I must have bad taste because I didn't think this was all that terrible. Six yelling at Peri and her flinching was clearly intended for laughs but fails miserably, but other than that it's a middling story.

Quite a good story! Herbert's presence and relationship with the Doctor is so great, I love it!

This story is, unfortunately, less than the sum of its parts. A lot of it is treading common ground; a sequel to an unseen story, like with Face of Evil; a deformed villain who wants Peri for his bride, like in Caves of Androzani; yet another explanation for the Loch Ness monster, like in Terror of the Zygons. Most of those aren't even good stories. The sequel to an unseen story is good in concept but tends to be more confusing than anything in execution; I've expressed my distaste for Zek in my Caves of Androzani review; and while the Loch Ness monster could be fun, we've already done that, so a second explanation creates a bit of a mess.

All that aside, I didn't think the story was terrible. The secondary cast was filled with interesting characters, and the actors held up the story quite well. The only exception in my opinion was Herbert. I found him as insufferable as the Doctor did, and didn't see a reason for him to be there for the most part. I did think the reveal that he was H.G. Wells was quite charming, however.

Things fell apart more in the second part. The pacing was very odd, and the climax where the Doctor attempted to sacrifice himself really suffered for it. It stretched far too long, and with Herbert acting as comic relief I found it extremely difficult to be invested. I knew they would survive, but they weren't even trying here. It doesn't help that when they inevitably returned the Doctor refused to explain how; really showing the hand of the author there, it's obvious they just couldn't be bothered to think of an explanation.

So while I didn't suffer watching this as much as some people clearly did, and I might choose to rewatch it (if only the first part) in the future, I wouldn't exactly recommend it.

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

Previous Story: Davros

I was going into this expecting something awful and what I got was an OK story. Just OK, bit dull at points, bit fun too. Really generic story about weirdly-named aliens fighting other weirdly-named aliens while having some sort of a civil-war. It's really unremarkable but it's not as horrible as I've seen other people rate it.

At the very least, Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant are good here. Baker especially is incredibly entertaining to watch and manages to make stories like this worthwhile. I like this story's usage of a historical figure, H. G. Wells. He's played quite well by David Chandler and has a fun dynamic with the Doctor. The reveal of his identity at the end was quite charming.

Overall it's definitely not a great story but I don't see why this one is hated as much as stories like The Twin Dilemma.

Next Story: Year of the Pig

Bad 👍