5G3 - The Creature From The Pit 3

Picking up where the last episode left off in the ludicrous factor, The Doctor attempts to communicate with the giant beast with gobsmacking results. How on Earth was Tom Baker allowed to perform fellatio upon this thing and get away with it? Mary Whitehouse was mortified when it looked as if The Doctor had drowned in The Deadly Assassin (hint, Mary: it's called a "freeze frame"), but she didn't seem to bat an eye at this inter species oral sex.

But this isn't the most troubling aspect of The Creature From The Pit for me. No, it's the fact that The Doctor and Romana, becoming increasingly invincible, are, in effect, armed in this story. Romana is almost always carrying K-9, and K-9 almost always is shooting down guards with his nose laser. At first just a cute, know-it-all computer, now the robot dog has become the universe's bulkiest stun gun - yet another easy fix for The Doctor to go along with his glib tongue to get him out of sticky situations.

And another thing (and although it really does seem like I'm cutting this poor story to shreds, I hope to be more positive in the next write-up), another big beef I have is not with this story, essentially, but with John Nathan-Turner in four years' time after this story aired. I'll delve into more when the time comes, but Geoffrey Bayldon is such an almost perfect match, both physically and vocally, to the late William Hartnell that every time I watch this story (and, to an even greater extent, when I watch Bayldon in an episode of the 1987 series Star Cops), I can't help that, with all due respect to Richard Hurndall, Bayldon should have been the automatic choice to play the First Doctor in The Five Doctors in 1983. Good thing the producers of Doctor Who Unbound at Big Finish thought the same thing.