Doctor Who: The Awakening [1984]

This two-parter may be spinning the wheels - copping a premise and even an ending from The Daemons - but it's brisk, entertaining, free of padding and has good guest characters. The TARDIS materialises in the English village of Little Hodcombe in 1984 so Tegan can visit her grandfather and the Doctor runs into characters in English Civil War uniform - a rare instance where it is the travellers who are confused by an anachronism, since it turns out everyone is re-enacting a Civil War massacre, and the local magistrate [Dennis Lill] has been impressed by the usual ancient evil alien taken for a demon [the Malus] into carrying out the massacre for real so it can draw from all the emotions and become corporeal again. The monster is a big grinning stone face with green lamps for eyes, hidden behind a crumbling wall in the derelict church, but also a head-on-backwards lizard-thing which takes form in the TARDIS [this serial is very casual about the box's supposed inviolability].

It's a runaround with a promising new character in a timeshifted peasant lad Will Chandler [Keith Jayne] set up as a possible regular [though he was dumped between serials], but at least it doesn't need to drag on too long. At this point, all performances were broad except for Peter Davison's whimsical underplaying - so the guest cast go along with it, especially Polly James [well, Nerys Hughes had been in Kinda] as the sensible schoolteacher who dislikes the play-acting and Glyn Houston as the Roundhead. Some elements [Tegan fated to be burned at the stake as Queen of the May] are so rushed it seems likely this was scripted as a longer show and shrunk. A beheading, carrying through a peril evaded in The Daemons, is so tactfully edited that it's hard to tell what's happened.

First published in this form here.

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