‘I’m not waiting around while you plot the course to your own destruction.’ Later, when the show offered this kind of thing every week for a couple of years, it became quite easy to be sniffy about the military SF of Earthshock, with ‘gritty’ working class soldiers (you can tell because one of them has a northern accent), macho posturing (Scott grabbing the Doctor roughly by his lapels) and a massive, gruesome body count. Here, it’s like a slap across the face. The series hasn’t offered up anything that’s tried to be this tough since The Seeds of Doom. It’s got a relentless pace, machine gunning you with scene after scene of people being reduced to goo in the dark.

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‘Unbelievable. Quite unbelievable.’ The first episode was charming in a fairly superficial sort of way, but this is just annoying. Everyone behaves like idiots. Lady Cranleigh must realise the game is up when George escapes and starts to murder half the staff, but is willing to let the Doctor be arrested for murder. The Doctor looks utterly hapless as he can’t talk himself out of the situation, sitting looking forlorn as Sir Robert reads him his rights.

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The opening is probably the best hook this season: a man is strangled in a wood-panelled corridor; cut to (apparently) Nyssa asleep in a grand old bed. If this was a new series episode that would make an awesome teaser. It’s followed by more intriguing mystery: why does the TARDIS keep arriving on Earth? Why is everyone staring at Nyssa? And why is the Doctor expected at Cranleigh Hall? When Sir Robert mentions the Master, the Doctor is immediately on edge. A murderer on the loose, and the Doctor seems to have been drawn to the scene of the crime…

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‘Try and think what the Doctor would do if he were here.’ Possibly the most “basic” Doctor Who story so far, it’s all perfectly adequate without ever giving the impression that there’s anything going on beyond the edge of the TV screen. In that sense, it’s the polar opposite of Kinda, which implied a whole society we never really see. The Visitation reduces the 17th Century to a few old-fashioned houses and a forest; one fruity local, and a punchline that’s like something from a World Distributors Annual. It succeeds because it’s mostly aiming to achieve the bare minimum. It’s less dense and complex than one of the new series’ celebrity historicals.

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‘Kill them Scythe Man, and you die as well!’ This is like a checklist of Saward cliches – the monster that declares, ‘Excellent!’. The oddly civilised baddies (the Terileptil talks about living with grace and beauty). ‘You must think me a fool.’ Because a lot of its being done for the first time, it has novelty value, and there are some nice moments like the Doctor suggesting to the Terileptil, ‘Why not smile and let me live?’ Saward has an earned reputation for brutality in his scripts, but half the time they’re actually pitching for black comedy, and I think some of that is evident here.

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‘Are you capable of carrying a tired thespian?’ After Kinda threw buckets of ideas at the wall, this offers practically none. It looks very nice though, with some pretty spring filming and authentic-looking locations. It’s a shame, Mace aside, that it’s populated by non-characters with banal descriptions like ‘Poacher’, ‘Miller’ and ‘Scythe Man’ (unforgivably, villagers who grew up together don’t call each other by their names), but it requires no effort to follow, and was probably just the job for eating your dinner in front of on a Tuesday evening.

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‘While you were enjoying 48 hours peaceful sleep in the delta wave augmenter, my mind was occupied. Taken over.’ Welcome, Eric Saward: one of the key creative figures of 1980s’ Doctor Who, making his debut with a script that demonstrates some of the most grating elements of his style (suddenly, everyone in the universe talks like they’re a bowdlerised Shakespeare character), but also some of the strengths.

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‘Was it real or not?’ The script has a charming awareness of its own obfuscations, and Todd becomes a brilliant audience mouthpiece, baffled and irritated by the gnomic comments of Karuna, and demanding rational explanations which, by and large, are forthcoming. The Mara lives in the ‘dark places of the inside’ (‘or wherever’ – the Doctor doesn’t buy into the mysticism either) and has used Tegan to cross into the material world and possess Aris.

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‘You male fool.’ Though the script is dismissive of men, it’s notable that neither of the female companions even appears in the episode. Again, this skirts with being baffling because the script is full of poetic allusions: ‘Wheel turns, civilisations arise, wheel turns, civilisations fall.’ You could write a book on the thematic depth and imagery (oh, they have). On the flipside, if you’re just interested in following on with the story basically Aris the Kinda has been possessed by an evil force and plans to kill the human settlers, even though the wise woman has already planned to defeat the invaders through a mix of the telepathic box, and reasoning with Todd.

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‘I don’t want to understand everything, I want to work things out for myself.’ The difference, I think, between this and the earlier stories this season is the balance it strikes between the elevated SF of the forest, and the rather more robust scenes inside the dome with Simon Rouse’s portrayal of Hindle’s insanity, and Davison’s brilliantly judged “phew, what a loony” reactions. In both strands, madness is creeping in to disrupt the world, it’s just we understand the rules a lot better in one setting than the other.

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