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| The last humans are enslaved by an alien race! |
4 episodes: The Steel Sky, The Plague, The Return, The Bomb. Running Time: Approx. 98 minutes. Written by: Paul Erickson, Lesley Scott. Directed by: Michael Imison. Produced by: John Wiles.
THE PLOT:
The TARDIS brings the Doctor, Steven, and Dodo to a huge spaceship in the far future - an ark, carrying the last of the human race to a new home on the planet Refusis. The ship is manned by a small crew of human Guardians and Monoids, a mute alien race who came to Earth after their home planet was destroyed. The rest of the human and Monoid population is in hibernation, miniaturized to be awakened upon arrival, in 700 years' time.
The Ark's commander (Eric Elliot) welcomes them as friends, and they are shown around the ship, including a statue that has just begun construction, but that when finished in 700 years will be of a human being. Before they see much more, however, a strange disease begins afflicting the crew, humans and Monoids alike. Dodo had a cold - a minor illness for her, but the people on the Ark have no resistance to it. When the commander falls ill, Zentos (Inigo Jackson), his second-in-command, orders the strangers arrested and tried for what he believes was a deliberate attack on the ship.
The Doctor manages to find a cure for the illness, and he and his friends leave in peace. But the TARDIS brings them right back to the Ark. It is now 700 years later, and the ship is finally arriving at its destination. The statue is finished, as well - But instead of a human, the finished statue's likeness is of a Monoid. They have taken control of the Ark, and the humans are now their slaves!
CHARACTERS:
The Doctor: "Once this crisis is over, I'm going to teach you to speak English." He does not appreciate Dodo's informal, intermittently slang-riddled mode of speech (one can only imagine how he would react to some of his own later incarnations). Despite this, he is quite kindly and protective toward her. Though she brought the disease onto the ship, he reassures her that the crisis is not her fault, instead blaming himself for not anticipating the potential danger posed by her germ. He refuses to wallow in self-recrimination, or to allow Dodo to the same - What's done is done, and it is now their responsibility to do what they can to fix the situation.
Steven: Seems exasperated by Dodo - Not so much by her speech patterns as by her relentless perkiness. Amusingly, he is also annoyed when she refuses to believe they have traveled in time... despite him having been even more stubborn in disbelieving the same on his first journey! When put on trial by the Guardians, his already-thin patience breaks down and he lashes out at them in the story's single best scene: "The nature of man, even in this day and age, hasn't altered at all. You still fear the unknown, like everyone else before you!" His reaction to the Guardians' rapid willingness to resort to state-sanctioned violence gains added resonance when the story is watched in context. Steven has just come from a time period in which fear and hatred of the "other" resulted in mass violence, only to see so-called "civilized" humans from the far future behaving in far too similar a manner. Peter Purves is terrific here, easily elevating the episode.
Dodo: Her first proper story, after her rushed and somewhat jarring introduction at the end of the The Massacre. Additional exposure does not lead to improvement. Her relentless cheer in Episode One is genuinely irritating, as is her crying and despair in Episode Two. I know the script is trying to show her taking to heart the consequences of exposing the Ark to her cold, but in practice it plays more like the mood swings of a manic depressive. Most of the problem lies with the writing, as it's clear that no one in the creative team has any idea exactly who this character is. She's better in the story's second half - But that's mainly because she gets no focus in the second half, merely acting as a generic companion while the Doctor and Steven carry the plot.
THOUGHTS:
A fully complete and existing story at last! In the wake of the recent animations of Season Four stories, and the 2013 recovery of two Season Five stories, I believe the run from Galaxy Four to The Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Eve is now the longest run of missing stories with no animated titles. The Ark is weaker than almost all of that run - But after so many reconstructions and/or audios, it's nice to actually watch a Doctor Who story again.
ALAS, JOHN WILES, WE BARELY KNEW YE:
The Ark is the final story of producer John Wiles' brief tenure, and it is almost certainly his weakest - Which is actually fairly high praise in itself, as for all of its faults, The Ark has multiple interesting and ambitious ideas. As I noted in my review of The Myth Makers, Wiles oversaw a run of strong stories - There's not a genuinely bad one in the bunch. He and script editor Donald Tosh worked particularly well together, establishing a more adult tone for Doctor Who.
Wiles oversaw arguably the darkest period of the series. His stories are stuffed with death: massacres in ancient Troy and in 16th century France; a common cold infecting a community with no resistance to it and transforming into a deadly plague; even his most purely escapist tale, The Daleks' Master Plan, has multiple deaths of characters who could arguably be considered companions.
Peter Purves' Steven enjoyed his best run of stories under Wiles. Also, while Wiles and Hartnell's mutual antipathy is well-documented, the Doctor receives a lot of strong dramatic material. Where Wiles and Tosh most visibly faltered was with the female companions. Maureen O'Brien's Vicki was unceremoniously dropped from the series, and not for any particularly good reason. Wiles and Tosh were aware of the need for a female regular, but didn't seem to have any ideas beyond just "female," and Wiles' entire era sees literally a different female companion or stand-in for each story: Vicki in The Myth Makers; Katarina and Sara in The Daleks' Master Plan; Anne in The Massacre; Dodo in The Ark. It's probably uncharitable to observe that, if you merely reversed the order for Katarina and Sara, then each replacement would manage to be weaker than the one before.
A TALE OF TWO HALVES
As for The Ark, it's more interesting in its ideas than its execution. The story is structured as a pair of two-parters, which is both a blessing and a curse: The brevity of each half keeps it running at a good clip; however, with so little time to tell each mini-story, characters and plot complications are decidedly underdeveloped, and each story's crisis (the plague and the Monoid bomb) is resolved a bit too quickly and easily for the conflict to be fully felt.
The first half is far the better of the two. Steven's horror at the thought that they may have brought diseases to other times and places is effective, and a bit too easily hand-waved away by the Doctor. The Guardians respond with panic, with Zentos's eagerness to eject the time travelers into space creating a decent sense of jeopardy, as it actually feels convincing - The worst side of human nature, which Steven rightly denounces.
The second half is pure "B" movie nonsense, with the Monoids transformed from allies of the humans to one-dimensional baddies. There are things that could be done with the idea of an underclass revolting against their oppressors, only to become as bad or worse than the previous regime... But that's not what the story actually does. Sure, at the end the Doctor tells us that the Monoids had been treated like slaves, so of course took the chance to turn the tables. But what the first two parts showed was the Monoids being treated respectfully by the humans, basically as equals save for not being represented in leadership. If the first half had demonstrated the Monoids being treated as second-class citizens, then there might be some nuance. As it stands, the Monoids are suddenly just plain evil (and stupid evil, at that).
It does not help the story's weaknesses that both halves suffer from some of the worst guest acting yet seen in the series. Eric Elliot and Inigo Jackson, who get the major guest roles of the story's first half, both overact painfully. Elliot, in particular, seems to read his every line as if he's delivering a soliloquy from Shakespeare, an effect that becomes unintentionally comical after a while.
I will give the story some credit for its ideas, and for some good interplay among the TARDIS team. I will also say that the Episode Two cliffhanger, in which the time travelers return to the Ark to find the statue completed as a Monoid, is a stunner, probably one of the series' all-time best.
However, this remains the weakest Doctor Who story since Galaxy Four, an impression not helped by the second half repeating some of Galaxy Four's story beats - including presenting an alien race whose benevolence is only matched by their power. The Refusians are peace-loving and virtually omnipotent - which means that they eliminate any sense of threat the dumb and comparatively primitive Monoids may have posed, much as the powerful and peace-loving Rills nullified any potential threat by the Drahvins in the earlier story.
It's slightly better than Galaxy Four thanks to a faster pace and some interesting ideas (particularly in the first half). But honestly? It's not much better, and I'd trade these four episodes for any four episodes from The Myth Makers, The Daleks' Master Plan, or The Massacre in a heartbeat.
Rating: 4/10.
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