“Do you know, it just occurs to me: there are vampire legends on almost every inhabited planet. Creatures that stalk the night and feed on the blood of the living. Creatures that fear running water and certain herbs, and that are so strong they can only be killed by beheading, or a stake through the heart.”
Still trapped in E-space (recognizable by the fact that outer space is green with stars, instead of black with stars) the TARDIS lands on a planet with what the Doctor at first takes to be a charming medieval scene: a large castle, really just a single very tall tower, and a village of small houses “clustered like ducklings around their mother.” But the TARDIS never lands where all is well. Apparently there is only the one castle, and the one village, on the entire planet. The Lords who rule from the castle send out their guards to periodically choose young people from the village— some are recruited to become guards themselves, but most are never seen again. There is an obligatory rebel group but this time it’s composed of the old men of the village, and they have a secret storehouse of advanced technology which they’re trying to learn how to use: no easy task, since the Lords forbid any form of education, even reading, to the villagers.
While the Doctor and Romana investigate, hoping to find some information that will help them navigate out of E-space, they’re still unaware that Adric stowed away on the TARDIS at the end of the previous story. He sneaks out on his own and soon gets caught by the guards and handed over to the three Lords, who believe he’s the chosen one whose appearance marks the time that the “Great One” will arise— and devour the universe.
This is a terrific story, in my opinion the best by far of Dr Who’s season 18. It is unabashedly a vampire story, owing more to the Hammer Horror/Christopher Lee Dracula movies than to Bram Stoker. Its style and tone are a throwback to the Hinchcliffe/Holmes golden age of “gothic horror” stories— there’s a reason for that, it was first written, by Dr Who veteran Terrance Dicks, for the Doctor and Leela during that period. It was canceled because the BBC was producing a prestige adaptation of Dracula starring Louis Jourdan and sent down a “thou shalt not compete” directive to the Dr Who production office. But the script remained on the shelf, and producer John Nathan-Turner put it on the schedule for this season. Dicks did a rewrite for the changed roster of companions, but otherwise the story remains as he originally wrote it.
The story is spooky, with steadily building suspense up to the reveal that the Lords are actually vampires. By the time the Doctor uses the word vampire (in the speech quoted above) we viewers have figured it out, as every trope of Hammer vampire movies has been rolled out one by one, but the reveal still manages to produce one of the best cliffhangers in Dr Who, at the end of episode 2. The actors playing the three vampires ham it up in just the right melodramatic way: they’re completely over-the-top but in precisely the way vampires— in Doctor Who— should be. The castle sets are beautiful, and it’s hard to imagine how they were done on Dr Who’s miniscule budget (sets for the village and for the rebels’ hideout are more ordinary).
The story sits firmly in the “gothic horror” style, with almost no attempt to give the vampires any kind of science fiction explanation. We learn that in the time of Rassilon (so long ago that Romana at first considers it just a myth, like the vampire myths of other planets) the Time Lords fought a terrible war against a race of giant vampires capable of draining the life from entire planets. The present vampires were created by a surviving “great vampire” from that war. But that’s it as far as rationalizing or explaining them— they’re just vampires, and that’s what we want them to be. (The story had a narrow escape from being turned into the kind of hard SF that current script editor Christopher Bidmead wanted Dr Who to be, see “details” below.)
Even the music is terrific. I have not been a fan of the new electronic music introduced with season 18. Partly that’s because it has sounded very dated, while Dudley Simpson’s prior music doesn’t (early eighties synthesizers have come and gone, while real musical instruments— or at least synthesizers capable of sounding like them— remain). But the main problem is that the music has very ostentatiously drawn attention to itself with fancy melodies and ornate touches that take over from the scenes rather than enhance them. That’s exactly what a background score should not do (and what Dudley Simpson knew not to do).
But in this story, the music works. Composer Paddy Kingsland manages to make it both good music and music that supports the story rather than distracting from it. In particular it plays perfectly with that episode 2 cliffhanger I mentioned, with a repeating phrase (that sounds vaguely like the Twilight Zone theme) that keeps rising in pitch together with the rising tension of the story. I’m not the only one who thinks the background score for this episode is excellent: the DVD release includes a music-only audio track.
Even K-9 finally gets to participate, without getting blown up or otherwise damaged. Stuck in the TARDIS for the first half of the story, he gets to come out in the second half and join the rebels in their attack on the castle.
How much of the credit for this story’s quality goes to the fact that the script was originally written during the Hinchcliffe/Holmes golden age? Some, certainly, especially for me as I tend to focus on the writing when watching Dr Who. But the designers, actors and even the composer all stepped up to match it. The only flaw I find is that some of the miniature effects are disappointing— but then that’s Classic Dr Who. They’re no worse than normal for the series of that time, they only look worse because of the contrast with how great the rest of it is.
Details
- Script editor Christopher Bidmead did a complete rewrite of Terrance Dicks’ original script, removing all the horror elements, giving a scientific (or at least science fictional) explanation for the vampires, and loading it down with all the hard SF elements he valued. But it was Dicks’ version that actually got produced. Credit goes to the story’s director, Peter Moffatt (no relation to current showrunner Steven, who has a different number of T’s in his surname). This was Moffatt’s first directing job on Dr Who, though he’ll do more going forward. John Nathan-Turner had worked with him before and sent him Terrance Dicks’ script for State of Decay thinking he was a good choice to direct it. Moffatt loved it and agreed. Then, when he arrived to begin production, he was handed Bidmead’s revised script. He was outraged. He told JN-T “you showed me this script because you knew I’d love all the gothic horror and now it’s all been removed!” He said if they didn’t go back to the script he originally saw, he wouldn’t direct the episode. JN-T decided he wanted Moffatt directing more than he wanted to keep Bidmead happy, and agreed.
- The Doctor at one point tells Romana how he heard the legend of the Time Lords’ war against the great vampires from an old hermit who lived near his home when he was boy. The Third Doctor told Jo Grant another story about that hermit in The Time Monster. It was very rare for Dr Who in this era to have that kind of callback: in the days before home video, with Doctor Who Magazine in its infancy, and with the BBC never showing repeats, almost no viewers would have known about the older reference. Such callbacks will later become common (too common, in fact) but this case is probably not the beginning of that trend. It’s more likely something Terrance Dicks put in just for fun, since he was script editor at the time of that earlier episode.
- The E-space storyline is in the background, but not forgotten, while the main story proceeds. The Great One escaped the war with the Time Lords by crossing over into E-space, and later drew a spaceship from Earth into E-space, turning its officers into vampires. Unfortunately the monster has to be destroyed, the secret of how it crossed over lost before the Doctor can find out anything that might help the TARDIS escape.
- At the end of the story, the Doctor tells Adric he’s taking him straight back to his people. Unfortunately, that doesn’t end up happening, and we’ll be stuck with Adric for a while.
Next Week
“Warrior’s Gate,” 4 episodes.
Program note:
Sorry this post was late, it should have come out last weekend, but I was distracted by other things.
