This story was a little slow for my likely but really picked up on the final half

this felt so childish and just... i'm not really sure tbh but i didn't vibe with this at all unfortunately. really wanted to like this new era however i'm finding it grating. i've never been a harry fan and this isn't making me like him at all either.

😶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.

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

Previous Story: Matryoshka

It's a very silly story, I mean, talking wombat colonists? It doesn't really have any deeper message to it or atleast if it does It's extremely subtle. Ultimately though, I found it fun, it had some novel concepts and a fun little jaunt.

The sequence with the tiger at the beginning was absolutely brilliant and Tom Baker pulled it off marvelously.

The acting in general was rather good and the Wombat voices were absolutely brilliant if a bit similar to Big Finish's rendition of the Meep.

Next Story: Metamorphosis