Review

Season 17 starts with Terry Nation's last Dalek story and this story introduces quite a few character replacements! Romana I, Mary Tamm gets replaced with Romana II played by Lalla Ward, the voice of K-9, John Leeson, is replaced by David Brierly and Davros gets replaced with the David Gooderson version...

This season is also known for being the season of Douglas Adams as story editor. His influence and humour is quite often noticeable, sometimes too noticeable. You can see this with Romana's regeneration, K-9's laryngitis, Tom Baker reading a book and making 'humorous' comments and so on... There's also a dumbing down of the Daleks as 'robots' and the 'you can't climb stairs' joke really takes the menace out of them.

So to the story... well, it's not bad with the idea of the Daleks and Movellans at loggerheads in their war a good one. The Movellans are well realised but when I first saw them the song 'D-I-S-C-O' just rolled around in my head! It's also easy to defeat a Movellan - just take away their power pack. It's incredibly lazy writing...

The solution to the 'problem' is a simple one and this actually lets the story down. The Daleks also suffer in their appearance, looking tatty and they're often clumsy when 'walking around', bumping in to things left, right and centre.

Davros is well played but shuffles visibly in his chair and at one point it sounds like David Gooderson forgets Davros' accent so sounds like he comes from the North of England.

Overall not a bad start to the season.

For the Collection box set, view this with the updated visuals and the enhanced 5.1 surround sound audio which gives the whole serial a boost!

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