Initially, I thought this would perfectly slot into "so bad it's good" - the opening actively made me laugh out loud. Unfortunately, the further into the episode I got, the more it was turning into "just plain bad".

The effects are bad and make the whole thing feel cheap and amateurish. Obviously they don't have a BBC budget, but I've seen student films that were done better than this. The side actors (with the exception of the second witch) were also pretty bad. That, combined with the narration, made me continually ask myself why this wasn't just a short story, rather than an episode. The visuals don't really add much.

The plot was thin but serviceable, and I wasn't expecting much, anyway. My biggest issue was probably the repeated use of a pretty common slur for the Romani people. I'd be able to brush it off in something from the 70's, but 2018? Absolutely not. It's made all the worse by the way it's clearly just meant as a synonym for "witch" rather than a term that is usually used to describe a people.

For a bit of nitpicking, none of the symbols on that book are Egyptian, and none of them are the ankh.

There's some things to like here and some..... not to like.

The idea of having these stories be narrated as if an oral history of these events is rather interesting, and Damaris Hayman, reprising her role as Olive Hawthourne from 40+ years prior, certainly makes a good narrator for that story. It's especially an interesting choice to have her almost dubbing over other characters who we see speaking to the camera, it puts us in her place really effectively, hearing her mindset recounting the events as we watch through her eyes.

The story itself isn't really much to write home about, but it's an interesting expansion on the character's history, the sort of thing you could see being mentioned in The Daemons, but there not being much time to explore.

That all said, the liberal use of a romani slur does somewhat darken my perception of this story, without it I'd place this higher, but it's frustrating to hear, especially in a story that was released so relatively recently, and casting very much white actors for romani roles is also not a great look.