One of the great Doctor moments is watching the third Doctor stagger out of the miniscope, and then moments later effortlessly brush aside Pletrac’s bureaucratic bluster to bluff his way into a position of authority, wiping the floor with the Inter Minorans with his righteous indignation, then, to top it all off, charming Shirna and inspiring Vorg to do the right thing and save the inhabitants of the scope (including, presumably, the Cybermen and Ogrons). In its way this is as punch the air fantastic as the end of Bad Wolf and I love it to pieces.

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You could do a reading of Carnival of Monsters as a meta satire on television, with Jo appalled at the idea of being watched for vicarious thrills:

JO: And outside there are people and creatures just looking at us for kicks?
THE DOCTOR: Very probably.
JO: They must be evil and horrible.
THE DOCTOR: No, not necessarily, Jo. Thoughtless, maybe.

If so, though, it’s a reading that suggests TV can change the world – the adventures of the little characters inside this particular idiot’s lantern inspire a political revolution on Inter Minor, as Kalik plots to use what he’s learned from watching to overthrow the government of Zarb.

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Carnival of Monsters succeeds where The Time Monster failed, by actually having story that progresses week on week, alongside larger-than-life but credible characters. On paper, the plot of the episode seems thin: the Doctor and Jo escape from the SS Bernice into the circuits of the miniscope, emerging in a swamp where they’re menaced by Drashigs. Meanwhile, Vorg and Shirna must convince the paranoid Inter Minorans that they are not Lurman spies smuggling in dangerous alien monsters to bring about the downfall of the government. It’s hardly Gravity’s Rainbow, but each scene feels like it’s advancing the story, and there’s no obvious fat (rather scenes cut to the chase – for example when Vorg turns the aggrometer up we switch straight back to the Doctor squaring up to Andrews).

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I really like that for the Doctor’s first freedom run into time and space that Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks didn’t choose to do a returning monster, or play it safe with a trip to a base under siege – both of which would have been entirely understandable especially in the anniversary series. Instead, we get the oddest first episode since Terror of the Autons, with two plots that seem entirely separate: the Doctor and Jo battle a plesiosaurus and an apparent time anomaly in 1926 while two carnival show people arrive on a planet of grey-faced bureaucrats.

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The theme of this episode, and I suppose the moral of the story, is freedom. Omega believes he’s been abandoned in exile by his fellow Time Lords, and wants the Doctor to take on the burden of maintaining the anti-matter universe, and when this proves impossible threatens to destroy everything in a massive fit of pique. Meanwhile, the Doctor, who actually has been exiled, is willing to sacrifice himself to save the universe and is therefore given back the freedom Omega craved. It’s a nice little fable of the deserving character winning the prize.

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Fittingly, this episode focuses on the power of myth and the lasting influence of heroes from the past. Omega is a kind of Gallifreyan Moses, the ‘solar engineer’ (I love the idea of someone who can create suns, no wonder he has a God complex) whose sacrifice gave his ‘brother Time Lords’ (no mention of Tecteun or the Shobogans here) their time and space travel. But while he’s been revered and remembered by Gallifrey, his continued existence, as a force of will, has left him jealous and resentful at his imagined betrayal and abandonment. I like the idea, the sense that the past can come back to haunt the present, especially in an anniversary story. In a sense, Omega is fulfilling the same role as the War Doctor in The Day of the Doctor: the guilty secret underpinning the show’s current incarnation. Only by acknowledging the past can we move on from it.

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The first few minutes of the episode feel like a proper Troughton comeback, as he takes centre stage to battle the anti-matter blobs at UNIT HQ. It’s a lovely showcase of his character, as he pokes at the creature then runs back into the TARDIS when it reacts. He forms a surprisingly effective double act with John Levene, with Benton clearly taking on the unavailable Frazer Hines’ role (you can practically hear Jamie saying the lines when the Doctor leaves Benton in charge of an electronic gizmo). Later, when the Brigadier is stubbornly refusing to take him at his word, there’s a flash of his old wolfish grin, and a sort of pained exasperation (and later, outrage when the Brigadier presents him as the third Doctor’s assistant). And he gets another great scene where he apparently wrecks the Brigadier’s radio before cleverly turning it into a better version, like the scatty genius of The Krotons. He doesn’t play this exactly like he did in the 1960s, acting a lot of scenes with a vaguely amused superiority that, possibly, suggests that he knows he can’t actually be too badly hurt because he has to live to be the third Doctor, but this is probably the episode that gives us the best idea of what a Season Seven Troughton might have looked like.

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The series’ 10th anniversary season begins innocuously with a weather balloon drifting down to earth in the middle of a bird sanctuary. This rural idyll is rudely interrupted by an electronic flash that kidnaps a gamekeeper – odd, but nowhere near as odd as the events that unfold next. Because, thanks to some fuzzy logic, the Doctor quickly deduces this is all a plot to get to him, and soon blobby orange monsters are surrounding UNIT HQ while a similarly blobby electronic effect is menacing the TARDIS. Only the Time Lords can help – but they have problems of their own – something is draining away all their power into a universe of anti-matter. That escalated quickly.

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After four weeks of running on the spot and a week introducing the power politics of Atlantis the final episode wraps everything up slightly too expeditiously to be satisfying. Hippias gets summarily dispatched, and the Doctor plays matador with the late Dave Prowse’s minotaur. Having cleverly seduced her last week, the Master stupidly treats the Queen with high-handed arrogance, over-stepping the mark and bringing their relationship crashing down minutes before Atlantis does the same. This is all much too brief a turn of events to be convincing, and a waste of Ingrid Pitt, who we last see, rather wonderfully, using a sword to free the Doctor as her world crumbles around her.

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And after four weeks of playing with us, everyone finally arrives in Atlantis, and the story immediately improves. It’s still by no means very good, but the location is colourful, the cod-Shakespearean hamminess is more watchable than the gratingly arch performances back in the 20th Century, and finally the story seems to be about something – the Master corrupting a civilisation to get his hands on their secret treasure – rather than the baffling stream of consciousness we had in the earlier parts. This is now more like The Underwater Menace, with the Master in the Zaroff role. And the fact that this is a good thing says pretty much everything about the story so far.

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