After Season 15 offered up Image of the Fendahl for Halloween, Season 16 gives us another Dennis Wheatley horror thriller set in contemporary Britain. So far, this is preferable, largely because the villains are more vivid (I love that De Vries smokes a cigarette and sips sherry during his interview with the Doctor: it’s so gloriously stockbroker-turned-Satanist) and there’s an oppressive, ominous atmosphere of empty countryside and haunting music that makes for an excellent contrast with the garrulous sci-fi of The Pirate Planet.

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‘A bit crude but immensely satisfying.’ Being cold about it, this ending isn’t quite as good as the set-up. Partly it’s that the execution isn’t quite snappy enough so some of the repartee doesn’t sizzle as much as it might, and the Mentiads’ destruction of Zanak’s engines looks fairly drippy. Mainly it’s because, having criticised Xanxia’s bafflegab the Doctor spouts a great deal of it himself, and Adams doesn’t quite give the villains the exits they deserve (Xanxia, in particular, literally just fades away).

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Again, the dialogue makes this sing. The Captain has a poetic turn of phrase that hints he isn’t simply the bellowing bully he appears to be: ‘I built [the ship] with technology so far advanced you would not be able to distinguish it from magic’; ‘Do you not see how my heart burns for the dangerous liberty of the skies?’; ‘I come in here to dream of freedom’. His confrontation with the Doctor in the trophy room is rightly celebrated, but it’s only part of an ongoing verbal duel between the two of them.

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There’s no doubt Douglas Adams had seen Star Wars, is there? It would have been extraordinary if he hadn’t. I think there’s a hint of it in the psychic-powered monks who take away a young man as his Force awakens; the cyborg villain and his cowering military, who dress like the Death Star crew, and obviously the planet-sized, planet-killing spaceship. If this were post-Return of the Jedi you could even draw a semi-convincing analogy between Emperor Palpatine and the decrepit Queen Xanxia.

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When I was much younger, I didn’t get all the fuss about Douglas Adams. And if I squint I can sort of see why this didn’t impress me much: there’s not really a monster (well, Polyphase Avatron, I suppose), and there’s not a great deal of action. What went over my stupid child head is both the wittiness of the script and the cleverness of the delivery. Watching it now, I can see the whole 21st Century series coming into focus. Romana is River Song, piloting the TARDIS. The Doctor plays the fool, but there are centuries of wisdom behind it, with a burning curiosity and moral authority (he cares about Calufrax, even having dismissed it as boring). The Doctor’s backstory is almost casually revealed (he stole the TARDIS 523 years ago). They’re pitched as equals: Romana even gets to offer around the jelly babies (lifted from the Doctor’s pocket – she must have been learning his technique since The Ribos Operation).

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This ends more satisfyingly than Holmes’ previous scripts largely because the plot is so light. A character comedy, this perfectly pays off its three central partnerships. The Graff and Sholakh go out as warriors, albeit in the Graff’s case as a ranting tyrant who engineers his own downfall. Garron and Unstoffe lose the Graff’s money and their jethrik, but land on their feet because Garron always has something else up his sleeve. And the Doctor and Romana seem to have reached a grudging mutual respect as they unveil the first segment of the Key of Time.

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For all it’s a comedy, Holmes inserts a great deal of pathos into this. The scenes with Binro are rightly praised, with his touching delight in Unstoffe’s validation of his beliefs. But I also think Tom Baker gets some weightier material that plays against the slightly conceited comedy of the earlier episodes (e.g. getting caught in a net), when he does something clever to convert Garron’s bug into a communicator, and when he stops joking about with Garron to remind him, ‘A lot of people are going to die if we don’t get out of here.’

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This is one of the great comedy episodes of Doctor Who, with Holmes extracting a huge amount of witty mileage from Garron and Unstoffe’s long con on the singularly humourless Graff. Unstoffe’s delight in his own improvised story of the ‘scringe stone’ is brilliant, and highlights how well this is performed: had everyone been doing things as broadly as in some of Season 15, the comedy yokel wouldn’t have worked nearly as well. And while no-one could accuse Iain Cuthbertson of giving an understated performance, it’s completely right for Garron, who’s one of the slipperiest customers the Doctor’s met. His lapse from Jagoish master of ceremonies to Cockney villain is wonderful, especially because the implication is neither is the true Garron. He’s always playing to the audience.

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The show’s new mission statement is introduced with considerable style as the Doctor and K9 MII’s plans for a holiday are interrupted by crashing organ chords announcing the arrival of the White Guardian. With the Time Lords comprehensively debunked, apparently Graham Williams felt the Doctor needed a new “higher authority” he was accountable to. What we get is an ageing white man who feels that things have gone too far into permissiveness and chaos, and that order needs to be restored – a back-to-basics approach for the universe, which can only be achieved through assembling the six segments of the Key to Time (or ‘of Time’, the script isn’t sure).

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I’m coming to the conclusion that Doctor Who isn’t very good at endings. This is easily the weakest episode of the story, with far too much wandering about, the Doctor solving everything with a massive gun, and then forgetting all about it. It’s very “that’ll do”. And it’s bizarre that the De-Mat gun should be the solution to the Sontaran threat, when constructing it relies so much on secret presidential knowledge. If there had to be a particularly boring and secret super weapon, it might have been a better pay off to the long game with the Vardans rather than improvised off the cuff.

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