But this isn't another follow-up to The Web of Fear (though it was intended as such at some stage), as Professor Travers is in America and letting his place out to a man named Professor Watkins, who happens to be working for IE. The Doctor and Jamie go to IE to find him while Zoe stays behind with Watkins' niece Isobel. We don't meet Watkins, but we do encounter the head of IE, Tobias Vaughn -- played by the marvelous Kevin Stoney. Here's a villain (and he's largely portrayed as a villain from the outset) who's charming, sophisticated, and thoroughly likeable, which means we can see how he became a success. So many of these people in charge are such ranting lunatics that it's a wonder anyone ever gave them anything. Vaughn, by contrast, is so slick that you can't help but be charmed. Even if he blinks too slowly and seems to be working with some sort of alien machine.
Episode two is present in all its glory, so we can see things like the business where the Doctor and Jamie are trapped in an alley and the Doctor starts dealing out cards, including to the men there to take him away. But then a jaunty theme from composer Don Harper suggests that maybe these men aren't in fact the bad guys, a fact which is confirmed when they're taken to a mobile HQ inside an airplane which is being led by none other than The Web of Fear's Lethbridge-Stewart, now promoted to Brigadier and the head of the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce, or UNIT -- an organization designed to investigate strange happenings that was set up after the Yeti incident. UNIT has been watching IE with concern, as people have been going in and either coming out different or not coming out at all. Nicholas Courtney does a fine job in this role, making him enough like his last appearance to be recognizably the same character while still having undergone a metamorphosis for the better (he's noticeably less fatalistic and helpless here than he was in The Web of Fear). Oh, and we get our first good look at Benton (played by John Levene, who was also in The Web of Fear -- albeit as a Yeti), who will also return next year. (All right, he's actually in episode one as well, but here we can see him.)
All this and intrigue too. Zoe and Isobel go to IE after the Doctor and Jamie and end up wrecking a computer -- which, wonderfully, makes Vaughn laugh with delight rather than rage with anger. And so the Doctor and Jamie go after them, snooping around the IE building in search of them. But they're soon caught by Vaughn's guards, including his henchman Packer. "Like rats in a trap!" Packer proclaims triumphantly as the credits roll. Trapped indeed.