The Evil One (2014)

The Evil One is my favourite story from this series so far. That’s destroyed any tension that you might have expected but I enjoyed this story a lot. I thought that it was going to be tough to beat ‘The Crooked Man’ because I thought that it was such a great story but then I hadn’t realised that this story was coming. Nicholas Briggs has a great track record when it comes to him as a writer and he doesn’t disappoint here. He writes the story with a straight forward idea and when I say straight forward I don’t mean it as a fault but more of high praise because it means that the story of Leela’s father can be what drives the early part of this adventure. The story sees the Doctor and Leela land on a luxury space cruiser which is lacking in people. What they encounter when they leave the TARDIS is a very eerie atmosphere that would seem out of place on classic Who.

Louise Jameson takes the ball in this story and runs with it giving a great performance from start to finish. For some reason I quite like Evil Leela and easily steals the show often out performing Tom Baker who isn’t poor in this by any means. In fact on this occasion, Baker plays it brilliantly allowing Jameson to take centre stage. Geoffrey Beevers is always guaranteed to give a superb performance. If you haven’t listened to ‘Mastermind’ then you should do because that is Beevers at his best and he gives another stunning performance though I would have liked to have heard more from him but that’s my only critiscm of the story.

When the Doctor is fighting for his life after he is struck with the janis thorn this leads to a thrilling finale where the Doctor is trying to hide from Evil Leela. The final part of this story is a lovely and heart warming scene which shows how far the Doctor and Leela have come since their TV days and credit should go to Tom Baker, Louise Jameson and Nicholas Briggs.

I am going to reiterate that I love this story. I loved every single second of it and this series is proving to be a cracking one. Everything worked brilliantly and I thought that ‘Night of 1000 Stars’ from the Jago and Litefoot series was going to by my story of the month but I have might have to reconsider on the evidence of this story. Top Quality.