Doctor Who: The Bad Penny

This time paradox story sees the Doctor and Leela visiting a London hotel at the centre of a temporal anomaly. The result is quite complex in places, with the hotel and its guests not only shifting through different time periods, but also through different versions of what the future might hold. An interesting consequence of the latter, though, is that the story is mostly contemporary with the relevant TV season (i.e. 1977) but that we also meet characters from as far ahead as 2018, as if our world is intruding on a Tom Baker episode from the 1970s.

Of course, the classic TV series rarely did an episode quite like this, although there perhaps some parallels with The City of Death and more so with a certain 5th Doctor story that's obliquely referenced in the script. The result includes quite a bit of chopping and changing in terms of the scenery, but the plot itself is relatively straightforward. It takes a while for it to become apparent what the central core of the paradox is, but the plot relies more on how somebody is taking advantage of it, and it's pretty clear from early on who that someone is. (It's not explicitly revealed until well into the second half, but it seems unlikely that Starkey intended it as a real mystery).

Despite this, it feels very much like a 4th Doctor story, and it would also be very different with a companion other than Leela. Compared with, say, some of Moffat's stories, it isn't “timey-wimey”; except for a brief scene with a message from the future that serves as foreshadowing, everything takes place in chronological sequence. The result is an entertaining story that feels right at home in the TV season its emulating, even if it isn't something that Hinchcliffe or Williams ever truly did when they were showrunner.