Day 494: The Androids of Tara Part 3

A fun part of this story is the character of Count Grendel. Played by Peter Jeffrey, he is the villain of this story. The character is clearly evil, making no attempts to hide this fact. He wanders around the story, making attempts to become the King by killing various people and acting like a villain straight out of children's cartoon. This can be seen, for instance, in the ending to this episode which features him wandering into the Doctor's hideout under a flag of truce, in an attempt to get the Doctor to change sides, then leaping over a bench to capture Romana and ride away on horseback. In other stories, this character would be a little disappointing, as we might want a little more nuance in the role of villain, such as those found in the stories of Malcolm Hulke. But in this story, we can excuse this, because we've already bought into the idea of this being a simpler, lighter story. In this case, the Count falls perfectly into the role for which we expect him to, being your typical cartoon villain. Essentially, we allow the villains to have fun in their role because we're allowed to have fun watching it. And what's a fun adventure serial without a clearly evil villain to face?