The Doctor grows larger and longer until he is the same size as the aliens. Pletrac wants to pewpewpew him, but Kalik argues against this. The Doctor gets up and joins in:
"The tribunal is not deliberating. The tribunal is arguing. And quite nonsensically, if I may say so."
After he gets over his disappointment at not being on Metebelis Three, the Doctor begins to take over the scene. He quickly has the measure of the bureaucratic officials.
Orum: "One wonders why the tribunal is submitting to questioning by this creature. Shouldn't it be the other way round?"Doctor: "Well, I'm sorry to have to tell you, gentlemen, but you are all in very serious trouble."Orum: "Really one almost admires its audacity."
Vorg and Shirna try to be friendly to the Doctor, but he gets very angry with them as the owners of the miniscope, especially when Vorg refers to the creatures inside it as "livestock." When he finds out from them that "the scope's packing up" his priority is to save Jo and the other mannys still trapped inside.
This prompts a cut back to Jo, who is hiding from Harry and Major Daly on the ship, but gets caught (again) and locked in the cabin (again) and prepares to use her skeleton keys to escape (again). The Groundhog Day-esque repetitiveness of the scenes of the ship could have been used as the main plot of a Doctor Who story, but here it is used simply to pad out the episode and give Jo something to do while separated from the Doctor.
Shirna admits to the Doctor that Vorg has no idea how the miniscope functions, so the Doctor has to improvise a plan. With Jo elsewhere, Shirna has to act as his Companion temporarily - as evidenced by her dialogue during this bit.
Shirna: "What's the idea, Doctor?"Doctor: "Well it's simple, really. You see the Scope's... er... omega circuit is broken. Now if I can link it to the TARDIS and use that as the master, I can reprogram the scope."
Jon Pertwee stumbles over his line slightly, which actually helps create the impression that the Doctor really is making it up as he goes along. Or maybe his mention of the "omega circuit" just reminded him of the previous story?
Shirna: "And what will that do?"Doctor: "Well two things, I hope. It'll enable me to get Jo out of here in time, and get her out of this wretched contraption, and it will return all the other lifeforms to their original space time coordinates."
Vorg and Shirna agree to help the Doctor, while Kalik and Orum put their plan into action - having sabotaged the eradicator so that it can't pewpewpew anything, they have no other defences for if (or, as Kalik hopes, when) the Drashigs escape from the miniscope like the Doctor did. Orum says
"They'll never break through those plates. They're molectic bonded distillum."
(which is either nonsensical technobabble worthy of Star Trek Voyager or else the actor fluffing his lines and there not being time for another take.) Kalik replies:
"Then perhaps one had better give them a little help?"
With equipment from the TARDIS the Doctor has rigged up a device to send him back into the miniscope.
When the Doctor disappears, Pletrac pews at him with his little pewpewpew gun but he hits the machine instead, damaging it.
Jo has escaped from captivity (again) and made it back to the CSO interface between the ship and the miniscope's inner W-wordings, where she meets up with the Doctor.
Kalik succeeds in letting the Drashigs escape from the miniscope...
...and immediately regrets his decision, because he gets nomed. Vorg and Shirna have found the missing part of the eradictor (planted on them by Kalik so that they would take the blame if his plan went wrong in a way that it didn't) and so they use it to Hitchcock the Drashigs.
Inside the miniscope, all the mannys pass out from the failing power beginning to cause a failure of ontological inertia, even Jo and the Doctor, so it is up to Vorg and Shirna to carry out the second part of the Doctor's plan to... er, carry them out of the machine.
The plan succeeds, and the Doctor and Jo appear outside the miniscope just after it blows up. We also see the ship and its mannys returned to the Earth of 1926, and Major Daly finally gets to finish his book.
"Seems like the longest book I've ever read in me life."
If the SS Bernice does reach India after all, that surely means history must have been changed, based on what the Doctor said about it in episode one? Unless, of course, something else happens to it after the end credits roll, like maybe involving the dinosaur that presumably got sent to Earth along with the ship...
The last scene sees Pletrac grateful to Vorg and Shirna for pewpewpewing the Drashigs (never mind that they brought them to the planet in the first place) and Vorg decides that, since they are now lacking a miniscope, he can make them moneys by scamming Pletrac. We are supposed to laugh at Pletrac as his opinion of his own superior intelligence leads him to wager (and then lose) increasing sums against Vorg.
Doctor: "I don't think we need worry too much about our friend Vorg."Jo: "He'll probably wind up president."
The Doctor and Jo certainly have a good old chuckle about it, before leaving in the TARDIS.
What's so good about Carnival of Monsters?
At its core, Carnival of Monsters is a carefully crafted, well-plotted science fiction story by Robert Holmes. To begin with, the seemingly disparate parts of the plot create a compelling mystery, and then they all come together by the end for a satisfying conclusion.
To make it even cleverer, the mystery that faces the Doctor and Jo is not the same as viewers at home are presented with, since we see the events that unfold outside the miniscope from the start, while the Doctor doesn't participate in them until the final episode.
Carnival of Monsters is also a rare (in fact almost unheard of) instance of a story without an antagonist. Kalik, a schemer who is eventually undone by the results of his own scheming, might superficially look like the closest thing to it, but he actually saves the Doctor's life more than once. Vorg, meanwhile, is the owner-operator of a machine "expressly forbidden by intergalactic law" and as such is responsible for everything that happened throughout this story, yet is presented to us as a quirky and cheeky character, not as an outright baddy.
The story contains several early examples of memorable Robert Holmes characters, in the shape of Vorg, Shirna, Pletrac, Kalik and Orum. Both the pairings of Vorg & Shirna and Kalik & Orum form double-acts of the sort that Holmes would later perfect with Jago & Litefoot, Garron & Unstoffe, and, of course, Avon & Vila.
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