State Of Decay: Ranking - 143

   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?!' 

I came to ‘State Of Decay’ near-last out of the ‘old’ 20^th century DWs and, well, let’s just say it wasn’t quite what I expected from the guidebooks and what seemed a straightforward story about vampires from, in Terrance Dicks, one of DW’s most refreshingly straightforward writers and a story made in the early JNT era when DW was as straightforward as it ever gets. This story is...weird. It’s hard to put your finger on why, as all the hammer horror cliches are there (albeit in a very DW scifi rather than true blood-curdling way) and yet nothing in this story is quite what it seems at all. The haunted castle is actually a rocket and that the trio of vampires we meet are the survivors of a ship that crashed in e-space, mutating into vampires (though quite how that mutation happens is never really explained).These vampires aren’t outcasts living on the fringes of society – they are the society, the masters and rulers of an empire and their castle isn’t relegated to some out of bounds castle but overshadows everything else. The ‘state of decay’ in the title refers not to them so much as the planet and the masses on it and while the vampires can drink blood directly they mostly live off ‘energy’ in a more general scifi ‘Savages’ type way (you’ll have to wait for the Plasmavores in ‘Smith and Jones’ for DW’s first true blood-sucking monsters). Weirdest of all, despite the Medieval vibes, this lot are technologically amongst the most advanced race we’ve ever seen in the series, their abilities as advanced as the timelords. 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’ DW finally got round to doing a story about vampires, but they don’t look much like my namesake Robert Pattinson. 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? All that said anyone watching DW for goth kicks will like ‘State Of Decay’ a lot, a story which features as many of the ‘Addams Family’ cliches inside 100 minutes as it can: secret towers, dark lighting, bats, lots of blood. The vampires are, in so many ways, one of the deadliest of all DW foes, with a history as old as the timelords and lots of mentions of the power they contain – yet there’s little in the script that actually shows such a power. Instead ‘Decay’ is more of a comedy script, something which might be explained by the fact that is a hasty re-write in the more kiddie-friendly era of the series, rather than the horror-filled Phillip Hinchcliffe era it was pitched for (the story was turned down by the BBC controller in 1977 not, as it happens, for any violence that might have given Mary Whitehouse kittens but because the BBC had just done a ‘straight’ drama of ‘Dracula’ and they feared some of the plot twists made their big epic look like a parody; by chance this story ended up going out just when the new romantic movement was making goth trendy again and couldn’t have been better timed – much of this story looks like a Siouxsie and the banshees promo). Really, though, it’s not a story about vampires at all but a typical DW (and very typical Terrance Dicks) story about growing up and learning to become independent, without trusting the people around you at face value. 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 (they’re our Royal Family basically, complete with crowns). The vampires’ bloodsuckingness is really just a clever metaphor for that old DW favourite class and society, where the people in charge are stinking rich and the people who work under them just stinking, taken to extremes. Adric, the new Alazarian on the block in his second story, finds to his cost repeatedly that aliens aren’t all as benevolent as the Doctor, Romana too struggles to be as independent as usual and gets rescued a lot (presumably the original script was written for Sarah Jane) 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. A lot of people have a very different world view by the end of this episode and that includes the viewer. The vampires, after all, are defeated by the Doctor not in the usual hammer horror way but through intelligence (best line: ‘he has the greatest weapon of all...knowledge!’) after years of banning education on this planet just in case anyone else figures that out too – and if that line doesn’t summarise DW in a nutshell I don’t know what does (it was, after all, first pitched as being ‘educational’ every bit as much as it was ‘entertainment’), although its typical of this story that we get the stake-through=-the-heart cliche at the end anyway, in deeply odd circumstances (spoilers: the vampires’ own castle is really a rocket ship and its that which is used as the stake!) There are lots of clever moments in this story that make it more than just your run-of-the-mill vampire story, with more to sink your teeth into than most. Not everything works though admittedly: this story is a prime example of why DW 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! 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; this planet might as well be in our space too for all the effect it has on the plot (which goes to great lengths to say that the vampires were once ‘everywhere’). With all this talking going on you rather long to have some more of the vampire cliches too and the fake flying bats just don’t cut it. This is a story which is oddly low on action, thrills spills and kills for a story that’s all about blood-sucking mutants, something which makes ‘State Of Decay’ one of the more dated DW stories. 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. ‘State Of Decay’ keeps you guessing how things are going to turn out throughout with a clever script that’s full of twists and turns and goes for existential scares that curdle the blood in a philosophical sense rather than jump-screams. And I for one prefer that. So fangs very much!

+ 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. 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.

- 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. It’s about time that the series, looking for a younger audience, had a juvenile character viewers could relate to, like the olden days of Susan and Vicki. Matthew, too, copes admirably with a one-dimensional character whose 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 leave him behind and if this was the production team’s idea of what their core teenage audience was like then its 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 recording (this story being filmed before ‘Full Circle’) and she assumed it was a bad joke. Many fans still assume it was.