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Castle of Fear drops Peter Davison’s Fifth Doctor and Nyssa straight into a quaint Christmas mummers’ play in 1899, only to discover that the villagers’ past and present are literally bleeding into one another. People in the play know who the Doctor is and what he’ll do, and that’s always a warning sign.
They immediately jaunt off to the real 1199 version of the same castle. There we meet Hubert, Earl of Mummerset, a bunch of killer boars, the terrifyingly named Maud the Withered, Turkish knights with anger issues, and Roland of Brittany, a knight who speaks like he’s allergic to subtlety. The castle is infested with Rutans, the alien shapeshifters doing exactly the kind of disguise experiments they do best. Through tunnels, fog, and knightly screaming, the Rutans hijack bodies, the Doctor gets strapped to a torture thingie because of course he does, and everyone has a crisis about selfhood that could fill a bingo card. And then, because this is Big Finish in this era, it all ends with a giant explosion. Of course it does.
Performances are deliciously theatrical. Davison’s Doctor is simultaneously bemused and gleeful, like he’s been handed a game board with no rules at all and told to roll dice until something happens. Sarah Sutton’s Nyssa is sharp and absolutely not here to be a damsel, especially when she takes charge of the waterwheel situation in a way that makes me want to hug her and also terrify lesser metal generators. The supporting cast revel in their roles, from pompous knight to too-stiff aristocrat to villagers who absolutely should not play poker, and the comedy llands because it’s rooted in character rather than mugging. There’s a lovely pantomime quality to the repeated identity twists, not in a dumb way, but in that knowing “oh, we’re doing this now” tradition of British farce. You can almost hear the wink through the microphone.
Thematically, Castle of Fear is about how story and identity blur over time. History isn’t a fixed record here; it’s a tangle of half-remembered lies, deliberate reinventions, and people pretending to be what circumstance demands. Almost everyone is playing a role, and the Doctor, as ever, is both participant and audience. There’s also a surprisingly sharp awareness of class dynamics. The script recognises the gulf between peasants and serfs, the limited agency of those at the bottom, and the casual cruelty of those at the top. It doesn’t lecture, but it knows.
Now. The ending. I enjoyed this story a great deal. This is extremely my thing. But it loses a point because of that cliffhanger. By this stage in the Big Finish range, monthly releases were being grouped into trilogies, a format that would eventually evolve into the box sets we have now. Fine. Great, even. Except this is the second trilogy in a row to end its first story with “and then there is a giant explosion,” the previous offender being Patient Zero. Once is dramatic. Twice is a pattern. And a slightly lazy one.
Final Thoughts
Light, clever, funny, and historically playful, Castle of Fear is a delight with a slightly overfamiliar sting in its tail.
4 out of 5 exploding medieval castles that really should have better health and safety regulations.