8. The Death Game Controller Machine Makes Action Figures For No Reason
In fairness to John Nathan Turner, one of the things he understood and did well was use television as a visual storytelling medium as opposed to just a way to relay Science Fiction concepts. Particularly in his first few years he did a fairly good job of making sure that stories moved forward on their visuals and not just on words. So when the concept that you're trying to express is a villain using these our heroes as pawns in a great big evil game, it makes perfect sense that that is expressed through a visual of a villain (who actually breaks to change into his Evil Outfit before settling down to a nice chunk of villainy, despite the enormous time constraints he must have been under) who has tiny model of these our heroes that he manipulates around what is clearly a big game board. There's the core of the story in one visual nutshell. Which is all well and good, but if you look at the game from the view of people in the story it makes no freakin' sense whatsoever. Why does the timescoop feel the need to make Action Figures? It doesn't allow the Mysterious Villain to actually control any of the kidnapped players. They aren't in scale with the board, which in any case is nowhere near detailed enough for the figures to be any kind of use in marking where these our heroes are. All they do is stand there being nicely backlit and reminding us that no action figures actually existed for Doctor Who at that time. Which was irritating. Dear Ancient Evil Timelords - ust because you have a fancy evil 3-D printer doesn't mean you can use it just anyhow. Rope it in