Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror - Review

A fairly solid episode, exciting and fun in places, but perhaps a little too talky and slow to get started to be judged anything better than "good".
We're back in history again, with more real historical figures (as with the second half of Spyfall). If Mary Shelley is in a later story (and the new BBC America trailer suggests she is) then this series will take the record for historical figures featured.
The episode primarily focused on the eponymous Nikola Tesla, the Serbian-American scientist who was a pioneer of sorts in many fields. A brilliant scientist, but a poor businessman who failed to capitalise on his ideas. He was well played by Goran Visjnic, who is a fan of the inventor. Also appearing is Thomas Edison (Robert Glenister) who is his polar opposite. He wasn't much of a scientist, but he was a brilliant businessman who knew how to make his fame and fortune from the scientific work of others.
Tesla is set up as a mirror of the Doctor - the inventor who creates for the sake of invention, whilst Edison is there to mirror the Skithra, who simply steal other races' technology but don't have a clue how any of it actually works. If Tesla is a Doctor-parallel, then Dorothy Skerritt (Haley McGee) is his companion / assistant-parallel.
The Doctor's companions only seem to know Tesla from the Elon Musk electric car named after him. I already knew something about him, having seen the 2006 movie The Prestige in which he's played by David Bowie. Tesla died penniless in 1943, but I wouldn't feel too sorry about this as he was also a great believer in eugenics and racial purity.
The Skithra were yet another well-realised alien race, although their Queen, played by Anjli Mohindra, was a little reminiscent of the Racnoss Queen. It was nice to see Paul Kasey get a role where he wasn't smothered in latex, especially creepy when they distorted his face.
The actual Skithra plan did not bear much thinking about. It was a nice idea to have an alien menace which simply wants to abduct someone to help them fix things, rather than conquer or destroy the planet. However, if they are able to steal all this alien technology, why couldn't they abduct someone from a more advanced species who might actually understand their purloined tech? When the Doctor refuses to allow Tesla to hand himself over, the Skithra Queen does then threaten to destroy all life on the planet - despite having just told Tesla that their weapons are one of the things they want him to repair.
A minor gripe was the Doctor's description of the Silurians as "alien" when she knows full well they were the original dominant species on Earth. However, even their creator - Malcolm Hulke - had the Third Doctor describe them as "alien" in their very first story.
If the Skithra were well realised then the story had some lovely visual flourishes as well. I particularly liked the train sequence near the start, with the hooded Skithra agent being left behind on the uncoupled freight wagon, plus the attack by the aliens on the Wardenclyffe laboratory. I think it was the murky green light that did it in both sequences.
I was rather disappointed with the conclusion. I have said before that the Doctor's new pacifist stance might be problematic, and here we saw the Skithra merely chased away - meaning that they are able to simply attack some other planet to get what they want. There's also the inconsistency around the Doctor telepathically removing knowledge of herself and future events from historical figures she meets. They made a big deal of her removing the memories of Ada Lovelace and Inayat Noor Khan, yet Edison and Tesla were left with their memories intact. Surely far more dangerous to leave them with these memories than Khan, who would be dead a year or so after meeting the Doctor.
So, definitely a step up from last week's nonsense, but it fell short of greatness as far as I'm concerned, mainly due to the pacing.