The Underwater Menace

This 4 part story has to go down as a major failure in the series history. It takes place on Atlantis and sadly it is silly and badly produced in most respects compared to the series usual great standards. Being quite ridiculous at times it is at best camp fun but it mostly fails to maintain that fun as it is also pretty boring much of the time. The attempts at humour often fall flat (although it can be seen as unintentionally funny in how silly the story and production is) and its implausible plot (from writer Geoffrey Orme) is not a good idea.

A disappointing adventure in almost every respect with only the regular cast's performances and a few small elements raising it above an Atlantis like descent into total awfulness. One of the worst Doctor Who stories but with just enough fun and decent aspects to keep it above the level of a lot of the dross you see on TV.

One word in its defence, many people accuse the villain Zaroff of having an awful accent but that was the actor Joseph Furst's own natural accent!

All 4 Episodes - 5/10

This is my least like Troughton story so far but it must be said... I cracked up enough to merit a rewatch. The water scenes and score are just hilarious and at the very least it was pleasant to watch a serial I’d not yet seen as I’ve seen most now.

There’s a mad scientist and Atlantis has his help / hindrance. It’s a crud plot but I don’t know I just had to giggle a bit.

I love this show

The last classic Doctor Who story to come to DVD, this features the earliest existing episodes for the Second Doctor.

The plot is absurd mad scientist stuff with an insane scientist who could think of no better achievement than destroying the Earth. In the hands of another crew, the story would become an absolute fiasco, but credit the cast on, “Underwater Menace,” the story is played with absolute conviction, so it rises above its silly, campy idea to become a perfectly watchable story that’s a bit of a homage to many B American sci-fi horror films of the 1950s and early 60s. Troughton is superb and he is in full command in his third story as the Doctor.

The DVD release does have some problems. Mainly, it’s that the still used for the missing 1st and final episodes don’t tell complete stories and the whole thing would have been helped by using the BBC narration tracks that have been used for the audio-only release so that viewers could know what was going during lost visual bits.. In addition, the closing “message” of the story is a bit of a non-sequitur to what actually happened in the episode.

Overall, not bad, and a mostly fun story.