayed on!

The Mind of Evil Episode Four

The one where UNIT loses an illegal nuclear-powered missile...

The Keller machine has grown so powerful now that even the Master is struggling to control it, which already gives a fair indication of how this is all going to play out. If it's anything like Terror of the Autons, then the Master is very soon going to find he's out of his depth, and require help from the Doctor to defeat the creature (I think this is the first we learn that there is a sentience inside the machine, what the Doctor describes as "a creature that feeds on the evil of the mind"). It's fascinating to see the Master joust with the Keller machine though, trying to reassert his mental control, something he's very used to having over lesser beings (and when Roger Delgado says: "You can't harm me, I'm stronger than you are", he sounds remarkably like Anthony Ainley in Survival).

It's also interesting that we get to see what it is the Master fears most, which is humiliation by the Doctor. The way this is depicted on screen is wonderful, with the Master diminutive in the foreground and a projected giant Doctor guffawing mercilessly, grasping at the Master's contorted form. Quite how the Master might die from this abject humiliation is another question...

The Mind of Evil Episode Three

The one where Jo overcomes a prison riot, but the Master just goes ahead and starts another one...

The Chinese dragon costume really isn't all that bad. Its saviour is director Timothy Combe, who quite rightly decides to shoot it as ambiguously as possible, using extreme close-ups, quick cuts, fades and blurring. You don't get to see the whole thing very clearly at all, just a second or so in long shot when the Brigadier fires his pistol. But the close up of its head before it merges back into Chin Lee shows what a lovely sculpt it was. At the time, the production team laughed at it, labelling it Puff the Magic Dragon, and if it hadn't have been shot as judiciously as Combe did, it would have been the laughing stock of the Pertwee era. As it stands, it remains pretty effective.

But the dragon's manifestation continues to smudge my understanding of exactly what the Keller machine is doing. I struggle to follow whether Chin Lee actually turns into a dragon, or just appears to do so in Alcott's imagination. The fact the Doctor, Brigadier and Fu Peng physically see the dragon too is explained away as a "collective hallucination", which means the machine's power is affecting them too, and isn't targeted solely on Alcott (by the way, full marks to Tommy Duggan for acting his socks off during the dragon's assault!).

The Mind of Evil Episode Two

The one where we discover the Master is trying to disrupt the world peace conference...

The fluctuating quality of the colour in episode 2 demonstrates just how good the pain-staking hand colourisation of episode 1 by Stuart "Babelcolour" Humphryes was. At times the colour recovery process used here is almost as pointless as The Ambassadors of Death's, in which colour sometimes became an option between two shades of beige. As with Ambassadors, I tend to think they should have just left it in black and white rather than wishy-washy semi-colour.

Anyway, so the reprise of the cliffhanger sees Jo burst in and break the Keller machine's grip on the Doctor's mind, proving that he is imagining the flames, rather than them actually being there and burning him. The Doctor asserts that "we believe what our minds tell us to", so it seems everything the Keller machine's victims are "seeing" is imaginary, which means the physical effects of their deaths (scratches and bites, lungs full of water) are nonsensical. Colour me confused.

The Mind of Evil Episode One

The one where a man drowns in a completely dry room...

For the first time in what seems too long, the Doctor actually seems quite happy in the opening scene of this story, although his good mood doesn't last very long at all. It's odd, because this Doctor seemed pretty jovial and pleasant in Spearhead from Space, and only really got grumpy when he saw things going wrong. But in the past few adventures (the latter half of Season 7 and Terror of the Autons), he comes across as a right moody devil, and not someone I'd particularly want to spend time with. This is very possibly why the Third Doctor has traditionally been one of my least favourite incarnations; the version we had in his debut story is much more appealing.

The early scenes inside Stangmoor prison are cacophonous and unsettling, with the raucous prisoners shouting and clanging away on the verge of a riot. The soundtrack is really noisy, making it hard to make out dialogue at times, and the grittiness of the scene where the wardens collect an irate Barnham makes it feel more like Get Carter than a family teatime adventure show. Ray London's prison set is impressively convincing though.