The Visitation

Another attempt to return Tegan to her own time and place goes wrong and the TARDIS arrives in 1666 just outside of London. The time machine is not the only visitor to the area; a few nights prior to its arrival a comet passed overhead and left a trail of fire in its wake, and afterwards a prominent local family was murdered and plague began to spread. The Doctor immediately suspects an extraterrestrial presence, and Nyssa's discovery of alien artefacts confirms it. An escape craft holding a group of Terileptils and an android servant has crashed and the survivors are intending to wipe out humanity using a plague bacteria being spread by infected fleas on rats, and their first target is London.

Another of the simplistic tales of aliens in the past trying to establish themselves and putting the future of the human race in danger again, with only the Doctor to stop them. Always a fun storyline, really. The BBC always does well with period drama so there is always a good supply of actors to fill the historical roles and good costumes all around. Interesting though on that costume note how once upon a time the Doctor and company used to take great pains to wear period outfits to not draw attention to themselves, yet here they all are wandering around 300 years in the past wearing modern clothes. Even the Terileptil leader spots this - a monster with an eye for fashion. Still, they do enjoy beautiful things in their culture, and their android is adorned with crystals and jewels despite being a killing machine.

How do the Terileptils stack up against other monsters? Bear in mind now that tried and true favoutites like the Daleks and the Cybermen have been absent from the series for a while, and with his desire to make the show more of a stand-out with all the revamping, producer John Nathan-Turner asked his writers for new monsters, new aliens, new villains. The Terileptils here are a breakway group from their own people; escaped criminals who broke out of their life sentence of working the tinclavic mines on the planet Raaga. A new dimension indeed; usually the frightening repitle monsters are all bad all the time, but here these are not indicative of the rest of their species, who the Doctor does not condemn as warlike or savage, just as engineers. They build androids. And Nyssa blows this one up in a showdown inside the TARDIS. Good for her.

So we're four adventures in and I've not made any kind of critical assessment of the new Doctor. Why? Because there's not much to say; he's just a guy. Oh sure he's really different from the previous Doctor and he tends to come close to hyperventilating when he starts going on at length but a defining characteristic? Hm. I have this horrible feeling that he is just going to go down in Doctor Who history as "the nice one"; the previous Doctors had a bit of an edge to them, being kind and merciful all the time but this one... he's polite. He doesn't yell. He just takes Tegan's barrage of insults on the chin when he fails to get her back home. The first Doctor would have thrown her out. Geez, Doc, grow some.

A matter of interest here, though, is the demise of the sonic screwdriver. First seen in Firy from the Deep the handy devide got the Doctor out of many a jam, and in The Visitation it meets the end, shot by the lead Terileptil. Producer John Nathan-Turner commented at WHO-FEST 1984 (I was there for that one) that he felt the sonic screwdriver was becoming too much of a cop out, much like K9 was seen to be, and it would be interesting to see how the Doctor coped without it. Third Doctor Jon Pertwee was sitting beside Nathan-Turner at the same panel when this was being discussed, and he was actually annoyed to hear that this had happened, and as he left the panel room to head for an autograph session he defiantly raised his own version of the device to the crowd.

Let's see how the Doctor copes without it.

NEXT EPISODE : BLACK ORCHID