Doctor Who: The Forsaken

This is an excellent base-under-siege story of the type so common in the Second Doctor's era on TV. Whereas most of those were set in literal bases in the future, however, this is set in a colonial-era hotel on an island off Singapore during the actual siege of that city in 1942. While the few remaining residents wait for evacuation, something deadly stalks the hotel corridors...

Since the monster can shapeshift, the resulting story has much in common with John Carpenter's The Thing and the novella it was based on (the '50s film version, for all its quality, diverged rather more from the original). The slow picking off of the various characters and the fact that you can't quite be sure who to trust, adds to the somewhat paranoid atmosphere of an island that's also under threat from the Japanese.

On the other hand, there are elements of the story that seem to owe rather more to Scooby Doo than to traditional horror, although not in a bad way. While some might find this off-putting, perhaps reducing the menace of the monster, I found that it fit the era's style, and it was never over-the-top or unbelievable. If anything, the fact that it's just one monster that can, at least temporarily, be dealt with in this way, helps gives the story more of a personal feel than some galaxy-wide threat would, and doesn't overshadow the '40s setting.

Ben gets more to do here than he did in the previous release, not least because a key element is that his father turns out to be one of the people sheltering in the hotel... and it's set a few months before his conception. While this relationship isn't strongly explored (in the way that, say, Ace's relationship to her mother is in The Curse of Fenric) it does add an interesting element to the story, with Ben keen to preserve his own future existence. Polly spends rather longer complaining about being sidelined but, as written, this comes across as more a commentary on the TV stories of the time than a slavish recreation of them, and doesn't detract.