Rubbish.
Buried under a metric sh-- ton of shlock is a neo-colonialist screed (possibly) but it's a cliched and boring one. (It's neo-colonialist because the refinery guys do what they do for reasons of industrial profit rather than political domination but I'm not sure it matters...)
The script is flat, the dialogue is flat, the acting is flat. The plot is corny and seems vaguely reminiscent of Colony in Space or The Mutants or some crap Tarzan story.. (Miners trying to dispossess indigenous people.)
Robert Holmes has written this in a hurry or he's bored with DW or something... it's a very under-par effort.
Weirdly this is the **only** monster story in Series 16.
Tom is close to taking the piss is most scenes. Can't say I blame him... Some of the jokes he's making are pretty crap. Tom's best bit is the commentary on what he believes is Early Samoan architecture in the hut where the fifth holy ritual is taking place. It's banal and almost doesn't work. But it makes a terribly cliched scene at least a little interesting.
These vine breaking scenes in p3 (from 3m00s to about 14m00s) are a mix of bulls--t, Edgar Rice Burroughs and unbelievable coincidence. The story takes place over a day and a half or so (I think) and apparently 'it rains all the time' yet it only rained once and for a few minutes when convenient. The glass shattering nonsense is just nonsense. (p3 13m27s to 13.45s) The shots of Doctor, Romana and Rohm Dutt escaping after this show dry ground and blue skies.... um, basic film continuity error?
A reasonable cast. Not very good performances. Neil McCarthy (Mind of Evil), Phillip Madoc (Brain of Morbius etc), John Abineri (Ambassadors of Death, Fury From The Deep etc), Glyn Owen (B7 Spacefall an 40 years of other TV roles), Carl Rigg (James Bond 1987 The Living Daylights) all phoning it in. Can't say I blame 'em...
Mary is trying her best to look ok in most shots but her dialogue is not real kind and she has next to nothing to do.
Hey, how do the swampies make little swampies? There are no girl swampies...
Direction is up to Norman Stewart's previous standard (Undeworld). The swampies appear at the refinery in p4 (10m18s) and there's no set up scene where they decide to do this. (Actually I'm wrong it's at 5m53s. 4.5 minutes before in a episode 22m01s long with 1.5m intro/outro and 1.5m reprise....means that's why I missed it.)
Location work is distinctive but wasted.
Optical effects: Kroll horizon shots are incompetent and risible. There's a shot in p2 (DVD 14m03s) where a Swampie's head is cut off by the join in the picture!!! Unbelievable!!
Visual Effects: Whenever the tentacle appears and grabs any character there's some kind of obvious 'climbing' into the pipe while wrapping the tentacle around themselves sequence. Some terrible edits frequently make these scenes even worse.
The Kroll hedge based squid tentacle puppet theatre stuff in p4 (2m54s to about 3m10s) is **the** worst visual effect in 70's Who. (It has some competition...)
Model effects aren't great (which isn't new) but the director/editor leaves lingering shots of the model refinery on screen which really suck the suspense from the story. Try p4 12m12s to 12m20s.... it's not the only one.
The sets on the refinery are very, very wobbly and rough and cheap. The perspective of the studio camera makes it look like the control room is enormous and the tech guys are crowded around the control desk. Weirdly there's no equipment mess strewn about the place. None at all. According to legend the set designer Don Giles was subsequently disbarred from working on DW ever again by the BBC Controller Graeme McDonald.
This is easily the weakest Series 16 story for many reasons. Is the budget running dry? Like the fifth story from last year it has THE BEST UK ratings of the series. (p2 had 12.4 million tune in on 30 Dec 1978.)
p.s. Reviewer fact Check no 4031
Gareth Roberts writes in DWM 298: "This is the only Doctor Who story based around farts."
Squids on earth (so not necessarily equivalent to Kroll) don't fart as a by product of digestion like most mammals. Most mammal or human farts contain hydrogen, carbon dioxide, nitrogen and sulfurous gases (with the latter responsible for much of the smell). Methane is the by product of anaerobic vegetable decomposition not squid farts.
Sorry Gareth...
ABM Rating 1.60/4.00
LJM Rating 1.99/5.00
SPJ Rating 1.52/10
No. 95 (out of 102)
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