N.B. there might (or might not) be spoilers in this article!

There are moments of genuine horror in Frontios — what with the bodies being sucked into the hungry earth and enslaved human minds being used to power the Tractators’ excavators. (And try saying that after a few too many!)

“Frontios buries its own dead.”

Range, Frontios: Part Three

Unfortunately, there also moments of genuine tedium — with a lot of time given to running about in tunnels later on — which perhaps goes to explain why I remembered even less of this story than The Awakening.

But, as I say, Frontios has its moments. Part One has one of those cliffhangers that on first viewing appears to be there just to mark time. ‘”The TARDIS has been destroyed”, my arse!’ was my initial reaction, but, as it turns out, the TARDIS has in fact been, if not exactly destroyed, then disassembled.

There’s the aforementioned horror in the Tractators’ use of the colonists as excavators, which is even more gruesome in Christopher H. Bidmead’s novelisation. This suggests Bidmead’s original ideas might have gone a bit too far — although they would probably have made it into Season Twenty-Two — but I’m getting ahead of myself there!

“I want no mention of this to anyone. Do you hear me? Not to anyone!”

Brazen, Frontios: Part One

Elsewhere, Turlough unlocks a race memory and goes all Jimmy Dean: ‘It’s tearing me apart!’. And Tegan rivals Liz Shaw for shortest mini skirt yet seen in Doctor Who.

They also missed a glorious opportunity for a bad pun. As the Doctor and Tegan were drawn back to the Gravis, it was crying out for a ‘We’re caught in a Tractator beam!’

No? Well, suit yourself.

After loving Christopher H. Bidmead’s previous scripts (Logopolis and Castrovalva) I can’t help but be a little disappointed with Frontios. There are some good ideas here and I could see it fitting into 21st century Who quite well. Consequently, it’s never quite as thrilling for me as Bidmead’s earlier stories.