It is very good. I probably under-rate it a little, simply because for a long time the audio (the cassette! That's how far back I'm going) was one of the few TV stories I owned, so I listened to it many times and became over-familiar (I wore the tape out in the end and was glad when it was released on CD).
I actually like the shift in story style, which I think makes it feel more epic. I read someone recently complain that one of the common failings of classic Who was telling a different story in the last episode to that which was started in the first, but I feel that while this is sometimes a problem, at other times it can be turned into an advantage. Evil (like the other great Troughton epic, The War Games) uses its scale and scope to really make you feel like you've been on a journey across time and space; it's not just running up and down the same corridors for three hours. It probably does complement The Power of the Daleks quite nicely, perhaps deliberately. It's as if David Whitaker said, "I did a sort of chamber piece for the Daleks seven months ago, so this time I'll go to the other extreme and do an all-out epic." Up until this point in Doctor Who only The Daleks' Master Plan had even attempted a story on such a grand scale and this is far superior.
There are some great performances too, particularly Troughton (probably one of his best performances in the role) and John Bailey as Waterfield, who really does come across as being trapped in a living nightmare. I wish we could see more of it, as the surviving episode makes the direction look pretty good too, by the standards of the time.
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I actually like the shift in story style, which I think makes it feel more epic. I read someone recently complain that one of the common failings of classic Who was telling a different story in the last episode to that which was started in the first, but I feel that while this is sometimes a problem, at other times it can be turned into an advantage. Evil (like the other great Troughton epic, The War Games) uses its scale and scope to really make you feel like you've been on a journey across time and space; it's not just running up and down the same corridors for three hours. It probably does complement The Power of the Daleks quite nicely, perhaps deliberately. It's as if David Whitaker said, "I did a sort of chamber piece for the Daleks seven months ago, so this time I'll go to the other extreme and do an all-out epic." Up until this point in Doctor Who only The Daleks' Master Plan had even attempted a story on such a grand scale and this is far superior.
There are some great performances too, particularly Troughton (probably one of his best performances in the role) and John Bailey as Waterfield, who really does come across as being trapped in a living nightmare. I wish we could see more of it, as the surviving episode makes the direction look pretty good too, by the standards of the time.