Three members of the Woolstencroft family are contributors to BC Magazine. Each discovered the BBC's Doctor Who at a different point: Tony goes all the way back to Hartnell, Ian started with Pertwee, and Daniel came on board during Davison's stay in the Tardis.

The Script

Tony: Solid but clichéd. What more can you say about yet another “mad scientist turns himself into monster” story?

Ian: Sometimes it pays to keep things simple. There isn’t a lot of plot here – mad scientist builds a machine to make him young, things don’t work out as planned and mad scientist turns into a monster who feeds on people, the Doctor has to stop him – but it’s a well-written story that gives both the regular cast and the guest stars plenty to work with.

Tony: And at least Stephen Greenhorn is sensible enough to keep the Jones family involvement reasonably brief.

Ian: I thought Martha’s family were far less annoying than anticipated, and that has as much to do with the writing as the performances. There is also some intriguing foreshadowing of events to come, just who was the mystery man and what did he whisper to Martha’s mum? This is Greenhorn’s first Doctor Who script but hopefully it won’t be his last.

Daniel: Yes, it's a cliché - this is pretty much a Doctor Who tribute to The Fly - but there's some excellent dialogue here, mainly from the Doctor and Lazarus. The performances - as we'll mention in a moment - help a lot, but if the script sucked initially they'd have nothing to work with.

The Effects

Ian: The visual effects team have come up with one ugly-looking beastie. They may have borrowed parts from elsewhere (the creatures “mouth” brings to mind the bad guy in Blade II) but it works and while you’re never really convinced it’s anything but a CGI creation some nice interaction with the environment helps.

Tony: Given the constraints of the budget, this was a top-notch effort. Great makeup on Mark Gatiss and a fantastic design on the creature. This was the best episode of the series so far.

Daniel: Who cares if the monster was clearly CGI: it was incredibly cool. It's like some sort of Human Transformer; you can see the ribs and the shoulders, and despite its huge size suspension of disbelief isn't a problem. Easily one of the best Who creatures I've seen, and some of the best CGI animation the series has given us so far.

Cast and Crew

Tony: I could have lived without the hackneyed, creature-POV shots, but aside from that this was a much better effort from director Richard Clark. The acting honours go without a doubt to Mark Gatiss, completely convincing under a ton of makeup playing a 76-year-old. I’m now firmly convinced that the Doctor has made a huge mistake and picked the wrong sister as his new travelling companion: Gugu Mbatha-Raw is far more appealing as Tish than Freema Agyeman, who appears to have very little dramatic range. Reggie Yates is about as good as you’d expect a TV presenter to be (not very) and Adjoa Andoh is very good at frowning (and not much else).