Doctor Who (TV Series) The Ribos Operation: Part Three (1978) User Reviews

Not as slick as Part 2, but some great performances.

[Sleepin_Dragon · 7/10 · 16 August 2015]

Part 2's cliffhanger saw The Doctor, Romana and Garron due to be executed, he decides instead to long them up. The fresh faced Unstoffe managed to break in to the gold and the jethrik, so the Captain summons The Seeker (a Visionary.) Binro a filthy street dweller hides Unstaffe and the Doctor summons trusty K-9. The seeker indicates the guards must visit the Concourse (place of fires) in search of Unstoffe. Garron explains what jethrik is and how he's completed his swindle many times. All descend into the catacombs to chase Unstoffe (and the first segment.) The Doctor, Romana, K-9 and Garron are forced to hide from the Graff and his guards, but The Doctor gives the game away.

The humour goes a little over the top with The Doctor and The Graff glove slapping each other, but is later very funny when all characters hide in the catacombs, The Doctor with a skeleton and Romana on top of Garron, very funny.

The Seeker has clearly been on the gin and is definitely over the top, her costume is not so good when compared with the class of the others.

Binro is great, I love his scenes with Unstoffe, what a great actor Timothy Bateson was.

The design on the guards looks identical to the ones used in the Ice scenes in The Keys of Marinus.

The production values once again are surpassing all expectation, the Hall of the Dead is brilliantly realised,

Iain Cuthbertson is again the standout performance, he was sublime throughout even Tom seems utterly captivated by him.

7/10, one final point i'd like to make is the lighting is excellent, it's very subtle.

Alas, Poor Jethrick...

[Xstal · 7/10 · 7 July 2022]

The Doctor, Romana and Garron break free, in search of lost Unstoffe, who's managed to flee, into catacombs, cadaverous rooms, where Shrivenzale plow, just like panto cow.

Peak Performances Precede the Sag

[darryl-tahirali · 9/10 · 16 March 2022]

Part Three of "The Ribos Operation" sports the big reveal to the Doctor and Romana, one which viewers have already realized: Garron (Iain Cuthbertson) and his protégé Unstoffe (Nigel Plaskitt), using a hunka-hunka burnin' jethrik as bait, aren't just trying to sell a jethrik mine to the brutal warlord the Graff Vynda-K (Paul Seed), they're trying to sell the entire planet of Ribos to him. Not that it's theirs to sell, but the benighted natives don't even realize there are other peoples on other worlds--we'll get to Binro the Heretic in a moment--other than their own.

With its hoary premise that harkens back to gags about selling the Brooklyn Bridge, Robert Holmes gets the last laugh from his sparkling script that blends broad humor with some genuinely poignant moments while having the Time Lord the Doctor and his companion Romana, also a Time Lord, searching for the first segment to the Key to Time--and don't think the Doctor isn't getting suspicious about that jethrik.

First, though, he, Romana, and Garron have been captured by the Graff and his adjutant Sholakh (Robert Keegan) and are awaiting execution. Naturally, the Doctor and Garron get on like a house on fire--to Romana's dismay, as she hasn't faced death nearly as many times as the Doctor--as Cuthbertson cements his status as the star of this four-part story; his con man Garron even relates how his first scam was to sell a mark Sydney Harbor along with the Opera House to boot (hardly fair dinkum).

However, the keynote moment comes when Unstoffe, warned by Garron that the Graff is on the hunt for him, takes refuge in the grimy cubbyhole of Binro the Heretic (Timothy Bateson), shunned by his people for daring to suggest that the dots of lights in the sky are not ice crystals but suns like their own and might have worlds like theirs revolving around them. (Shades of Copernicus and Galileo.) Hearing this, Unstoffe reveals that he is from one of those worlds, with Plaskitt rising to the emotional occasion although it is Bateson, pulling out all the stops without being melodramatic, who delivers the most moving single performance of the story.

By contrast, the most over-the-top performance comes from Ann Tirard, the Seeker, a local mystic, summoned by the captain of the shrievalty (Prentis Hancock) to ferret out Unstoffe, who flees with Binro ahead of the armed mob after him into the Catacombs as "The Ribos Operation" heads toward its conclusion in the final part.

Also entering the picture is K-9, the Doctor's robot dog, left in the TARDIS once it landed in Shur, Ribos's principal city. Conceived by producer Graham Williams the previous season, K-9, with formidable computing capabilities and lethal weaponry, can be too easy a solution to the Doctor's problems even if the prop's actual mechanics sorely underscore the series' technical limitations--after seeing R2D2 and C3PO in "Star Wars," K-9 looks like a wind-up toy.

The Part Three cliffhanger should be a nail-biter but instead it presages the sag that pervades the final part. Still, Bateson, Cuthbertson, and Plaskitt make this penultimate installment a keeper.