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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It was quite fun to see Hartnell in shirt sleeves for the last episode – but he’s found another coat for this one, just in time for a journey into the realms of Universal’s Old Dark House horror. Right from the off, the haunted house isn’t exactly pitched as the most terrifying environment – Ian quips about the Daleks not liking stairs, and despite the swooping bats, floating ghost and dancing skeleton, it’s all written more like Abbott and Costello Meet… than a real horror story.

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The episode opens with a rather unique quasi-pre-credits sequence of the regulars celebrating their victory over the Daleks on Aridius – before the Doctor notices that the Time Path Detector is alerting them to the fact that there is a time machine on their tail. Cue a strange starfield through which flies the TARDIS and the Dalek timeship.

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As the ominous (and brilliant) title suggests, this is a much more serious proposition than last week’s episode as things take a decidedly grim turn for the TARDIS crew. Between murderous Daleks, ravenous Mire Beasts and Quisling Aridians, this has a greater sense of urgency and danger than anything since the last Dalek story.

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This episode has one of the most charming openings ever: a bored Vicki wandering round the TARDIS as the Doctor tinkers with his Time TV, Ian reads a ‘far-fetched’ storybook about alien monsters, and Barbara, practical as ever, does some dressmaking. This is all lead up to the big reveal of the Space-Time Visualiser, which can show any event from history, including Abraham Lincoln, Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare, and the Beatles.

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This is a really good episode for all the regulars. William Russell is finally getting hero moments again – rescuing the Doctor from becoming an exhibit, and forcing Lobos to reverse the freezing process. Having incited armed revolution, Vicki heads back into the Space Museum to search for her friends. And Barbara is the one to drag Dako to safety from the Morok gas attack, before she gets to reflect on their existential dilemma, and finally cleverly defuses a brewing temper tantrum by the Doctor. As this is practically the final time we’re going to see the whole team together, it’s a lovely last hurrah.

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Another week, another week of the regulars standing about wondering if they can change the future – and again, Barbara sounds like the voice of the audience: ‘All we do is stand around saying this whole thing is a nightmare. Why don’t we do something?’

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After last week’s focus on the regulars, the story begins to open up to explain more about the situation they find themselves in. Lobos is the governor of Xeros, ‘a planet in the Morok empire’. The Moroks were apparently once a great spacefaring people, now declining into indolence and decadence. What’s amusing about them is that while the show has attempted to make previous aliens, such as the Sensorites or the Menoptra, ‘otherworldly’, the Moroks are basically bureaucrats with silly hair. They’re the kind of aliens Robert Homes creates. Had Holmes written them they would have been funnier, but probably not by that much. If there’s an issue at all, it’s the performance of Richard Shaw that struggles to land the joke.

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