"Every cloud has a strontium lining."

Sharaz Jek really is a marvelous creation. Once comely, by his own admission, he laments the loss of his beauty by skulking around an underground secret laboratory hoarding stores of Spectrox, a wonder drug that keeps its users youthful. He is, I've always imagined, the sort of mad scientist at the heart of Laboratoire Garnier, Paris.  Jek's love of beauty even extends to the extremely vain act of giving his face mask's fake eye some delightfully big eyelashes.

The scenes with Jek, Peri and the Doctor are really quite atypical for Doctor Who, as is most of this story. He is perceived as a baddie and yet he's not simply holding a blaster to the Doctor's temples like so many of his colleagues on other worlds. Could it be because you're not really sure whether Jek is the bad guy at this point or just one of a number of bad guys extending along an infinite spectrum of villainy? There's an awful lot of character back story going on here, giving some added depth to all the main players.

And at last we get to see where the inspiration for the 6th's Doctor's coat of many colours comes from, it's simply the andriod's scan of the Doctor's interior. Genius. Then hark, what horror this way comes? As the sound of a sweaty man in a foam rubber suit heralds the arrival of the unconvincing one and a fairly poor cliffhanger.