6M2 - The Awakening 2

There's much to enjoy about The Awakening - Denis Lill as Sir George, the pairings of The Doctor and Will and The Doctor and Jane Hampton (the latter a poor man's version of The Fourth Doctor and Amelia Rumford duo), great location footage - but the classic series just never seemed to quite know what to do with two-part stories enough to make them feel consequential.

The new series basically compresses a classic series four-part story into 45 minutes, removing any padding and upping the pace, but somehow manages to make it all build to something at the end. The end of The Awakening is possibly the most disappointing aspect of the story, as the reasons for why and what happened are not immediately apparent and are either having to be shouted out by The Doctor while the actions happening, or hurried explained by him afterwards.

The last scene of the episode seems to go on forever, too, with about half the population of Little Hodcombe traveling in the TARDIS, most of whom aren't even fazed by the interior dimensions of the TARDIS. It took Ian and Barbara two years to learn where the door control was on the console; it was apparently the first and only thing that Jane noticed when she first entered the ship because she's already operating it minutes later.

All-in-all, The Awakening is like a small scale reenactment of The Daemons that is bizarrely both rushed and leisurely paced at the same time.