Part 1, I enjoyed a lot more than I expected to. Unfortunately, Doctor Who doesn't have the greatest track record with its portrayals of Asian cultures, so seeing a story that was set in Colonial India that seemed to be about a mystical tiger... well, you can see why I went into it with suspicion. However, all four of the TARDIS team managed to have something to do all through this episode, which is something that is so often lacking in stories with three companions. I was also relieved to see that the Indian characters were relatively inoffensive, if somewhat unmemorable (I am writing this up a few weeks after listening, so it is probably telling of how much impact this story had on me that I can't remember much of it).

And then parts 2 - 4 went downhill. Part 1 seemed to offer us a story of a tiger with psychic abilities who both seemed to be the enemy and yet the victim at the same time, which is interesting enough, but then the rest of the episode dragged out into something that seemed to want to riff off The Jungle Book while also still being about aliens, while also becoming an Indiana Jones style chase while also still being about aliens, and for some reason most of it seemed to take place on a train.

By part 4, I was confused. What started out being about a tiger turned into a story about the Power of the Divine Motherly Instinct, which left a pretty bad taste in my mouth. Because, of course, as we all know, the only point of a woman is for her to be gentle and loving and have such a wonderful desire to have children... It is a deeply annoying trope to me and didn't do anything to endear me to a story I was finding average to begin with, and the pastiche of The Jungle Book did nothing to make me any happier about the fact that the lady tiger adopted a human child and loved it while her brothers were big mean men.

But hey, at least it wasn't too drastically racist, right?