Halfway through the Season 16 viewing and my sneaking suspicion has proved correct.
Yes, "The Stones of Blood" is really bloody annoying.
Not annoying in the sense that "The Pirate Planet" is annoying, please note. There's none of Douglas Adams' heavily laboured, self-conscious, smart-arse dialogue, for example. At least Adams' story is packed full of verve and invention (even if nobody on Zanak can even begin to shoot straight).
No, David Fisher's maiden script is annoying for the same reason that women who extoll the virtues of multi-tasking are annoying - it attempts to do a lot of things at once, and ends up doing them all rather badly.
Nothing ever quite clicks into place, it seems. As soon as things start to get interesting, "The Stones of Blood" trundles off onto another seemingly random tangent, like an Ogri with Alzheimer's.
And I end up being the archetypal embarrasing middle-aged Monoid that I truly am, shouting at the screen in an impotent rage of irrational disappointment.
And all because they killed off (an admittedly miscast) de Vries an episode too early.
They never learn, do they?
