Doctor Who: The Masque Of Mandragora (1976)

The start of a new season (the fourteenth) of Doctor Who was marked by the Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker) and Sarah Jane Smith (Lis Sladen) 'stumbling' upon the secondary control room of the TARDIS; a steampunk-design room before the term had even been coined by science-fiction author K. W. Jeter in 1987.

This was the first major overhaul of the TARDIS control room since the show had started and when 'discovered' by The Doctor and Sarah it has a number of Easter Egg props dotted around that tie-in to the First, Second and Third incarnations of The Doctor.

Having had a narrow escape from the intelligent space anomaly known as the Mandragora Helix, the TARDIS materialises in 15th Century Renaissance Italy.

Sarah Jane is promptly kidnapped by masked monks of the secret cult of Demnos - to be sacrificed - and The Doctor is arrested and brought before the local noble as a spy.

Little does anyone realise at the time, but a fragment of the Mandragora Helix has secreted itself into the TARDIS and is now loose in the Italian countryside.

As a period piece you can be pretty much guaranteed that the BBC costume department will bring their A-game and the use of Portmeirion in Wales (aka The Village from The Prisoner) for the location work is just perfect, but what lets the story down, sadly, is it's technical realisation of Mandragora itself and the strangely rushed ending.

While the story itself serves as a not particularly subtle metaphor for the triumph of rational science over baseless superstition, The Doctor and Sarah become entangled in the tangled skein of court intrigue, phony astrology, masked balls, and Dennis Wheatley-style black magic cults.

It's almost a shame that old school writer Louis Marks - who'd been with the show since The First Doctor's era - wove in the science-fiction elements. With little effort this could have been a brilliant return for The Doctor's purely historical adventures.

As with all time-travel stories there is always the nagging question of why the villain chose to strike at that particular moment - man's transition from the Dark Ages to a time of Enlightenment - when it could have struck earlier (say, during the time of cave men) and taken control of man's destiny much more easily.

I'm still not entirely sure how The Doctor eventually defeated the Mandragora Helix, but the evocative scenery, costumes and Machiavellian scheming just about won the day for me over the technobabble and dated effects.