4,5 ( )

The Kraals are back! Yeah, I never thought I’d hear that sentence either, and I never felt that the world needed reminding of The Android Invasion. But here they are anyway, teaming up with the Master for The Oseidon Adventure as they invade the Earth with only the Doctor and Leela to stop them.

Though nothing about the Kraals particularly demanded returning, they’re okay enough here. The story is rather strongly built around their manufacture of android duplicates, and this makes The Oseidon Adventure work well enough, as in typical Alan Barnes fashion, we get an imaginative and crazy plot. So if you’re going to have a bunch of android duplicates, you may as well use the Kraals — though one suspects the starting point of this story was “Bring back the Kraals” and the endpoint was “Oh, they made android duplicates, didn’t they?” (I, for one, would have enjoyed a return to Tara, but I suppose that makes little sense with Leela or the Earth-invasion plot.

Read the rest at Unreality SF.

Alan Barnes has rarely disappointed me, and I'm glad to report that in his double story that ends this season, Trail of the White Worm/The Oseidon Adventure, he is on top form. Geoffrey Beevers returns as the Keeper of Traken Master, the idea being that he absorbed enough energy in The Deadly Assassin to become a bit less putrescent as the Doctor puts it. (There's nothing in The Keeper of Traken to contradict an earlier meeting between the Fourth Doctor and the Beevers Master.) In fact the standourt performance in Trail of the White Worm is Rachael Sterling, daughter of Diana Rigg who is to appear with her mother in a Mark Gatiss episode of the coming New Who season, playing a posh woman with more to her than meets the eye. The two stories are more separate than one normally gets in two-parters, though each still has both the Master (Beevers has good rapport with Baker, but isn't quite as evil as most Masters) and a wonderful demented colonel played by Michael Cochrane (who appeared twice in Old Who, as Charles Cranleigh in Black Orchid and Redvers Fenn-Cooper in Ghost Light). The Oseidon Adventure, not surprisingly given its title, is to a large extent a remake of The Android Invasion, with a lot of the same plot elements but doing it much better - particularly the confusion of identity of working out if you yourself may not unwittingly be your own android double. ( )