😶54% = Average! = Skippable!

Thworping through time and space, one adventure at a time!

NOTES & COMMENTS:

This story opens with a strangely seriocomical funeral of Top the Wombat, followed by the Doctor befriending a tiger in 1870. Then we meet a supplier of exotic animals (Charles Jamrach, played by a silly Michael Fenton-Stevens), whose menagerie also hides other secrets. Eventually, we bump into evil alien wombats, and that’s when the story loses a lot of its potential credibility. It doesn’t help that the story isn’t particularly captivating to begin with.

Tom Baker is fine, but not very engaging. Harry and Naomi make for fine companions; Christopher Naylor captures Harry’s typical mannerism quite well, while Eleanor Crooks continues to provide energy as Naomi. The wombat voice actors sound like the Meep in The Star Beast.

Mark Gatiss is sinister from the onset, with his soft-spoken voice and carefully chosen words raising all your red flags, but this time he ends up being a decent guy, if slightly eccentric.

This is one of those stories that is both a bit silly and pretty generic and hardly leaves any lasting remarks. I’m not even very impressed by the fact that Matthew Sweet bases a lot of this story on historical facts.