Made before Horror of Fang Rock, this is new producer Graham Williams’ first Doctor Who serial. After all the fuss kicked up by Mary Whitehouse about violence during Hinchcliffe’s run, Williams had been instructed to tone down the horror. I think that’s instantly clear. The opening scene on a spaceship navigating the asteroid belt is apparently crewed entirely by students of the Rogin school: 1970s workers transported to the year 5000, and still griping about how dull their jobs are, and how often they’ve been overlooked for promotion. Equally, the crew of the Titan base can’t wait to go home, have broken out the bubbly and fruit bowl. The new series has made an art out of making the future feel familiar in precisely this way.

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A lot of the effects look like something from Top of the Pops or an early 1980s pop video – like the Doctor hanging from the lighthouse window, or Reuben the Rutan’s transformation. It’s obviously a long transition period, but for the first time I feel like this is starting to look like the show I remember from my own childhood in the 1980s. The Rutan itself looks like a lump of phlegm, but speaks with a fairly clipped, RP accent – much like Linx the Sontaran. And like the Sontarans, the Rutans of Ruta 3 are ruthless warmongers, concerned only about victory at any cost. No wonder the Doctor’s never taken sides in their war.

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This is a masterclass in how to structure a Doctor Who four-parter. Having established the situation in the first episode, introduced a wider cast of characters and complications in the second, this now begins to weave together the side plots into the main story, with Palmerdale’s greed and Skinsale’s attempts to foil him escalating the crisis on Fang Rock, further isolating the characters. Meanwhile, the Doctor’s attempts to fight back against their mysterious assailant hit a stumbling block when he realises, too late, that it is a shape-changer, and, in one of the greatest of all cliffhangers, tells Leela, ‘I’ve made a terrible mistake. I thought I’d locked the enemy out. Instead, I’ve locked it in, with us.’

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My favourite thing about this story is that the monster isn’t just green, it’s a bubbling lump of purest green. It’s also treated quite straightforwardly as an actively malevolent entity, which started off moving about Fang Rock cautiously, understanding the lie of the land, the defensive capabilities of the locals, and their biology (it conducts a post mortem on Ben, which makes it a sort of outer-space Litefoot). It ‘contrived to isolate us’ and now it’s waiting to strike. Before the night ends, every human being on Fang Rock might be dead.

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This opens almost exactly like The Time Warrior with yokels watching a falling star land somewhere nearby. Given this introduces the Sontarans’ arch-enemy, the Rutans, it has to be an in joke between Terrance Dicks and Robert Holmes, and it remains one of the most beautifully subtle kisses to the past in the series’ history. The difference is that when Holmes wrote The Time Warrior back in 1973, the concept of the Doctor Who historical had been more or less dead for half a decade, but since Hinchcliffe took over it’s become, if not the norm, then very much one of the main types of story. It almost feels as if this picks up where The Talons of Weng-Chiang left off, with Leela in period costume arriving in turn-of-the-20th-Century fog to learn more about her human ancestors.

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Once again, this isn’t exactly the most satisfactory conclusion. The Doctor talks about Greel’s vampirism as ‘a postponement of the inevitable’, and that could sum up this episode, which would have ended very differently had Greel been slightly more ruthless towards Leela at Litefoot’s house, or if he’d talked less and acted more at the House of the Dragon. Instead, there’s lots of frantic running about, wrestling, and explosions that mask the fact that Holmes, once again, hasn’t thought of anything more elegant.

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Five episodes in, the first meeting of Henry Gordon Jago and Professor George Litefoot, one of the most delightful double acts in the entire series. It seems everyone involved in making this recognised that fact: Holmes’ script focuses more on their comic misadventures than it does the Doctor and Leela (who get all the legwork and exposition). Their first meeting is classic: Jago, mistaking Litefoot for a footman, has to slather on the flattery when he realises his mistake. And, rather wonderfully, Litefoot laps it up, his ego almost visibly inflating as Jago declares, ‘It’s a great honour and privilege for me to be working with you on this devilish affair.’ Jago spurs Litefoot on to greatness, Litefoot drags Jago up with him.

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In many ways this episode is the culmination of the Chang plot (he’ll return next time, but only for an epilogue). Fittingly, the climax is on the stage of the Palace Theatre, where we first saw Chang, and where in front of a live audience, his showdown with the Doctor plays out in a brilliantly tense sequence where the “safe” peril of the magic show suddenly becomes real suspense as we’ve seen Chang load his revolver and pick out the Doctor as his mark. Of course, Chang gets thrown to the wolves by Greel who, unforgivably, ruins the performance exactly like in The Phantom of the Opera.

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This is the one with the giant rat cliffhanger, the second-most regrettable thing about the story. Which, given it’s on screen for about 3 seconds mostly in shadow, is barely a criticism at all. For the most part, this is every bit as strong as the previous two episodes, and shows no sign of mid-serial doldrums.

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This is very obviously influenced by The Phantom of the Opera (Greel’s broad-brimmed hat and cloak silhouette is pure 1925 Lon Chaney), with some moments, like the chase through the theatre flies, that are impressively filmic. These, plus location filming at night and the BBC’s ability to convincingly present Victorian Britain, mean this looks even lusher, if a lot grimmer, than The Masque of Mandragora. Even the maligned rat and a huge money spider are kept in the shadows so we don’t see the budgetary limitations.

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