Doctor Who: The Lure of the Nomad

This starts out as an unremarkable story of its type, with the Doctor answering a distress call from what turns out to be an abandoned hulk floating in space. It soon turns out that the hulk is being rebuilt as a hotel and, wouldn't you know it, the aliens hired to do the building work have mysteriously turned homicidal.

So much, so very base-under-siege. There's even an obnoxious billionaire businessman and an egotistical reporter thrown into the mix, with the former being a particularly common trope of the show. A few things, however, managed to nudge this above the average, at least for me. For a start, there are some clever ideas in here, with the killer aliens being politely reluctant and working for an interior designer who is quite an entertaining character (and would look great as a visual, with suitable CGI). The dialogue is often witty, managing to poke fun at a Sixth Doctor who's obviously still in his early, pompous stage - he's often blind to what's going on, but, for once, this just seems to be in character.

The biggest oddity of the story, however, is that it features a previously unseen companion. Apart from not having a sense of humour, there doesn't seem to be much characterisation to him and what do get isn't really interesting. There is, in fact, a reason why this story wouldn't work with a regular companion, although one could wonder if there might not have been other ways of achieving the same thing. This, and some rather slow pacing in the first part, are marks against the story.

The reason that I nudge it up to... well, let's say 3.5 stars because the weaknesses are still visible, is that the story suddenly take a left turn at around the three-quarter mark. At this point, it stops being a base-under-siege and turns into something else as the full details of what's been happening on the spaceship are revealed. The result isn't a true classic, not least because there's a fair chunk of exposition in the final quarter. But it deserves some kudos for trying to twist an established format, even if it takes a while to get round to it.