Doctor Who: Ghost Walk

The story begins with a present-day ghost tour of an unspecified city in northern England as the tour guide begins to hear ghostly voices for real. It's a story heavy on time travel, visiting no less than four other time periods as we uncover the various events - caused by the Doctor and his companions - that have given rise to the legends. The earlier sections are good with a sense of menace provided by the unseen evil presence that sparks things off and some well-written banter between the leads.

Some of the segments work better than others. Nyssa's visit to the 18th century, for instance, is effective as she encounters small-minded bigotry (amplified, one assumes, by the monster) that places her in real danger while she's being her usual gentle self. Adric's, however, is much less so, partly because he doesn't seem to be taking the threat he's placed in very seriously, undercutting any power it might have. The section set in the 1980s, while relevant to the larger plot, doesn't go anywhere of itself at all.

For me, however, the second half dragged a little as some of those threads were seemingly abandoned and we have more of the monster just gloating about how much damage it's going to cause and characters wandering about in dark catacombs. It comes together towards the end, though, even if the somewhat nebulous nature of the antagonist isn't especially interesting.

Clearly this is intended as a horror story of sorts, and has a number of themes in common with The Awakening, but that wasn't a high point of the Fifth Doctor's run for me. The interweaving of different time periods, while not complicated in the way that, say, some Eleventh Doctor stories were, is ambitious, but, especially when added to the present-day segments, don't quite come together in the way that they might. With such a detailed story, it's surprising how much of the 2-hour length feels like padding.