Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: Spearhead from Space Episode Two

Sometimes cliffhangers cheat, and here when it recaps the last few seconds of episode one the soldier shouts

"Stop firing you fool!"

instead of

"Who told you to fire, you stupid..."

so that we can keep Doctor Who as a kitten-friendly, family TV show. The trigger-happy soldier asks "is he dead, sir?" because he wants the experience points, and then the scene hard cuts to the hopistal where the Brigadier has clearly just asked the doctor (not the Doctor... oh let's not go through all that again) the same question.

The Doctor is unconscious so the Brigadier takes his key under Finders Keepers rules. He then turns his attention to the "meteorites" as UNIT has found a piece of one and is keeping it in a box. They have a photograph of Mr. Reeder (or it may be a screenshot taken from episode one, I don't know - if so they only have a black-and-white television set, lol).

Cut to a factory, where lots of mannys are hard at W-word making dolls. There are bits of dismembered dolls everywhere, including lots of severed heads and limbs - this is real body-horror stuff, so much for "a kitten-friendly, family TV show." I'm surprised this got away with a PG rating to be quite honest with you.

One manny, John Ransome, is wandering about looking confused. Mr. Reeder watches him while looking sinister. If we didn't know that this is just his way we might have thought that he was a baddy.

John has an interview with George Hibbert, which thematically mirrors Liz's interview with the Brigadier in the previous episode, and it allows us to get the exposition while they tell each other things they already know.

"What's happened to this place? Most of the staff gone, and security notices everywhere?"
"We're developing a new process, it's all very secret. We've, er, changed everything."
"I'll say you have. The whole layout of the factory floor is different. And my workshop, what's in there now?"
"Stay away from there John."

George looks shifty, and he tries to warn John.

"I don't think you should have come here, John. You must go away at once. It's not safe."

But then Mr. Reeder comes in. He has obviously hypno-eyesed George because he suddenly acts all hypno-eyesed and tells John to go away. John leaves, and Mr. Reeder makes sure that he goes.

Back at UNIT, the Brigadier has obviously run out of things to do since he's bored and is bothering Liz while she is doing science in her makeshift laboratory.

"I deal with facts, not science-fiction ideas."

says Liz, a line which is quite meta. As is her mocking the Brigadier's description of the Doctor

"An alien who travels through time and space in a police box? LOL!"

Mr. Reeder is hypno-eyesing George again, this time into talking exposition with him.

"You talk about these energy units as though they were living things."
"All energy is a form of life."

They have lost two "energy units" (i.e. the "meteorites") and need to wait for their signals to get stronger before they can find them.

Sam Seeley has one of them in his sack, which he is now keeping in a box in his shed. When he opens the box to look at it, it sends out a beeping signal that is received by a dummy.

Mrs Seeley is curious about what Sam is up to, but he hides the unit (not UNIT. Oh noes, here we go again) from her. She knows he is concealing something, but not what - she probably thinks it is just some old-fashioned pornography, lol. When Sam closes the box the dummy becomes confused, because it can't tell if the unit is alive or ded.

The Brigadier and Liz meet General Scobie, who immediately patronises Liz to help make the Brigadier seem more sympathetic in comparison. When the general notices the TARDIS in the corner of the room, Liz takes the opportunity to troll him.

"Camouflage, general. It's not really a police box, it's a spaceship ROFL."

The Doctor, meanwhile, is is trying to escape from the hopistal. I can't blame him, I went to a hopistal once and I would have liked to escape from it as soon as possible. He steals some clothes and we can see the Doctor has somehow regenerated into having a tattoo already in place.

The Doctor steals a fancy car and drives away. By the next scene the Brigadier has obviously been informed of his escape because he knows about it and says that the Doctor "won't get very far." Is he a baddy?
No, he's only saying it because he has the TARDIS and knows the Doctor won't want to leave it behind.

UNIT mannys dig up an energy unit which is already glowing and beeping. This summons the dummy, which makes the UNIT jeep crash so that it can steal the box with the unit.

Mr. Reeder and George have a control room with lots of computers and some more dummys standing by. They are waiting on a visit from General Scobie, which helps keep the number of characters down because there is no point in having two generals in the same story.

The Doctor drives straight up to UNIT and demands to see Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart. The manny he speaks to, who is played by Producer Derrick Sherwin, makes a series of komedy faces, really overplaying his small part. I suppose it's good to be the boss.

The Doctor was able to find UNIT because he has a TARDIS homing device built into his watch. It beeps in a manner not entirely dissimilar to the way the units beep to allow the dummys to find them. The Doctor then does a bit of business about "the planet Delphon, where they communicate with their eyebrows."
Mr Sherwin take note - this is how you do a komedy face:

As soon as he is introduced to Liz they start talking science and she quickly draws him into the mystery of the plastic of the units (I think that phrase sounds like it could have been an alternative title for this story). The Doctor agrees with the Brigadier that he will help them on the promise that the Brigadier will "possibly" return the TARDIS key - he didn't bargain very hard, because really he wants to help them.

It doesn't take the Doctor long to reach some conclusions about what must have happened to the rest of the units.

"Then the answer to your question is obvious, isn't it? By the time your search party arrived, the rest of these things had been collected. Collected and taken somewhere. The question is: where?"

John Ransome, having returned to the factory, is busy doing some investigating of his own. Mr. Reeder and George Hibbert are making a dummy of General Scobie, and he is happy to help them with this - the general has no reason to suspect anything bad is going on, after all, Mr. Reeder works for Sir Jason! But I, at least, am beginning to think there is something up with Mr. Reeder, and it seems that John agrees with me.

John breaks into the control room. He sees one of the dummys move and he makes a face - cliffhanger!