Leela’s execution by steaming as presented in Terrance Dicks’ novelisation always filled me with horror as a child and went a long way to making this one of my favourite Doctor Who books. For all this is largely a comedy, Robert Holmes doesn’t skimp on the scares, and when it comes down to it, Tom Baker doesn’t undercut them by playing for laughs. The moment when he realises Leela is to be killed in a particularly gruesome way, there are no one-liners or mucking about: he looks stressed out, if anything, snapping at K9 to get on with it, and forgetting any other distraction as he single-mindedly focuses on a rescue plan. None of this feels remotely silly.

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I enjoy how the story is driven by the Doctor and Leela’s attempts to get back to each other, which incidentally start to cause the society of Pluto to begin to unravel. In the Doctor’s case, an attempt to get ransom money for Leela ends up with him captured and incarcerated in the infamous Correction Centre. However, Hade’s conviction that the Doctor is part of a conspiracy means the Doctor is spared from brain surgery, resulting in my favourite scene of the episode: the Doctor and Hade circling round each other as they politely humour each other.

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I unreservedly love the opening episode of a story that evidently should have been called Death and Taxes. Amazingly, it’s the first ‘normal’ Robert Holmes script in years (rather than an emergency rewrite of someone else’s story, or the special exemption for the experimental The Deadly Assassin). Predictably, it’s both very horrible and very funny.

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‘How do you kill death?’ The same way you kill an intelligent super-virus or a Rutan, it seems: blow it up. I’m hoping Anthony Read turns out to be better at workshopping endings than Robert Holmes is. The Fendahl turns out to be Wanda Ventham painted gold and doing callisthenics, and some giant slugs that are as susceptible to salt as the common-or-garden variety. How tarsome.

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‘I was frightened in childhood by a mythological horror,’ the Doctor confesses at one point. References to his childhood are few and far between – Pertwee’s Doctor occasionally mentions his youth, when he visited the hermit on the mountain, but I think it’s largely in the Williams years that we start to hear about Time Lord children (or Time Tots), and get a glimpse of the scared little boy that Moffat riffs on in The Girl in the Fireplace and Listen.

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OK: it’s Quatermass and the Pit.

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This has the style of The Time Monster done right – bantering scientists; advanced equipment in a country house; ancient glowing artefacts wreaking supernatural havoc on hapless passers-by; the whiff of something unethical that needs covering up, and Pertwee-years yokels. It resurrects an interest in the origins of humankind, and has some attractive folk horror overtones.

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Most of the silly bits are knowingly ridiculous: the jokes about the embiggened Nucleus being another ranting megalomaniac, and the fact that – after repeatedly dismissing the idea the Doctor solves everything by blowing up Titan – are definitely deliberate. There’s an amusing bit of business when the Doctor opens a door on Titan and has to shut it again quick sharp because a man with a gun is standing right outside, and ‘I only hope he’s TARDIS trained’ is a funnier punchline than most of the “they all laugh at Spock” endings from Star Trek (a low bar, to be fair). Only the Nucleus claiming to be ‘mighty and invulnerable’ when it can barely move without assistance is obviously a gap between the imagination of the script and the budget-conscious logic of the production (CORRECTION: the script says the Nucleus is cumbersome and immobile, which instantly makes me like the story 10% more. Thanks to Revenge of the Swarm’s Jonathan Morris for pointing this out).

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The best bits of the serial so far take place inside the Doctor’s brain, where there’s a creditable attempt to create an environment as weird and alien as Axos, supported by strange little gnomic comments like the mind/brain interface ‘the gap between logic and imagination’ where you can’t see one side from the other. There’s also an odd little reference to the Doctor’s ability to tune into the Time Lord intelligentsia having been removed when they kicked him out – an idea of the Doctor as a sort of university drop-out that hovers round the edges of the Williams stories.

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Compare Frederick Jaeger’s performance here as Professor Marius to Sorenson in Planet of Evil. Both are fairly big performances – Sorenson’s werewolf transformation is hardly achieved through subtlety. But there was a sense that Sorenson was a realistic person being torn apart. No-one could say the same of Marius, who’s a wacky professor with a mid-European accent and a robot dog. Tom Baker is clearly enjoying what Jaeger is doing (‘Good for nothing spaceniks’, ‘Oh dear, he’s gone again!’), and so do I – but it sums up the difference between Hinchcliffe and Williams’ versions of Doctor Who.

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