3 out of 5

Director: Mervyn Pinfield, Douglas Camfield

It’s a pretty standard sci-fi trope – being shrunk down to mini-size – but the Doctor Who variant sells it well by including something you’d think the trope would be bundled with but, sadly, is rarely the case: ‘Planet of Giants’ actually uses a good dose of logic to get the crew to an understanding of their predicament and how to ‘solve’ it.  Yes, some of it is inclusive logic (the TARDIS doors opened mid whoosh-whoosh and so… we shrunk), but none of it reeks of complete gobbledygook, and everyone, Susan included, is surprisingly incisive when it comes to observing their surroundings.

Still, there’s a subplot happening in the “regular” sized world that’s meant to intertwine with the DW crew and though it does impact things, it feels a bit wedged in – there’s no real direct interaction with the main characters in this subplot, and it’s oddly defined if the “giants” are meant to be simple antagonists, so it’s a bit distracting and serves, maybe, as a mouthpiece for someone’s feelings on pesticides: a scientist, a financial backer? and a politician? are at odds about what to do with a super pesticide, since it means big bucks but potential eventual threats to the populace.  The odds are solved via the politician – who’s not on board – being offed by the evil money man, but the ‘harmful’ aspect of the pesticide comes to the fore sooner rather than later when Barbara innocently handles a chunk and then falls ill, giving the crew’s need to return to normal size (they’re kept from the TARDIS via the usual exploration-leading-to-forced-separation trick, but as it’s wrapped up in figuring out that they’re shrunken down, it works this time around) a time limit.

The attempts at realism are nice – confronting the sound differences between the sizes, and the doc’s hasty calculations on how things occurred, or how the changes have affected them – and I like whenever they remind us that these people have educations, as Ian and the Doctor study some papers about the pesticides.  The sets are stark (black backgrounds) but the large size props are nice and varied and the cast does a good job of treating them with appreciable weight.  But because we’re not really exploring a “new” world, the episode has a sorta’ gimmick or stop-gap feel to it, especially with the pesticide aspect.  Combining episodes 3 and 4 down to 1 was a wise choice; the relatively brief runtime keeps the serial watchable.