26x2. Ghost Light
Writer: Marc Platt
Director: Alan Wareing
Script Editor: Andrew Cartmel
Producer: John Nathan-Turner
Synopsis: The Doctor brings Ace to Gabriel Chase, a then-abandoned house that she burned
down in her youth, in late 19th century Perivale, where the denizens of
an alien ship - Light, a surveyor who has long been asleep,
Josiah Smith, who is plotting against the throne and has attracted
controversy over his embrace of the theory of evolution, and Control,
who escapes and seeks to become a "ladylike" - are engaged in a bizarre
power struggle.
Review: Let's
get one thing out of the way: "Ghost Light" is a deeply weird piece of
work. If I had to pick two scenes that sum up the entire
serial, it would probably be Gwendoline's piano performance of "That's
The Way To The Zoo," which is appropriate for both the script's theme
of evolution and the general level of chaos at Gabriel Chase, and
the Doctor's exclamation, in response to the latest episode of bizarre
behavior, of, "Even I can't play this many games at once!" It's the
sort of effort that earns a certain respect just for having the courage
of its strange convictions even if it hadn't entirely succeeded.
Fortunately,
"Ghost Light'" is mostly a success. The Seventh Doctor again strikes a
somewhat
enigmatic pose, and our sympathies probably lie more with Ace when she
discovers that he's brought her back to a place where she had a
disturbing experience when she was young. But he's also trying to
enable her to face her fears, and he does his best to prevent the
denizens of Gabriel Chase from being victimized further by Josiah and
helps Control to escape her imprisonment. In an echo of "The Greatest
Show in the Galaxy," there's an illuminating contrast between the
Doctor as an explorer with a keen scientific mind and a moral compass
and both Light and Josiah. Light is an explorer as well, but he cares
only for the accuracy of his "survey" and is prepared to destroy Earth
rather than allow the process of evolution to render it out of
date (also proving himself to be a terrible scientist with his
willingness to fudge the data). Josiah possesses more imagination
but uses his power in
self-serving ways, plotting to take over the British Empire, keeping
several people in states of hypnosis or mind control for his own ends,
and arranging a
"trip to Java" for Reverend Matthews by turning him into an ape when he
continues to argue against the validity of evolutionary science. The
theme of evolution and change is also reflected in the characters of
Nimrod, who, ironically, was chosen as a representative of a species
that stopped evolving (Neanderthals) but who eventually realizes that
Light is not worthy of his people's worship as "the Burning One," and
Control, whose original nature was that of a largely unchanging being
but becomes a "ladylike" (as she puts it) after escaping.
It
would be fair to say that "Ghost Light" might have benefited from being
four episodes long instead of three. At least one critical turning
point, in which the Doctor apparently makes contact with Control and
agrees to help her, is left off-screen, and while I thought I had
understood the nature of the relationship between Josiah and Control,
the DVD extra with writer Marc Platt reveals that I was wrong. Based on
the Doctor's comment that "Josiah is
the survey" (emphasis mine), my interpretation had been that the two
were personified representations of the very concepts of the survey and
control in a general sense, with Control's imprisonment reflecting the
fact that the survey had gotten out of control. Instead, according to Platt, Josiah was
apparently meant to be a survey agent who metamorphoses into the
dominant species of every planet they visit, with Control playing the
role of an unchanging experimental control. But this is far from clear,
and I know I'm not alone among Who fans
in finding the serial's plot to be somewhat obscure. I also have to
question just what kind of survey Light has been running, and where,
such that he's so thoroughly flummoxed by the concepts of evolution and
adaptation. We've seen plenty of other planets on Doctor Who,
after all, and even when the series plays fast and loose with science,
it has never implied that a biological process like evolution is
somehow unique to Earth.
As has been the case for a number of serials in this era of Doctor Who,
"Ghost Light" suffers somewhat from an underdeveloped premise - we're
never told where exactly Josiah gets his powers or how characters like
Mrs. Pritchard, Gwendoline, or Redvers Fenn-Cooper became trapped at
Gabriel Chase - and at times it teeters on the verge of simply becoming
an incoherent mess. But what it does well, it does very well: there's a
uniquely sinister atmosphere that nicely ties into Ace having perceived
the house as "haunted" when she encountered it in 1983, there's some
solid character work for Ace (we also learn that she set the fire out
of frustration over a friend's house being destroyed by racist
whites), and the Doctor is again suitably mysterious without
quite crossing the line into being off-putting or unpleasant. Whatever
one might say about the Sylvester McCoy era, it's certainly not marked
by playing it safe, and I for one am enjoying the ride even when it
hits bumps in the road.
Rating: *** (out of four)
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