Episode MA28d: Explaining the Plot

The final episode - and it's full-on comedy! Unlike so many stories where the humour starts out light and get darker, this one is following the opposite trajectory. There are too many specifics for me to comment on, but I'll just mention the return of Otley and Haldann, the mirror comedy duo to balance Firking and Hodge. The translators were the characters I was least interested in when we first met them, but they have grown on me; and it's good to see them show a bit of actual intelligence rather than just scoring book-learning points. They are still insufferable, but in a more human way.

There's a lot of slapstick here, with plenty of shots of people being caked in mud and slime (as well as the shoemakers' incompetent swordwork); but there's also plenty of verbal humour, and much of that is in the references. There are contemporary ones, like misquotes from Shakespeare and Good Queen Bess, but there are also more modern ones. I'm sure I missed a lot, but I smiled at one from Looney Tunes, and if I'm not mistaken there's even a reference to Plan 9 from Outer Space!

Speaking of anachronisms, there's a lot of use of matches in this story. They did exist at the time, but only in the East: Marco Polo could have picked some up, but it wasn't until the Nineteenth Century that London had any for real use. Did this bother me? Heck, no! It's fully in keeping with the spirit of the era.

There were a couple of things that weren't, though. The Web of Time gets mentioned (for the second time in this book), which I don't recall being part of the show until much later; and the Doctor's companions know he isn't human. Now, these are minor quibbles, but they did pull me out of the action briefly.

A bigger disappointment with this episode was that Barbara still had less to do than Vicki or the Doctor, meaning that for the second serial running she's been the one missing out most. Perhaps Jacqueline Hill was on holiday for two weeks, and the little we saw of her were filmed inserts? For whatever reason, in a historical, this just seems wrong.

Still, everything was tied up very neatly, history was set right in a satisfying manner, and it kept me gripped - I read past midnight because I didn't want to put the book down. In fact, it has been particularly hard during this story to leave a day between episodes, and the last three have been read and reviewed over a single three-day period (I had one day off after Plot Devices because Monday was packed). Mostly I've been reading them at night and writing them up in whatever gaps I can find the following day, and that's worked well.

The reveal of the encoded message at the end was fun, if a little unbelievable. I flipped back and forth to work it out, and could only do so with the solution - but then I hadn't spent days with Stuart speakers! I would have preferred an epilogue with the Daleks, but that was never going to be on the cards from a licensing perspective.

Overall, a good closing episode.

Rating:
8/10.

Next Time:
The Plotters as a whole.