The first we've had from Terrance Dicks in since the excellent Horror of Fang Rock. It is rare to have a writer who is established on the show these days, so great to know it’s not the end of our time with Dicks.

Mathew Waterhouse is a little stiffer in this story. It feels like he should be getting notes from the director (direction seems all over the place). I love how he is introduced as a stowaway, without The Doctor or the audience realising he is there until well after the story had gotten started.

It’s another futuristic medieval setting, similar in some ways to Meglos, which I always find a little boring and lends itself to pompous, archaic verbiage. I had to watch the cliffhanger for part 1 twice to really get what was going on. It was so low energy and poorly realised that it was not very obvious at all that The Doctor and Romana were supposed to be being attacked by birds. Considering that the last story had one of the best cliffhangers ever (watermelon spider) it’s a bit of a shame to see a shoddy production impact the overall quality here.

I’m surprised this sits side by side with Full Circle in this season given that they both feature a disused spaceship that has sat there for generations and a population who is having their behaviour and access to the truth limited. Bidmead and JNT should have been looking at these similarities from a higher level view and weeding them out. The use of vampires however is something that has until now not been fully explored in Doctor Who (and no, I’m not counting The Chase).

The best parts of this story are when The Doctor and Romana or K-9 are chatting to each other and have interesting character moments that the show often doesn’t have time for. When it gets stuck into the plot there are generic baddies and predictable perils. Dicks makes Adric appear ungrateful and foolish before revealing his apparent attitude to be all part of his plan. This is a good beat for him but in general he doesn’t shine quite as well here as the story before.

The way the story ties up, with the very large monster being pierced with a spaceship that had *just* enough fuel left to blast off before hurtling back down to earth, was very clever. It doesn’t quite make up for the rather unremarkable villains though. There is something about Middle Ages inspired characters who speak in overly formal, arch and hyperbolic ways that bores me to death.