COLONY IN SPACE [1.6]

Fearing a dastardly scheme of the the Master, the Time Lords temporarily release the Doctor from his exile on earth, catapulting him and Jo across time and space to the titular Colony in Space. On a grim planet, a group of ragged colonists are trying to make ends meet, while the creepy, silent natives watch them. Everything is turned upside down with the arrival of a mining corporation, determined to oust the colony and harvest the mineral wealth of the world. As the clash reaches deadly proportions, the Master himself arrives, claiming the authority of Earth government to adjudicate between the factions.

The Majesty

It's good to see the Doctor leaving earth, just to mix things up a bit. And the Master is as enjoyable as ever. We even get a one-liner which opens up a lot of his motivation for being generally evil: “One must rule or serve. It's a basic law of life.”

Dent is a great villain – the classic “Lawful Evil” type. Unlike the Master, he does not ooze charisma. He is simply detestable, and therefore works very well in his role.

The Misery

The colonists are a dull insipid bunch, and their world is so inhospitable that you think they'd welcome the chance to leave it. We have to introduce the further idea that they can't (because their spaceship is so old) but then they do anyway (apparently choosing a slow uncertain death over a clean and swift one) and then the big twist is that they don't actually (though we saw the twist coming a mile off).

The whole thing is very slow moving and involves endless imprisonments and moving backwards and forwards between different factions.

Magical Moments

• There's a nice little scene where Jo steps onto an alien world for the first time, and her mind is blown. She wants to go back home, but the Doctor can't bear to return to earth so soon. It's a good character moment for both of them.
• Jo sits down to eat with the colonists: “Is this the first course?”. Naturally, it's the only course. Perhaps Jo was feeling particularly hungry.
• I love the giant lizard – a massive close up of a normal lizard with tiny people superimposed on the front of it. It's hilarious but it works better than a man in a rubber suit!
• The Doctor goes for a ride in a miners' buggy. It's a cool little contraption!
  
  
  
• On the other hand, the adjudicator's space ship is a tiny model held up by strings. As low budget as the show could go.
• The reveal that the adjudicator is the Master is very nicely handled. 
• There's a small creepy guy with his brains spilling out the top of his head. (No wonder Jo screams when she sees him.) But even he is nothing in comparison with the smaller creepier guy who sits on a shelf in a cupboard and whose brain spills even further out of his head.
• The Doctor distracts a guard with magic tricks then wallops him on the back of his head.
• There's a particularly weird moment when the Doctor and Jo have to lie down on the floor and wriggle underneath a laser beam. Jo seems a much more natural wriggler than the Doctor, but both look decidedly peculiar as they wriggle along together.

In Summary

This is a dull and boring story. There's a lot of chatter about food productivity and such like, but we never see any agriculture, just the quarry. In general there's a lot of what my nephews term “men talking in corridors”. It just seems to go on and on! I know there was something to do with a doomsday weapon, but it was only ever talked about, and nothing ever came of it. So in the end it was a bit of a non-entity. The heart of this story is all about mining rights and colonisation and frankly I couldn't care less.

Overall: 1.6