Doctor Who: The Day of the Comet

The Doctor and Leela arrive on a planet mere days before it is due to be destroyed by a comet strike, and become caught up in events as the inhabitants try to board the last remaining sublight evacuation ship. Honestly, the science around all this is pretty ropey but that's not often what Doctor Who is about and it feels forgivable here. (And compare with TV story Galaxy 4 where the planet is about to fall apart for no obvious reason at all).

What we get instead is a doomed race against time where even the Doctor is apparently powerless in the face of a natural disaster that also happens to be a fixed point in time (not that that term is used here). The nature of the struggle changes as the story unfolds and more is revealed about how various characters are trying to take advantage of the situation but hanging over it all is the sense that few, if any, of the guest characters are going to make it out alive.

There are some weaknesses here and there, with rather too many captures and escapes and the leads being repeatedly held hostage for various reasons. In this respect, perhaps, it could have been trimmed. And it's really only in the first 30-minute segment that we get much of a sense of the desperation people are under. But there are plot twists along the way that, if not especially surprising when they occur, do at least keep things moving. Some of the villains also turn out to be less two-dimensional than they initially appear, coming up with a bad solution to an intolerable problem but ultimately faced with the same prospects as everyone else.

There are some good guest characters, a suitably quirky Doctor, and Leela gets to punch things a lot. Which for this era of the show, is pretty much what you want.