While it’s very easy to spot patterns that aren’t there, I think there’s a definite sense of Season Eight leading up to this episode, and the next story. We hadn’t seen the TARDIS since Spearhead from Space, but it reappeared in Terror of the Autons, we got our first glimpse inside it since The War Games in the previous episode, and here, 39 episodes into his era, Jon Pertwee gets to pilot the Police Box for the first time. Fair enough, it’s only for a short trip, but at last the show is breaking out of the shackles of the exile format.

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It’s Pertwee’s face in the titles but to all intents and purposes the Master is the lead in this episode. He gets to do all the Doctorish things including, astonishingly, being the first character in the colour era we follow into the TARDIS. He potters round the console, tutting, flicking switches and tinkering in a way we haven’t seen since Troughton. He even gets standard third Doctor dialogue, snapping at the cautious Sir George, ‘Risk the cables, man. Risk everything you’ve got.’ At the cliffhanger it’s the Master who, with no obvious relish, tells the Brigadier if they’re to save the world they’ll have to sacrifice the Doctor and Jo – and waits on the Brigadier’s response before he acts. He’s a villain, but with Delgado and Dicks characterising him, he’s so much more than that.

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I’m really enjoying the amount of “showrunning” effort going into the series since Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks have been running things. Season 8 has started to forge a distinct aesthetic that’s giving it the same sense of cohesion as Seasons 14 and 18. It’s also introducing some ongoing character threads that go beyond “the Master is the villain in every story”. This episode picks up on the Doctor’s eagerness to steal the Master’s dematerialisation circuit in Terror of the Autons, and his annoyance at being stuck on Earth with the Brigadier while the Master goes into space and time at the end of The Mind of Evil. The Doctor is suspicious of Axos – but he’s also excited that it might be the key to getting his own TARDIS working again.

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The opening scene is almost exactly like the start of Spearhead from Space, but whereas Spearhead went on to establish the new series premise in a fairly realistic way, we’re now well into the Doctor Who version of Avengerland where everything is heightened. Hence Chinn, this story’s civil servant. Last season’s civil servants, like Geoffrey Palmers’ Masters, were played with a level of naturalism completely at odds with Peter Bathurst’s frankly ridiculous turn here. But when you’re introduced holding a file marked “top secret” in a massive cartoon font, I guess it sets the tone for your performance.

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‘The mind of evil Jo – I should have realised!’ Whenever a character declares, “I should have realised!” I’m always a bit suspicious. This ending is inelegant: we’ve never had an indication that Barnham can neutralise the mind parasite, but luckily for the Doctor, who is entirely vexed with the problem of how to defeat it, he happens to stumble in at an opportune moment. Then there’s a bizarre moment when the Master gives every appearance that he’s forgotten he’s trapped on the planet he’s about to plunge into armageddon until the Doctor reminds him.

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While UNIT race to stop the Master from launching the stolen Thunderbolt missile, the Doctor has his own challenge: to bring a temporary halt to the alien mind parasite’s increasingly greedy attempts to feed on the evil in Stangmoor Prison. Meanwhile, Mike Yates is strapped to a chair at the launch site, and Jo’s locked in a cell surrounded by sex-starved male prisoners: in context, Mailer’s little air kiss to her is one of the scariest things in the entire series.

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The Doctor’s flashback to monsters of yesteryear, and an increasing willingness to draw on the show’s backstory, recalls the second Doctor’s defence at his trial, and points the way to more clips to come – in Day of the Daleks and The Three Doctors, and then as an annual event during the JNT years. It opens the episode on a high point – the Doctor’s hearts nearly give out under the mental pressure of the Keller Machine and the Master rushes in to save him.

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The prison riot sub-plot is really very weird. Mailer and his goons take over the prison and hold Jo hostage, but she manages to grab Mailer’s gun and help the warders take back control for all of about five minutes (her finest moment so far). Then, the Master, in the guise of Emil Keller, turns up and re-arms Mailer, organising a second prison takeover. So what was the point of the first one? I suspect it’s our old friend “padding”. There’s a lot of good stuff in the episode, and the plot just about hangs together, but it does lack the momentum of Inferno, an altogether more ramshackle piece of work. 

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On top of the killer rehabilitation machine, the World Peace Conference, the missile transport we now have a prison break and the Master thrown into the mix on the basis that something has to stick. The risk is that there are a lot of stories rather than one good one, but Houghton has more or less proved he can keep the plates spinning, and at least this is giving the sense that everything – somehow – is connected, rather than being introduced, Terry Nation style, to extend the script for another week.

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This is almost as scattergun as Terror of the Autons: we’re presented with UNIT observing a revolutionary new method of rehabilitating criminals; investigating a World Peace Conference threatened by allegations of international espionage, and transporting a missile. Last time Don Houghton wasn’t sure if his story could stretch to seven episodes he chucked in a parallel universe plot which added an extra element of tension to Inferno. This time, it just feels like a string of unfortunate coincidences.

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