Someone, or something, has disrupted the spacetime continuum. Was it The Doctor, who broke the rules of Time travel by saving Charlie from her destined fate on the R-101? Or are there evil forces at work, threatening the very fabric of perceived reality?

After the breathtakingly ingenious and insular Chimes Of Midnight, wherein one single household was caught in a bizarre timeloop, Seasons Of Fear takes the opposite approach. A sprawling epic, spread over two thousand years, the story begins in Singapore on New Year's Eve not long after the events of Storm Warning, as Charlie's pre-arranged rendezvous with her not-boyfriend Alex is fulfilled thanks to The Doctor.

His reverie amidst the stunning surroundings is interrupted by the appearance of a mysterious stranger who claims to be, in no particular order; from the future, working for powerful masters intent on destroying the Earth, immortal, and to have killed The Doctor in a time to come. The man, calling himself Sebastian Grayle, then vanishes into the night.

What follows is a somewhat fraught chase back and forth through time to stop Grayle and his masters from achieving their goal. Vital DNA from the unlikeliest of sources holds the key to The Doctor's hopes of tracking down Grayle before a gateway to Earth for his diabolical masters can be opened.

It needed Caroline Symcox to pull the various strands of Paul Cornell's original narrative together but the balance, between the latter's ambitious concepts laced with snappy dialogue and the former's gift for pace and structure, is just about perfect. Yet, even at this stage the BFs can still feel a bit stagey and convoluted - for all the wit, passionate technobabble and gripping action involving McGann and Fisher, the supporting cast and characters continue to jar more than they should.

Grayle would, in an ideal world, be played by an actor with the gravitas of David Warner, but soundalike Stephen Perring does an admirable job in a demanding role without ever quite nailing Grayle's growing meglomania. The other performances range from decent to rather amateurish.

Part Four offers a major surprise when the identity of Grayle's masters is finally and spectacularly revealed; The Doctor admonishes himself for not spotting the clues sooner, and given the references in the story to Roman legends of slaying a demonic bull perhaps the revelation will be more obvious to some. No-one, however, will be prepared for the seriously unsettling and cryptic finale. Seasons Of Fear - more than a load of old bull..

SCORE

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