Competent mystery thriller but dating fast.
The chanting druid doods are back and there's not much new there. There's some variation of chanting semi religious assembly in too many Williams/Read productions.
Famed old time British actor Beatrix Lehman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatrix_Lehmann) makes what turned out to be her final screen appearance as the little old lady archeologist. The performance is charming and accomplished (watch the eyes) but the character seems out of place. Nevertheless this is the standout guest star appearance of series 16.
Mary is great to watch and a rival for screen real estate with Tom.
Tom is angry and raging through most of the script. The story director Darrol Blake tells of Tom's domestic habits on the DVD making of doco makes you wonder about his state of life. Susan Engels as Viven Fay is merely adequate and not very impressive. He comes across as patrician rather than suspicious or menacing.
The other roles are unremarkable.
I think swapping roles for Engels and Lehman would have been a good move. Cutting the DeVries (both of them) altogether would have helped too.
The hyperspace stuff is fantasy, made up rubbish. Nothing to do with Einstein at all. But this is DW so I guess it comes with the territory.
The Ogri are presented as classic DW monsters but they are ridiculous when subject to the scrutiny of any rational analysis. How do they move? What 'biological' process makes them awaken? There's a throwaway line in p2 their origin on a planet in Tau Ceti and that they survive there on the contents of amino acid pools...(oh yes..) and the nearest equivalent is human blood (globulin)... well it isn't. The nearest equivalent is seawater or maybe brackish swamp water... but how does it work? It doesn't.
The way the Ogri suddenly appear in p2 seems to be missing a setup scene.
Also the shot of the Ogri scooting past the studio set window is repeated in p2 and p4. It looks pantomime to me.... come to think of it the smashing through wooden doors get used more than once as well.
The Megara are fun but they come out in p3 and 4 as a way to stretch out the plot. They are realised in a simple but imaginative new way. The actual effect was done by Mat Irvine holding an apparatus with two sets of circling reflective balls on a frame with a pair of bright lights which flashed according to the dialogue (like Daleks). This was half keyed into the regular scene by semi fade while the other actors left a gap in the scene.
Nowadays, you wouldn't even think of doing it that way. It'd be green screen and CGI for sure.
The story is set in the "present" but the forty years since have not been kind. The stuff with the missing portraits and Viven Fay's backstory identity is fascinating but in the 21st century, would be quickly solved by Googling not any brilliant deductive insight.
Likewise the uncertainty about the number of stones would be much more easily verified. (Here's the wikipedia site for the location https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollright_Stones) Indeed the Rumford/Fay stones survey would be done by remote sensing and proper spatial surveying, not silly notes in little books. It seems ridiculous that such a survey would even be necessary nowadays.
This is some variation of what novelists call the pre-mobile phone effect.
The real world would have some serious questions for Professor Rumford after the story finishes. Dead bodies at the camp site and the stones, all that damage at the Manor house, no sign of Miss Fay and she's been eating her sausage sandwiches. What happened? Er, yeah....well, there was this Doctor and a robot dog....and some homicidal, moving giant rocks.
But the story is interesting and engaging even if the ending is a little anticlimactic and unsatisfying...
The 100th DW story is routine and unremarkable. We've had three good ones in a row. That's about Graham Williams' limit isn't it?
ABM Rating 3.40/4.00
LJM Rating 4.25/5.00
SPJ Rating 9.10/10
Link to Cumulative Rankings
No. 20 (out of 100)
Rankings Scoreboard
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