Malcolm Hulke’s take on the Master is absolutely fascinating. Earlier in the season he’s been both a Bond villain and a dark version of the Doctor, but Hulke gives him a motivation of his own. With the Doomsday Weapon in his grasp, the Master offers the Doctor a half share in the Universe, and he really means it. ‘You could end war, suffering, disease. We could save the Universe… Bring good and peace to every world in the galaxy.’ While he’s clearly a Satanic character – his mantra seems to be better to rule in hell than serve in heaven, and he continually tries to tempt the Doctor – he isn’t just a force of random evil. He’s the classic Sauron/Palpatine/Daenerys type, desiring order, but believing only he can deliver it. Steven Moffat picks up on this characterisation when writing Missy, another incarnation who offers the Doctor absolute power.

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Structurally, Malcolm Hulke is trying to pull off the same trick with Colony in Space that he and Terrance Dicks managed brilliantly in The War Games: materially advance the plot each week, gradually peeling back the layers, and keeping things interesting through a series of reversals. The problem is that The War Games was melodramatic, with vivid characters, locations and fairly momentous revelations. Whereas Colony in Space has characters like David and Robert, a muddy quarry and some caves, and a very serious moral about corporate exploitation.

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We’ve known from literally the start of this serial that the Master was going to show up at some point, the mystery was when and where. If you don’t know what’s coming, the cliffhanger of the last episode might suggest that he’s been lurking in the “Primitive” city, waiting for Jo to be brought before him. But, in fact, he’s disguised himself as the Adjudicator. Surprise!

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The structure of the serial is good. Like Hulke’s The War Games, there’s a logical progression and escalation, with the first episode introducing the colonists and their situation, the second focusing on IMC and their objectives, with this episode bringing both sides together. In principle, having set up two groups of people with opposite aims, this should be where the sparks fly. In practice, it’s a bit damp.

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Writing partners Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke were famously not enamoured with producer Derrick Sherwin’s decision to exile the Doctor to Earth, and a big part of the success of Season Seven comes down to their attempts to push the boundaries beyond simple alien invasions or mad scientists. With Sherwin gone, Season Eight has felt like a snowballing attempt to revert to an earlier, less restricted concept of Doctor Who. In that sense, Colony in Space feels like the upshot of what Dicks and Hulke have been aiming to achieve.

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While it’s very easy to spot patterns that aren’t there, I think there’s a definite sense of Season Eight leading up to this episode, and the next story. We hadn’t seen the TARDIS since Spearhead from Space, but it reappeared in Terror of the Autons, we got our first glimpse inside it since The War Games in the previous episode, and here, 39 episodes into his era, Jon Pertwee gets to pilot the Police Box for the first time. Fair enough, it’s only for a short trip, but at last the show is breaking out of the shackles of the exile format.

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It’s Pertwee’s face in the titles but to all intents and purposes the Master is the lead in this episode. He gets to do all the Doctorish things including, astonishingly, being the first character in the colour era we follow into the TARDIS. He potters round the console, tutting, flicking switches and tinkering in a way we haven’t seen since Troughton. He even gets standard third Doctor dialogue, snapping at the cautious Sir George, ‘Risk the cables, man. Risk everything you’ve got.’ At the cliffhanger it’s the Master who, with no obvious relish, tells the Brigadier if they’re to save the world they’ll have to sacrifice the Doctor and Jo – and waits on the Brigadier’s response before he acts. He’s a villain, but with Delgado and Dicks characterising him, he’s so much more than that.

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I’m really enjoying the amount of “showrunning” effort going into the series since Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks have been running things. Season 8 has started to forge a distinct aesthetic that’s giving it the same sense of cohesion as Seasons 14 and 18. It’s also introducing some ongoing character threads that go beyond “the Master is the villain in every story”. This episode picks up on the Doctor’s eagerness to steal the Master’s dematerialisation circuit in Terror of the Autons, and his annoyance at being stuck on Earth with the Brigadier while the Master goes into space and time at the end of The Mind of Evil. The Doctor is suspicious of Axos – but he’s also excited that it might be the key to getting his own TARDIS working again.

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The opening scene is almost exactly like the start of Spearhead from Space, but whereas Spearhead went on to establish the new series premise in a fairly realistic way, we’re now well into the Doctor Who version of Avengerland where everything is heightened. Hence Chinn, this story’s civil servant. Last season’s civil servants, like Geoffrey Palmers’ Masters, were played with a level of naturalism completely at odds with Peter Bathurst’s frankly ridiculous turn here. But when you’re introduced holding a file marked “top secret” in a massive cartoon font, I guess it sets the tone for your performance.

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