Day 177: The Abominable Snowmen Episode 4

Terrifying face, or bad make-up job?

Before this entry begins, I should make a small note. When I watch these episodes, I watch them in one of two ways. One is that I sit down and give the episode my full attention, the other is that I will have it on in the background whilst I do some work. The latter is not preferable, because it means that I'll sometimes lose key points of the episode in question, and so my impression might not be as truthful as the episode actually is. But this is just me pussyfooting around the fact that this episode's cliffhanger is one of the worst that I've encountered so far. The ending is that Victoria encounters the hidden face of the voice that has been guiding events, that of Padmasambhava (the writers really enjoy making me double check spelling, don't they?). As scripted, it is meant to be a wizened and decrepit old man, centuries past his use-by date. As it appears on screen, it's just another face with abnormally large lips. Perhaps it's the fact that I'm going off a reconstruction of the episode, and that his actual appearance is meant to be terrifying. But somehow I doubt that. It's not even got that much to back it up in terms of plot, because although the man has been hinted at as being a terrifying figure, he hasn't done much beyond tell people what to do, and so by seeing his face, the plot doesn't really advance too much, certainly not enough to make audiences want to tune in the next episode.