The sleepy English village of Little Hodcombe, 1984. The village re-enactment of the English Civil War is in full swing, but a malign alien presence intends the mock-battles to be rather more realistic than planned...

The Malus, an alien that's purely evil, needs the civil war re-enactments to become authentic so it can feed off the psychic energy of dying and embattled men and fully revive. Not if the Doctor can derail things, of course.