How many Doctor Who stories have at the heart of them a Problem Bureaucracy? I’m talking about a horrible central power, usually run by a paranoid and irrational old man who won’t listen to anyone, that serves mostly to string out the story’s run time or give it a reason to exist at all, by creating unnecessary and often unnatural conflict?

Often in these scenarios, everyone else in the story’s world seems more or less reasonable; it’s just this one bad apple, with a few of his puppets, who causes all the problems that allow the story to wheeze along.