With the countdown clock towards new Doctor Who episodes now firmly ticking ever downward, the Tour makes another (for a while?) foray into Classic Capitology with the Season 15 story Image of the Fendahl.
When the edict to reduce the perceived ‘violence quotient’ came down after the masterpiece that was Season 14, some residue of the more gothic elements of the Hinchcliffe-Holmes collaboration seemed to persist, perhaps because they were commissioned before the change in emphasis occurred or more simply because they fulfilled the more balanced approach to humor/horror that was favored at the time, lingered on into Season 15. Both Image of the Fendahl and Horror of Fang Rock would feel right at home a year earlier than here and, for the purposes of argument only, the Tour Brain Wizards would argue that Image of the Fendahl was the more successful of these outings.
Of course, the remembered images from the story are the glowy-glowy skull and the golden Wanda Ventham with eyelids as eyes, a look later duplicated in part for The Fires of Pompeii.
As has been the case of late, the new caps for Fendahl represent a fairly significant increase in both quantity and quality than existed before in the Tour archives.
Who knows what (or when) the next cap addition will be?
