Nightmare Of Eden
(Season 17, Dr 4 with Romana II, 24/11/1979-15/12/1979, producer: Graham Williams, script editor: Douglas Adams, writer: Bob Baker, director: Alan Bromly with an uncredited Graham Williams for some scenes)
Rank: 144
'Hey man, wanna smoke some Mandrel? Or if that's not to your taste there's a whole gamut of the galaxy to try. Ever snorted an Abzorbaloff? That gives you the munchies that does. Smoking a Krynoid is kind of like smoking grass, except that it's made out of actual grass and instead of waking up with a hangover you don't wake up at all. And then there's the Mara which will open all the doors to your consciousness if you take it plus you also get a free snake tattoo, groovy! Haha fooled you, I was an undercover Judoon all the time. Now listen to my Who all-star charity record 'Just say nooooooooooooooo or we’ll have to release more charity records and then the Doctor and you will really be in distress!'
Ah, dear ‘Nightmare Of Eden’, the well-meaning anti-drug story that you’re so proud of Dr Who for trying but which looks as if everyone making it was on drugs. ‘Trainspotting’ as re-made by the cast of Sesame Street, that’s ‘Nightmare Of Eden’, as everyone tries to smuggle in one of Dr Who’s hardest-hitting scripts about not just addiction but the horrific effect it has on the universe around you behind the sort of pantomime acting you only get at Saturday teatimes. This story has a more substantial feel than most 4th Doctor scripts and, talking of substances, is the only Who story to date where the plot revolves around drug-smuggling, the sort of thing American scifi series do all the time nowadays but was rare in a 1970s and decidedly English series meant for children. It makes sense though: one of the great things about the Whoniverse is its realism and accuracy (give or take the odd clumsy bits of science), how representative it is of what might really be out there good bad and indifferent: after all everything else we have is out there in space too, it makes sense there would be drug pushers in the future too. Vraxoin is pitched as a sort of all-things drug, one that makes the user as giggly high as cannabis, hallucinate as much as LSD and as spaced-out and desperate as taking heroin, a gateway and end drug all in one. It’s an odd, curious, unsettling watch where thousands of passengers suffer after a shuttle crash when a pilot is somewhere over past the fifth dimension and commits mass genocide on the side in a desperate attempt to get his fix, while his drug dealer appears to be such a kind and environmentally concerned young man. Of all the ordinary things Dr Who turned extraordinary, addiction might just be the most, well, extraordinary choice of material. I don’t for the life of me understand why ‘Eden’ doesn’t get more kudos though, a hard a hitting tale of dependency and addiction and the ripple effect that causes to the universe around you. It’s a story that goes out of its way to show how taking drugs is so not cool. A few panicked memos from the producer and a point raised by Lalla Ward toned things down to make drugs sound less ‘appealing’ to children compared to the first planned draft (the name got changed from the children-friendly and more likely ‘Zip’ to the unpronounceable ‘Vraxoin’), but it’s still quite a hard hitting plot for its day that manages to convey the horrors of addiction whilst being kind and understanding to those who fall to their clutches. Unlike most adult shows trying to get down wi da kiddies that only makes children more likely to disobey they mean it too: poor Secker isn’t a cool rebel but pitiable, trying to lose himself in a fake artificial world where he stops carting about things, especially the people and species he’s put in harm’s way with the scenes of him laughing his head off or on his knees pleading for another fix some of the hardest hitting the series ever did. Not even ‘Grange Hill’ was doing this sort of thing on children’s telly back then. It would be the most grungy gritty real life Dr Who story going, had it not been set on such a brightly lit spaceship with so many actors hamming up their lines.
For that’s the downside
of this poorly treated story: no one is taking this most serious of Dr Who
stories seriously. I’ve long wondered, was it a deliberate choice perhaps
demanded from on high by a scared producer and worried script editor to make it
seem more child-friendly? (Unlikely given what else Graham Williams and Douglas
Adams got away with but still). Was it a rogue acting choice, where this
particular cast suddenly decided to have a particular amount of fun one day,
the way they did with the next story ‘The Horns Of Nimon’ too (another actually
pretty gritty script turned into a bright and gaudy pantomime)? Was it Tom
Baker seeing what he could get away with against an old fashioned director?
(Alan Bromley, who was considered out of touch when he did ‘The Time Warrior’ in the far more staid and
straight-laced 3rd Doctor era, who lost control and was effectively
sacked before the end, with Williams taking over from his notes?) Was it all
end of term it is from a production team that had been working too hard? Was it
hysterics that we were at the end of a season that had been financially
squeezed like no other and that the money had run out for all the costumes and
sets? Was it panic at the amount of things that went wrong while making this
story? (visual effects designer Colin Mapson, who worked on more episodes of
the series than anyone bar John Nathan-Turner, Dudley Simpson and the
Radiophonic Workshop, called it without doubt the most disastrous story I was
ever involved in’ and was so grateful when it was over he had t-shirts printed
for the last day that read ‘I’m So Relieved The Nightmare Is Over’).Was it the
first sight of a Mandrel on set, the unintentionally cutest Who monster since
The Sensorites? Was it simply that nobody involved in this story besides the
writer understood what he was doing? Whatever the cause its one of the greatest
mysteries of Who to me that a story that we should be at least nodding and
marking with respect for trying to be tough ends up being dismissed by most
fans as that silly one with the cute monsters and all the jokes. There are
quite a few Dr Who stories that ‘got away’ because they weren’t treated with
the proper care and authority they deserve but this is surely one of the worst
offenders, a story that should have been an ‘Eden’ that turned into a ‘nightmare’.
Certainly Bob Baker was
aiming for tough. We know him best today for his two cute canine-heavy
co-creations (K9 and Wallace and Gromit) but in his time Baker did a number of
hard-hitting series too, including co-writing an episode of cop show ‘Target’
in which Katy Manning of all people plays a heroin addict and trafficker (she
really was trying to shake off her Dr Who image in the late 1970s wasn’t she?)
that quite shocked the public (it’s ‘Big Elephant’ if you want to, ahem, track
it down) and a standalone and by-1970s-scandalous TV thriller ‘Murder At The
Wedding’, both with his usual co-writer Dave Martin. By 1979 the pair were so
revered that they had been invited to adapt the latter into a novel; Martin,
who’d always wanted to write a book was thrilled and wanted to write lots more
– after the fiasco that was ‘The Armageddon factor’ you can also sympathise
with a writer who felt his work was always being mistreated when it was adapted
on screen; Baker, who felt television was the better format with a wider
audience, wasn’t so keen: why talk to a few hundred people niche people when
you have a readymade family audience of millions?! Martin had also just had a
big family and had moved house further away from his friend, which put a strain
on their writing relationship (where they used to meet at each other’s houses,
one of them walking about saying ideas while the other sat at a typewriter;
hard to do in a house of screaming children). So after a decade of working
together (and a career including the two old friends agreed to go their
separate ways with a handshake, wishing each other good luck. Martin was happy
for Baker to keep up his Dr Who appearances though, which he juggled alongside
writing his other hard-hitting crime shows now that he had a reputation for
them before it dawned on him, why not make a Dr Who story about the same thing?
Douglas Adams’ presence as script editor is perhaps stronger here than on the
rest of the stories that aren’t his too, as ‘Nightmare of Eden’ does a
‘Hitch-Hikers’ job of making very serious points in an often silly way in a story
that seems right up his street (although the problems making it were also partly
what made him quit as script editor at the end of the year; Graham Williams
too).
Clearly it would have to
be different showing drugs on Dr Who as opposed to Target and the like. You
couldn’t actually show anyone using drugs on a series still overwhelmingly
considered as being for children. You couldn’t have any syringes or needles or
pills or mysteriously coated sugar-lumps or anything that a child might copy.
The great thing about Dr Who though is the scope the setting gives you to twist
any ‘real’ life thing into a space age (or historical equivalent). One of the
stories Baker had considered for another show involved the guilt and shame that
came from a drug user crashing a car into another one while high from drugs –
that was easy enough to turn into a spaceship. Remembering a rubbish package
holiday and the endless calls to his insurance policy to claim that gave Baker
the idea of a drug that was so new the insurance policies of the spaceships
wouldn’t know what to do about it. And while the story couldn’t show any actual
drugs being actually smuggled through customs (how do you even have borders and
customs in a universe where lots of species travel between planets?!) there was
all sorts of other ways of doing that in Dr Who, Baker coming up with the
deeply clever idea of a drug that (spoilers) came from the body of an alien
monster, one which had been smuggled in using a microscopic ‘jungle’ planet
under the pretence of the preservation of endangered animals around the
universe. The drug smuggler clearly couldn’t be like the hardened bad-asses
Baker had been writing for but then not all drug peddlers were – some were
charming, a few were sweet, a handful even had an air of respectability and
everyone who didn’t know what they did for a day job thought they were nice and
probably did kind things for charities. Tryst is one of the programme’s
greatest twists, a scientists who seems as if he’s doing the right things for
the right reasons and whose charm and intelligence fools even The Doctor for
three episodes until the horrid truth hits him: while everyone has been running
in fear from the mandrels the ‘real’ monster is the man who says he’s trying to
save them. Having a drug that comes from a monster is a terribly inventive idea
(and one that Baker certainly couldn’t use on his more realistic shows!): a lot
of Dr Who stories are about trying to teach us not to be scared of aliens that
don’t look like us especially in its early days (take your pick, today we’ve
gone with ‘The Savages’, tomorrow it could be ‘Galaxy 4’) but ‘Nightmare Of
Eden’ takes it further, with the monster that’s been growling at us for three
episodes treated in the most appalling way for a short human drug fix. You
start off being scared by it (or at least you should – they do rather botch
that on screen) and end up feeling sorry for it an apparent predator turned
into a apparent victim.
That’s kind of true for
the rest of the story too which makes Secker not as some evil mastermind
criminal but a pathetic man who just can’t cope with the mundanity of even Dr
Who’s extraordinary world. At the start of the story you think he’s the baddy;
only by the end of the story do you realise it’s the person making money off
his desperation and becomes increasingly desperate. What’s great about this
story, and indeed this era, is that there’s no lecture to go with it (if this
was the 13th Doctor she’d be making an impassioned speech to camera
by episode four): you’re left at home to make your mind up, even though it’s obvious
how dangerous and addictive drugs can be. For an industry pretty notorious for
its drug use, where In the 1970s more people were taking something than not if
enough biographies are true, its quite a brave bit of television. If any work
of fiction was going to make me drug free/tee-total it’s this one, a story
about the darker excesses of human nature, the ever steady call of temptation
and how it’s always at arm’s reach. That leads into another theme of this
story, mankind’s fall from grace in the Bible and the original Eden, when
humanity was kicked out because Eve got the munchies and fancied an apple,
inventing the idea of sin. ‘Eden’ seems at first to be a daft and funny name
for a jungle planet full of radiophonic howls and swamp-fog (it never looked
like this in any illustrated Bible I ever saw!), but at least its free, at
least it’s pure, at least the Mandrels inside it get to live free and full
Mandrel lives. Despite the cliffhanger of episode two (when The Doctor and
Romana jump into it despite being earned about certain death if they did) it’s
on the outside, in the spaceship, where the real monsters lie: the people who
act as if they want to save your soul or your pets but really just want to take
your money. Greed is portrayed as an addiction as powerful as any drug, as
Tryst wastes all that talent and all those resources and inventions to repeat
an endless cycle of exploitation. This isn’t conservation for the good of the
nation – it’s for his own bank account and preservation. The
snake of course is the lure, the obsession, the drug that takes you out of your
mind and turns you into someone else, where you lose all that purity in your
desperate struggle to forget your existence,
your problems, your responsibilities, your relationship with the people
around you who miss the real you. They don’t shy away from it either: Secker
used to be meticulous and orderly but now has become reckless and undisciplined,
rudderless, endangering himself and others in his drug-addled fog (they cut it
from the script but originally Secker was meant to question everything the
first episode, answering orders with lines like ‘what’s so good about time?’
and ‘what’s so good about work?’ that drove his employers mad). It’s another one of Dr Who’s regular themes that
advanced technology will only be useful if humans advance with it and use it
for good to help one another; few stories are quite as devastating about what
can happen if the wrong people abuse it as this story though, where innocent
mandrels die.
Tryst seemed such a hero at first too, with his CET machine, basically an electronic zoo where you can see exotic creatures up close in their natural yet artificial habitat (like the miniscope from ‘Carnival Of Monsters’) saving animals two by two, like that other Biblical hero Noah (all this story is missing to complete the set is the space plague, ‘The Flood’ via Mars, Terminus’ Lazurs, the Vespiform locusts and Samaritan Slitheen). But it’s all fakery to get people to trust him and Tryst is still a monster underneath. Although it’s not in the script Lewis Fiander plays the part with a heavily accented German accent; to most fans this is deeply daft and off-putting but it puts me in mind of the Nazi scientists who ended up being wooed and cooed over to the Allied side after WW2, rehabilitated by the press in the fight against the Russians in the Cold War despite being the enemy a few years earlier, a subtle comment on American and British greed (if ‘subtle’ is quite the right word to use about an accent that strong). After all, this is a story that asks big questions about whether ‘good’ inventions like the CET machine can be truly good if the people who make them are responsible for evil. There’s a sly comment on zoos too: not as strong as the one in ‘Carnival’ at least but nevertheless this story takes similar pot-shots at people who claim to love animals but only save the expendable ones, that are ‘useful’ or can make money in some way, The Doctor getting in a scathing line about how this style of conservation is the same as ‘conserving raspberries in jam’. That’s what separates us from animals, our ability to exploit and use our intelligence for bad. Only in a sense this time it’s more like a portable safari, animals that you can see from the safety of your own seat, unless you jup in it like The Doctor (where it’s all very real).
There’s another ‘snake’
here too: bureaucracy. That’s the natural villain of the 4th Doctor,
the biggest rebel of all the regenerations in so many ways, someone who breezes
in and turns worlds upside down in an afternoon despite the work of tyrants and
dictators across quadzillions of years. It’s got out of control: the rules that
were once made to keep us safe and help us have been misinterpreted, made too
strong so that they’ve cut back on our enjoyment and in turn caused more
suffering (‘I don’t make the laws’ says Fisk at one point when it’s pointed out
how wrong they are ‘I just enforce them’. This is a world where conformity is
automatic. Even when it’s stupid). That’s the real snake that took us from the
Garden of Eden where we were ‘free’ – it’s what told us where to go, what to
do, who should do it. Most of the first episode is trying to get an insurance
company to pay out, with as many terms and condition hoops and exceptions to
jump through in the future as there are now. We aren’t free to be ourselves
anymore, instead we have to ‘prove’ our motivation, our character, over and
over and over. It’s crueller than that though: bureaucracy keeps us in our
places and tells us who we can and cannot be. Just check out The Doctor’s line ‘they’re
worse than idiots they’re bureaucrats, they just exist to tangle people up’. The best gag in the story though comes from an
irate official pointing out how many people Secker’s sloppiness has just
killed. ‘They’re
only economy class, what’s all the fuss about?’ he replies an answer dripping
in venom, given that he’s clearly only lower class himself (either by birth or
by circumstance, working a rubbish job in order to make the money he needs for
his drug habit). The hint is that it’s rules like this, the fixed position that
Secker will be trapped in for the rest of life, that made him turn into drugs
in the first place. Tryst, of course, has no regard for rules either: at first
that makes him the hero, the scientist able to think outside the box and so
create his box of delights, his CET with all its wonders; but ‘Nightmare’ is a
clever multi-layered story that shows how freedom can be a two-edged sword.
It’s rules that keep us safe and stop us exploiting one another; even Tryst
isn’t above the law when his crimes are revealed.
There are lots of little
things to love about this story. The Mandrels themselves are clever, a sort of
cross between a bear and a dog that comes out as a sort of shaggy bigfoot with
big green ‘cat’s eyes’ taken from a car that glow in the dark, with a
radiophonic workshop growl that’s really effective and a name that combines a
‘mandril’ (an aggressive shouty monkey that even some conservationists are
terrified of) and a ‘mandreal’ (an implement used in metalwork): they’re both,
to some a scary monster they’ve been told to be afraid of and to others simply
a tool to be used. For once I love the fact that they’re a Dr Who monster that
never talks: usually that means hours of exposition and The Doctor trying to
work out a species’ background at boring length but here the spell would have
been broken if we’d heard them talk to each other in unbearably cute voices. The
Mandrel costumes are often mocked and its true that even at my speed I could
probably escape most of them at a quick walking pace on their home planet.
However we’re not on their home planet – we’re on a spaceship with limited
space to run and if you were to wake up with one leaning over you, roaring,
breaking through a wall as in the episode two cliffhanger you probably wouldn’t
find them funny either. Admittedly they’d look even better dripping with slime
(the way they were meant to in the script). And if they didn’t have a zip
visible down their back with the padding foam coming out (in the electrocution
scene). But they look good when seen in long shot when the camera doesn’t
linger on them and those radiophonic growls are super effective. Talking of the
electrocution scene, they mess up the effect rather on TV but if you’re in the
right mood the scene where The Doctor kills one by accident, running for his
life as a mandrel touches a wire and ends up electrocuted, is one of the era’s
most powerful scenes: The Doctor is mortified at being an inadvertent cause of
its death but then the penny drops as he
sees the mandrel turned to powder form. The fact he’s then easily ‘busted’ for
being covered in vraxoin (and is already a suspicious stranger who turned up out
the blue just as things were getting out of hand, wearing clothes that scream
eccentric and exactly the sort of person pulled over by customs officials for ‘standing
out’) is one of Baker’s cleverest bits of writing.
In fact both Bakers are
on great form: as much as he might have caused the director to have a nervous
breakdown adding them (including a cut gag of Romana chomping on an apple in
Eden and The Doctor commenting ‘better not – remember what happened last
time!’) Tom improvises some of his greatest jokes. The stick everyone usually
beats this story with is the one at the end when he’s caught by the mandrels
(painful!) and emerges in a tatty costume complaining ‘ooh my legs, ooh my
arms, ooh my everything!’ sometimes cited as Dr Who’s worst scene which isn’t
horrifically bad so much as not quite as funny as it thinks it is. There are
worse scenes in the opening credits of the ‘TV Movie’ or shots at random from
the lower half of the Jodie Whittaker stories that would make anyone’s hair
curl. Or curl more in Tom Baker’s case). That gag’s reputation rather
overshadows the really great ones he slips into this story – the jelly baby
offering, the running rings around the ship’s officers, the way The Doctor
should be having the worst day of anyone on this ship given the things that
happens to him but still reacts as if he’s enjoying relaxing holiday (‘I don’t work for anyone’
The Doctor says at one point when being questioned ‘I’m just having fun’). I
admit I’m a sucker for this particular period of Dr Who comedy and enjoy more
than most fans do and more than I should (‘Here am I K9, trying a little
lateral thinking, and what do you do? You trample all over it with logic’). Not
every writer gets this free-wheeling deeply anarchic yet highly moral Doctor
right but Baker gets him bang-on in this story (The Doctor also gets one of his
best descriptions when Rigg calls him an ‘Inter-galactic Mr Fixit’) using
comedy to mask the darkness of the villain’s plan and their need to be taken
seriously. It’s the way this Doctor changes in a heartbeat too, choosing when
to get angry and serious. Just look at the way The Doctor, who’s spent most of
the story laughing with Tryst and swapping banter with a fellow ‘;genius’, can
only growl ‘go away’ to the man whose let himself, his species and The Doctor
down. This is an a rare occurrence in
the Graham Williams era (when Mary Whitehouse shenanigans turned him into more
of a comedy figure than a dark one, the way he was when Phillip Hinchcliffe was
in charge) and Tom Baker’s dark snarl is the highlight of a story that
otherwise doesn’t take itself very seriously at all.
That said, no other
character fares as well. Poor Romana gets precious little to do and her only memorable moment is one they cut
back heavily in episode three so as not to scare little children (when Secker,
mad from going ‘cold mandrel’ and turns
threatening in his desperation). If you’re keeping score of the great Dr Who
romance this is a story where she and Tom are distantly cold; there are none of
the tantrums of their later stories but mostly they kept apart and said as
little to each other as possible (Lalla spent most of her time in her dressing
room drawing illustrations for her rather good ‘Astrology For Pets’ book and
was often so carried away she missed the director’s frantic pleas to come to
set) Shockingly Bob seems to forget how
to write for his own creation, K9, whose come a long way from his early days
when he was right in the middle between dog and robot, ending up either one
(he’s used as a blaster weapon for much of this story) or the other (the
unforgivably stupid scene when he starts ‘sniffing’ round Stott when The Doctor
says the guard is a ‘friend’. There are, also, rather too many scenes where the
Doctor, Romana and K9 are all engaged in scientific gobbledegook which is meant
to make them look terribly clever, but just makes the viewer feel left out
(it’s hard to deliver on a plot that’s all about the mistakes made by humanity
when none of the regulars are human, a problem in quite a few Romana stories
but particularly here). Where this story really falls flat though is the
humans: this is one of those spaceships where everyone is bored in their work,
which is totally in keeping with particularly Douglas’ acerbic view of the
future being as humdrum as now but in fancier vehicles, but makes for bland
viewing. Tryst feels oddly one-dimensional for such a potentially strong
character even if you read his lines rather than watch/hear him (admittedly
it’s hard not to read his lines out in that accent once you’ve heard them).
Dalla, bigged up in the press before this story, has no discernible character
or impact on this story at all (because she was blonde and beautiful; for some
odd reason the usual photographers weren’t available on the days when the
Mandrels were on set, which the production team used to their advantage, making
up a story about how they were considered ‘too scary’ to show – a cheque they
really couldn’t cash). Even Secker, the one character with a rich and juicy
backstory, never feels like someone you care about and can invest emotion or
time in because there isn’t a character there beyond ‘druggie’. We don’t find
out how he became a user, whether he used to be a respected person with a fine job
who fell from grace or grew up in the slums of Betelgeuse or Zigorous 3 or whatever.
We don’t know either that much about how Baker and Martin divided up their
scripts but I’m willing to bet that Baker’s strengths was in delivering plot
and metaphor (which is excellent this story) and the odd one-line zinger, but
that it was Martin who filled in the gaps of characterisation and fleshed ideas
out into ‘real’ people. The ‘whodunnit’ angle never really takes off either –
unlike so many other DW instances, from ‘The Robots Of Death’ down, there’s no
sense of drama, of wondering who will be next or trying to work things out
before the Doctor, even if the Mandrel link ends up being rather a clever
twist. The plot too, despite its brilliant points, spends an awful lot of time
delaying big revelations and saving them for the cliffhangers so ends up being
another one of those Dr Who stories where people spend half their time running
around for no reason (at least its new I suppose: usually drug films, even
anti-drugs films – as indeed most seemingly pro-drug films are at their core,
are full of static people shooting up in grubby alleyways and dirty toilets: ‘Nightmare
Of Eden’ must be the only example where the lights are on full blast and everyone
is running around a glisteningly clean set at top speed).
And that’s before the
production team got involved and gave this story such rubbish sets to run
around in. After all Bob Baker’s been around the block enough ow, weith this
his last of nine stories for the series: he really should have known that two
spaceships and a jungle planet, a workable machine prop and an ‘army’ (end
result: five) of monsters was pushing it in most years, never mind the one
where inflation meant the budget fell like never before. It feels like everyone
realised it would look terrible no matter what they did so everyone just sort
of gave up. Few Dr Who productions feel as amateurish or as rushed (or
under-rehearsed) as this one: actors come in at the wrong time, dry, clash with
each other’s lines or have what they say drowned out by Dudley Simpson’s music
arriving at exactly the wrong time. Bromley was a great TV director: some of
the best, most cerebral ‘Out Of The Unknown’ stories were directed by him. Unfortunately
he’s totally the wrong old-school director for this new type of story juggling
japes and jokes with cuts to the jugular; by his own admission he didn’t
understand it at all and treated it like a colourful romp. I’m not sure why
they invited him back or why he said yes: he’d already complained he couldn’t
make sense of ‘The Time Warrior’, his only other Who, and considered it rubbish
despite it being a pretty much foolproof trademark Bob Holmes Dr Who story;
there’s no way he was going to have the subtle touch a story like ‘Nightmare Of
Eden’ needed, a story full of hints and symbolism rather than full-on plot.
Because the director doesn’t care for this story much everyone begins to think
the same and whenever anyone asked for direction it never came so the cast
began to mess around, Baker worst of all, much to the director’s anger. When
matters came to a head as early as day two, Baker snapping to the gallery ‘is
there a director up there? Or just a commentator?’ Williams stepped in. Even
though he too was once so irate he wrote a whole story about his star getting
his own way, Williams sided with Tom Baker: he understood how the show worked
when the director didn’t. The cast and crew back from lunch after one heated
row too many to find the director had been sent home and Williams himself was
directing the rest from the notes that had been made. Williams wasn’t thrilled
by this script either but you can still tell the moment he takes over around
halfway through episode one (though like most 1970s stories this one was shot
in order of set, so the production schedule wasn’t linear); the actors start
lifting their performances, adding subtleties, playing it less for laughs.
Before then though you have some of the worst and most excessive performances
ever seen in the series. Everyone treats this story with a nod and a wink and
an eye roll, often with both eyes, making sure we get the joke. These
characters can’t even walk into a room normally and don’t speak their lines so
much as declaim the, as if trying to wake up the back rows of a theatre. You
know you’ve got problems when the subtlest and most nuanced actor in the room
is Tom Baker, the star whose famous for being larger than life – a lot of this
era feels like other cast members truing to go out of their way to ‘top’ him
but few are quite so blatant about it (the nearest candidate is the next story
‘The Horns Of Nimon’, where a similarly
promising story also ends up a load of bull). Or maybe they’re just trying to
distract from the sets and the overall design: boy have there been a lot of
bland spaceship sets in Dr Who over the years but this one takes the (probably plain
or vanilla) biscuit: it doesn’t look like people live and work here it just
looks like a set. The original plan was to film the jungle Eden bits on film
before budgets got slashed so they did that in the studio too and it looks even
worse, a huge retrograde step after the brilliant jungle planets of old. Even
the post-production is amongst the worst of its vintage: an asbestos scare on
day one meant an evacuation of TV centre (a true sign of things to come with ‘The Greatest Show In The Galaxy’ nine
years later) and everything got rushed,
including the notorious Dalla death scene where she’s clearly blasted in the
neck – and then dies, clutching her stomach (maybe all humans have developed a
weird nervous system by this point in the future where every attack is felt in
the stomach first? That might also explain the aversion to any colour that isn’t
white, yellow or light grey, to save people being sick everywhere).
Goodness knows you learn
to see through performances and rubber costumes and the occasional wobbly set
(not as many as critics say: I’ve counted maybe three?) as a Whovian; I’ve
always said if you’re looking for a series that looks amazing you’re watching
the wrong show; this is instead a script that sounds amazing, thanks to script
and sound effects (sometimes incidental music too). ‘Nightmare Of Eden’ pushes
that to an extreme though: rarely has such a good script been treated in such a
horrible way. There are lots of times when ‘Eden’ is truly un-watchable, a
nightmare indeed; it’s only when you dig through to the core story that’s there
underneath it all that you realise that it is Eden after all. Nevertheless it’s
still closer to paradise than Hell and I have to say I’ve never understood the
hate for a story that means well, even if it doesn’t always appear on-screen well.
It’s a whole load of contradictions no other series could pull off and a
testament to its writer, in the way that it manages to be a cute story that
doesn’t shy away from the horrors odd drug-taking, a story about the darker
side of human nature that still fits in some terrible jokes and one that makes
you both glad and sad to be alive, often in the same scene simultaneously. Did
it save kids from drugs? Probably not, but its low-key preaching and realism
(understanding why people take drugs but showing the unglamorous realities of a
life of addiction) is way more effective than any amount of jazzed up school
programmes and certainly its hearts are in the right place. If the production
team ended up tipping it down the silly side that doesn’t take away from how
hard-hitting an powerful a lot of the ideas in this story truly are, taking risks
that nothing else out there in 1979 would even consider let alone dive into
head-first. In other words, despite its relatively high ranking, I can see why
so many more casual fans skip this one altogether and more committed fans warn
others to steer away from it. But I’m addicted to Dr Who and need my fix, happy
to watch all of it good bad or indifferent and while this isn’t the strongest
hit out there it’s still a purer, better dose at its core than fans give it
credit for, even when diluted with sawdust and iron filings and whatever they’re
using to pad out drugs nowadays.
POSITIVES + The story
starts with a clash of spaceships, The Empress and The Hecate, with Dr Who
taking even something as ordinary as a car crash and taking it to its logical
extremes. It’s a really great model effect as the two ships are wedged in tight
on screen, as helpless and unable to move as two cars that have collided at the
corner of a car park.
Previous ‘The Creature From The Pit’ next ‘The Horns Of Nimon’
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