State Of Decay
(Season 18, Dr 4 with Romana II and Adric, 22/11/1980-13/12/1980, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Christopher H Bidmead, writer: Terrance Dicks, director: Peter Moffat)
Rank: 143
'Hello, I'm one of the old ones and I've just dropped into your bloodbank to take some out. No not in, out. I told you I want to make a withdrawal. What do you mean? It's a bank isn't it?!'
Now we reach the
‘twilight’ years of the Tom Baker era, both literally and figuratively with Dr
Who’s first real ‘vampire’ story turning up surprisingly late (unless you count the fleeting scene with a
vampire in a house of horrors in ‘The Chase’).
I came to ‘State Of Decay’ near-last out of the ‘old’ 20th century Dr Whos and,
well, let’s just say it wasn’t quite what I expected from decades of reading
guidebooks. What always sounds on paper a straightforward story about vampires
from, in Terrance Dicks, one of Dr Who’s most refreshingly straightforward
writers and a story made in the early John Nathan-Turner era when Dr Who was as
straightforward as it ever gets and mostly about alien cactuses and Marshmen is
actually ...weird. It’s hard to put your finger on why, as all the hammer
horror clichés from the Phillip Hinchcliffe era are all there (albeit in a very
Dr Who scifi rather than true blood-curdling way) and for the most part this
story is rooted in the old Who tradition of overthrowing corrupt regimes. Yet really
this is a story about defying your expectations at every turn and nothing in
this story is quite what it seems at all. The story starts off like a
historical, only it’s a trip to another planet that’s in something akin to the
Middle Ages – before (spoilers) the revelation that the old castle on the hill
is actually a giant space rocket. You’re led right down the garden path that
this story is another ‘Face Of Evil’ or a ‘Full Circle’ (the story that was on just
the week before) where the Three Who Rule are the descendents of those who
landed, only for it to turn out that they are the same visitors and they’ve
never grown any older. The rulers aren’t your common or garden Earth vampires
but e-space vampires, beings as old as time who have a rivalry with timelords,
with hints that they’re from the same ‘source’ (or at any rate that they’ve
both discovered means of prolonging life from similar sources). Though still
the Dr Who story with the largest volume of blood this story is actually pretty
tame, an intellectual horror rather than a violent one. Every time you think
you’ve got this story sussed it turns out to be about something else: at first
it’s all about the power, then it’s all about the blood, then it’s all about
survival. . In other words its a story where all the expected tropes are there,
but twisted – far more so, than, say, the pretty traditional twists on
Frankenstein in ‘Brain Of Morbius’ or
the mummy’s curse in ‘Pyramids Of Mars’.
This story must be even
weirder when seen through modern eyes I should think. Thirty years before
‘Twilight’ finally got round to doing a story about vampires, this lot look
nothing like Robert Pattinson, young and sexy. No, this lot are immortals, ‘old
ones’ who are well old, very out of place now we’ve had three decades of being
sold vampires as being young, vibrant and sexy. Which is pretty odd when you
think about it. I mean, vampires can be any age but vibrant? Sexy? They’re the
living dead, people! They’re meant to be pale barely-walking corpses. See
modern Who’s take ‘Vampires In Venice’,
where they’re all young sexy fish people, for a particularly flesh-filled
example – if you must. Where did our expectations change so drastically? Then
again this lot aren’t like any other vampires was Terrance Dicks has great fun
subverting all the other things people think of in a vampire story. Despite
Bram Stoker basing ‘Dracula’ loosely on Vlad the Impaler by and large vampires
are portrayed as outcasts living on the fringes of society. Here they are the
society, the masters and rulers of an empire they live off. Quite literally, in
a ‘Krotons’ type way, as every so often
villagers are sent up to the castle to either be transformed into guards or
turned into lunch. Usually vampires live out the way of society in some gloomy
remote place no one else can get to but here the their castle dominates the
landscape and literally overshadows their entire world. Even the title isn’t
quite what it seems: you’re meant to assume the ‘state of decay’ is about
vampires in a state of decomposition, as vampires usually are, but this lot are
thriving and at the peak of health (if a bit pale).Weirdest of all, despite the
Medieval vibes, this lot are technologically amongst the most advanced race
we’ve ever seen in the series, with the revelation that this lot are the
timelords’ oldest rivals who escaped to e-space. Instead it’s the planet that’s
in a state of decay, as their rules keep the population backward, keeping them
starved and uneducated (like ‘The Krotons’ again, the first story Dicks worked
on as script editor after all). The peasants have the sweet detail of the ‘see
no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’ sign when they see their Masters,
demonstrating that they life in ignorance and have no curiosity (the one thing
The Doctor lives for). This is no way for a planet to evolve and grow, as their
rulers act as ‘vampires’ in both a literal sense (draining the odd villager of
blood) but also a metaphorical one, living off their work while they live in an
ivory (well, metallic) tower above it all.
You don’t tend to read
about it in guide books, perhaps because Terrance isn’t usually a political
writer (he’s a conservative with a small ‘c’ who was even – shock horror –
quite nice to Margaret Thatcher in the Dr Who Musical (!) ‘The Ultimate
Adventure’ once), but it’s clearly about the Royal Family (they even wear
crowns). This un-named planet is clearly meant to be Earth’s equivalent (K9
even says it has 350 days a year and 23.3. hours, which is close enough), just
in e-space with blood-suckers who are a bit more open about what they are. The
vampires’ bloodsuckingness is really just a clever metaphor for that old Dr Who
favourite class and society, where the people in charge are stinking rich and
the people who work under them just stinking, taken to extremes. The villagers
leave in fear of them in an equal feudal system where they toil the land, but
most of what they have ends up as taxes and every time one get too big for
their boots they get eaten. Education has been banned, under pain of death, so
they’re kept stupid and easier to control. In short, this lot are more Machiavellian
than the Machiavelli we saw in ‘Masque Of Mandragora’!
It’s only a small step from someone draining your energy metaphorically to
literally so you can see where Dicks might have got the idea from back when
Robert Holmes first commissioned him to write this story in 1976 (in the slot
that became ‘Horror Of Fang Rock’
instead). The fact that one of them is
called ‘Camilla’ might make a few people think of Royals nowadays, though at
the time this story was on air she and Prince Charles were ‘just good friends’ (it’s
actually quite a common ‘vampire’ name appearing in a few stories and films
over the years, including the title of a Le Fenu story from 1872. Another
common vampire name is ‘Helga’, the part Lalla Ward played in her first ever
film ‘Vampire Circus’ about a travelling troupe going from village to village
killing peasants. She’s a vampire in that one so it’s a bit odd seeing her on
the ‘other’ side’). More typical of Dicks, perhaps, is Kalmar the revolutionary
who never actually does anything but spout from books, a possible dig at Karl
Marx. Rather than being a political metpahor, though, this is purely about
class. The vampire tradition of being ‘pale’ used to mean being ‘noble’ in
centuries gone by: it’s a relatively modern concept that a tan makes you look
‘healthy’, as in decades past it used to mean that you were out working in the
fields under the baking hot sun all day. People used powder paint in the 18th
century in particular to make them look pale, so they might be mistaken for the
gentry who stayed indoors all day. Dicks throws in some great lines here: in
episode two Camilla talks about how ungrateful the peasants are after ‘all we
do for them’ and Romana asks cheekily ‘What do you do for them? Apart from save
them from gluttony?’ Later a peasant adds, without a hint of irony, ‘that if
you serve the Lords faithfully and well they allow you to work until you die’. This
is clearly a corrupt and evil regime: of course The Doctor has to remove it,
with the traditional stake through the heart (even if, in another of this
story’s twists you don’t see coming, the ‘stake’ turns out to be their own
spaceship!)
That ending was added by
new script editor Christopher H Bidmead, who wasn’t happy with this story at
all. As a man with a scientific background rather than a literary one, he
wanted to move Dr Who away from the gothic horror of the Hinchcliffe era, but
when new producer John Nathan-Turner took over and found Douglas Adams and
Anthony Root had cleared out every script they could find in the cupboard this
was the only one left that was workable. That's no surprise: Dicks had a
reputation for delivering scripts that didn’t need much work and writing them quickly
and efficiently and this is the only one of his Dr Who stories that was never
used. It was abandoned not for the usual reasons, because the then-script editor
didn’t like it (Holmes, Terrance’s good friend, loved it) or because it would
have cost too much (as a former script editor Terrance knew these pitfalls
well) but because the BBC happened to choose that year as the big launch for
their big drama version of ‘Dracula’. They put out a memo asking all other
series to steer clear of anything vampiric for the foreseeable future, with an
especial eye on Dr Who, which had often been accused of parodying their big
budget work. So the story got put in a cupboard until JNT found it and realised
the foreseeable future had surely passed by now. Terrance reckons he ‘started
again from scratch’ but we know that some of the original idea must have been
reworked. The question is what.
The whole feel, after
all, is very much a Hinchcliffe-Holmes period story rather than a JNT one. It’s
all very Hammer Horror, down to being filmed in Burnham Beeches where a lot of
their films were (thanks to it’s desolate look and moody skyline) and openly
based on a source that’s been ‘Whoified’ which a lot of the audience would have
read. There are times, too, when a bit of ‘Leela’ (the original companion)
slips out, in Romana and Adric’s sub-plot both and it would have been fun to
see our favourite savage cutting through the nonsense of the aristocracy with
Leela’s typical forthrightness. At other times though this is very much a
script of its era and often looks like a goth new romantic video (particularly
one by Siouxsie and the Banshees), with the ‘e-space’ feeling of other-worldly weirdness.
There are times, too, when this story is so clearly made for Romana’s
haughtiness and aristocratic moments (and similarly pale skin: well, she did
get this body from a princess in ‘The Armageddon
Factor’ after all!) that it’s hard to imagine anyone else in it (this is, in
so many ways, the poshest Tardis team what with Adric being from a dropout from
a noble Alazarian family). Romana’s ‘good’ posh though, someone who believes in
education and hard work unlike the Vampires she comes up against. It’s also
very in keeping with the ‘Bidmead’ year when the phrase ‘state of decay’ could
refer to just about any story in season eighteen (though not ‘Meglos’ perhaps):
a year when the Doctor grows old, when planets go through environmental cycles,
when the garden of paradise is infiltrated by evil and The Doctor regenerates. There’s a sense of gloom that the goth mood really fits, the sense that even with
the happy ending evil and misery and death are such a part of life that they
can’t be avoided even in e-space. There’s even a sort of half subplot too about
‘The Wasting’ though we never quite find out what it is. This is what the Three
Who Rule say they’re protecting their people from, but is it meant
metaphorically (without a cruel ruler to direct them they’d have no ambition
and waste their lives away?), an outright lie they’ve made up or a real thing
bigger than they are? The sense that something is wasting away is very in
keeping with this year though, even if I suspect this is part of the ‘original’
story that Terrance forgot about when he revived this story years on.
Rather than being a tale
of pure gore too it’s really a typical Dr Who (and this time very typical
Terrance Dicks) story about growing up and learning to become independent,
without trusting the people around you or taking them at face value. It’s ‘The Krotons’ again, with a hint of ‘Claws Of Axos’ (a story with the working title
‘Vampires From Space’), to accept people by their behaviour and actions, not by
their words and false promises, to work out why people are really doing what
they do. The vampires have kept their people enslaved for years with promises
of keeping them safe, even though they’ve been the enemy keeping us in our
place all along. A lot of people have a
very different world view by the end of this episode and that includes the
viewer. Romana struggles to be as independent as usual and gets rescued a lot and
even the Doctor is surprised by some of the things he finds out because he
never for one second believed that the old legends of vampires could be real.
However the biggest lesson is for Adric, the young stowaway who’s travelled on
The Tardis in search of a new life but discovers that his cost that not every
alien is as benevolent as The Doctor and Romana. It’s a sign of both what a
last minute addition to the script he is and how little Bidmead has spent
thinking about the lad yet that Dicks has a slightly different view of Adric to
every other writer. Bidmead’s big idea for him was as the ‘artful dodger’, a
cheeky chappie who gets into situations above his head. For Dicks, though
(quite possibly the only writer for Adric who’d read the original Dickens
rather than seen the film) he’s a morally ambiguous character who can never be
pinned down, a bit like the 2nd Doctor if you were to take him at
face value story to story (or in the first half of ‘Power
Of The Daleks’) rather than as ‘our hero’ who always comes good in the end.
Adric spends this story thinking on his feet, throwing his lot in with whatever
side appears to be winning and at one point even seems to have betrayed The Doctor;
he says later that he was only stringing the vampires along and for that matter
I believe him (he’s just trying to survive, even if it means selling out the
people who help him), the rough moral edges not yet smoothed off by being in
The Doctor’s presence. This story is a learning curve for Adric more than
anyone, as he starts the story acting not unlike the vampires themselves,
haughty and arrogant, but ending it aware of the importance of kindness. It’s
an idea that works well: the only downside is that this is the arc of pretty
much every Adric story, as other writers pick up the idea from Dicks and have
the Alzarian befriend The Master, Urbankan frogs or Todd the colonialist in
Kinda. This should have been the only story where they tried this trick, not
the first of many. After all, more than anything ‘State Of Decay’ is a story
about the importance of education, of learning, with the vampires afraid of The
Doctor’s ‘knowledge’, which no one else on this planet has had for thousands of
years.
You would have thought
that would be right down Bidmead’s line, having Dr Who as an intellectual
exercise, but he’s said to have hated this script, commissioned before he
joined the production team. Bidmead resented the idea of Dr Who being like hammer
horror and borrowing from other sources; he wanted scripts rich in science and
logic, that could happen, rather than fairytales. So he set about changing
ideas: the ancient scrolls became computer cards for instance and the tower,
part of an actual castle in the original, became a spaceship (though it was
Dicks’ twist to turn it into the ‘stake’!) The new and old script editors ended
up fighting over practically everything in this story, Dicks recalling a half
page of dialogue that Bidmead added about how names evolved over time and
wanting to skip ahead to the action. Dicks apparently didn’t get on very well
with JNT either, who wanted ‘new’ blood not old hands who knew the series
better than he did. By the time the
script came out the other side it was a compromise that had lost a lot of the
original feel and reportedly the director Peter Moffat went to Bidmead and
demanded a copy of Dicks’ original script without the tampering, swapping bits
of it round again which didn’t endear him to the new production team either. Notably,
nobody worked with Terrance again (with the exception of the last minute
desperation around the anniversary story ‘The
Five Doctors’ when Robert Holmes dropped out). Then again this wasn’t a
happy story when it was being made either. Set designer Christine Ruscoe, given the difficult task of
a set that doubled as both a castle and a building, tried to make it both but
the writer objected to the stone staircase and the script editor hated the
‘copper/wood’ sets so much he screamed at her on set (they were meant to look
metallic and reportedly did in person, just not on the cameras). The director
Peter Moffat meanwhile, usually one of Who’s more laidback and gentle
directors, lost his cool and yelled at Lalla. Those of you keeping tabs on the
Tom Baker-Lalla Ward romance might notice that the pair spend as little time
looking at each other as possible during this story, though something strange
happens by episode three when they suddenly become an item all over again (and do,
indeed, get married the same day that episode four goes out on air,
surprisingly everyone who was only in the earlier episodes). It sums up their
on-off again relationship well that in rehearsals Tom refused to help Romana
down from a ladder as scripted, snarling ‘she knows how to look after herself’
– then in filming they were getting on so well that he suggested giving her a
hand, forgetting it was in the original script! Then again Tom was cross with
everyone this story, suffering from an undiagnosed metabolic disorder that saw
him lose weight at speed and his hair lose its curl (that’s a perm, which is
why it doesn’t look quite right. As far as I know it didn’t turn his blood blue
but that’s what you can see when the bat bites his hand as the actor figured
timelords would be ‘aristocratic’. JNT blew his top at the idea that something
that important wasn’t passed through him when he saw the rushes and cut a
close-up – though it doesn’t actually contradict anything seen in other stories).
As for Mathew Waterhouse (who notably wasn’t invited to the wedding), filming
his first story (because they wanted time to get Adric’s debut ‘Full Circle’
right), started as an eager Dr Who fan who had a poster on his wall and ended
it demoralised and frustrated, with just
about everyone upset at him (it didn’t help that he’d offered suggestions to
Tom, who didn’t take advice from anyone at the best of times never mind teenage
newbies, but it sounds more like youthful idealism than rudeness. Though Lalla
in turn lost her temper with him for refusing to take his expensive costume off
to go and eat in the canteen). There’s a tale that Matthew sadly and
symbolically removed his Tom Baker poster from his wall and hid it when he came
back, shell shocked, from the first day of rehearsals. Then the model team
sheepishly admitted they’d run out of time to do all their shots so had to set
everything up in the TV studio, filming with a skeleton crew in the time between
the actor’s shots. Mercifully nobody got physically hurt through temper tantrums,
though this story has more than its fair share of accidents too: Thane Bettany,
playing Tarak, accidentally whalloped Tom Baker opening a door (a shot you can
still see in the story) and Matthew missed his cue with his knife and accidentally
threw it into his leg before dropping it on his foot. This was not a happy
camp, then, and unlike some Who stories where the production difficulties actually
brought everyone closer together (this story’s ‘replacement’ ‘Fang Rock’ is a good example) you can kind of
tell: nobody wants to be there, no one is enjoying themselves, nobody believes
in this story and everyone wants to bite everyone’s heads off (that’s working
with vampires for you I guess).
All that said, it’s good
fun for the audience. Anyone who thinks Dr Who is usually too bright and
cheerful and is vainly watching Dr Who for goth kicks will like ‘State Of
Decay’ a lot, a story which features as many of the ‘Addams Family’ clichés
inside 100 minutes as it can: secret towers, dark lighting, bats, lots of blood,
but all cleverly linked to the plot. It’s good to have a race that our heroes
have not only heard of but are afraid of, shocked to find characters from
fairytales alive (it will get maddening by the late McCoy period when every
monster we meet dates back ‘before the beginning of time’ but here it’s pretty
much the first time and feels ‘new’ in context). The three vampires are in
something of a marriage of convenience too, each one slightly different and
ruling for contrasting reasons, all explored in other Dr Who stories but rarely
if ever in the same one. Zargo rules purely for power, Aukon out of tradition
seeing his job with the sort of zeal usually kept for religious figures or
revolutionaries in Who while Camilla seems to be in it purely for the if you
excuse the expression, ‘bloodlust’. The Doctor and Romana might kill the ‘giant
vampire’ with a stake through the heart, but they have to defeat all three in
different ways first, bringing out their worst tendencies. The tower being a
spaceship is a brilliant twist you don’t see coming and the moment The Doctor
discovers the secret panels, though ripped off Professor Chronotis’ rooms being
a Tardis interior in ‘Shada’ (which JNT
worked on), would have been new to the viewing public who hadn’t seen that
unfinished story. The bats are well handled, the stock footage of real ones
cleverly used and the model ones (actually model birds that coud be bought in toy
shops with added bat’s wings) amongst the more convincing Who model shots of
the era (even if the one we see in close-up using Romana as a drinks bottle
isn’t quite as strong). The blood isn’t used goringly for shock but sparingly,
a tank naturally lying around the tower in the same way Humans have drinks
cabinets. This feels like a ‘real’ plausible scenario somehow, far more so than
most vampire films, with just enough ambiguity to believe that Human tales of
vampires all stem from The Three Who Rule and the days they used to live in
‘our’ universe. There’s just enough gore and violence here to take this story
seriously, but just enough humour so that you don’t have nightmares. Given that
this is a re-write of a three year old story, with new characters added and
changes insisted on by two different script editors, it’s amazing this script
not hangs together plotwise as well as it does but that it feels so balanced.
Not everything works
admittedly. This story is a prime example of why Dr Who needs to have at least
one human character in there somewhere to make us care. By the time the Doctor
and Romana have finished pontificating from a timelord point of view and the
old ones have discussed pre-history with them that leaves us with Adric’s eyes
to see things through – and he isn’t even from our sodding universe but
e-space, so he still knows things that we don’t, while Adric’s cynical eyes aren’t
the best eyes to see anything through! Talking of which, e-space is barely
mentioned this story too; the others either side of it, ‘Full Circle’ and ‘Warrior’s Gate’, are all about getting
stuck in this scary dimension away from ‘normal space’ where everyone might get
trapped forever, part of JNT’s desire to make Dr Who more like his beloved
soaps, with stories that criss-cross each other and link up; this planet might
as well be in our ‘n’ space too for all the effect it has on the plot (which
goes to great lengths to say that the vampires were once ‘everywhere’). It
would help this story a lot if we got to know and like the villagers properly,
so that we had a, ahem, ‘stake’ in their future and was rooting for The Doctor
to help them. Instead he doesn’t even meet them: it’s Adric who has that
sub-plot. K9 is badly served again in what will be his penultimate adventure:
he isn’t confined to the Tardis but The Doctor spends the whole story telling
him to shut up (even though he should know by now it’s probably important) and
K9 sort of trundles along in the background not doing much. There’s way more
talking than in any other vampire work ever put on film, with more nattering
than biting and it’s all oddly low on action, thrills spills and kills for a
story that’s all about blood-sucking mutants. That’s why the guidebook
impressions of this story always feel so ‘wrong’: the plot synopsis sounds like
its full of staking and blood, but they’re background details for what’s at the
real heart of this story, two different ideologies that can’t both exist (and
in true Dr Who fashion the one that’s fairest for everyone is going to win out
over the one that benefits the few at the expense of the many).
That said, in many ways
that’s a relief: you know what’s going to happen in every variation of
‘Dracula’, starting with the BBC version it was feared this story would
lampoon. This story is still more ‘Quatermass’ than ‘Dracula’ when you get down
to it (including the tank of blood, funnily enough). ‘State Of Decay’ is
superior to most vampire tales because it keeps you guessing how things are
going to turn out with a clever script that’s full of twists and turns and lots
of great individual scenes to sink your teeth into along the way. This is a
great little Dr Who story, even if it disappoints a few people by being a poor
vampire story: even Mary Whitehouse found nothing to complain about (though The
House of Lords did. There’s been a push from environmentalists to make bats ‘friendly’
and there were complaints Dr Who had undone a decade’s work. Though they hadn’t
really: if anything I only wanted one as a pet more after this story). While
this isn’t one of those Dr Who stories that’s perfect all the way through there
are lots of great little scenes, a lot of which weren’t in the original script,
from Tom Baker’s injoke quoting Hamlet (in the summer break Lalla Ward had played
Ophelia in the BBC production of it that went out on air during this story’s
rehearsal) to his joke misquoting Alexander Pope (‘What is, is right’ becomes
the more Doctory ‘What is, is wrong’) to the Tardis scanner now apparently
getting Ceefax (I like to think everyone sat around playing ‘Interplanetary
Bamboozle’. Well, the 5th
Doctor did keep releasing quiz books with his face on them in the next
few years!) Yes the set does look a bit too ‘castlely’ but the colour scheme,
moody red blacks and greys, is really effective and the ‘Saxon’ look works well
(The Doctor is clearly joking and/or disarming the vampires when he remarks to
Romana that it’s ‘Rococo’). For once the lighting has been turned down to make
it seem as spooky as it ought to be (Lalla, who’d had some fan letters about
how upset children were at the ‘crumbling to dust’ sequence in ‘The Horns Of Nimon’, insisted the shot be
almost in the dark this time around so you couldn’t see what was going on.
Which only made it scarier!) The acting, too, is strong throughout and even if
everyone making this story is having a miserable time they still give their
all. Mostly. If you’re watching this purely to be scared and to see los of
blood gushing from every orifice then you’re likely to be disappointed, but if
you’re more into existential scares that curdle the blood in a philosophical
sense rather than jump-screams then there’s much to enjoy. I for one prefer
that, so fangs very much! POSITIVES + There’s a
great finale (spoilers) in which it looks as if Adric has sided with the
baddies and an unconscious Romana is about to be sacrificed that’s solved not
because of the usual ‘wave a sonic screwdriver at the problem to make it go
away’ or even K9’s laser beams but because of the events across the rest of the
story that the Doctor has inspired, stirring up a rebellion that should have
started a long time ago (as per ‘The Space
Museum’). It’s enough to make you want to turn off your TV sets and pick up
your burning pitchforks and join in, which after all is also what this show is
all about. Hoisting the Great Vampire on his own petard (well, turret) is a
just and proper end too.
NEGATIVES - Usually I
stick up for Matthew Waterhouse and Adric. After so many stories with Romana as
an equal it was about time we had a youngster wet around the ears and as
teenage prodigies go Adric has a lot more going for him and is a lot less
drippy than, say, Wesley Crusher. Matthew, too, copes admirably with a
one-dimensional character who’s personality changes script by script
considering his age and that he’d done barely any acting before this. The
production team truly shot themselves in the foot making this Adric’s second
story though: the Adric of ‘Full Circle’ gains our sympathies through all the
awful things that happen to him but here Adric as at his worst, reckless,
unrealistically naive and putting his foot in it more times than a
Sensorite-Voord lovechild. It’s this story, more than any other, that makes you
want to punch the annoying brat and throw him to the vampires and if this was
the production team’s idea of what their core teenage audience was like then it’s
no wonder the viewing figures begin to drop off alarmingly from hereon in.
Reportedly nobody told Lalla Ward about the cast change until the first day of
rehearsal (this story being filmed before ‘Full Circle’) and she assumed it was
a bad joke. Many fans still do.
BEST QUOTE: Romana: ‘How long have things been like this?’
Kalmar: ‘Forever. The lords rule in the tower; the peasants toil in the fields.
Nothing has changed in over a thousand years’.
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘Blood Harvest’ (1994), the 28th
‘New Adventures Novel’, features a return for The Great Ones. The long awaited
return from Terrance Dicks for the first time since the range launched three
years earlier, it’s not quite as eye-opening and ‘adult’ as his ‘Timewyrm’
novels but it’s close and is, I would say, the most ‘Torchwood’ of 20th
century Who. The Tardis lands at a Speakeasy in Chicago in 1929 where a bunch
of aliens are swigging booze and threatening each other with big shooty weapons
– with the 7th Doctor, Ace (‘The Lady In Black’) and Benny in on a
piece of the action. Worse, the nightclub is called ‘Docs’ and he appears to be
the proprietor with Al Capone out for his blood, while Ace falls for private
eye investigator Dekker (with some quite intense sex scenes that will change
how you see the teenage TV Ace forever more). Benny has the most interesting
sub-plot though, being stranded in e-space on whatever the planet from ‘State
Of Decay’ was called, with a bunch of vampires who are then rescued in a
surprise cameo by Romana on her way back from ‘Warrior’s Gate’
(they don’t get on!) Terrance cleverly interweaves and mirrors both story’s
plotlines, showing how corruption and breaking the law is a universe-wide
problem all sentient creatures face and it’s quite a clever plot, with Agonel a
worthy meddling villain in a ‘Monk’ type way, before making way for more
regular Who villain Borusa near the end for a sequence on Gallifrey intended to
wrap everything up. There’s a nice lot of humour too, as Terrance laughs a lot
at the sort of things he used to stick in every Target novel going (Ace thinks
anyone who hears the Tardis materialisation as a ‘wheezing groaning sound’ must
be an idiot!) One of the better ‘New Adventures’ books around, though it’s a
shame we’re still told about the Great Ones being a threat rather than actually
seeing it. Their bark is again worse than their bite – which is a bit off for
Vampires when you think about it.
‘Goth Opera’ (1994), a missing adventure novel by Paul
Cornell, was released hard on Blood Harvest’s blood-drenched heels and is often
viewed as a sequel even if it isn’t one officially. As the striking cover gives
away this is mostly a Nyssa story in which the Trakenite is turned into a
vampire, much to the 5th Doctor and Tegan’s horror (and British
newsagent W H Smith’s: they refused to stock the first version with a
blood-stained cover in the children’s department where they usually kept their
Dr Who books, so the final result only has Nyssa with fangs). What’s weirder is
that we’re not in e-space but Manchester in the 1990s: I don’t remember this
happening in real life, so we must be in another of those pesky alternate
universes. Nyssa is bitten by accident by a ‘Great One’ baby who assumes she’s
The Doctor (had they heard about the gender change of Dr 13?) The person
setting the trap for The Doctor turns out to be a part timelord, part Vampire
hybrid named Ruath whose a worthy foe, although this hammer horror pastiche
uses all its cards early on and doesn’t have many other places to go past the
halfway mark. Cornell himself later claimed to hate this book although it has
quite a fan following: this is one of those books you tend to either love or
loathe, depending on how much you love blood and gore. Me? It’s kind of okay –
hearing the Big Finish version (in their short-lived ‘novel adaptations’
series) is much more interesting than reading the book itself for me, given how our regulars
are forced to play against type (and are really rather good!)
‘Blood Invocation’ is a 5th Doctor comic
strip again written by Paul Cornell and drawn by John Ridgeway from the 1995 Dr
Who Yearbook. An Ancient One has made his way to Gallifrey to munch on a
timelord blood sandwich (‘or my ancestors: a distant dream, for me:
breakfast!’) and after the Gallifreyans find a dead body drained of blood in
the panoptican they hastily call in The Doctor to help, figuring for some odd reason
he’d be best placed to deal with them.
He discovers that the dead timelord was part of the cult of Rassilon and knows
that vampires can cause dead timelords to rise. Meanwhile poor Tegan’s got a
cold and has gone to sleep in the Tardis, leaving Nyssa to have all the fun,
when the vampire runs into the Tardis and attacks her, causing her to become
possessed and in turn attack The Doctor and make him fly across the universe planet
by planet so he can take it over, starting with Earth. Nyssa gets to save the
day for once by doing something very clever with the Tardis time controls and the
vampire simply fades away from view, leaving a groggy Tegan wondering what’s
going on and The Doctor giving a lecture about how some vampire DNA still
exists on Earth. A bit hard to follow, with the Rassilon plot dropped too
early, but this is one of the best looking comic strips of the lot with
Ridgeway really capturing the likenesses of the trio of regulars, plus some
great Hammer Horror shots of the vampire mid-kill. ‘State Of Decay’ is also the 4th Doctor
story referenced in the first McGann novel ‘The Eight Doctors’, written by
Terrance Dicks (1996). The 8th Doctor has amnesia and is passing
through his older selves in an attempt to jog his memory. Which is just as well
because his 4th self is in trouble. The Great Ones kidnap Romana
(unseen on screen) and hold her ransom as a bargaining chip for The Doctor coming
to get her and becoming their new King and Queen. He refuses, they bite back (quite
literally) and soon he’s on the floor dying and losing pints of blood, three
vampires to each leg and two to each of his arms (it tastes sweet,
apparently).Romana flees into the forest hoping to get to her Tardis and
Adric/K9. Instead she runs into the ‘wrong’ Tardis and is most confused to meet
Dr 8 (she comments that he’s just as fond at giving lectures in both
regenerations!) Who better to give yourself a blood transfusion than your older
self though? As ever Terrance nails the 4th Doctor’s steel behind
his flippant remarks and has more fun with this sequence than any in the book,
even if it does seem to contradict quite a lot of his own original story.
You have to feel for the poor 8th Doctor.
All his early adventures tend to be biggies: in the TV Movie he’s up against
The Master, over in book form he has his memory wiped in ‘The Eight Doctors’ and
no sooner is he back to himself again then here, in his second book, he’s dealing
with The Great Ones again. ‘Vampire Science’ (1997), a rare collaboration, by
Kate Orman and Jonathan Blum, is really more a book about new companion Sam
though. Terrance Dicks barely had time to sketch her in across ‘8 Doctors’ but
this book gives her character and she’s an under-rated, often overlooked
character in the Whoniverse I think, as lovable as Rose, practical and worldly
wise as Martha and as sarcastic to passing aliens as Donna. Once again there
are vampires on Earth and, unlikely as it may seem, we’re back in San Francisco
again (from The Doctor’s point of view that’s two journeys out of three that
have landed there, despite having a whole universe to explore!) Putting his
detective hat on, The Doctor works out (a bit too quickly) that the only thing
linking mysterious deaths is a nightclub known as ‘The Other Place’ with Sam
undercover as a ‘medical student’ (very Martha) while The Doctor disappears to
do doctory stuff. Inevitably she gets bitten by vampires while a bonkers ending
sees vampires turn Human after drinking timelord blood. Good for the
characterisation, not so much for the plot.
Previous ‘Full
Circle’
next ‘Warrior’s Gate’
This story must be even
weirder when seen through modern eyes I should think. Thirty years before
‘Twilight’ finally got round to doing a story about vampires, this lot look
nothing like Robert Pattinson, young and sexy. No, this lot are immortals, ‘old
ones’ who are well old, very out of place now we’ve had three decades of being
sold vampires as being young, vibrant and sexy. Which is pretty odd when you
think about it. I mean, vampires can be any age but vibrant? Sexy? They’re the
living dead, people! They’re meant to be pale barely-walking corpses. See
modern Who’s take ‘Vampires In Venice’,
where they’re all young sexy fish people, for a particularly flesh-filled
example – if you must. Where did our expectations change so drastically? Then
again this lot aren’t like any other vampires was Terrance Dicks has great fun
subverting all the other things people think of in a vampire story. Despite
Bram Stoker basing ‘Dracula’ loosely on Vlad the Impaler by and large vampires
are portrayed as outcasts living on the fringes of society. Here they are the
society, the masters and rulers of an empire they live off. Quite literally, in
a ‘Krotons’ type way, as every so often
villagers are sent up to the castle to either be transformed into guards or
turned into lunch. Usually vampires live out the way of society in some gloomy
remote place no one else can get to but here the their castle dominates the
landscape and literally overshadows their entire world. Even the title isn’t
quite what it seems: you’re meant to assume the ‘state of decay’ is about
vampires in a state of decomposition, as vampires usually are, but this lot are
thriving and at the peak of health (if a bit pale).Weirdest of all, despite the
Medieval vibes, this lot are technologically amongst the most advanced race
we’ve ever seen in the series, with the revelation that this lot are the
timelords’ oldest rivals who escaped to e-space. Instead it’s the planet that’s
in a state of decay, as their rules keep the population backward, keeping them
starved and uneducated (like ‘The Krotons’ again, the first story Dicks worked
on as script editor after all). The peasants have the sweet detail of the ‘see
no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’ sign when they see their Masters,
demonstrating that they life in ignorance and have no curiosity (the one thing
The Doctor lives for). This is no way for a planet to evolve and grow, as their
rulers act as ‘vampires’ in both a literal sense (draining the odd villager of
blood) but also a metaphorical one, living off their work while they live in an
ivory (well, metallic) tower above it all.
You don’t tend to read
about it in guide books, perhaps because Terrance isn’t usually a political
writer (he’s a conservative with a small ‘c’ who was even – shock horror –
quite nice to Margaret Thatcher in the Dr Who Musical (!) ‘The Ultimate
Adventure’ once), but it’s clearly about the Royal Family (they even wear
crowns). This un-named planet is clearly meant to be Earth’s equivalent (K9
even says it has 350 days a year and 23.3. hours, which is close enough), just
in e-space with blood-suckers who are a bit more open about what they are. The
vampires’ bloodsuckingness is really just a clever metaphor for that old Dr Who
favourite class and society, where the people in charge are stinking rich and
the people who work under them just stinking, taken to extremes. The villagers
leave in fear of them in an equal feudal system where they toil the land, but
most of what they have ends up as taxes and every time one get too big for
their boots they get eaten. Education has been banned, under pain of death, so
they’re kept stupid and easier to control. In short, this lot are more Machiavellian
than the Machiavelli we saw in ‘Masque Of Mandragora’!
It’s only a small step from someone draining your energy metaphorically to
literally so you can see where Dicks might have got the idea from back when
Robert Holmes first commissioned him to write this story in 1976 (in the slot
that became ‘Horror Of Fang Rock’
instead). The fact that one of them is
called ‘Camilla’ might make a few people think of Royals nowadays, though at
the time this story was on air she and Prince Charles were ‘just good friends’ (it’s
actually quite a common ‘vampire’ name appearing in a few stories and films
over the years, including the title of a Le Fenu story from 1872. Another
common vampire name is ‘Helga’, the part Lalla Ward played in her first ever
film ‘Vampire Circus’ about a travelling troupe going from village to village
killing peasants. She’s a vampire in that one so it’s a bit odd seeing her on
the ‘other’ side’). More typical of Dicks, perhaps, is Kalmar the revolutionary
who never actually does anything but spout from books, a possible dig at Karl
Marx. Rather than being a political metpahor, though, this is purely about
class. The vampire tradition of being ‘pale’ used to mean being ‘noble’ in
centuries gone by: it’s a relatively modern concept that a tan makes you look
‘healthy’, as in decades past it used to mean that you were out working in the
fields under the baking hot sun all day. People used powder paint in the 18th
century in particular to make them look pale, so they might be mistaken for the
gentry who stayed indoors all day. Dicks throws in some great lines here: in
episode two Camilla talks about how ungrateful the peasants are after ‘all we
do for them’ and Romana asks cheekily ‘What do you do for them? Apart from save
them from gluttony?’ Later a peasant adds, without a hint of irony, ‘that if
you serve the Lords faithfully and well they allow you to work until you die’. This
is clearly a corrupt and evil regime: of course The Doctor has to remove it,
with the traditional stake through the heart (even if, in another of this
story’s twists you don’t see coming, the ‘stake’ turns out to be their own
spaceship!)
That ending was added by
new script editor Christopher H Bidmead, who wasn’t happy with this story at
all. As a man with a scientific background rather than a literary one, he
wanted to move Dr Who away from the gothic horror of the Hinchcliffe era, but
when new producer John Nathan-Turner took over and found Douglas Adams and
Anthony Root had cleared out every script they could find in the cupboard this
was the only one left that was workable. That's no surprise: Dicks had a
reputation for delivering scripts that didn’t need much work and writing them quickly
and efficiently and this is the only one of his Dr Who stories that was never
used. It was abandoned not for the usual reasons, because the then-script editor
didn’t like it (Holmes, Terrance’s good friend, loved it) or because it would
have cost too much (as a former script editor Terrance knew these pitfalls
well) but because the BBC happened to choose that year as the big launch for
their big drama version of ‘Dracula’. They put out a memo asking all other
series to steer clear of anything vampiric for the foreseeable future, with an
especial eye on Dr Who, which had often been accused of parodying their big
budget work. So the story got put in a cupboard until JNT found it and realised
the foreseeable future had surely passed by now. Terrance reckons he ‘started
again from scratch’ but we know that some of the original idea must have been
reworked. The question is what.
The whole feel, after
all, is very much a Hinchcliffe-Holmes period story rather than a JNT one. It’s
all very Hammer Horror, down to being filmed in Burnham Beeches where a lot of
their films were (thanks to it’s desolate look and moody skyline) and openly
based on a source that’s been ‘Whoified’ which a lot of the audience would have
read. There are times, too, when a bit of ‘Leela’ (the original companion)
slips out, in Romana and Adric’s sub-plot both and it would have been fun to
see our favourite savage cutting through the nonsense of the aristocracy with
Leela’s typical forthrightness. At other times though this is very much a
script of its era and often looks like a goth new romantic video (particularly
one by Siouxsie and the Banshees), with the ‘e-space’ feeling of other-worldly weirdness.
There are times, too, when this story is so clearly made for Romana’s
haughtiness and aristocratic moments (and similarly pale skin: well, she did
get this body from a princess in ‘The Armageddon
Factor’ after all!) that it’s hard to imagine anyone else in it (this is, in
so many ways, the poshest Tardis team what with Adric being from a dropout from
a noble Alazarian family). Romana’s ‘good’ posh though, someone who believes in
education and hard work unlike the Vampires she comes up against. It’s also
very in keeping with the ‘Bidmead’ year when the phrase ‘state of decay’ could
refer to just about any story in season eighteen (though not ‘Meglos’ perhaps):
a year when the Doctor grows old, when planets go through environmental cycles,
when the garden of paradise is infiltrated by evil and The Doctor regenerates.
There’s a sense of gloom that the goth mood really fits, the sense that even with
the happy ending evil and misery and death are such a part of life that they
can’t be avoided even in e-space. There’s even a sort of half subplot too about
‘The Wasting’ though we never quite find out what it is. This is what the Three
Who Rule say they’re protecting their people from, but is it meant
metaphorically (without a cruel ruler to direct them they’d have no ambition
and waste their lives away?), an outright lie they’ve made up or a real thing
bigger than they are? The sense that something is wasting away is very in
keeping with this year though, even if I suspect this is part of the ‘original’
story that Terrance forgot about when he revived this story years on.
Rather than being a tale
of pure gore too it’s really a typical Dr Who (and this time very typical
Terrance Dicks) story about growing up and learning to become independent,
without trusting the people around you or taking them at face value. It’s ‘The Krotons’ again, with a hint of ‘Claws Of Axos’ (a story with the working title
‘Vampires From Space’), to accept people by their behaviour and actions, not by
their words and false promises, to work out why people are really doing what
they do. The vampires have kept their people enslaved for years with promises
of keeping them safe, even though they’ve been the enemy keeping us in our
place all along. A lot of people have a
very different world view by the end of this episode and that includes the
viewer. Romana struggles to be as independent as usual and gets rescued a lot and
even the Doctor is surprised by some of the things he finds out because he
never for one second believed that the old legends of vampires could be real.
However the biggest lesson is for Adric, the young stowaway who’s travelled on
The Tardis in search of a new life but discovers that his cost that not every
alien is as benevolent as The Doctor and Romana. It’s a sign of both what a
last minute addition to the script he is and how little Bidmead has spent
thinking about the lad yet that Dicks has a slightly different view of Adric to
every other writer. Bidmead’s big idea for him was as the ‘artful dodger’, a
cheeky chappie who gets into situations above his head. For Dicks, though
(quite possibly the only writer for Adric who’d read the original Dickens
rather than seen the film) he’s a morally ambiguous character who can never be
pinned down, a bit like the 2nd Doctor if you were to take him at
face value story to story (or in the first half of ‘Power
Of The Daleks’) rather than as ‘our hero’ who always comes good in the end.
Adric spends this story thinking on his feet, throwing his lot in with whatever
side appears to be winning and at one point even seems to have betrayed The Doctor;
he says later that he was only stringing the vampires along and for that matter
I believe him (he’s just trying to survive, even if it means selling out the
people who help him), the rough moral edges not yet smoothed off by being in
The Doctor’s presence. This story is a learning curve for Adric more than
anyone, as he starts the story acting not unlike the vampires themselves,
haughty and arrogant, but ending it aware of the importance of kindness. It’s
an idea that works well: the only downside is that this is the arc of pretty
much every Adric story, as other writers pick up the idea from Dicks and have
the Alzarian befriend The Master, Urbankan frogs or Todd the colonialist in
Kinda. This should have been the only story where they tried this trick, not
the first of many. After all, more than anything ‘State Of Decay’ is a story
about the importance of education, of learning, with the vampires afraid of The
Doctor’s ‘knowledge’, which no one else on this planet has had for thousands of
years.
You would have thought
that would be right down Bidmead’s line, having Dr Who as an intellectual
exercise, but he’s said to have hated this script, commissioned before he
joined the production team. Bidmead resented the idea of Dr Who being like hammer
horror and borrowing from other sources; he wanted scripts rich in science and
logic, that could happen, rather than fairytales. So he set about changing
ideas: the ancient scrolls became computer cards for instance and the tower,
part of an actual castle in the original, became a spaceship (though it was
Dicks’ twist to turn it into the ‘stake’!) The new and old script editors ended
up fighting over practically everything in this story, Dicks recalling a half
page of dialogue that Bidmead added about how names evolved over time and
wanting to skip ahead to the action. Dicks apparently didn’t get on very well
with JNT either, who wanted ‘new’ blood not old hands who knew the series
better than he did. By the time the
script came out the other side it was a compromise that had lost a lot of the
original feel and reportedly the director Peter Moffat went to Bidmead and
demanded a copy of Dicks’ original script without the tampering, swapping bits
of it round again which didn’t endear him to the new production team either. Notably,
nobody worked with Terrance again (with the exception of the last minute
desperation around the anniversary story ‘The
Five Doctors’ when Robert Holmes dropped out). Then again this wasn’t a
happy story when it was being made either. Set designer Christine Ruscoe, given the difficult task of
a set that doubled as both a castle and a building, tried to make it both but
the writer objected to the stone staircase and the script editor hated the
‘copper/wood’ sets so much he screamed at her on set (they were meant to look
metallic and reportedly did in person, just not on the cameras). The director
Peter Moffat meanwhile, usually one of Who’s more laidback and gentle
directors, lost his cool and yelled at Lalla. Those of you keeping tabs on the
Tom Baker-Lalla Ward romance might notice that the pair spend as little time
looking at each other as possible during this story, though something strange
happens by episode three when they suddenly become an item all over again (and do,
indeed, get married the same day that episode four goes out on air,
surprisingly everyone who was only in the earlier episodes). It sums up their
on-off again relationship well that in rehearsals Tom refused to help Romana
down from a ladder as scripted, snarling ‘she knows how to look after herself’
– then in filming they were getting on so well that he suggested giving her a
hand, forgetting it was in the original script! Then again Tom was cross with
everyone this story, suffering from an undiagnosed metabolic disorder that saw
him lose weight at speed and his hair lose its curl (that’s a perm, which is
why it doesn’t look quite right. As far as I know it didn’t turn his blood blue
but that’s what you can see when the bat bites his hand as the actor figured
timelords would be ‘aristocratic’. JNT blew his top at the idea that something
that important wasn’t passed through him when he saw the rushes and cut a
close-up – though it doesn’t actually contradict anything seen in other stories).
As for Mathew Waterhouse (who notably wasn’t invited to the wedding), filming
his first story (because they wanted time to get Adric’s debut ‘Full Circle’
right), started as an eager Dr Who fan who had a poster on his wall and ended
it demoralised and frustrated, with just
about everyone upset at him (it didn’t help that he’d offered suggestions to
Tom, who didn’t take advice from anyone at the best of times never mind teenage
newbies, but it sounds more like youthful idealism than rudeness. Though Lalla
in turn lost her temper with him for refusing to take his expensive costume off
to go and eat in the canteen). There’s a tale that Matthew sadly and
symbolically removed his Tom Baker poster from his wall and hid it when he came
back, shell shocked, from the first day of rehearsals. Then the model team
sheepishly admitted they’d run out of time to do all their shots so had to set
everything up in the TV studio, filming with a skeleton crew in the time between
the actor’s shots. Mercifully nobody got physically hurt through temper tantrums,
though this story has more than its fair share of accidents too: Thane Bettany,
playing Tarak, accidentally whalloped Tom Baker opening a door (a shot you can
still see in the story) and Matthew missed his cue with his knife and accidentally
threw it into his leg before dropping it on his foot. This was not a happy
camp, then, and unlike some Who stories where the production difficulties actually
brought everyone closer together (this story’s ‘replacement’ ‘Fang Rock’ is a good example) you can kind of
tell: nobody wants to be there, no one is enjoying themselves, nobody believes
in this story and everyone wants to bite everyone’s heads off (that’s working
with vampires for you I guess).
All that said, it’s good
fun for the audience. Anyone who thinks Dr Who is usually too bright and
cheerful and is vainly watching Dr Who for goth kicks will like ‘State Of
Decay’ a lot, a story which features as many of the ‘Addams Family’ clichés
inside 100 minutes as it can: secret towers, dark lighting, bats, lots of blood,
but all cleverly linked to the plot. It’s good to have a race that our heroes
have not only heard of but are afraid of, shocked to find characters from
fairytales alive (it will get maddening by the late McCoy period when every
monster we meet dates back ‘before the beginning of time’ but here it’s pretty
much the first time and feels ‘new’ in context). The three vampires are in
something of a marriage of convenience too, each one slightly different and
ruling for contrasting reasons, all explored in other Dr Who stories but rarely
if ever in the same one. Zargo rules purely for power, Aukon out of tradition
seeing his job with the sort of zeal usually kept for religious figures or
revolutionaries in Who while Camilla seems to be in it purely for the if you
excuse the expression, ‘bloodlust’. The Doctor and Romana might kill the ‘giant
vampire’ with a stake through the heart, but they have to defeat all three in
different ways first, bringing out their worst tendencies. The tower being a
spaceship is a brilliant twist you don’t see coming and the moment The Doctor
discovers the secret panels, though ripped off Professor Chronotis’ rooms being
a Tardis interior in ‘Shada’ (which JNT
worked on), would have been new to the viewing public who hadn’t seen that
unfinished story. The bats are well handled, the stock footage of real ones
cleverly used and the model ones (actually model birds that coud be bought in toy
shops with added bat’s wings) amongst the more convincing Who model shots of
the era (even if the one we see in close-up using Romana as a drinks bottle
isn’t quite as strong). The blood isn’t used goringly for shock but sparingly,
a tank naturally lying around the tower in the same way Humans have drinks
cabinets. This feels like a ‘real’ plausible scenario somehow, far more so than
most vampire films, with just enough ambiguity to believe that Human tales of
vampires all stem from The Three Who Rule and the days they used to live in
‘our’ universe. There’s just enough gore and violence here to take this story
seriously, but just enough humour so that you don’t have nightmares. Given that
this is a re-write of a three year old story, with new characters added and
changes insisted on by two different script editors, it’s amazing this script
not hangs together plotwise as well as it does but that it feels so balanced.
Not everything works
admittedly. This story is a prime example of why Dr Who needs to have at least
one human character in there somewhere to make us care. By the time the Doctor
and Romana have finished pontificating from a timelord point of view and the
old ones have discussed pre-history with them that leaves us with Adric’s eyes
to see things through – and he isn’t even from our sodding universe but
e-space, so he still knows things that we don’t, while Adric’s cynical eyes aren’t
the best eyes to see anything through! Talking of which, e-space is barely
mentioned this story too; the others either side of it, ‘Full Circle’ and ‘Warrior’s Gate’, are all about getting
stuck in this scary dimension away from ‘normal space’ where everyone might get
trapped forever, part of JNT’s desire to make Dr Who more like his beloved
soaps, with stories that criss-cross each other and link up; this planet might
as well be in our ‘n’ space too for all the effect it has on the plot (which
goes to great lengths to say that the vampires were once ‘everywhere’). It
would help this story a lot if we got to know and like the villagers properly,
so that we had a, ahem, ‘stake’ in their future and was rooting for The Doctor
to help them. Instead he doesn’t even meet them: it’s Adric who has that
sub-plot. K9 is badly served again in what will be his penultimate adventure:
he isn’t confined to the Tardis but The Doctor spends the whole story telling
him to shut up (even though he should know by now it’s probably important) and
K9 sort of trundles along in the background not doing much. There’s way more
talking than in any other vampire work ever put on film, with more nattering
than biting and it’s all oddly low on action, thrills spills and kills for a
story that’s all about blood-sucking mutants. That’s why the guidebook
impressions of this story always feel so ‘wrong’: the plot synopsis sounds like
its full of staking and blood, but they’re background details for what’s at the
real heart of this story, two different ideologies that can’t both exist (and
in true Dr Who fashion the one that’s fairest for everyone is going to win out
over the one that benefits the few at the expense of the many).
That said, in many ways
that’s a relief: you know what’s going to happen in every variation of
‘Dracula’, starting with the BBC version it was feared this story would
lampoon. This story is still more ‘Quatermass’ than ‘Dracula’ when you get down
to it (including the tank of blood, funnily enough). ‘State Of Decay’ is
superior to most vampire tales because it keeps you guessing how things are
going to turn out with a clever script that’s full of twists and turns and lots
of great individual scenes to sink your teeth into along the way. This is a
great little Dr Who story, even if it disappoints a few people by being a poor
vampire story: even Mary Whitehouse found nothing to complain about (though The
House of Lords did. There’s been a push from environmentalists to make bats ‘friendly’
and there were complaints Dr Who had undone a decade’s work. Though they hadn’t
really: if anything I only wanted one as a pet more after this story). While
this isn’t one of those Dr Who stories that’s perfect all the way through there
are lots of great little scenes, a lot of which weren’t in the original script,
from Tom Baker’s injoke quoting Hamlet (in the summer break Lalla Ward had played
Ophelia in the BBC production of it that went out on air during this story’s
rehearsal) to his joke misquoting Alexander Pope (‘What is, is right’ becomes
the more Doctory ‘What is, is wrong’) to the Tardis scanner now apparently
getting Ceefax (I like to think everyone sat around playing ‘Interplanetary
Bamboozle’. Well, the 5th
Doctor did keep releasing quiz books with his face on them in the next
few years!) Yes the set does look a bit too ‘castlely’ but the colour scheme,
moody red blacks and greys, is really effective and the ‘Saxon’ look works well
(The Doctor is clearly joking and/or disarming the vampires when he remarks to
Romana that it’s ‘Rococo’). For once the lighting has been turned down to make
it seem as spooky as it ought to be (Lalla, who’d had some fan letters about
how upset children were at the ‘crumbling to dust’ sequence in ‘The Horns Of Nimon’, insisted the shot be
almost in the dark this time around so you couldn’t see what was going on.
Which only made it scarier!) The acting, too, is strong throughout and even if
everyone making this story is having a miserable time they still give their
all. Mostly. If you’re watching this purely to be scared and to see los of
blood gushing from every orifice then you’re likely to be disappointed, but if
you’re more into existential scares that curdle the blood in a philosophical
sense rather than jump-screams then there’s much to enjoy. I for one prefer
that, so fangs very much!
POSITIVES + There’s a
great finale (spoilers) in which it looks as if Adric has sided with the
baddies and an unconscious Romana is about to be sacrificed that’s solved not
because of the usual ‘wave a sonic screwdriver at the problem to make it go
away’ or even K9’s laser beams but because of the events across the rest of the
story that the Doctor has inspired, stirring up a rebellion that should have
started a long time ago (as per ‘The Space
Museum’). It’s enough to make you want to turn off your TV sets and pick up
your burning pitchforks and join in, which after all is also what this show is
all about. Hoisting the Great Vampire on his own petard (well, turret) is a
just and proper end too.
NEGATIVES - Usually I
stick up for Matthew Waterhouse and Adric. After so many stories with Romana as
an equal it was about time we had a youngster wet around the ears and as
teenage prodigies go Adric has a lot more going for him and is a lot less
drippy than, say, Wesley Crusher. Matthew, too, copes admirably with a
one-dimensional character who’s personality changes script by script
considering his age and that he’d done barely any acting before this. The
production team truly shot themselves in the foot making this Adric’s second
story though: the Adric of ‘Full Circle’ gains our sympathies through all the
awful things that happen to him but here Adric as at his worst, reckless,
unrealistically naive and putting his foot in it more times than a
Sensorite-Voord lovechild. It’s this story, more than any other, that makes you
want to punch the annoying brat and throw him to the vampires and if this was
the production team’s idea of what their core teenage audience was like then it’s
no wonder the viewing figures begin to drop off alarmingly from hereon in.
Reportedly nobody told Lalla Ward about the cast change until the first day of
rehearsal (this story being filmed before ‘Full Circle’) and she assumed it was
a bad joke. Many fans still do.
BEST QUOTE: Romana: ‘How long have things been like this?’
Kalmar: ‘Forever. The lords rule in the tower; the peasants toil in the fields.
Nothing has changed in over a thousand years’.
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘Blood Harvest’ (1994), the 28th
‘New Adventures Novel’, features a return for The Great Ones. The long awaited
return from Terrance Dicks for the first time since the range launched three
years earlier, it’s not quite as eye-opening and ‘adult’ as his ‘Timewyrm’
novels but it’s close and is, I would say, the most ‘Torchwood’ of 20th
century Who. The Tardis lands at a Speakeasy in Chicago in 1929 where a bunch
of aliens are swigging booze and threatening each other with big shooty weapons
– with the 7th Doctor, Ace (‘The Lady In Black’) and Benny in on a
piece of the action. Worse, the nightclub is called ‘Docs’ and he appears to be
the proprietor with Al Capone out for his blood, while Ace falls for private
eye investigator Dekker (with some quite intense sex scenes that will change
how you see the teenage TV Ace forever more). Benny has the most interesting
sub-plot though, being stranded in e-space on whatever the planet from ‘State
Of Decay’ was called, with a bunch of vampires who are then rescued in a
surprise cameo by Romana on her way back from ‘Warrior’s Gate’
(they don’t get on!) Terrance cleverly interweaves and mirrors both story’s
plotlines, showing how corruption and breaking the law is a universe-wide
problem all sentient creatures face and it’s quite a clever plot, with Agonel a
worthy meddling villain in a ‘Monk’ type way, before making way for more
regular Who villain Borusa near the end for a sequence on Gallifrey intended to
wrap everything up. There’s a nice lot of humour too, as Terrance laughs a lot
at the sort of things he used to stick in every Target novel going (Ace thinks
anyone who hears the Tardis materialisation as a ‘wheezing groaning sound’ must
be an idiot!) One of the better ‘New Adventures’ books around, though it’s a
shame we’re still told about the Great Ones being a threat rather than actually
seeing it. Their bark is again worse than their bite – which is a bit off for
Vampires when you think about it.
‘Goth Opera’ (1994), a missing adventure novel by Paul
Cornell, was released hard on Blood Harvest’s blood-drenched heels and is often
viewed as a sequel even if it isn’t one officially. As the striking cover gives
away this is mostly a Nyssa story in which the Trakenite is turned into a
vampire, much to the 5th Doctor and Tegan’s horror (and British
newsagent W H Smith’s: they refused to stock the first version with a
blood-stained cover in the children’s department where they usually kept their
Dr Who books, so the final result only has Nyssa with fangs). What’s weirder is
that we’re not in e-space but Manchester in the 1990s: I don’t remember this
happening in real life, so we must be in another of those pesky alternate
universes. Nyssa is bitten by accident by a ‘Great One’ baby who assumes she’s
The Doctor (had they heard about the gender change of Dr 13?) The person
setting the trap for The Doctor turns out to be a part timelord, part Vampire
hybrid named Ruath whose a worthy foe, although this hammer horror pastiche
uses all its cards early on and doesn’t have many other places to go past the
halfway mark. Cornell himself later claimed to hate this book although it has
quite a fan following: this is one of those books you tend to either love or
loathe, depending on how much you love blood and gore. Me? It’s kind of okay –
hearing the Big Finish version (in their short-lived ‘novel adaptations’
series) is much more interesting than reading the book itself for me, given how our regulars
are forced to play against type (and are really rather good!)
‘Blood Invocation’ is a 5th Doctor comic
strip again written by Paul Cornell and drawn by John Ridgeway from the 1995 Dr
Who Yearbook. An Ancient One has made his way to Gallifrey to munch on a
timelord blood sandwich (‘or my ancestors: a distant dream, for me:
breakfast!’) and after the Gallifreyans find a dead body drained of blood in
the panoptican they hastily call in The Doctor to help, figuring for some odd reason
he’d be best placed to deal with them.
He discovers that the dead timelord was part of the cult of Rassilon and knows
that vampires can cause dead timelords to rise. Meanwhile poor Tegan’s got a
cold and has gone to sleep in the Tardis, leaving Nyssa to have all the fun,
when the vampire runs into the Tardis and attacks her, causing her to become
possessed and in turn attack The Doctor and make him fly across the universe planet
by planet so he can take it over, starting with Earth. Nyssa gets to save the
day for once by doing something very clever with the Tardis time controls and the
vampire simply fades away from view, leaving a groggy Tegan wondering what’s
going on and The Doctor giving a lecture about how some vampire DNA still
exists on Earth. A bit hard to follow, with the Rassilon plot dropped too
early, but this is one of the best looking comic strips of the lot with
Ridgeway really capturing the likenesses of the trio of regulars, plus some
great Hammer Horror shots of the vampire mid-kill.
‘State Of Decay’ is also the 4th Doctor
story referenced in the first McGann novel ‘The Eight Doctors’, written by
Terrance Dicks (1996). The 8th Doctor has amnesia and is passing
through his older selves in an attempt to jog his memory. Which is just as well
because his 4th self is in trouble. The Great Ones kidnap Romana
(unseen on screen) and hold her ransom as a bargaining chip for The Doctor coming
to get her and becoming their new King and Queen. He refuses, they bite back (quite
literally) and soon he’s on the floor dying and losing pints of blood, three
vampires to each leg and two to each of his arms (it tastes sweet,
apparently).Romana flees into the forest hoping to get to her Tardis and
Adric/K9. Instead she runs into the ‘wrong’ Tardis and is most confused to meet
Dr 8 (she comments that he’s just as fond at giving lectures in both
regenerations!) Who better to give yourself a blood transfusion than your older
self though? As ever Terrance nails the 4th Doctor’s steel behind
his flippant remarks and has more fun with this sequence than any in the book,
even if it does seem to contradict quite a lot of his own original story.
You have to feel for the poor 8th Doctor.
All his early adventures tend to be biggies: in the TV Movie he’s up against
The Master, over in book form he has his memory wiped in ‘The Eight Doctors’ and
no sooner is he back to himself again then here, in his second book, he’s dealing
with The Great Ones again. ‘Vampire Science’ (1997), a rare collaboration, by
Kate Orman and Jonathan Blum, is really more a book about new companion Sam
though. Terrance Dicks barely had time to sketch her in across ‘8 Doctors’ but
this book gives her character and she’s an under-rated, often overlooked
character in the Whoniverse I think, as lovable as Rose, practical and worldly
wise as Martha and as sarcastic to passing aliens as Donna. Once again there
are vampires on Earth and, unlikely as it may seem, we’re back in San Francisco
again (from The Doctor’s point of view that’s two journeys out of three that
have landed there, despite having a whole universe to explore!) Putting his
detective hat on, The Doctor works out (a bit too quickly) that the only thing
linking mysterious deaths is a nightclub known as ‘The Other Place’ with Sam
undercover as a ‘medical student’ (very Martha) while The Doctor disappears to
do doctory stuff. Inevitably she gets bitten by vampires while a bonkers ending
sees vampires turn Human after drinking timelord blood. Good for the
characterisation, not so much for the plot.
Previous ‘Full
Circle’
next ‘Warrior’s Gate’
No comments:
Post a Comment