Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7.5/10
Cast: Tom Baker, Louise Jameson, Rowena Cooper, Richenda Carey, Claudia Grant, Allison McKenzie, Jane Slavin.
When young women start go missing from St. Matilda’s College in Oxford, the police are to be summoned to help explain the disappearance; help arrives but not in the way it was expected, and neither is the sense of the problem at hand.
Jonathan Morris’ Fourth Doctor adventure The Cloisters of Terror sees the world in a way that for some misguided people might seem to be the inverse of what the nature of life should be, the thought of religious belief and practise turned science fact, the exclusion of education being separated by gender and the fact that the Doctor is almost at a subservient end to the decrees of the convent nuns and the feminine force at work beyond the realms of normal sight. It is a world to which some would find oppressive but into which female education, of learning based in the safety of single sex environment, thrives and is to be congratulated.
Environment is at the heart of this particular episode and one that asks the listener to believe that something other what can be first perceived is actually going on. It is the threat without, rather than the threat within which keeps the story on course and one that is of a great deal of interest throughout.
The past is very much on the mind of the script and not only in the way that the religious practise of the convent is run. To have the wonderful Rowena Cooper play Emily Shaw, the mother of one of the finest and cleverest companions of the Doctor Liz Shaw, portrayed on screen by the brilliant Caroline John. Jonathan Morris’ fine touch at writing a continuation of the Liz Shaw story, albeit through the eyes of her mother, is one that is at the very heart of the Doctor Who feeling of family and that nobody is ever truly forgotten.
The ghosts that parade the corridors of St. Matilda’s stalk their prey, no one is safe, least of the Doctor.
Doctor Who: The Cloisters of Terror is available to purchase from Worlds Apart on Lime Street, Liverpool.
Ian D. Hall