I can recall that when this story was broadcast, everyone was asking the same question: just who let the Doctor out of the locked room? It can't have been Thea as we see her elsewhere - and we later see her come looking for him in the room. Neither Adam nor Max would have any reason to free him, and both appear to be elsewhere at the time as well.
Dr Fendleman might just be a possibility, if unconsciously under the influence of the Fendahl - in which case it is the Fendahl which has freed him. However, it would have no reason to free someone opposed to it either.
One theory is that no-one did it - it was just the delayed action of the Doctor's own attempts to open the door. If that is the case, then it doesn't look like that on screen. We're definitely meant to think that someone has sneaked up and unlocked it, then moved away to avoid detection.
Did Anthony Read simply fail to spot and correct an error in the script?
The novelisation does not help, as it wasn't written by Chris Boucher. Uncle Terry goes for the delayed action option.
The Doctor's explanation about the Fendahl's influence over the human race is... Well, he gives three of them, which is a bit confusing and annoying - especially when the third explanation is that it might just all be coincidence. It would have been nice if Boucher could have committed himself.
The Doctor thinks that it is the influence of the Fendahl which has led to the dark side of Man's nature. So what caused the people of all the other planets to have a dark side?
Negative emotions and behaviours simply exist across the entire cosmos, so why think there's something unique with humans?
The Time Lords of old put the Fifth Planet of our Solar System into a time loop, after apparently blowing it up. Why blow it up when you can just stick the whole thing in a time loop?
Saying that, the supposedly god-like Gallifreyans really mess up the time loop. It fails to contain the Fendahl - as its skull makes it to Earth. It fails to contain the planet, as parts of it make up the asteroid belt; and it fails to contain knowledge of these events, as the Doctor knows all about it from his youth.
And he's able to visit it with Leela - so almost as rubbish a time loop as a Chronic Hysteresis.
The Fendahl is said to have stopped off on Mars on its way to Earth and destroyed life there. What life would this have been millions of years ago (the Flood?), and how could the Ice Warriors have later evolved on a sterile world?
Martian history is confusing enough without this adding to it.
Where did the little Fendahleen come from, which we see covering Thea's body in the kitchen? The creatures are created from the coven members, who haven't been transformed yet.
Indeed, where does the one we don't get to see in the woods come from? Is it simply a psychic force at this stage? If so, why physical wounds?
The fully-grown Fendahleen are able to affect the muscles of their victims to stop them running away - but don't influence the arms, so their victims can still shoot them or throw salt-bombs at them. Why not disable their victims completely?
There's a real cheat with the resolution to the first cliff-hanger - a whole scene slipped in of Leela jumping back from the cottage door, before the shot is fired, which we didn't get to see the previous week.
This was the sort of thing that the old Saturday morning cinema serials like Flash Gordon, Underwater Kingdom, Radar Men From The Moon etc. used to do. People complained about them then, so why should they be any more acceptable in Doctor Who?
The Fendahl Core has fake eyes all too obviously painted on Wanda Ventham's eyelids.
The Doctor offers the skull a jelly baby - and it's clearly a liquorice allsort. He'll do this again in later episodes.
The Doctor knows details about the two earlier victims of the Fendahleen - the hiker and the security guard - when there hasn't been time for anyone to tell him about them.
It's a huge coincidence that the Priory will implode after 100 hours usage of the time-scanner - and the device just happens to have been running 99 hours.
Finally, the Priory is apparently sucked into a space / time warp, destroying it completely - the inference being that it ceases to exist. Yet the Doctor removes the skull from this event, thinking that a supernova is going to be more effective. That's just a big explosion. Wouldn't removal from space / time altogether be a better solution?
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