The Doctor hears Jo scream so he and the Brigadier run to look for her, while Mr Chin and his scientist friends couldn't give less of a shit. The chief alien explains to Jo that what she thinks she saw and heard were hallucinations. The Doctor, despite his scepticism of the aliens and their explanations last time, buys this, and it is Jo's turn to make a sceptical face.
Bill Filer turns out to have a gun (of course, Gamma Longcat, I should have realised! That's why he's an American!) and the Master tells him which tentacle to shoot to allow them both to escape. They get recaptured by the aliens in the very next scene we see them in, making their escape attempt seem like pointless padding that would be unworthy of a six-parter, never mind a four-part story like this is.
Chin goes back to the UNIT base to telephone the Minister, who tells him
"Just remember, it's your head on the block, Chin, not mine."
which only goes to show how prescient Doctor Who was in setting the UNIT stories in 'the near future' when the doctrine of ministerial responsibility would have been done away with.
After they have given samples of Axonite to Chin, the aliens say "begin re-absorption" and then they turn all blobby and derpy.
The Brigadier doesn't like Chin having the Axonite, so he pulls out his gun and takes over, but when they get back to their base he finds that other soldiers w-wording for Chin have captured the rest of UNIT. They are led by Captain Harker, played by Tim Pigott-Smith, whose poshness is such that he can outrank the Brigadier even though he is only a captain.
The aliens make a copy of Bill Filer in the most ostentatious, SFX-laden way the BBC could afford. Things have obviously moved on a lot since the days when the Daleks made a copy of the Doctor.
The Doctor is taken to the power complex to help the scientists find out what Axonite can do. There they have a cyclotron, which is reminiscent of Doctor Who and the Silurians. The Doctor is soon arguing with the scientists about the best way to analyse the Axonite.
The aliens send their fake Bill Filer to find the Doctor and bring him to them, as they know he is a Time Lord from when they gave him a headache. The real Bill Filer manages to escape surprisingly easily this time, without any help from the Master...
who he then sees talking to a giant eyeball, which seems to be in charge of the aliens. It lets the Master go, but keeps his TARDIS as a way of stopping him from double-crossing them.
When the Master leaves the spaceship, he does a cat-like stealthing up on a soldier, and then pewpewpews him when he gets noticed. Bill Filer also escapes out of the spaceship when the door is still open from letting the Master out.
The Doctor wants to use equipment from his TARDIS to analyse the Axonite, and the chief scientist Winser agrees only when his own equipment is unsuccessful. The Doctor says this is because "it's deliberately resisting analysis."
The Master gets involved in a much more exciting sub-plot when he does a stunt to jump on a truck, and then he hypno-eyeses the driver. How exactly he does this is a complete mystery to cat science - it is like he has the ability to be inside the wing mirror (from where he can see the driver) at the same time as he is still hanging off the side of the truck! This must be another one of those Time Lord abilities that we have not previously seen on-screen.
The Doctor's plot suddenly gets exciting too, when both Bill Filers come in and have a fight with each other (or at least with each other's stuntmanny) until the fake clumsily falls into the cyclotron and gets turned into bubbles.
Bill Filer is able to tell the Doctor what he found out about the aliens from the Master off-screen (presumably when they were both prisoners), and together they tell the Brigadier and Jo, but then they all get recaptured by Captain Harker.
The Master goes into the unit base and hypno-eyeses all the mannys he meets until he reaches one of them who can send a message for him.
When the Doctor is alone in the power complex laboratory, he decides to use the cyclotron on the Axonite like he's a character in a point-and-click computer game who has noticed that they are the only two clickable objects in the room. He decides to make a "recording of what not to do," which is a clever way of allowing him to speak the explanation to us even when there are no other characters present for him to talk to.
When they cyclotron reaches the speed of light it turns the Axonite into bubbles and gives all the aliens back at the spaceship headaches, so the Doctor gets his own back for what they did to him in part one.
The Brigadier, Filer and Jo escape. Filer and Jo go to the laboratory to find the Doctor. Winser also finds him and is not happy about the Doctor using the cyclotron, but when he tries to turn it off he gets electriced. This somehow prompts the Doctor to have a revelation about what is going on:
"Yes, of course! Axons! That ship, Axonite, it's all the same thing! Don't you see, we're dealing with one single living creature!"
Then some aliens come in and menace them, and once again Jo signals the cliffhanger by screaming.
No comments:
Post a Comment