Warning: spoilers for the story
This week’s story does a much better job than last week’s of keeping the silliness in check (with the exception of a couple of unfortunate moments). We’re still in Dr Who’s sitcom era, and so comedy is pervasive, but it manages to play its underlying story straight, and the story takes on an unusually “true crime” topic for Dr Who, while managing to give it a nice only-in-Dr-Who eccentricity in the process: it’s about drug smugglers hiding their shipments in a sort of primitive version of a TARDIS’ bigger-on-the-inside pocket dimension. Plus there are monsters.
In complimenting the episode I’m parting company from the Fan Conventional Wisdom (FCW), which I haven’t mentioned in quite some time in this series. The general view of the story is that it’s just another silly embarrassment from season 17, and in particular the Mandrills, the monsters of the story, are considered either laughably unconvincing or, by some, too cute and lovable to be scary. I’ll grant that I’d never pick Nightmare of Eden as an episode to show a friend who’s not already a dedicated fan. But it scores higher than its surroundings in this season and it has a couple of really good moments.
The drug being smuggled is Vraxoin, which takes everything dangerous about illegal drugs and scales it up to the max. The high it produces is basically to destroy all interest in anything (“complacency and apathy” are the symptoms we’re told), and just one dose leaves you hopelessly addicted, while the withdrawal symptoms are always fatal. To make sure we don’t miss the point, the Doctor on three different occasions says “I’ve seen Vraxoin destroy whole planets, while the merchants make a fortune.” On the one hand, this makes Vraxoin into a straw man on a par with the infamous movie Reefer Madness. On the other hand, in Dr Who it kind of works: this is a drug turned into a Dr Who villain. It’s the Dalek of narcotics.
It’s being smuggled inside the “continuous event transmuter” (CET), which is something like the miniscope from Carnival of Monsters a few years back, except instead of shrinking the life forms and their habitats down to tiny side inside the machine, the CET digitizes them onto data crystals which can be viewed on a screen. The Doctor and Romana recognize that what the CET is really doing is creating pocket dimensions similar to the inside of the TARDIS, only it’s so primitive that it lacks even basic safeguards. The CET belongs to a scientist using it to collect and preserve endangered species, but when the passenger liner he’s traveling on suffers a collision in hyperspace, the resulting spatial distortions allow creatures from inside the CET to escape and start killing the other passengers.
The rather complicated setup of the story gives us several moments of genuine surprise, a couple of moments of black humor (which serve the suspense of the story rather than taking away from it) and one very good cliffhanger: at the end of episode two, on the run from a couple of customs agents convinced they are the drug smugglers, the Doctor grabs Romana’s hand and leaps at what until that moment we’ve thought of simply as a projection screen (displaying the contents of the CET) and the two of them go right through it into the jungle that seemed to be just a picture. (The story hasn’t revealed to the viewers what the CET is really doing until that point.)
There are surprisingly dark moments in the midst of the story. The fate of the passenger liner’s captain is one. He’s shown to be reasonably competent and an ally of the Doctor (after a pro forma round of initial suspicion) until the villain doses him with Vraxoin without his knowledge. The next we see him he’s grinning at a viewscreen watching the Mandrills kill his passengers, completely unconcerned and laughing over the fact that this will mean the end of his career, then he’s frantically begging Romana to “give me something for this feeling, I know you have it! I know you have it!” until he finally attacks her and is shot by one of the customs agents. This is serious stuff and sells the danger of Vraxoin better than the Doctor repeating how it’s destroyed planets: the story has the courage to show us how it destroys one man, who didn’t even know he’d taken it.
Another great moment comes at the very end, when the villain’s finally been caught and the monsters safely returned to the CET (where they’ll later be restored to their proper planets). It’s not much of a surprise that the smuggler was the scientist who owned the CET (but I put that spoiler warning at the top of the article anyway, just in case). The Doctor is at the controls of the CET, grinning at his own cleverness in that distinctive Tom Baker way, and as the police start to drag off the scientist he tries to justify himself. “Doctor tell them, I had to do it to fund my research! You’re a scientist, you understand!” The Doctor’s expression doesn’t flicker, and he doesn’t even look at the guy. He just whispers, “Go away.” The scientist tries again. “But Doctor—”
“Go away,” the Doctor whispers again, and the way Tom Baker plays it is very nearly terrifying. In this era of the show, the Fourth Doctor rarely gives any glimpse of the ruthless streak that the Doctor’s worst adversaries sometimes bring out, but we see it here. You get a distinct impression that if the cops didn’t drag the villain out of the room at this point, something very bad might have happened to him.
Details
- The story is written by Bob Baker, who has previously written a number of stories with his writing partner Dave Martin. This is Baker’s only solo contribution to Dr Who, and the last that either he or Martin would write for the series.
- The production for this episode was evidently a harsh trial for all concerned. Going by what people say about it in interviews, the main problem was a director who had never worked on any kind of science fiction before and refused to make any allowances for the way things were done on Dr Who. According to the interviews, he wouldn’t listen when the visual effects and technical people said a shot had to be done a certain way, and he micromanaged the actors to the point that Tom Baker eventually shouted, “I thought we were supposed to have a director in the control room, not a commentator.” Producer Graham Williams eventually had to fire the director in mid-shoot (literally during a lunch break) and finish directing the story himself. After it was all over, someone in the crew printed up and handed out T-shirts that said “I’m glad the nightmare is over.”
- David Brierley does a much better job as K-9 in this episode than last week’s, although you still can’t help thinking that it’s just not the right voice.
- I suspect Douglas Adams’ hand in one scene that could have come directly from one of the obstructive bureaucrat scenes that populate the Hitchhikers Guide stories. Two customs agents are on board the ship as everything is falling apart. The senior asks his assistant for a casualty report among the passengers. “Twelve dead, twenty-nine injured.” The senior agent doesn’t trouble to hide his satisfaction. “We’ll get a promotion out of this!” he exclaims. His assistant is a little more concerned, but the senior agent explains, “We just have to keep out of the way. It’ll all sort itself out, and then we have two ready-made suspects [the Doctor and Romana] to hand over when it’s done!” He goes on to explain that the more casualties, the bigger the case and therefore the bigger the rewards when they make arrests. To cap off this picture of the civil service at work, these two guys do eventually make the arrests they’re hoping for (the Doctor makes sure they end up with the right suspects) and as far as we know gain all the rewards they were hoping for— all of which is a very Douglas Adams kind of picture.
Next Week
“The Horns of Nimon” 4 parts. I’ll also talk briefly about the unfinished story, Shada.
