Aquitaine

This one was so boring I can't even remember what happened three seconds after finishing it. Nyssa gets a disease. Again. Tegan is loud and shouty. Again. They wander back and forth and then the day is saved. The robot butler Hargreeves was kind of fun, but couldn't do enough to stop this story being deathly dull to me.

This is part of a series of reviews of Doctor Who in chronological timeline order.

Previous Story: Secrets of Telos

This story feels like it was tailor-made for me. An eccentric robot butler in a bowler hat, conspiracies aboard a spaceship orbiting a black hole, plant zombies. I mean, what more could you possibly want, this story has whimsy and tragedy and drama all wrapped up in an incredibly timey-wimey bow.

I'm a sucker for stories that really utilise Doctor Who's unique position as a time-travel sci-fi franchise, stories that really play around with chronology and paradoxes. This story predates World Enough and Time, but neither story is very similar to one another beyond the "spaceship orbiting a blackhole makes time go funny" premise.

The robot butler, Hargreaves is absolutely the stand-out in this story, it's great to have a genuinely competent service-robot in Doctor Who, that's something that doesn't happen often. There was a moment at the end that made me think Hargreaves might be a companion, which would have been fantastic. Unfortunately it was only a tease.

This story lifts a lot from The Seeds of Doom, the main antagonistic force of this story is heavily inspired by the Tom Baker serial. I do prefer the monsters in this one, being more like traditional zombies than plain-old sentient plants adds a bit more to the horror factor in my opinion. Hargreaves is also somewhat lifted from that story, fulfilling the same role as the butler of the same name in Seeds.

Overall, this might not be everyone's favourite, but it manages to tick off basically everything I'd want in a Doctor Who story and for that I can't give it any less than a glowing review.

Next Story: The Peterloo Massacre