Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Curse of Fenric Part Two

The soldiers decide to take the Doctor and Ace to Captain Sorin.

Dr Judson reads more of the translation and in the church basement new runes appear, as if they are making up their ominous foreshadowing as they are going along.

The Doctor teams up with Captain Sorin so they are let go.

Dr Judson is now in the church basement where he sees the new runes, and Commander Millington tells him to use their computer to translate them, since they are too new for Nicholas Parsons to already have a translation prepared earlier. The Doctor and Ace then go into the basement and see the new runes.

"Ace, come here and look at that. What do you notice?"
"This one's a slightly different alphabet to the rest."
"Yes?"
"And, well, it uses fewer characters."
"And?"
"And, that means it's older than the rest."
"And?"
"And, er, I don't know."
"And it wasn't here this morning."

Then Commander Millington captures them.

Nicholas Parsons makes a speech in which he hesitates and repeats himself a lot. I don't know if he was deviating from the subject as well, but as there is nobody there to listen to his speech (except us viewers), I think it indicates that he is going mad. Have I mentioned yet that this is one of Cthulhu's favourite Doctor Who stories?

There is a brief scene of padding where the British and Russian soldiers have a fight on the beach. Scenes of them fighting on landing grounds, fields, streets and hills were presumably cut for time.

Commander Millington takes the Doctor and Ace into his secret lab where they are making poison to drop on the Nazis. Then he takes the Doctor to see their computer, "the Ultima Machine," where they have hidden some poison for when the Russian soldiers come to steal it.

The two mannys who went swimming back in part one talk to an old manny, who says

"You will burn in the everlasting fires of hell, you wicked, evil girls! You have black hearts. There's no love in heaven or Earth for you - nothing for you but pitiless damnation for the rest of your lives. Think on it."

which seems a bit harsh to me, but then I'm only a cat.

Commander Millington demonstrates his poison by poisoning some birdys, which upset my friend Mr Purple Cat, and the Doctor wasn't impressed either. As if having a Nazi office wasn't a big enough clue, we know Millington is definitely a baddy now. He gives the Doctor the exposition about how it will win the war against Russia, who they are not actually at war with.

This scene was nominated as the 20th best evar moment in the series back in Doctor Who Magazine #242, a flawed list that curiously omits to include any scenes from Timelash, and, while they made a good case, I can't help but wonder... if the Ultima Machine is programmed to self-destruct when it translates the word "love," they had better hope that they don't end up translating any Nazi codes or Viking runes that contain the word "love" before the Russians steal it. Symbolism is all very well, but it can only let you get away with so much...

A special effect knocks down a bit of wall so that some mannys find a pot. They ignore it, so it tries glowing green for a bit to get their attention, but it doesn't manage to succeed... yet.

The two mannys go swimming again and get disappeared by a camera transition.

Millington orders his henchmanny to burn all the chess sets he can find. This sounds a bit mad, but then again he did have a set in his office earlier so the henchmanny ought to find at least one. Except that this scene takes place in his office, and the henchmanny leaves without finding a chess set to burn.

Dr Judson translates the new runes, which by this stage are clearly just trying to ominously foreshadow as hard as they possibly can.

The two mannys have been turned into vampires, and they lure a soldier into the water where some monsters grab him.

Ace speaks to Dr Judson and tells him that the runes are a computer program (without using that exact term, so presumably she already used it earlier in the round). This makes him very excited and Ace very pleased with herself.

"And the half-time score: Perivale 600,000,000; rest of the universe nil."

she says, although I don't think we can simply take her word for it as Nicholas Parsons is usually in charge of keeping the score.

The two vampires go in and menace the old manny from earlier in a really over-dramatic, stereotypical vampire way. However it is still quite effectively scary. In the following scene the Doctor and Ace find her body and, because this isn't part one, don't immediately get framed for her murder.

The vampires next meet Nicholas Parsons who quite reasonably points out that "vampires are just superstition," but that doesn't stop them from menacing him until he gets rescued by the Doctor and Ace.

It turns out that Ace did the wrong thing in smugly helping Dr Judson, and so the Doctor and Nicholas Parsons rush to try and stop him from running the program on the Ultima Machine.

It's time for a lot of monsters to rise up out of the sea, but surprisingly this isn't the cliffhanger. It was good enough for The Sea Devils and Full Circle, but not here.

The Doctor, Nicholas Parsons and Ace run into the room to try to stop the computer which is already running the program, and it cannot be stopped. Millington says

"You're too late Doctor!"

and we get a proper crash-zoom to the Doctor's face to end upon.

It is tough to judge this episode in isolation - it is great at building up atmosphere, but the plot has yet to come together fully, with the Doctor, Ace and other characters still seemingly going from location to location as required to hit the necessary plot beats to let the story come out a bit at a time.

We're halfway through now though, and I have hope and faith that it will all start to come together in the next part. (Also I've seen this story before, so I know it does.)