The Visitation: Ranking - 219

   The Visitation

(Season 19, Dr 5 with Adric, Nyssa and Tegan, 15-23/2/1982, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Anthony Root, writer; Eric Saward, director: Peter Moffat) 

'Ring-A-Ring-O-Roses

Reptilian aliens with no noses

Atishoo! Atishoo!

Till London burns down'

Ranking: 219

Amazingly it took nineteen years for DW to explain away the black death and the great fire of London, two events in history that seem ripe for a scifi twist. Here we get two for the price of one as the terrileptils (giant space turtles) like the look of the planet but want to get rid of humanity so they can have it for themselves. Which seems reasonable to me. So they release a deadly plague which could be stopped by a ‘Doctor’ only people don’t listen to him because they’re too busy trying to pretend life is normal under a pandemic. Which doesn’t seem reasonable to me but is I fear, after certain recent events, realistic. Personally I can’t wait for the inevitable sequel to this one in a few decades time, when the Perriteptils (close cousins who are giant space pangolins, who grew up near ‘The Leisure Hive’) unleash covid on planet Earth to kill of humanity and add to global warming, which can only be solved by ventilation and wearing masks. In fact, I’m going to pitch that to Big Finish right now before somebody else does...Meanwhile, back in the 17^th century, it’s a rare and welcome return to the historical for the first time in eight years (give or take a brief trip to ask Da Vinci to paint some extra Mona Lisas) and one of surprisingly only a quark-size handful of DW stories set in this historically busy century. Like oh so many DW historicals it’s a visual feast, with exotic location filming and some clever studio sets (with real working downstairs and a ‘painted’ upstairs, matched so well you can’t see the join even on DVD) that make it feel as if London is still surrounded by forests and people are living in wooden slums that are just waiting to be attacked by fire. Turn the sound down and it’s easy to believe you’ve just taken a real trip through time. Turn the sound back up, however, and it’s all a little less edifying. Nobody talks proper in this story and I don’t just mean they speak like seventeenth century cockney peasants – I mean nobody behaves like a real Human being. Except obviously the Doctor (who behaves erratically) and the Terrileptils (who, funnily enough, are the most believably ‘Human’ characters of the lot). The regulars are all annoying this story at different times (we’re used to Adric being annoying – that’s his thing – and Tegan too when the writers don’t know how to write for her properly, but Nyssa is incredibly whingy and the fifth Doctor is written all weird, veering from being wet and passive, suffering from Jodie Whittaker syndrome where the bad guys explain stuff to her while she stands there listening and having a crisis, and being oddly bloodthirsty in the finale). You can tell that writer/script editor Eric Saward is a lot more interested in unemployed actor Richard Mace, one of the few ‘fictional’ people in DW created for a different show and so with more back story than most, but between actor Michael Robbins' gurning and not knowing what to  do with him in terms of plot the actor seems to spend most of the episode just getting in the way and making snarky remarks (to be fair to Robbins, it’s not the sort of part anyone could play subtly). The Terrileptils themselves rather sum up this story: they look amazing and were so pioneering for the day (DW’s first real use of animatronics and though the speech doesn’t always match the mouth moving, if you watch these stories in production order the leap still feels like witchcraft). You have to hope somebody gives revives them and gives them a better plot one day. In theory they’re still one of the most plausible, intelligent races seen on DW: reptilian (if alien life is going to be anything, well odds are it’s probably aquatic to be honest but reptilian a close second)  with a love of art and culture rather than the usual Humanoids who want to take everything over, snobbish rather than slobbish. Alas, though, some of the dialogue they get is awful and quickly descends into the usual ‘I’m going to shoot you because I can fare’ and even the Doctor’s in on it, ending the story by shooting them and accidentally setting Pudding lane on fire. Whoops! (Nyssa too, surely one of the companions least likely to shoot at anything – what happened to you?!) Still, as Eric Saward stories go it’s a lot more likeable than ‘Resurrection’, a lot more fun than ‘Earthshock’ and less quirky than ‘Revelation’. ‘The Visitation’ comes so close to greatness, in other words, but a few clunky scenes and particularly the bloodthirsty ending end up knocking it down to average. A plague on it!

+ Your average DW historical doesn’t really care much about the ‘little people’. Generally speaking we’re visiting Kings, Queens, famous writers or scientists, basically anyone whose in the running for appearing on a banknote. But ‘The Visitation’ gives us real people, working class peasants whose lives are turned upside down by two disasters that they don’t understand and tops it off with an unemployed actor as the ‘main’ supporting character. As a result this story feels a lot more true to life to ‘real’ time travel than most of the other historicals, give or take ‘The Massacre’ or ‘The Aztecs’, even with the appearance of alien reptiles.    

- They destroyed the sonic screwdriver! How dare they! We were robbed of the chance to see what the 6^th, 7^th and 8^th Doctors’ sonics would have looked like (I reckon the 6th Dr’s would have been stripy and flashy, the 7^th a question mark to match his umbrella and the 9^th gothic and romantic) The story goes that the production team considered it a ‘get out of jail free’ card that led to lazy scriptwriting, but that’s nonsense – when used right it speeds up those interminable ‘being captured and spending an episode in a cell before escaping through a ventilation shaft’ larks we used to get all the time. As the Doctor says, it feels like the death of an old friend when it’s destroyed (and, given what we know now about the Tardis growing them, why is he so touched and why doesn’t he just get another?)