After the drama of Air Lock, The Exploding Planet is about the mechanics of rescuing Steven, repairing the Rill spacecraft, and escaping the planet before it explodes. Maaga and her crew barely feature: having pushed the Rills too far the Drahvins are revealed as being the ineffectual threat they always were – unable to pose a genuine risk or even to help themselves. Co-operation and friendship have trumped deviousness and coercion.

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This is easily the best episode of the serial so far. Possibly that’s because it’s the only one still to exist, and we can therefore see Derek Martinus’ direction makes the most of the rather stretched material – for example, in Maaga’s straight-to-camera speech; the gruesome flashback to the first contact between Rills and Drahvins, and the cross-fades as Steven’s air runs out. However, there’s also a bit more substance to this episode than the last two weeks.

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The main point of this episode is to highlight the differences between the Drahvins and the Rills. The Doctor and Steven think that the Drahvin spaceship is old fashioned, and the Drahvins aren’t very intelligent (an impression reinforced by the particularly gullible Drahvin guarding Steven later in the episode). The Doctor also points out that the metal of the Drahvin spacecraft is ‘Very common… Old trash’.

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The third season opens with a short TARDIS scene that neatly suggests that some time has passed for the Doctor, Vicki and Steven as well as for the audience. They all seem quite comfortable in each others’ company, and Vicki is even cutting Steven’s hair. While they initially think they might have landed somewhere peaceful where Steven can go for a swim, they’re quickly disabused of that notion by the arrival of a conical robot.

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This episode rather cleverly subverts the idea of changing history. The Monk isn’t an outright villain. Like Barbara in The Aztecs, he wants to improve things, prevent wars, save thousands of lives and make things happen ahead of their time:

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I love how bossy Vicki is, telling Steven not to just sit there but to help her look for a secret passage. She combines intelligence (usually on the same page as the Doctor – for example, when they’re operating the Space-Time Visualiser), adventurousness, feistiness and a healthy disrespect for authority. In short, all the hallmarks that are usually associated with lazy press stories about “the new companion”. Every decent future companion follows the template of Vicki. And Maureen O’Brien is absolutely brilliant too.

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With a total of one line of dialogue in the last episode, Peter Butterworth’s impact was entirely down to his familiarity and a bit of comedy gurning. As the episode title suggests, The Meddling Monk gives him a lot more to do – starting with an extended sequence of him making breakfast with a toaster and a camping stove, for the captive Doctor – ending up with a cup of tea hurled in his face.

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The Powerful Enemy started with Vicki awaiting rescue – and then followed what happened when the TARDIS crashed into her world. The Watcher takes the opposite approach, starting with the Doctor and Vicki discussing Ian and Barbara’s departure, and a touching moment when the Doctor asks Vicki if she wants to go home and she laughs off the idea: ‘I made my decision.’ And then, into their world crashes Steven, initially revealed as a shuffling, ragged creature.

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After five weeks of build up, this episode could have been a damp squib. The ongoing plot – the Daleks’ hunting of the Doctor – comes to an end in a relatively brief, albeit quite well done, confrontation with the Mechonoids, on film, with some nice cross-fades and Dutch tilts to add some visual interest. The Mechonoids themselves are reasonably well designed, albeit quite unwieldy compared to the Daleks, but they get virtually no screen time and it’s impossible to imagine on the basis of this episode that they could ever have been considered as ’the New Daleks’. It’s actually more interesting to see the Daleks’ range of plunger attachments, here expanded to include some kind of whirling wall cutter.

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The planet of Mechanus is a miserable-looking place apparently inhabited only by shuffling mutant toadstools that are appropriately fleshy looking and nasty. Quite a lot of time is spent between various characters getting vigorously billowed at by these fungoids, but given that they don’t seem to do much beyond bobbing about, recoiling from light, and dying when shot by the Daleks, they’re not exactly a credible threat.

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