Well, something just isn’t clicking with this series, and I don’t know what it is. These two episodes could have been made among the first four series, back in the UK. They don’t go anywhere near as off-key or strange as series five’s adventures with the evil Traveling Scarecrow Maker, or the previous two episodes’ heightened unreality. One is Aunt Sally misunderstanding something, acting posh, and causing a scene, and the other, written by Fran Walsh, introduces a new scarecrow, Bulbous Cauliflower, who appears in two episodes and is played by David Weatherley. But they both feel like there’s no energy to them. Episode four seems like a huge missed opportunity, because Aunt Sally having a mud fight with the staff of a beauty parlor should have been uproarious, and episode five does something quite new: it seems that certain toxic chemicals, like DDT, can permanently alter a scarecrow’s mind. The set pieces are too staid and too slow, a problem that hampered some of the earliest episodes. These need to be manic and raucous, and they aren’t.
Fire Breathing Dimetrodon Time 