Doctor Who: Plague of the Daleks

The conclusion to the ‘Stockbridge trilogy' is set in the village's future. No prizes for guessing who the bad guys are, given the title, although it's strange that there's no hint of them at all until the half-way mark, where their sudden appearance is delivered as if it were supposed to be some sort of shock.

To be fair, the TV series made the same mistake more than once during the classic era, but you'd have thought we'd have learned better by now. Indeed, if you're a big dalek fan you're probably going to be disappointed by the first half of the play, which is basically a zombie story - and not too long after we had rather better zombies in Blue Forgotten Planet. There are some really nice scenes in this bit, although arguably some of the characters are bit overly stereotyped.

The second half, however, is basically your standard dalek runaround. The daleks do, for once, have a reason for not killing the Doctor on sight - although, in the grand scheme of things, you'd think they'd realise it's not a very good reason. There's also a slight inconsistency in that the daleks appear to be able to negotiate stairs without difficulty (they have to get down into a church crypt at one point), which is kind of odd given that they appear to be of the Dalek Invasion of Earth vintage.

It's not a terrible story, and there are good performances from the guest cast as well as the recurring charcters, but there isn't much special about it either. I found that it worked better than the first part of the trilogy, but it is one of those rare instances where the middle part is the best, likely because each story is distinct and there is no overall plot arc to drag its heels between the setup and the conclusion.

Still, some slip ups aside, at least it delivers what it tries to. So 3.5 stars rounded up to 4.

In the ten-minute chunk of The Three Companions at the end, the disparate strands start to come together, but still not an awful lot happens in the short time we have available. The format is really not helping this story, and that's even more noticeable now than it was in the initial segment with Polly.