In some ways this is a curious episode; while the Doctor and Peri are introduced immediately, having arrived on the planet Necros to pay their respects to one of the Doctor's now-deceased friends, they spend the entirety of the episode wandering around the complex that the Doctor's friend Arthur Stengos has been lain to rest in, unable to find a way to get in -- and other than an encounter with a mutant that's been hiding in a nearby lake141, they're completely dissociated from the action going on inside Tranquil Repose. Still, it's a nice blue cloak that the Doctor wears for most of this, at least, and Peri gets to spot a Dalek, even if she doesn't know what it is. But that's about it for them until the cliffhanger (which we'll get to).
Fortunately those interior sequences are interesting. Eric Saward's flexing his writing muscles a bit here, choosing to write a story that, while still steeped in death, isn't one of his standard war/mercenary stories (fans of those styles needn't panic, though, as this episode still features a mercenary and his squire -- although Orcini seems so far to be far more noble and moral than Saward's usual mercenaries). Instead (with an acknowledged debt to Evelyn Waugh's book The Loved One), Saward is interested in exploring a mortuary, with the sorts of characters who would be involved in such a job.
But this is still Doctor Who, so obviously this isn't going to be a straightforward retelling of that book. Instead we're treated to the sight of Davros, in some sort of special tank and apparently in charge of everything that goes on at Tranquil Repose. Pleasingly, we also get a shot of a white Dalek at the same time -- no waiting till the cliffhangers for the Daleks' appearance in this story. No explanation yet as to how Davros survived the Movellan virus at the end of Resurrection of the Daleks though. But this place is filled with people who are working for the "Great Healer", and they all seem more preoccupied with their jobs than with anything else going on around them (note how Takis and Lilt are slightly concerned, rather than terrified, by the presence of a Dalek). Jobel and Tasambeker are great examples of this -- Jobel's entire job is about appearances, and that's all he cares about. Tasambeker is obsessed with Jobel, who's completely uninterested in her ("This one thinks with her knuckles," Jobel says to Takis about her, early in the episode).
There are also some nice directorial choices from Graeme Harper, with lots of use of crane shots and close-ups (although the shot where he attempts to show the camera descending through the levels of Tranquil Repose looks more like the vertical hold has gone out of sync -- the main issue being that people's feet are cut off, which therefore doesn't make it look like a floor). The whole thing looks great, and the different styles of design from place to place do give the sense that this is a planet that's been lived on. The only thing that seems truly jarring is the presence of the DJ -- this isn't a slight against Alexei Sayle, who does a great job with it (the aside about Beck's Syndrome being a particular highlight), but his presence in the story is currently at odds with everything else tonally. But maybe that's the point. It's a strange idea in the first place, having a DJ for people in suspended animation, so Harper may be exploiting this in his direction, where Sayle delivers almost all of his lines to camera. And a special mention to the glass Dalek, which is both fascinating to look at and grotesque; they've done an excellent job with Alec Linstead inside as the half-Dalek Stengos -- I'm still not sure how they got his teeth to look like that. The scene where he begs his daughter to kill him is very effective.
The cliffhanger is also effective, as the Doctor discovers a monument to himself, in his sixth incarnation, and worries that he's meant to die in this body -- a thought which seems to really unnerve him ("I never thought precognisance of my own death would be so disturbing," he remarks). Although what he makes of the monument suddenly falling over on him, we'll have to wait till next time to learn.
141 A part originally offered to Lord Laurence Olivier, if you can believe such a thing -- Olivier was apparently amenable, but the scheduling didn't work out.