The Visitation Part Four

The one where the Doctor helps to start the Great Fire of London...

The Doctor discharging the Terileptil power pack to zap Mace's gun was nicely seeded in part 2, when he first demonstrated it. It's not 100% clear what the Doctor does unless you remember the power pack scene in part 2 - and remember, that happened a week ago in 1982 - but it's a nice solution to the Doctor's predicament.

Having overcome Tegan's trance-like state by hugging her, he asks how she's feeling. "Groggy, sore and bad-tempered," she moans. "Almost your old self!" replies the Doctor. Tegan may be some or all of these things from time to time, but she's also very practically minded, and is the voice of reason when they are trying to get the locked door open. Tegan suggests the sonic screwdriver (destroyed), then a flintlock (too noisy, she's told), but is having none of the fact Richard thinks he can pick a lock using a safety pin. The flintlock is the best option after all, and if they hadn't listened to Tegan they might have been there for ever!

The Visitation Part Three

The one where the Terileptil creates a super-infectious plague rat...

As the scythe hovers expectantly above the Doctor's neck, it seems all hope for the Time Lord is lost. Is this our hero's final end, the moment where his head says farewell to his body, when regeneration cannot save him? No, because his execution is derailed by a bad actor bursting in and proclaiming: "Wait!" This is the headman of the village, and he insists the Doctor is kept alive. Cliffhanger resolutions like this are always disappointing, like a pin bursting the bubble of a dramatic moment. The Doctor is about to be killed, until someone says "no" or "stop", and that's it.

Part 3 suffers, like many third episodes, from having not very much happen. In fact, not very much has happened since the end of part 1, and the story has spiralled into a sequence of captures and escapes which try the patience. The Doctor and Mace are imprisoned in the harness room for a good half of the story, then "rescued" by the android, before being taken to the Terileptil and imprisoned again. You can feel writer Eric Saward biding his time until he can get to the story's climax, treading water in the story's tertiary stage.

The Visitation Part Two

The one where we meet the creature that came down in the firestorm...

What a wonderfully glib continuation of the cliffhanger! It's less of a resolution, more of a visual gag, as Tegan calls out for the Doctor, and he leans in through the brick wall and says: "Yes?" The brick wall is an illusion, a barrier that you can step through to the other side. It might have made for an underwhelming end to part 1, but I do enjoy the way it pans out unexpectedly here!

On the other side of the barrier, the air smells musty and humid. The Doctor identifies it as soliton gas, and of course Nyssa can't help herself and has to chip in: "I thought I recognised it". Is there anything this teenage girl from Traken doesn't know or have experience of? She's insufferable sometimes (often). She gets away with things more than the other two too, such as when the Doctor tells Tegan not to disturb anything, but when Nyssa prods the soliton gas machine and it bursts into life, there's not a single word of admonishment.

The Visitation Part One

The one where the TARDIS lands in the time of the Great Plague...

The opening five minutes of The Visitation are sheer poetry, and a surefire pre-credits sequence if ever I saw one. It's a real shame the sequence wasn't treated as such, because it's a beautifully intriguing and affecting prelude to the story proper. We have five minutes of one innocent family being terrorised by an unseen creature in their own home, before we join the Doctor and co aboard the TARDIS for the traditional soapy kick-off.

We don't spend very long with the Squire, his two children and their servant, but the time we do spend really has an impact. They are a typical quarrelsome yet loving family unit (but where is mama?) who squabble over the temperature of the room and the amount of alcohol consumed. They don't get much screen time, but we do get to care about them by the time things start to go wrong.

Kinda Part Four

The one where the Mara takes corporeal form...

It gave me an itch of recognition towards the end of part 3, but I didn't realise until the reprise that Peter Howell's score during the vision scene, reflecting the ticking and clicking of clocks and the passing of time, reminds me heavily of his work on The Five Doctors, in particular Borusa's theme. The ticky-clicky theme works better here, but I can't separate it from The Five Doctors in my head!

Panna isn't dead at all, at least not her spirit. Her aged and decrepit body might be lifeless, but all of Panna's great knowledge and experience has passed into young Karuna, in a form of reincarnation where the souls merge as one, rather than exist consecutively. Sarah Prince is fantastic in the way she portrays this, walking with more maturity and genuinely seeming like an older woman in a young girl's body. I'm not sure how old Prince was at this time, but she'd been acting for a good five or six years by Kinda, so also had the experience to pull it off. She's an overlooked gem among so many in this story.

Kinda Part Three

The one where the Doctor is branded an idiot because he hasn't gone mad...

So, what's in the box? Turns out it's your common or garden jack-in-the-box, with a ghoulish Green Man twist, so Todd's ear-piercing scream of horror was slightly over the top. But opening the box leads to more than just a jack, as the lights in the dome begin to falter, the cell door miraculously slides open, and the Doctor and Todd share a bizarre vision in which Panna and Karuna beckon them to a cave. Later, we discover this "message" was meant only for Todd, not the Doctor, because Todd is a female. The Doctor and Todd leave Sanders behind, crouched on his knees and weeping (perhaps happy tears?). It's a sad sight to see this previously proud and bombastic man reduced to a mere child, and all credit to veteran film star (and Oscar nominee) Richard Todd for carrying this role so truthfully.

The Doctor and Todd make a cracking team, the younger Doctor and the older female companion. Nerys Hughes is so real in the part, treating it with respect and intelligence. There isn't an ounce of send-up in her performance, she plays it utterly straight, and as a result the pairing works so fluidly. There are many moments of charm between them, but it all begins with the scene where they escape the dome. As the ramp slowly begins to close on them, Todd exclaims (rather pathetically) "Ohhh!", and the exasperated Doctor growls "Well, jump!"

Kinda Part Two

The one where Tegan is (briefly) possessed by a serpentine entity...

That TSS prop really is a clunker, isn't it? It's not been designed with a jungle planet in mind, either within the fiction or without. If these colonists knew they were coming to a highly vegetated planet, then why bring something so boxy and unwieldy to travel through the undergrowth? You can see the leaves gathering at the machine's base as it bumbles through the jungle. It's a good job the jungle floor is so smooth - as smooth as a BBC television studio, it seems - as it would get nowhere fast if it were to encounter a fallen tree, or even a pile of twigs. Designer Malcolm Thornton thought he'd come up with a cracking design most probably, but in truth it has virtually no practical aesthetic (just look at the way Sanders uses those little arms to take the box from Karuna, and then finds he can do precisely nothing with it!).

Anyway, Sanders is encouraged to open the box, and he is engulfed by some kind of mental force, which appears to regress him to a childhood state. Whatever is in the box has infantilised him, stripped him of both his life experience and his complexities.