Day 528: The Leisure Hive Part 3

I've seen this story before. Well, sort of. It was repeated when I was around the age of 10 or 11, and I distinctly remember watching it at that time. Unfortunately, I had a school excursion to go on during the week in which it was broadcast, and so I missed around half of the story, so my recollections of it are vague. But, there were a few things that I recalled, such as the villain, the Doctor becoming ancient due to a mishap with a temporal experiment, and the basic design of the monsters, known as the Foamasi. So I sat down to this story expecting everything to play out as I thought it would.

I expected, for instance, that the major revelation that would take place in this story revolved around the villain's plan, which we later learnt is to do with cloning. My projection for the rest of the episode revolved around the Foamasi beginning their attack and the cliffhanger in particular would be the revelation of the Foamasi in full costume (they have been spending the rest of the story hiding from full view). So when we discover that the Foamasi don't seem to be that nasty, my interest was piqued. I'd seriously not expected this development, and I now had to re-think my thoughts about how the rest of the story would play out.

This was not the only surprise, however, as the cliffhanger proved. The Foamasi begin to advance on one of the humans on the planet Argolis, Brock, and begin to menace him. As a viewer, I expected him to be killed, and for the Foamasi to move on to another target. What I wasn't expecting, however, was for the Foamasi to reveal that Brock was in fact wearing a disguise and that he was actually a Foamasi. I was mightily confused, mainly through the swift editing used by Lovett Bickford in order to create more action, as well as the fact that the Foamasi head is quite clearly larger than a human's head, raising the question of how he was able to fit inside the costume. But these things fall by the wayside for what is, in fact, an absolutely brilliant cliffhanger. It's purpose is to provide enough new information as to change the direction of the story, something it clearly succeeds in doing. It also succeeds in terms of shock, as this is clearly not something that the viewer would necessarily expect to happen, and thus it sticks in the mind as a defining moment of this story.

So I'm actually kind of glad that I missed the last half of this when I first watched this. Because it meant that I was more inclined to let my guard down, and actually be completely thrown for a loop by a cliffhanger, that makes me want to watch the conclusion more than ever.