What's Wrong With... The Awakening

It's just a short two-parter - but that's one of the problems. Originally four episodes long, it was heavily edited down to half the length and this leaves it rather rushed.

The anachronisms should have been prolonged, so that the audience would be unsure as to when this story was set - the 17th or 20th Century. The fact that it's a contemporary story with characters just dressed in English Civil War costume is given away far too quickly.

The whole ghosts thing is confusing. Why do some people materialise corporeally, like Will and the disfigured thief, whilst others are just phantoms? And why do some of the latter look real whilst others are a sort of ghostly silver colour?

Everyone connected with the village seems familiar with the name "Malus" - but how would they have known its name?

A couple of directorial issues. Tegan is walking along, minding her own business, when she gets abducted. But you can see that her attacker must have been standing right in front of her in the open to have achieved this.

The Doctor and Jane confer as they're hiding under the stairs in the secret tunnel - despite their searchers only having just walked past (after ignoring the only place in the tunnel where anyone could hide).

What exactly happens to Sir George at the climax. He falls into the crack, but what happens next? Does he get eaten, or is the big malus of the same proportions as the little one, meaning there's a huge unseen drop below the face that he falls down? 

The story borrows (very) heavily from The Daemons, but in that story Chris Barry managed to show that Devil's End had a population. Where are the inhabitants of Little Hodcombe?

That 1970's story was also set at May Day. Here we see lots of sunshine, and no-one's wearing their big coats. So why does Sir George need a roaring log fire in his little study.

These days, the showrunner would devise a whole three season story arc around the fact that relatives of Tegan fall foul of alien interventions.

Finally, it's yet another Davison story in which lots of people get invited into the TARDIS and hardly bat an eyelid, and owning a dimensionally transcendental time machine apparently makes everyone automatically believe everything you say.