There is a reasonable Sci-fi story in here. The strange alien emissary and the base commercial motive of various characters are almost meta SF meat and drink but they are wasted by poor production, shoddy direction, camp scripting and lazy cliched performance. John Bryans as 'Fagin' and Myra Frances as the 'Wicked WItch" of the Panto are the two worst examples.
Despite the mea cupla by Mat Irvine and co in the DVD extras, the actual creature is realised quite well by DW standards. I think the lighting saves it. It is what it is. It looks like what it's supposed to be: a ginormous, shapeless green blob.
Worst effort is the direction. Coming as it does from DW royalty Christopher Barry in his DW swansong this is particularly disappointing. Large parts of p3 and p4 are actors standing around in front of an obvious studio 'cave' set with a static camera. It looks like a dull stage play. This is a mess which looks like someone decided to rush through and be damned.
The plot bits in p4 about weaving an aluminium shell to 'deflect' a gravity 'beam' (or whatever) is very poor made up crappy crap.
Tom and Lalla veer wildly from disinterest to phoning it in.
For some reason Geoffrey Bayldon puts in a competent, entertaining and comic performance which is about the only watchable thing in this.
This would benefit greatly by losing about 2 episodes. The 'plot' about metal v. chorophyl is only so interesting and it seems to take 3.5 eps to be revealed but is worth about 1/2 an ep....
ABM Rating 1.55/4.00
LJM Rating 1.99/5.00
SPJ Rating 2.90/10
No. 98 (out of 106)
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