Day 472: Underworld Part 3

There's no getting around it, on screen Underworld is a failure. Granted, that's not entirely it's fault. The series has suffered a bit of a lack of budget, which means that it's difficult to afford things such as sets. Thus, the decision was made to have half of the sets replaced with blue-screen, or Colour Separation Overlay, which means that everything looks incredibly fake. It also restricts the camera, meaning that much of what is seen on screen is static, making the story feel remarkably dull.

And it's not just that, the cliffhanger to this story ranks in my mind as the worst cliffhanger that we've ever encountered. To summarise: the Doctor and Leela are hiding in a mine-cart, someone pushing a mine-cart falls over (incredibly unconvincingly) and a mine-cart (that almost certainly doesn't contain the Doctor and Leela) is emptied in a crusher. It doesn't give any sense of peril, instead it just feels like the episode just ends. This isn't helped by the limited direction from Norman Stewart, most likely due to the issues mentioned in the first paragraph. But by watching this story, it's becoming increasingly apparent that this story really is very poor indeed.