Carnival of Monsters [TV/1973.1.27 ~ 2.17]

★★★★★

  There is a specific group of Dr. Who adventures that, with each watch and rewatch, reward you with so much imagination, creativity, cleverness, joy, fun and thrills that you know in your heart that it's an all-timer. Carnival of Monsters, the wonderful beast of a serial that it is, is one of my all-time favourites -- a four-part treat bursting at the seams with boundless imagination and an unparalleled drive to make all these impossible ideas work on a 1973 BBC budget.

  Imagine, if you will: a machine of entertainment and edification, for showmen and ringleaders to use and abuse throughout the galaxy, banned by the galactic powers for its horrible secret of containing compressed areas in which creatures of all kinds are trapped within a perpetual time loop for the entertainment of those outside... and the machine becomes the subject of a fun-hating planet's political turmoil and a life-or-death adventure for our heroes Dr. Who and Jo as their TARDIS bring them inside the compressed world. Ancient dinosaurs, seamen becoming violent and docile at a simple twist of a knob, secret passages leading to elaborately created circuitry sets (hence incorporating the best part of Planet of Giants, that giddy thrill of seeing people shrunken down, walking around giant sets of normally small things), the brilliantly realised Drashigs being an utter menace to everyone -- oh my, other stories really can't compare to some of the most ingenious moments of this serial. It's as if Robert Holmes threw in everything he had for this one, and Barry Letts gave a strong direction as well. Factor in that Jon Pertwee's utterly sublime as the mellowed and charming Third Doctor, and Katy Manning displays such a confident and sunny bond with this character and his actor, and it's truly a lightning-in-a-bottle bundle of greatness.

  With two wonderful characters, Vorg and Shirna, acting as the spectators to this madness and adding another layer of clever writing and pure fun, there really is not a single dull moment -- not one. If someone held me at gunpoint and told me to only watch one serial for the rest of my life... Carnival of Monsters would feel to me like a no-brainer choice. It's one of my personal favourites out of all of them, and I'll always cherish it for its ambition and polished execution.