Planet of Giants

It died instantly when it landed on that pile of grain.

I must admit that I found Planet of Giants a bit disappointing and for once, it was not the story or the acting that let it down. The story has two prongs: the Doctor and his companions land on Earth but have somehow shrunk to the size of insects. Meanwhile, there is a man who is trying to release a new experimental insecticide and ends up killing a man who was going to recommend shutting the program down. The Doctor and his companions get trapped in a lab where the man and the scientist he is working with try to get away with the murder and release the insecticide. The team manages to make enough of distraction to attract the attention of the police. They then flee back to the ship and restore their size, curing Barbara as well as she had been poisoned by the insecticide.

That sounds like it should be an interesting story and it started out that way. There was the oddity of being insect sized and the adventures that created while there was the jump back to the two men trying to get away with a murder. It had a Twilight Zone meets Alfred Hitchcock Presents vibe to it. Episode one established the problems and episode two exacerbated things but also started the team on the track to recovery. It wasn't setting up for a perfect score, but it was engaging.

Things however fell apart in Episode Three. The fundamental problem was that the producer, Verity Lambert, saw episodes three and four and thought they dragged, hurting the overall story. She told the production team to splice together the pertinent points from the two episodes and ready it as a single Episode Three. This also created the situation that required the episode, Mission to the Unknown. I don't know if Ms. Lambert was correct, but the editing job that was done on Episode Three did not do it any favors. The actions of the Doctor and his companions feel rushed and they jump to various conclusions without much thought. There is a strong feeling that things are happening that you are not seeing. The perspective of the two men at normal size is almost completely abandoned and when we do get a few shots of them, they are so rushed that you can't tell why they are acting the way they are. The scientist who is assisting the murderer started so passionately about the good that his development is going to do. Now he is suddenly talking about how the chemical compound is more dangerous than radiation. There is only the briefest jump cut of him seeing how the chemical was killing everything, both bad and good. Too much is left out to see the man's mental processes and that hurts the pacing.

Ian also comes across as a bit thick in this one. He dismisses Barbara and what she is saying when she is first poisoned, dismissing what she says and the obvious trepidation she is displaying when they discuss the insecticide and how to destroy it. It is only when Barbara collapses that the Doctor clues in that she has been poisoned and he had been separated from her for a while so his ignorance is understandable. But it is a bit of a regression on Ian's part.

In a way, this story has some of the same problems that crop up in the Seventh Doctor era. There is more to the story than what is being shown on screen and you are left with a sense of being excluded from something. Unlike the Seventh Doctor stories, you know all the relevant facts, you are just left out on the journey of how they were discovered and how they motivate the actions of the Doctor and his companions. I don't know if the story would have improved a great deal if episodes three and four were shown in total, but it would have been smoother and maybe a bit less jarring.

Overall personal score: 2 out of 5