Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: Inferno Episode Seven

Long story is looooooong!

The stock footage from the start of each episode now makes sense, it was foreshadowing the destruction of the evilverse which is only just now happening.

After the cliffhanger reprise there is a hard cut to the Doctor lying on the floor having sleeps - it is going to be very, very disappointing if the last four parts turn out to have been only a dream, mew.
He is back in the UNITverse, which we can tell when UNITverse Liz with her UNITverse hair comes in and sees him.

Stahlman is still the Health & Safety Executive's worst nightmare, even saying to Petra

"Safety margins are for cautious old women like Sir Keith."

When Greg and Petra together try to talk some sense to him, the close ups make it really obvious he is a properly mad scientist obsessed with reaching "Penetration Zero at the earliest possible moment."
Even they notice it now. Unlike a lot of mad scientists who are mad, evil, or mad and evil just to give a story a good baddy... er, I mean a decent baddy... er, no, oh you know what I mean, mew... unlike those, Stahlman's increasing monomaniacal obsession is caused by the green slime.

Stahlman describes Greg as

"One of Sir Keith's little army of experts. Well, we don't need your advice, Mr Sutton. Now that ridiculous Doctor has gone, Sir Keith himself has gone, why don't you follow their example? And then we might make some progress?"

Now, who does that remind me of?

Image of Michael Gove deleted under guidance from
the Cat Health & Safety Executive (CHASE)

Do you think he also must have touched the green slime?

There's an explosion and an alarm goes off. In the hut the Brigadier is there with Liz when the Doctor wakes up. He knows it is "number two output pipe blown" because he has already seen it happen in his dream the evilverse. The Brigadier confirms by telephone that this is indeed what has happened and is amazed the Doctor knows. He then mumbles about "reverse all systems" before going back to sleep.

Liz passes what the Doctor said on to Greg, and he says the same thing the other Greg already said in episode 4 when it happened in the evilverse:

"It's not such a crazy idea. It's been done before."

The Doctor wakes up, properly this time, and when he sees Liz and the Brigadier he says

"You know, you really do look better with that moustache."
"Delirious, poor chap."

LOL! He tells them where he has been, and once accidentally calls the Brigadier "Brigade Leader."

Sir Keith comes in with a bandaged arm. The Doctor says "so you're not dead?" and that this is "excellent, excellent!"

"Well, yes, yes, I think so too."

says Sir Keith, deadpan. The Doctor talks to himself (and us) about what this means:

"Yes, of course, of course. An infinity of universes, ergo an infinite number of choices. So free will is not an illusion after all. The pattern can be changed."

Then he turns to Sir Keith:

"Sir Keith, unless we do something very, very quickly indeed, there's going to be a disaster."
"How do you know, Doctor?"
"Because I've already seen it."

They go to the control room to stop Stahlman, but the Doctor jeopardises the mission when he goes on a rampage and attacks a panel to try and stop the drilling. The Brigadier is forced to have UNIT mannys take him away.

Even when Sir Keith tries to take charge, Stahlman refuses to relinquish control or stop the drilling. Stahlman chases all the other mannys out of the drill room, saying he wants to do it all by himself, then he closes the door. Once he is alone, Stahlman starts noming the green slime.

The Doctor uses Venusian Karate to Blake the two UNIT mannys taking him away, then runs for it. He goes up on the roof to hide from them, but that is exactly where the green manny is.

Just like he did in the evilverse, the Doctor gets the conveniently nearby fire extinguisher with which to extinguish the green manny.

The Doctor comes back into the studio. Even with everything that has happened, Sir Keith will not order the drilling shut down without Stahlman's agreement, and says "we have no proof of an emergency situation."

Stahlman opens the door and gives them all the proof they need, because he has become fully green and hairy. He hits the Doctor with a chair, then Greg and the Doctor fire extinguish him - and I get the impression that Greg had been wanting to do that to Stahlman for a while, lol.

Petra obeys the Doctor's order to shut down the drilling, while an extra behind her forgets what he is supposed to be doing and just looks confused. The drill keeps going anyway, because Stahlman has smashed one of the sets of controls, so the Doctor has to try and make it work. The countdown voiceover manny sounds disappointed when he has to report

"Attention! Attention! Countdown drilling stopped at minus thirty five seconds."

The emergency is over, so the scene moves on to the hut where the Doctor and Liz are working on the TARDIS console. The Brigadier and Sir Keith come in.

Sir Keith says goodbye, as he won't see the Doctor again until he plays Henry Gordon Jago in Talons of Weng-Chiang, but the Brigadier stays to argue with the Doctor about whether he should use the nuclear power to make one last trip with the TARDIS console before they switch the power off for good. This ends when the Doctor says

"Goodbye, Liz. I shall miss you, my dear. But I've had about all I can stand of this pompous, self-opinionated idiot here."

The Doctor and the console disappear, but the Brigadier and Liz only have time to exchange a few words before he comes back in.

He says the console only took him

"A few seconds forward in time, and a few hundred yards due east in space."
"The rubbish tip?"
"The rubbish tip."

What's so good about Inferno?

Inferno is one of the archetypal parallel universe stories in sci-fi TV, along with Star Trek's Mirror, Mirror and Red Dwarf's, er, Parallel Universe.

Considering the number of Doctor Who stories there are, it is perhaps surprising there haven't been more based around the concept of alternative versions of settings and characters we know. But then it would be tough for them to live up to the high standard set by Inferno, which does it so well on the first attempt - creating an interesting, and chilling, alternate police state Britain where our UNIT heroes are thuggish villains, all drawn in a few lines of dialogue between the Brigade Leader and the Doctor:

"I have full authority. Defence of the Republic Act, 1943."
"Republic?"
"Yes."
"Then what's happened to the Royal..."
"Executed. All of them."

And then there is the Inferno project itself, which starts off seeming like the sort of scientific research centre typical of the era, not dissimilar to the one most recently seen in Doctor Who and the Silurians, which we might reasonably expect to end up under some kind of siege from the green mannys or something, but instead it escalates into one of the most apocalyptic, high stakes stories evar - in the evilverse, we even see the Doctor lose!

This gives the story the kind of dramatic power that it is rare to see. On top of that, while a lot of Doctor Who stories see self-sacrifice from minor characters, such as might be expected of Greg or Petra, Inferno has it from main character Liz. And we also see our expectations further subverted when we get the opposite behaviour from the evilverse counterpart of the Brigadier, the one character who (aside from the Doctor) we know best.

While I know this is hardly an original observation, I am bound to say that it is interesting that there was no alternative Doctor in the evilverse. Perhaps there just wasn't room for one in the story with all the other plot elements - the evilverse already filled up the equivalent of a full four-part story within the context of a seven-parter. Dealing with opposition from an evil Doctor could have made it even longer, or conversely a second good Doctor (played by a different actor perhaps?) could have helped our Doctor shorten it.
Explanations for the evilverse-Doctor's non-presence have been provided in spinoff media (I believe it was Paul Cornell who suggested in one of his novels that an evil Doctor was the "precious dictator" that Greg referred to), but I think the simplest explanation is that that universe's Doctor would have had nothing to do with the evil mannys of the Republic.

I note there was no evilverse Captain Hawkins either, mew.

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: Inferno Episode 6

With the fire extinguisher as their weapon, they fight their way to a giant fire extinguisher that Greg rigged up earlier intending to cool the drill with. Despite the fact there are obviously more fire extinguishers on the walls, for some reason they don't use them and the Brigade Leader is worried about the one they have running out.

While Greg and the Doctor stay to try and fix the power that they need to send to the TARDIS console, the Brigade Leader, Liz and Petra escape out onto location where everything has gone orange to show how hot it is meant to be.

Back in the UNITverse, the Brigadier has received a telephone call about Sir Keith vanishing. He orders Benton to get Professor Stahlman so that he can ask him to "delay Penetration Zero" until Sir Keith returns. Obviously Stahlman says no because he is a knob.

That's enough UNITverse for now. Back where the Doctor is, he completes what he is doing and escapes with Greg, pausing to pick up two more fire extinguishers on the way. It is really not clear why nobody did this earlier when they only had one fire extinguisher between five of them.

Petra tries to fix up the nuclear power at the reactor room. The Brigade Leader shouts at her to hurry up until she snaps at him

"Brigade Leader, I'm trying very hard to carry out a complex scientific task under impossible conditions. You will not help matters by bullying me!"
"You are insolent, Dr Williams!"
"Am I? Then it's about time that you learned that some problems just can't be solved by brute force and terror."

The Brigade Leader obviously disagrees, because he tells Liz that he plans to use brute force and terror to make the Doctor to take them with him when the TARDIS console is working again.

The Doctor and Greg use Bessie to get to the hut where the console is, and when Greg sees it for the first time he says

"I thought it'd be a bit more impressive than that."

to which the Doctor replies

"What did you expect? Some kind of space rocket with Batman at the controls?"

Maybe Greg did expect something like that, especially if he noticed the Anti Thief Device gadget in Bessie.

The Brigade Leader is getting frightened, and Liz decides to troll him a bit by being insubordinate:

"All right, Brigade Leader, we're still here."

and

"You don't really think you can force him to take us? He's not the sort of man you can frighten."

Eventually the Brigade Leader admits that he will kill the Doctor rather than let him leave on his own:

"I shall make sure that he dies first."

Petra turns the power on but it doesn't work. There are explosions outside that we hear but don't see - to be honest we don't need to see them, this story is exciting enough already - these distract Liz for long enough that hairy Stahlman can sneak up and disarm her of her fire extinguisher. The Brigade Leader shoots him and they all run away.

Back out on location, they are chased by the other green mannys and also have to contend with falling over a lot from earthquakes. They get to the hut and tell the Doctor that the power still isn't working. Things look hopeless and the Brigade Leader panics.

He pulls his gun on Greg and actually tries to shoot him, but he has spent all his bullets shooting Stahlman.

"What do you do now, slap my wrists?"
"I don't need a gun to finish you!"

They have a punch-up, and the Brigade Leader looks genuinely surprised when Greg beats him.

Petra and Greg go back to try and fix the power again, since it is their only hope. Stahlman wakes up so Greg fire extinguishes him (again), allowing Petra to finish the job.

The Brigade Leader raises his gun and demands the Doctor takes them with him - do we assume he has remembered to reload it since two scenes ago? Greg actually challenges him on this, so the Brigade Leader fires off once to demonstrate that he has.
He counts to three, and then gets shot by Liz. The Doctor starts up the TARDIS console.

Out on location, the green mannys, as well as some other mannys that we see have survived this long, get attacked by the stock footage that the disaster has unleashed upon the evilverse. With the power of CSO it even threatens to reach them in the hut, looking a lot like a big pile of strawberry jam rolling slowly towards them.

Despite such a poorly dated special effect, this is an amazing cliffhanger, sold entirely by the terrified reactions of Liz, Petra and Greg.

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: Inferno Episode 5

The episode begins the reprise with the countdown on ten seconds, so here we can tell exactly how short it is. When the countdown reaches zero everybody falls over, including Stahlman so he can't shoot the Doctor after all.

In the drill room, Stahlman has a fight with the Doctor and Greg

although as they are all in disguise now it is hard to tell who is who, and who is their stunt double.

The Doctor and Greg come back out, and then the door is closed from the inside. Stahlman makes the other mannys in there with him nom the green slime. Lots of mannys and soldiers run away, which makes the Brigade Leader sad, but does at least mean there are less mannys to keep track of, although all the main characters are still there so it doesn't help all that much.

The Brigade Leader has been put in charge by "London" but Greg trusts the Doctor far more and asks him what will happen next.

"Well, the heat and the pressures will continue to build up until the Earth dissolves in a fury of expanding gasses, just as it was billions of years ago."
"How long have we got?"
"Maybe a few weeks, maybe only a few days."
"So it's doomsday?"

I certainly hope it isn't Doomsday, that was a terrible episode, mew.

A green manny comes in and rars at them. The Brigade Leader shoots him, then the Doctor fire extinguishes him. There are a lot of fire extinguishers about the place, it is terribly unlucky for the green mannys that they are so vulnerable to them. After that, Greg wants to leave but the Brigade Leader doesn't want him to go and they start shouting at each other.

"You're still loyal to your glorious Republic. I'd like to know what your precious dictator can do for you now."
"I will not listen to treason!"

Because Benton is still loyal to the Brigade Leader, along with some soldiers, he is able to regain control. Greg still wants to escape and he tries to convince Petra to help him.

The Doctor is sure that this world is going to blow up, which sounds bad - where would us cats keep our Blakes 7 DVDs if there was no world? He tries to convince Liz to help him save the UNITverse Earth if he can go back there in the TARDIS.

Having seen the console, the Brigade Leader still doesn't believe that it can go anywhere. Liz asks if the Doctor can give some proof to them, so he uses the little power that is stored in the console to make himself and it vanish for long enough to convince Liz and confuse the Brigade Leader before he reappears.
The Brigade Leader then asks a perceptive question for once:

"And take others with you?"
"No! No, I couldn't possibly do that."
"Why not?"
"It would create a dimensional paradox. It would shatter the space-time continuum of all universes."

Does the Doctor know this for certain or is he making it up? I bet he could take cats with him, or some less evil mannys perhaps?

"If you can save yourself, you can save us."

Is the Brigade Leader wanting the Doctor to save as many mannys as he can, or is he just wanting to save himself? We know that if it was the Brigadier it would be the former, but the Brigade Leader has been pretty evil so far, he could well be different enough to make the selfish choice.

Stahlman talks to them all over the intercom and says he wants to be let out of the drill room. The Doctor says they shouldn't let him out but the Brigade Leader threatens to shoot him (again) and Petra opens the door.

When he emerges Stahlman is still wearing his disguise but we can immediately see his fully green and furry paws. He then takes off his disguise to reveal his face has also gone green and hairy. The other mannys in the room have gone the same way, presumably from noming the green slime.

D'awww, so cute, can we keep them?

Benton comes in and gets got by them. He starts to go green and furry very quickly. Then he finds a pair of false teeth from somewhere, which unfortunately makes him look silly rather than cute.

Everybody else runs away. The green mannys cut them off from escaping completely, but they can get to the Brigade Leader's office. Even as they are trapped in there, we transition back to the UNITverse.

Sir Keith is in his car, where he guesses that his driver has been ordered (by Stahlman, of course) to not let him get back to the project after having persuaded the minister to shut it down. Just as he gets the driver back on his side, the car crashes. We then go straight back to the evilverse.

Everybody apart from the Brigade Leader is willing to help the Doctor, but before they can do his plan for escaping from the office, one of the green mannys tries to get in by breaking a pane of glass.

This is another cliffhanger that lacks a suitably dramatic punch, for all that it did include a literal dramatic punch. This is at least partly because the scene with Sir Keith formed a break in the action, and there was not enough time in the final scene to properly reestablish the momentum of rising tension before the climactic cliffhanger moment.

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: Inferno Episode 4

Another short reprise puts us right back where we left off, with only Benton's last line from episode 3 repeated. Liz stops Benton from shooting the Doctor, and he blathers for long enough to allow him to repair the computer.

When the others see he has done this, Greg realises that the Doctor can help with their current emergency and together they persuade Stahlman to reverse the polarity of number two outlet pipe... or something, I didn't quite follow all their technobabble. I'm a cat, dammit, not an engineer. Purring is not drilling, no matter what any '90s comedians might claim.

Liz reconises that the Doctor is a scientist and he tells her about the other Liz who is a scientist.

"I am a security officer. So there's no possible link, is there?"
"Did you ever think of becoming a scientist? Yes. Yes, I can see that you did."
"I read physics at university."

We are reminded that this is an evil universe when Greg is warned by first Petra and then Stahlman that he can be killed just for being rude to them. While it is never openly stated, it is heavily implied that the mannys in charge in this evilverse are Nazis, or else Soviet Unionesque Communists.

Things get even more serious when we see the Doctor being interrogated by Liz and the Brigade Leader, with a montage of them asking questions in turn before we see the Doctor's face. He tells them

"The TARDIS console slipped me sideways in time."

but they think "he's just babbling" because they don't know what a TARDIS is.

Stahlman comes in and the Doctor challenges him over the gloves in front of Liz and the Brigade Leader, so they see that underneath he has bandaged up his paw. Stahlman claims "I scorched my hands," the Doctor counters with

"You touched some of that green substance from that cracked jar, didn't you? Just a little, but it's enough to infect you."

Benton puts the Doctor in prison, then Liz comes in and asks him more questions, but it is clear that they won't believe the truth, they would only accept it if the Doctor tells them something that they are already predisposed to believe, which he won't do because it wouldn't be the truth. Eventually he says

"Your counterpart had some intelligence. I wish I could say the same for you."

We transition back to the original universe with UNIT in it... shall we call it the UNITverse? Here Sir Keith is still alive and he makes one last appeal to the marginally less evil version of Stahlman to be more careful, before he leaves for London to talk to the minister.
While hardly a vitally important scene, it does help remind us that things are still progressing there even with the Doctor away. It also serves to break up the action in the evilverse, so that when we transition back some time has passed and the Doctor is having some sleeps in his cell.

He is woken up  by the other prisoner making noises. It is the infected green manny that the Doctor fire extinguished back in episode 3, who has also woken up.

He kills a soldier, and then bends the prison bars to try and get to the Doctor. I suppose it would have been too convenient for there to have been another fire extinguisher right there for the Doctor to use, so instead the Doctor overpowers the manny with a mattress

and then escapes, taking a moment to lock the manny in, even though he saw him bend the bars only a few seconds earlier. Strangely, this seems to succeed in stopping the manny from following the Doctor out of the prison.

The Doctor gets back out on location and sneaks around, then puts on a disguise.

In the studio there is a proper voiceover announcing a countdown as they get ready for more drilling. The Doctor comes back in with other mannys wearing the same disguise as him (maybe they are all really prisoners trying to escape using the same plan?) which allows him to get back to the computer.

The Brigade Leader spots him, so the Doctor runs into the middle of the room and shouts out

"You must stop this countdown before it's too late! If you break through the Earth's crust now, you'll release forces you never dreamed could exist!"

Stahlman wants the Brigade Leader to shoot the Doctor here and now, and only Greg speaks up against this, saying it would be "murder."
An alarm goes off and the camera goes mad, zooming in and out on the drill to signify the danger they are all in.

"Listen to that! That's the sound of this planet screaming out its rage!"

the Doctor shouts. He's not doing his credibility any favours here, it seems more like a BBC sound effect to me.

Greg makes the Brigade Leader drop his gun and the Doctor runs away, but he is trapped by more soldiers. Stahlman picks up the gun and looks like he is about to shoot the Doctor himself.

This is the cliffhanger, and it is made even more dramatic by the voiceover manny counting down from ten as the action kicks off, and even when the credits start rolling after he reaches "two" he still says "one" over the top of the theme music, in defiance of the normal conventions of how these things are supposed to go.

It's no Blake (what is?) but this more than makes up for the poor cliffhanger we had last time.

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: Inferno Episode 3

There's a very short reprise at the start here, as the Brigadier and Liz see the Doctor disappear again. That already suggests there's going to be a lot packed into this episode. Liz says

"Stahlman's cut off the power. Wherever the Doctor is, he's trapped."

Stahlman refuses to restore the power to the Doctor's hut when they ask him to, because he is a dick. He puts on a pair of gloves to hide his increasingly green paws.

The transition from where they are to where the Doctor is is cleverly (but cheaply) conveyed to us by means of a spinning silver ball covered in tinfoil. The Doctor is having sleeps when we first see him, but he soon wakes up and finds that he is in a different place.

There is a poster on the wall which gets a close up so that we know it must be important.

Luckily Bessie has been transported along with him, so the Doctor gets in and drives outside. He is confused by the differences he sees, and then he gets shot at by a soldier so he drives away. The soldiers chase him, and we see that one of them is Benton who you would think ought to know better.
Or maybe not, this is Benton after all, mew.

The chase goes on for quite a while, and is probably our first evar proper Jon Pertwee chase sequence - he even knocks over some barrels with Bessie at one point. The incidental music is an odd choice for an action scene though, being weird and disorientating, as though trying to represent the Doctor's confusion as he tries to escape from soldiers he didn't know were there.

Abandoning Bessie, the Doctor climbs up on one of the industrial buildings where he meets one of the mannys who is turning into a monster. Luckily there is a fire extinguisher nearby (right where the Doctor is, in fact, which is very convenient) that the Doctor can use to spray him with.

Benton and the soldiers see the Doctor and chase him again, and as the Doctor runs away he meets Wyatt. The Doctor tries to get rid of him by throwing a stick, but Wyatt is not a doggy so doesn't chase after it.

The soldiers see Wyatt and, mistaiking him for the Doctor, shoot him. He does a HAVOC stunt and falls off, explaining why it was necessary for this scene to take place up on the high roof so that the stunt would be a lot more impressive.

The Doctor sees Liz but doesn't notice that she has changed her hair style and colour and her costume. Oh wait, I'm wrong, he has noticed, because he says

"Have you all gone mad? What are you doing in that ridiculous get-up?"

So he had noticed, he just didn't think it was anything he should be at all concerned about, silly Doctor. Obviously Liz replies by taking out her gun and capturing him. She summons Benton and the soldiers with a whistle (so maybe they are doggys after all?) to take him back to the studio.

The Brigadier turns round to reveal that he has an eyepatch and no moustache. When he asks the Doctor what his name is, the Doctor finally realises what is going on:

"My name? You ask me my name after all the years that you and I... Well now, wait a minute... Yes, I think I'm beginning to see what's happened here."

He says his name is Doctor John Smith, so even though the Brigadier Brigade Leader is quite clearly a baddy he doesn't feel the need to try and fool him with an alias.

"And where do you come from, Doctor Smith?"
"Yes, well, this is where we come to the difficult bit."
"Well?"
"I come from a parallel space-time continuum."

The Brigade Leader takes the Doctor to see Professor Stahlman, who has no beard here and is dressed like a Bond villain, and who is even more in charge here than in the other universe because, as he tells the Doctor, here Sir Keith is ded. The Brigade Leader tells Stahlman "he gave an obviously false name," which is an amusing moment in a very serious situation, because we know the Doctor has been telling the truth so far only they don't believe him.

This universe also has its own Greg and Petra, but here Greg is finding it harder to harass Petra because she outranks him. He does, however, manage to convince her to take the health and safety situation more seriously than Stahlman, though not enough for her to act against him yet.

We see that this Stahlman is also wearing gloves to hide his green paws, and not just to complement his cool-looking ensemble.

The Doctor tries to warn the Brigade Leader about Stahlman and the danger to the project, but when asked how he knows all this he can only tell them about the other universe. Nicholas Courtney is an underrated actor, as here he does a very good job of playing the same manny as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart but at the same time making him different, more menacing and unpleasant.

We get a classic exchange when the Brigade Leader says they will find out who the Doctor is from their records:

"But I don't exist in your world!"
"Then you won't feel the bullets when we shoot you!"

The Doctor is proved correct when their records contain no trace of him.*

An alarm goes off so the Brigade Leader and Liz go off to investigate, leaving Benton to guard the Doctor. He uses Venusian Karate (as foreshadowed last episode) to knock Benton out so that he can escape. There is an emergency going on and the Brigade Leader has to use his gun and his soldiers to stop all the mannys from running away.

Instead of escaping, the Doctor stops to try and repair the computer, which allows Benton to recapture him. Benton says

"Are you coming with me quietly, or do I shoot you here and now?"

It's not the best cliffhanger, with us having just passed several more dramatic moments, but sometimes the 25 minutes is up when it's up.

* I hope we will get to see parallel universe Captain Hawkins next time, since he would obviously still be alive in this world, what with there having been no Doctor Who and the Silurians here for him to get killed in.

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: Inferno Episode Two

D'aww, Harry Slocum is so cute, with his silly big paws and his rars.

A UNIT manny named Wyatt shoots him and then gets attacked. Harry makes things he touches very hot, such as the lever or the wall. Eventually he dies but the two mannys he touched start acting strange as well. Sergeant Benton tells the Brigadier they have disappeared.

The Doctor sees Wyatt up on a roof (a hot tin roof?) and chases after him. His face has gone green and he rars and tries to attack the Doctor but he falls off the roof instead.

Sir Keith has collected some of the green slime in a big jar and shows it to the Doctor and Professor Stahlman. Stahlman is not prepared to listen to anybody else, not even his own computer when it says something that he doesn't like. The Doctor gets fed up and tells him to his face

"You, sir, are a nitwit!"

He has obviously had more than he can take of obstructive mannys in positions of authority this season, but is still too polite to call Stahlman a cunt. Also I don't think they would have been allowed to use that word on TV back in the '70s, hence it being cut from Spearhead from Space.

When the jar of slime starts to bubble, Stahlman picks it up and puts it away in its box. The Doctor tells him

"Yes, well, I wouldn't have done that if I was you."

Stahlman says he's not going to let the Doctor have any more nuclear power, which is an obvious lie because they only just had a scene where the problem was they had too much power.

The Doctor says

"That's an incredibly childish attitude to take."

but this is my review and I can put in pictures from Blakes 7 to illustrate what "too much power" looks like if I want to, mew.

When Stahlman talks to Petra we can see that his paw has started to go green like Harry Slocum's did, although the characters are not aware of it yet. Then when he is alone he looks at his hand and makes a face.

Stahlman steals a component from the computer and is about to smash it when the Doctor catches him.

"That computer is a threat to you, isn't it? It could prove you wrong. Now give me that micro-circuit."

Stahlman is about to smash it anyway when the Doctor does "Venusian Karate" to stop him. He tries to tell the Brigadier about the computer sabotage but Stahlman gets away long enough to smash the micro-circuit on the floor.

The Doctor steals some nuclear power for the TARDIS console and goes back to his shed, then sends Liz away so he can do it by himself. After he has started his test, Stahlman notices what has happened and turns the Doctor's power off.

Liz and the Brigadier get back to the shed just in time to see the Doctor, the TARDIS console and Bessie all disappear in a very nice slow fade - cliffhanger!

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: Inferno Episode One

Inferno is the third and final seven-episode story from season seven of Doctor Who, first broadcast in 1970. It stars Jon Pertwee as the Doctor, Caroline John as Liz Shaw, and Nicholas Courtney as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart.

It starts with stock footage. This reminds me instantly of Volcano, which is an inauspicious beginning for two reasons. First, because Volcano is a rubbish episode of Blakes 7, and second, because it reminds me that they killed off Captain Hawkins at the end of Doctor Who and the Silurians, so Paul Darrow won't be in this, mew.

One manny who is unexpectedly guest-starring in this story is Jason King, undercover as a technician. He meets with Sir Keith (Christopher Benjamin). Sir Keith then goes to have an argument with Professor Stahlman (Olaf Pooley), who is already acting a bit like this story's Dr Lawrence, in that he doesn't want anybody to stop W-wording for any reason whatsoever, no matter how sensible.

These characters are new to us but they already know each other, and so once again it feels like we are interrupting a story that had already gotten underway before we joined in. The crux of the argument seems to be about who is in charge here, with both mannys thinking it should be themselves. A furious Kung Fu battle to settle the matter seems unlikely, at least not at this stage.

Jason King sees some green slime and he touches it. That was very foolish of him, what would Stewart Sullivan say if he were here? Jason's hand goes green and he makes a face, then he walks outside as though he has been hypno-eyesed while the incidental music helps convey that something sinister is going on. A manny tries to help him but Jason goes mad and attacks him - then there is a clever jump cut to a nail being hammered into a wall, both symbolic and suggestive of the violence we don't see.

The Brigadier, Sergeant Benton and the Doctor are in a room nearby. It is gradually revealed to us that it is actually the next day, and the Brigadier is investigating the murder of the manny. Jason King (or 'Harry Slocum' to use his naughty, naughty alias) has disappeared. The Doctor is here to do some "related experiments" to the drilling, not to investigate murders.

Greg Sutton has arrived to get some exposition from Sir Keith. The mannys are drilling 20 miles deep, and Greg is impressed so that must be a lot. Sir Keith also tells him they have their own nuclear reactor, which means that something is bound to go wrong soon, mew.

"As a matter of fact, some of the technicians have nicknamed this place the Inferno."

Clang!

They are drilling for "Stahlman's gas," which must be why they have Professor Stahlman here, he wants his gas back. Sir Keith introduces Greg to some of the other main characters, starting with Petra Williams. This is an unusual way of getting the story going, since we are not introduced to new characters via the Doctor or even Liz or the UNIT mannys, but instead Greg is acting as our POV character even though he is just as new as the rest. It comes off because Greg is an outsider to the project like us, the only one in fact.

Greg wastes no time at all before perving over Petra - did he and Jason King perhaps swap roles in this story by mistaik? Sir Keith has a good chuckle at this because the UNIT era isn't set far enough in the future for mannys to not be sexist, mew.

As soon as Greg is introduced to Professor Stahlman, the Professor goes on a Dr Lawrence-esque rant about Sir Keith:

"Well, he's a dedicated man, you see. Dedicated to stifling us with overcaution and an overabundance of experts and advisors. We're drowning in them, Mr Sutton."
"I didn't volunteer for this job, you know."
"How you came here is of no importance to me. You're here. We see them everywhere - advisors on this, advisors on that. Look, there's another one."

The Doctor comes in and the Professor starts ranting about him too, but the Doctor is a match for him (and has presumably had enough of this sort of nonsense already this season).

"Our liver playing us up again this morning, is it Professor?"

Greg asks Sir Keith

"Who's the gentleman in the fancy dress?"

He means the Doctor, lol.

The Doctor drives Bessie to a small shed where he uses the sonic screwdriver like a remote control to open the door. A UNIT soldier is amazed by this display of advanced technology.

Inside the shed is a studio set with some CSO, Liz, and the TARDIS console in it.

The Doctor tells Liz "there's been a murder" but Jon Pertwee has the wrong voice for the line. This would have been better coming from the Doctor when he was Sylvester McCoy, Peter Capaldi, or even David Tennant. The Doctor wants to use the project's nuclear to power the TARDIS console.

Jason King is now looking green and has hairy green paws. He does heavy breathing noises as he runs around. He sneaks up on a manny who is on the telephone saying "everything's very quiet up here," which is just asking for trouble, especially with the incidental music sounding like it does just now.

Liz turns the power on, but in another room we can see that Jason King is doing something else with a big lever - we don't know exactly what, but we do know it must be bad because he is moving it to the red bit. The Doctor says there is "too much power" and then he and the TARDIS console vanish.

The SFX goes mad and the Doctor obviously doesn't like it, judging by the faces he makes. Liz switches the power off and the Doctor appears again, upside down lol. The Doctor says he went to "some sort of limbo" and can't wait to have another go. He wants to find out what is on the other side.

The Doctor and Liz are interrupted by an alarm going off. The power has affected the drilling as well, and all the new characters are arguing about what to do. The Brigadier finds out that "there's been another murder" (no, he's no good at it either, even if he is a Stewart) near the reactor and he and the Doctor run to investigate. When they get there Jason King runs in and rars at them - cliffhanger!