“I can’t stand burnt toast. I loathe bus stations – terrible places, full of lost luggage and lost souls. And then there’s unrequited love, and tyranny, and cruelty.” —The Doctor
Story
The Doctor is getting proactive again. After Ace confides in him she has a fear of haunted houses after a terrifying experience in one when she was younger, he’s taken the TARDIS to that same house a hundred years earlier, to find out what happened there. Gabriel Chase, as the Victorian manor is called, is certainly a peculiar and spooky place. The daytime staff of servants all leave at sunset, terrified for any poor souls who might be stuck in the house overnight. Once they’re gone, a different staff emerge from alcoves in the walls, as emotionless as zombies. The owner, Josiah Smith, is apparently a naturalist who has been participating in the fierce controversies over Charles Darwin’s recent publication, but he seems to be crumbling into dust. The butler is a neanderthal— literally, that’s not a comment on his table manners. An explorer roams the halls, delusionally convinced he’s on safari in Africa, after being driven mad by a “light” he saw somewhere in the house. And the basement of the house appears to be the control room of a spaceship, with a couple of alien monsters lurking about, some unknown thing hidden behind a locked door, and an alien in suspended animation that the Doctor decides he wants to wake up and talk to.
Review
Ghost Light makes no sense. But it fails to make sense in a completely different way from last season’s incoherent Happiness Patrol. The earlier serial was little more than a choppy set of unconnected scenes, characters suddenly being in different places doing different things without any explanation of what was going on. In Ghost Light, the scenes flow together reasonably enough and we can follow the Doctor and Ace through the adventure without feeling like we’ve missed anything— but we never get any idea of what it all means. Happiness Patrol suffered from poor editing that removed key plot developments. Ghost Light has lost all its exposition.
For Ghost Light, the cuts came not in the editing room, post-production, but rather during the script writing process. The original script came in around twenty-five minutes too long (some sources say it was written to be a four part story and was then changed to three, others just that the draft was simply too long). Writer Marc Platt and script editor Andrew Cartmel worked together closely on revisions, but as Cartmel admits in later interviews, they were so used to the story after the lengthy revision process that they lost track of what the viewers didn’t know.
Their storytelling goals were correct, as far as they went. They wanted to keep the spooky, scary bits, the scenes that moved the plot forward, and lose the boring exposition. And they were correct to know that even when a story has room to be leisurely, it’s painful if the story gets stopped in its tracks for a long info-dump. But the solution is to figure out how to work the necessary exposition deftly into the narrative, not to just remove it altogether. They also felt that the Doctor’s companions often came off as less than intelligent with their “what’s that, Doctor?” role and wanted to show Ace being clever enough to understand what was happening without help. Unfortunately Ace’s cleverness only makes things worse. I can imagine a Dr Who story in which the Doctor never lets his companion, or the viewers, in on the secret of what he’s been up to— it would do very well with the Seventh Doctor’s Machiavellian chessmaster persona, who we’ve already seen keep his secrets until the end of a story. But when the companion also seems to be up to speed on everything that’s going on, then the viewers start to feel left out in the wrong sort of way.
And anyway, it doesn’t make the companion seem stupid to play that role. If Albert Einstein traveled in the TARDIS, he’d have to ask “What is that, Doctor?” when encountering something outside his knowledge and experience: in fact it’s the first thing an intelligent person would ask.
But the problem here is more fundamental than just the companion’s role. Cartmel and Platt decided being spooky and moody was more important than explaining anything. That can work— it worked for Greatest Show in the Galaxy, and the new series has gone that route several times— but it depends on the kind of story being told. In Ghost Light, though the alien in the cellar eventually wakes up and threatens to destroy the Earth, giving us the climax of the story, for most of it there is no particular threat the Doctor has to deal with: he and Ace are only there to find out what’s going on. Ghost Light is fundamentally a mystery: in story structure terms, its Dramatic Question is “What is the mystery of Gabriel Chase?”— and that’s the question the story completely fails to answer. There are plenty of clues, and if you think it through you can figure it out more or less, but that’s not good enough. When a story poses a dramatic question, then the story must answer it, or we feel unsatisfied.
In other details: the story wants to be a meditation on evolution, as well as a ghost story, but (as so often happens when science fiction writers try to address evolution) it gets is mostly wrong. For one thing, villain Josiah Smith’s transformations are referred to as him “evolving” but individual metamorphosis isn’t evolution. For another, evolution is presented as something unique to the planet Earth. The alien in the basement is a naturalist who came to catalog every living thing on Earth but was driven mad by the fact that it kept changing, so his catalog was out of date before he finished it— but then how did life on his planet form? Apparently Earth is the only place where this would be a problem. The story heaps contempt on an elderly clergyman who visits the manor to argue with Smith about Darwin’s “nonsensical” theory but you have to wonder what the writer had in mind for the rest of the universe.
The Explanation
Andrew Cartmel and Marc Platt got plenty of questions from fans over the years since Ghost Light aired, and were not especially reluctant to give the explanations they’d left out. So, if you’re following along and are now scratching your head what in the world was going on, here’s the explanation as they give it out (not quoting, I’m just writing it from memory):
An alien naturalist, called Light, has been traveling the universe making a catalog of all living things. He gathers specimens of some life forms, putting them into suspended animation. There are two other alien beings or devices used in the survey: a survey probe which goes out into the environment of each new planet and transforms itself into the highest form of life that exists there, then returns to the spaceship for study, and the “control,” a creature of the same type which stays in the spaceship and does not transform, for purposes of comparison when the probe comes back. The probe transforms itself in a series of metamorphoses, shedding its former skin at each change. The husks thus left behind still have a zombie-like semblance of life, controlled by either the probe or the control. The monsters in the basement of Gabriel Chase are alien life forms the probe changed into on previous planets.
The spaceship landed on Earth when Neanderthals existed. Among the specimens collected were the neanderthal warrior who later served as the butler at Gabriel Chase. Leaving Earth, Light went into suspended animation for the journey to the next planet but the probe creature decided it liked Earth and mutinied, taking the spaceship and returning there. The spacecraft reached Earth in Victorian times, two years before the beginning of this story. It materialized underground below Gabriel Chase. The probe killed the owner of the house and put his wife and daughter under mind control, along with the servants. It assumed the identity of Josiah Smith and began transforming itself into a Victorian gentleman, the highest form of life at the time, at least according to all the other life forms living in that part of England then. Unable to leave the house until his transformation was completed, Smith established himself in Victorian society through mailing letters and papers to scientific journals and the Royal Society. Eventually he formed the ambition of building his own empire by assassinating Queen Victoria, and had lured a prominent explorer (who was due to have an audience with the Queen) into the house, putting him under mind control in order to carry out the assassination. Down in the basement, the Control creature remained imprisoned but was desperate to come out and also transform into a Victorian lady, but the probe/Smith wouldn’t allow it, for fear she would awaken Light from his suspended animation (as eventually happened).
And that was where everything stood when the TARDIS arrived on the scene.
There now: that makes more or less as much sense as Dr Who’s free-wheeling approach to science fiction ever does. Wouldn’t Ghost Light have been a better story if they’d let us in on a little of it at the time?
Behind the Scenes
There are no great anecdotes from the making of Ghost Light to relate, but it does have one sad distinction. Shooting the serials for Dr Who wasn’t always in the same order they were broadcast. So it is that, although there are two stories still to go in this final season, Ghost Light was the last episode of Classic Dr Who ever produced. Cast and crew had no idea, when they were making it, that it was the end.
But it was.
Next Week:
“The Curse of Fenric,” 4 episodes.
