Carnival of Monsters Episode Four

The one where the Drashigs break out of the miniscope...

I love the look of disgust on Shirna's face when the Doctor emerges from the miniscope and begins to grow. Everybody seems to view the Tellurians (ie, Earth people) as a lesser species, despite the fact they look just like Lurmans. Shirna shows the disorientated Doctor some compassion when he's coming round, like a nanny might a child!

I also love how the Doctor completely takes over the situation the moment he arrives, questioning the Inter Minorian tribunal, reprimanding the Lurmans for operating the scope illegally, and blaming Pletrac for allowing its importation. Pertwee is on fire in this scene, commanding the set and putting every character in their place.

Carnival of Monsters Episode Three

The one where the Drashigs break out of their environment...

Fair play, the Drashigs are a damned good creation, a classic Doctor Who monster in my opinion. They look really monstrous ("horrible things", as Jo says), they have bloody great teeth, six eyes, spikes and scales, and they wriggle along like worms. It's Doctor Who's version of Tremors! And the noise they make! They sound like a mix of a woman screaming from a distance and a slowed-down hippo roar. Wonderful sound design, and to be fair to director Barry Letts, he uses his beloved CSO very effectively, blending the puppetry with the live action well.

The Drashigs - creatures lifted from a satellite of Grundle - are terrifyingly efficient in this episode, basically latching onto the Doctor and Jo's scent and pursuing them everywhere they go, which includes back into the miniscope's innards, and on to the SS Bernice environment. It's bold storytelling from Robert Holmes, and Letts directs with fine pace. The scene where the Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver to explode the marsh gas and scare off the Drashigs is spectacular, especially for 1973.

Carnival of Monsters Episode Two

The one where the Doctor and Jo become part of the machine...

Not until episode 2 does director Barry Letts show Vorg reaching into the miniscope and extracting the TARDIS (or bric-a-brac, as he sees it), but I still maintain it would have been better to show this at the end of episode 1 as part of the cliffhanger. The sight of a giant hand picking up the TARDIS is a corking OMG moment in itself, but to make it clear to the audience that the SS Bernice is actually inside Vorg's scope would be the icing on the cake. It's a good example of why I don't really rate Letts as a director, I find his work too choppy in the edit (The Enemy of the World is another example of abrupt editing, and the fact he doesn't give us a shot of the fully-grown TARDIS when it's taken out of the miniscope in this episode is unforgivable).

What also confuses me is why Vorg doesn't put the TARDIS back where he found it (in circuit three), if he's so bothered about destroying the illusion. Later in the episode, Orum fishes the police box out of the machine's circuitry, not the SS Bernice.

Carnival of Monsters Episode One

The one where a giant hand picks up the TARDIS...

I never knew until I researched this story before watching it that Carnival of Monsters was actually recorded at the end of the Season 9 recording block, and held over for Season 10. I just thought I'd drop that in at the start as an example of the sort of pointless trivia that we Doctor Who fans love.

The story opens with a crashing mix of impressive and underwhelming in quick succession. There's an all too brief model shot of a spaceship coming in to land which is gorgeous, followed by a studio-bound alien world drenched in Colour Separation Overlay and cheap-looking sets. In fact, almost everything about this alien planet is cheap-looking, from the awful wigs and make-up of the cast, to the embarrassingly ill-fitting masks of the Functionaries. Oh, and there's some of Dudley Simpson's cringy plinky-plonky "fun" music for good measure. Not a prestigious beginning.