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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Rather than getting us to Atlantis – something the serial has been promising for a month now – we get another episode where nothing really happens, dressed up with some urgent-sounding technobabble. While the Doctor, the Master, Jo and Krasis banter in the time vortex, Stu and Ruth exchange terrible dialogue and fiddle with equipment, and the Brigadier literally spends the episode doing nothing as he’s been frozen in time. Oh, and Benton gets turned into a baby.

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The story goes that Robert Sloman was originally meant to write a serial called The Daleks in London to conclude Season Nine, but Barry Letts decided the Daleks would instead be a great hook to launch the season. Sloman then came up with an idea involving timewarps that transported World War One biplanes to battle UNIT. The seed of that idea dominates this episode. And it’s garbage. This is thoroughly abject.

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Maybe there’s something about Atlantis that makes everyone forget how to make Doctor Who? The Time Monster gives us a glimpse of the place, which is populated by a child, a young man with copious eye make-up, and a bewigged old queen in a pink cape waving his arms about. It’s not as if this episode is struggling to meet its campness quota: you have Ian Collier declaiming ‘It happened just after the cup and saucer appeared… Like a tongue of flame… All my body was on fire… All my energy was being sucked out of me’ , Richard Franklin simpering down the phone and Wanda Moore playing every scene like she’s in Acorn Antiques (mind you, what can you do with lines like ‘So that’s what you meant when you talked about terrible danger’?)

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At this stage, producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks have every reason to be pleased with themselves. They’ve turned a show that by all accounts seemed to be on the brink of cancellation between 1969-71 into a success story about to go into its tenth series; they’ve weathered the storytelling challenges of the previous producer’s decision to strand the Doctor on Earth, and they’ve created a team of regulars and an aesthetic for the show that’s added two million onto the viewing figures, pushing it back towards its mid-1960s heyday. In this imperial phase, surely they’re entitled to enjoy themselves.

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It’s been a while since we’ve had a baddie go certifiably nuts, so it’s quite fun when Paul Whitsun-Jones really goes for it with the Marshal’s flip into fruit loops madness, staring wide-eyed at his model of Solos as he plots his new empire. He’s got competition though from possibly the gayest moment in the series to date as Ky transforms into a sparkling rainbow fairy and floats about beatifically. In between these two transcendent performances we get a courtroom scene (always a good move) complete with surprise witnesses and some rhubarbing administrators from Earth.

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With everything beginning to converge back on Skybase, this episode is largely about spinning plates for a week. Not a huge amount of new information is disclosed, not a great deal happens, it’s another fifth episode that feels like it’s marking time.

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Up to now some of Baker and Martin’s more off-the-wall ideas have been reined in presumably by Terrance Dicks and Christopher Barry, meaning that The Mutants hasn’t been quite as disconcertingly weird as The Claws of Axos. That changes in this episode, which sees the Doctor plunging into a radioactive crystal cave to satisfy his thirst for knowledge (he should be careful about that) in a sequence that goes on forever and throws every video effect available in 1972 at the screen including slow-motion, electronic lightning and strange blobs, and sparkly haloes around everything. It’s as trippy as the inside of Axos, and the weirdest thing we’ve seen so far in a season that’s largely toned down some of the tartrazine excesses of Season Eight.

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For various reasons, location filming in 20th Century Doctor Who almost inevitably looks more impressive than studio VT, so it’s a no-brainer to point out that when an episode benefits from more than the usual proportion of film. Still, it is worth pointing out that Christopher Barry, who oversaw the extensive filming for The Dæmons, makes this look equally impressive. Chislehurst Caves, illuminated by various coloured lights, are a lot creepier and cavernous than the studio caves in Doctor Who and the Silurians, and the chase of Varan across the steaming Solonian landscape, as he finally emerges into the light of a hill overlooking his village has an almost Season Seven sense of scale.

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Having adjusted my expectations downwards after Episode One, I enjoyed this with far fewer reservations. Partly this is because the film sequences are up to director Christopher Barry’s normal high standards: the handheld shots look great, and the masked guards looming out of the fog make this look like an early episode of Blake’s 7. But it also helps that the Skybase sequences are lit more atmospherically (the Herbarium, where Meatloaf-wannabe Varan hides out is all red and green low lighting, and the power failure the Doctor engineers plunges the space station corridors into moody darkness).

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