Program Note: My faithful reader(s) have probably noticed I’ve been dragging my heels a bit with these posts lately: a week and a half to two weeks between posts, instead of weekly. The truth is, we’re coming up on the end of the Classic series, and I’ve been reluctant to get there: I’ve enjoyed this “from the beginning” run since I started it almost four years ago on Facebook, and I’m not eager to see it end (I’m not planning on doing the new series). Still, time waits for no one— except perhaps the Doctor— so let’s continue.
“You know what’s going on, don’t you? You always know, you just can’t be bothered to tell anyone! It’s like it’s some kind of a game, and only you know the rules.” —Ace, to the Doctor
Story
It’s near the end of World War II and already some people are looking ahead to the Cold War that will follow it. At a military base near Whitby in England, pioneer computer scientist Professor Judson works on the Ultima machine to break the German ciphers. A Soviet commando unit has landed to steal the Ultima machine for Moscow— but the British military is well aware of the planned raid and intends to allow it to succeed, letting the commandos return to Moscow with an Ultima machine that’s been booby trapped to destroy the Kremlin with a chemical weapon.
But more is going on than these Cold War machinations. Judson and the base commander, Millington, seem more interested in using Ultima to translate ancient Viking runes in the area, which tell the story of a Viking expedition pursued by some terrible evil as they tried to return home after a journey through the Mediterranean into the Far East. Many of the local families are descended from the shipwrecked Vikings, and the local legend of the Curse of Fenric persists to this day. A local bay is posted with a warning against swimming due to “dangerous undercurrents” but rip tides might not be the real reason people who swim there sometimes just disappear. An apparently natural source of an unknown deadly poison bubbles up from underground in the crypt below the local church.
The Doctor and Ace arrive ostensibly because the Doctor wants to meet the historically significant Professor Judson— but as always with the Seventh Doctor, he has a deeper agenda. The strange events around this military base are the work of an ancient evil the Doctor met and defeated once before, and it’s time for a rematch.
Review
The Curse of Fenric is what happens when Andrew Cartmel’s vision for Dr Who finally works. It’s dark, spooky and suspenseful, and cares more about that than about explaining itself. Examine it too closely, and big chunks of it make no more sense than last week’s Ghost Light. But this time it doesn’t matter: it works. This is a terrific story.
Professor Judson and his Ultima machine are obvious fictionalized equivalents of Alan Turing and the Enigma machine. Since Dr Who at this time could not touch the issue of homosexuality, writer Ian Briggs symbolized Turing’s personal struggle by putting Judson in a wheelchair: where Turing was restricted by a society that wouldn’t let him express his sexuality, Judson is physically restricted (equating homosexuality to a disability is rather suspect if you’re trying to make a point about tolerance, but as far as what it meant for Turing in his own day, it probably fits). Briggs came up with elaborate backstories not just for Judson and Commander Millington but also for the story of the doomed Viking expedition and for the Doctor’s first encounter with Fenric many centuries earlier— stories he had no intention of providing on screen but just devised in order to give depth to the world of the story. He provided some of this background in the Target novelization of the story, and knowing it adds a layer to what we see on screen: but we don’t need it. We sense that it’s there, and that helps us feel we’re watching events with an existence beyond the screen.
Once again this era of Dr Who introduces the supernatural into the Whoniverse. There’s a hint of a science fiction gloss to some of the occult aspects: The monsters of the story are vampires that have been sleeping in the bay, grabbing people to make new vampires over the centuries, but the original “parent” vampire isn’t a supernatural undead but instead was brought back in time by Fenric from a distant future in which human beings have evolved into such creatures. The vampires are repelled by faith, which creates a “psychic barrier” they can’t endure, not by the supernatural power of crucifixes or other religious objects in themselves (one of the Soviet soldiers repels them with his faith in the Revolution). On the other hand, Fenric itself is an unabashedly supernatural, ancient evil (“Evil from the dawn of time,” the Doctor says) and most of what it does (and what the Doctor does about it) is straightforwardly magical.
The story isn’t perfect. Its main weakness is that sometimes the script is so fascinated with symbolism and subtext that it forgets there has to be a surface meaning as well: the low point is a scene in which Ace volunteers to distract a guard using feminine wiles, but then does so with dark, portentous dialog that wouldn’t seduce anyone. Ian Briggs points out in discussing the story how he wrote dialog for her that could be interpreted as being either about sex or about time travel, but what he left out was having it be in any way flirtatious. There’s a few other times when this happens, pulling you out of the story, but for the most part it works better than that.
The Curse of Fenric is ultimately about faith, and most of the main characters live or die by whether they have it— whatever they might have it in. The local vicar has lost his faith after the British started dropping bombs on German civilians in retaliation for the Blitz, convincing him there is no good left in the world worth saving (a seemingly minor scene when the vicar tries to read from the Bible Paul’s famous paragraph about faith, hope and love, but can’t finish because he no longer has faith or hope and so can’t believe in love either, was described by Briggs as the heart of the entire story). As previously noted, the leader of the Soviet commanders wards off the vampire with his faith in the revolution— and because he knows enough mythology from Soviet Romania to start carving wooden stakes when they appear.
The most important issue of faith in the story is that between the Doctor and Ace. The Doctor first introduces the element that the vampires are warded off by faith by driving away a group that are attacking the church. You have to look and listen carefully (and it helps if you’re a lip reader) but the way he does it is that he recites the names of all his companions over the history of the series. In return, Ace’s faith in the Doctor becomes the center of the climax to the story, in a short but heart-rending scene that is the best in the story.
This is a terrific scene which boils down to this: the Doctor has to destroy Ace’s faith in him. At this point, she’s holding the Ancient One (vampire) back thanks to her absolute faith that the Doctor will win, but he’s secretly got the Ancient One on his side. He can’t say so without giving the game away to Fenric, so he has to stop Ace from believing in him so that the Ancient One can pass.
The new series visited the same idea in the Matt Smith episode The God Complex, when the Eleventh Doctor had to break Amy’s faith in him to save her from a faith-eating monster, but the new series’ take on it was far less effective. Amy knew the situation, so when the Doctor started telling her he had no plan and couldn’t save her, she’d know what he was doing— and therefore it shouldn’t have worked. In any case, it causes her no particular upset.
In The Curse of Fenric Ace has no idea, and the Doctor can’t tell her or warn her. Despite her tough action-girl exterior, Ace has been very much a little lost girl desperately looking for a parent, and she latched onto the Doctor from the moment they met. And this is the Seventh Doctor, the Dark Doctor whose Machiavellian schemes are as ruthless as they need to be. He hates it, but he knows what he has to do and he does it: he slices Ace’s teenage heart to ribbons. I won’t spoil the scene by giving the details: go watch it. Once it’s over, the Doctor and Ace manage to patch things up again, but it’s not hard to imagine that had the series continued, it would have permanently affected their relationship.
Behind the Scenes
Editing seems to have been a constant issue for Dr Who in this era. This time around, in rehearsals it appeared that each of Fenric’s four episodes was running too short; but once they’d been shot, all four actually ran long and had to be trimmed. Unlike The Happiness Patrol, the editing was done correctly: nothing vital got cut, they just had to trim down establishing shots, characters going in and out of places, and so on. But the director was unhappy with the results and the DVD release for Curse of Fenric includes a “special edition” recut of the story, editing into a single feature-length special and with 12 minutes of previously deleted footage. Watching it, you’ll only notice a few things that were absent from the broadcast version, but the whole thing comes across much more smooth, with better pacing.
A lot of the DVDs for Classic stories have comparable special editions, with different cuts or enhanced special effects, but this is the only one I really recommend. While I’ve stuck to broadcast versions for this from-the-beginning series, most fans consider the Fenric special edition to be the “definitive” version of the story, and if you’re following along then by all means watch that instead of the broadcast version.
Next Week:
“Survival,” 3 episodes, the finale of season 26— and of Classic Doctor Who.
