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Rat Trap scuttles out of the darkness promising teeth, tension, and maybe a bit of claustrophobic horror… and instead hands me a damp cardboard box full of “oh, is that it?” while faint squeaking noises echo in the distance like my will to care slowly escaping through a drain.
We’ve got Peter Davison’s Fifth Doctor, who at this point feels less like a Time Lord and more like someone’s mildly irritated grandad stuck supervising a school trip gone wrong, alongside Nyssa, Tegan Jovanka, and Vislor Turlough, who continue to radiate the energy of three coworkers forced into a team-building exercise they did not consent to. And oh BOY, you can feel it.
The plot? Urban explorers poking around abandoned WWII tunnels. Which, okay, good start. That’s a vibe. Damp walls, echoes, history bleeding through the cracks, the sense that something old and buried might not want to stay that way. I’m leaning in. I’m ready.
Enter… psychic rats. No, wait, come back, it gets worse.
These are sentient, telepathic rats with a grudge against humanity because they were the result of wartime experiments. Which SHOULD be a slam dunk. There is a version of this story that is a haunting meditation on exploitation, war crimes, and unintended consequences. This is not that version.
Instead we get the most aggressively generic villain energy imaginable. The rats are just… there. They hate humans. They want revenge. They monologue a bit. You could swap them out for Silurians, Zygons, or an angry bin bag with a voice modulator and NOTHING would change. No distinct personality, no unsettling presence, no real sense of threat. Just squeaky resentment.
And the urban explorers? Oh my god. Cardboard. Absolute cardboard. I have seen more depth in a puddle. Every single one of them feels like they were assembled from spare parts labelled “generic horror fodder #1” through “mildly annoying skeptic #4.” You know exactly who’s going to panic, who’s going to get picked off, and who’s going to make the obvious bad decision before they even open their mouths. I am begging for CHARACTER. Just one. A crumb.
Meanwhile, the TARDIS team dynamic continues its slow descent into passive-aggressive hell. Nyssa tries. Bless her. Tegan snaps at everything that moves. Turlough lurks like he’s considering emotionally detaching from the entire concept of friendship. There’s tension, but not the interesting kind. More the “please can HR step in” kind.
And the Doctor? Look, I love Peter Davison, I do. But this performance feels like it’s stuck in neutral. There’s no spark, no bite, no sense that he’s elevating the material. Compare that to the sheer theatrical chaos of Colin Baker or the layered, manipulative depth of Sylvester McCoy or the experimental, wide-eyed energy of Paul McGann, and it just… sits there. Like the rats. Existing. Squeaking. Not doing much else.
Okay, FINE, one positive. I will give you ONE. The giant wheel scene. Yes. The psychic rats force Turlough to run in a massive wheel like some kind of Victorian hamster nightmare and it is SO stupid it loops back around to being incredible. I laughed. Out loud. Full pantomime nonsense. Ten out of ten, no notes, more of this chaotic energy please.
Everything else? Beige. Aggressively beige.
Final Thoughts
A painfully dull story with a decent premise that gets chewed up and spat out by generic villains, flat side characters, and a TARDIS team that feels like it’s one argument away from filing for separation.
1 out of 5 oversized psychic hamster wheels that deserved a better episode built around them