The Horror Of Fang Rock: Ranking - 117

       The Horror Of Fang Rock

(Season 15, DR 4 with Leela, 3-24/9/1977, producer: Graham Williams, script editor: Robert Holmes, writer: Terrance Dicks, director: Paddy Russell) 

Rank: 117

  'Three men dwell on Fang Rock to keep the lamp alight

For years they've gone to sleep these three expecting to make it through the night

But when a ship lands with passengers big and green we know they won't be alright

A passing policebox time machine now joins our tale

It travelled the sky as sturdy and yet as smooth as a whale

It's inhabitants, be-scarfed be-knifed, were close on the alien's tail

The alien blob, all big and green, it began to gloat

And soon I'd come to realise this thing wasn't local and hadn't come by boat

The lighthouse keepers were now in too deep and had no way to stay afloat

Before too long, through trickery, the Doctor deposed the rutan

How he did it I can't fair say - I didn't see much shooting

I think he did it with science, or something equally high falluting

The rescuers came next day with a sense of dread

Wondering how three such healthy men and guests could be so very dead

While over us in the sky shot a light all purple-red

So departs our lighthouse tale where aliens run amok

Where time was stopped as surely as if you'd trapped the hands of a clock

So perish sailors of the sea when meeting green blobby aliens on Fang Rock'

 

The second Doctor era developed a whole new strand of stories fans refer to as ‘base under siege’ plots where a small remote colony of Humans on the moon/on Mars/an oil rig/London Underground/Tibet/a holiday camp run by alien crabs get picked off one by one. Practically every variation on this formula was tried by the time Patrick Troughton regenerated into Jon Pertwee but one of the obvious ideas they never attempted was a lighthouse. It seems obvious in retrospect: an isolated place where humanity is cut off every bit as much as they were in space or at the South Pole, with only one basic set to build and a small guest cast. Even more so given the source material was, back in 1977, almost as famous as other Dr Who sources like Dracula and Frankenstein: the poem ‘The Ballad Of Flannan Isle’ about a mysterious lurking presence that drove three heroic young lads to their deaths is as Who-ish as plots come – it’s even quoted by the Doctor right at the end of the story and given its 1912 dating could feasibly be when this story is set too (‘Fang Rock’ is a rare story from the past where nobody gives a date but is clearly ‘Edwardian’ and somewhere between 1901 and 1914, the first time we’ve properly been to this time period rather than as part of a miniscope zoo; don’t ask), although you have to squint a bit to make the green blobby Rutans the ‘strange shaped birds’ in the poem (they do come from space though).

Script editor Robert Holmes hired his old boss Terrance Dicks to write it, so Terrance said, ‘in revenge’ for being asked to write ‘The Time Warrior’ set in the Middle Ages, a time Bob neither knew much about nor cared for (‘Go have a look in the library then’ was Dicks’ cheeky reply to one of his best mates). When Terrance protested he knew nothing about lighthouses or Edwardians he got told to head to the library too, ‘but the children’s section – where the facts are clearer and easier to understand’. The problem Terrance had, though, was that the story was written in something of a rush without the time for any real research: he’d been away from the series he’d once been in charge of for a couple of years writing ‘Target’ novelisations with the offer that, as someone who’d created the 4^th Doctor and knew the limitations of the series really well, the production team could always ring him up in an emergency. Well, this was an emergency: the transmission dates for the series had been pulled forward on a whim of the BBc which meant more work earlier in the year. That was a problem because both Bob and producer Phillip Hinchcliffe were leaving and their replacements Anthony Read and Graham Williams were still busy at their old posts. What Bob really needed was a nice easy script from an old reliable friend to stick first in the series’ running order. Dicks was totally wiling and had the perfect idea: unfortunately for them both his idea was to do the single most obvious hammer horror source the series hadn’t done yet: Dracula. Perfect said Bob, especially when Terrance talked about how vampires were an age-old foe of the timelords and a script was delivered characteristically on time and within budget. Only Terrance was out of touch with what was going on in other departments and the BBC high-ups, who’d mostly left the Who team alone in these years when they were such a ratings winner, got in touch with a panic: they’d already given the go-ahead to a colossal BBC-America crossover series ‘Dracula’ that was going to be one of the most lavish and ambitious series they’ ever made. It was hoped too that this was to be, not just a one-off, but the start of a long partnership where BBC expertise and experience were combined with actual money and they worried that if Dr Who did their own low budget version, a mere few weeks later, it would look like they were laughing at their American friends. The script got binned (until being revived, three years later, as ‘State Of Decay’). Terrance offered to help all over again, going back to the drawing board with a stiff drink and a copy of ‘Lighthouses, Lightships and Buoys’ by E G Jerome from his local library (which the Doctor quotes from liberally across the episode when explaining things to Leela). Oh and in case you’re wondering why they didn’t simply switch stories around the next one, ‘The Invisible Enemy’, introduced K9 but they didn’t yet know if the prop was workable enough to be filmed so had to have a story to before it; Terrance, who knew all about the problems they were likely to have with a robot dog on wheels (and was never terribly fond of K9, only writing for him in the brief cameo in ‘The Five Doctors’ where he’s left at home), may have cheekily suggested a building with a bucketload of stairs just to make sure he wouldn’t have to write the dog in!

Dicks also had a few sources in mind, genuine tales of lighthouses that had been found abandoned and empty (it had long been a long standing joke of the production team in the 1970s that new writers struggling for ideas and in a hurry might like to consider stories along the line of ‘what caused the Marie Celeste mystery?’ in deference to ‘The Chase’ where it was caused by the Daleks scaring everyone overboard). There are lots of them in English folklore: ‘Flannan Isle’, a poem by William Gibson, was published in 1923 about a mystery that took place over the Winter of 1900-01 and is the one quoted by the Doctor at story’s end; another is ‘The Fog Horn’ a short story by Ray Bradbury, one time writer for Who’s American cousin ‘The Twilight Zone’, about a dinosaur that somehow survived in the sea (like Nessie!) scared away from a remote post by the sound of their warning siren; there was a folk story, too, about a lighthouse in Pembrokeshire in 1801 when one of the two-man crew drowned in an accident and the other went mad, unable to contact the mainland and convinced he’d be hanged for murder on the discovery, driven mad by nightmares of his friend’s ghost coming back to haunt and taunt him. The wonder, really, was that no one had made a ‘lighthouse’ Who story before, both back in the Troughton days when every other remote base going was attacked by monsters and earlier in the Phillip Hinchcliffe years when the show’s raison daitre was to scare above all things. 

   

The result was a story that nobody actually wanted to make. Terrance found it a struggle coming up with what was close enough to a polished draft first time out, without much time to correct it. Bob was already rushed off his feet and distracted trying to get his other scripts for season fifteen to work (technically he’s credited as script editor on ‘The Invisible Enemy’ and ‘Image Of The Fendahl’, commissioned from other old reliable friends doing him a favour, Dave Martin and Bob Baker plus Chris Boucher, but had a hand in the rest of the season too). Director Paddy Russell, who’d been excited to work with vampires, was appalled: a big round lighthouse in a cramped space was no good for camera shots and wasn’t sure how she was ever going to film at the top of one, even a mock-up one, with all the glass up top without it reflecting the camera angles. The cast were hired in something of a hurry, based more on people that owed a favour to the director rather than because they were right for their jobs. Biggest problem of all: the delays in writing this story and the slow speed at which BBC bureaucracy worked meant that all studios at television centre in London were booked so, for the only time in the entire run of the original run of the series, Dr Who moved premises to Birmingham’s Pebble Mill. Though the technicians were enthusiastic and helpful to the extreme, eager to work on a programme that was held with such love and esteem that was so much more exciting than their usual documentary and magazine-based programmes, they had never made a drama before. And Dr Who was far from your usual drama. The cast, too, had a lot of grumbles about having to trundle so far away from home to make this programme and having to find new accommodation for the month or so this story took to make. The irony, too, of making a story all about an English lighthouse in the middle of the country, with Birmingham only a few miles away from being the place in England furthest away from the sea! (In case you’re wondering ‘Fang Rock’ is a real place a few miles off the coast of Southampton, so the Edwardian boat must have crashed almost immediately after leaving port). The general consensus from those making this story was that it was a flawed story, one that seemed silly and cheap when they were making it and which suffered even more than usual from the usual Dr Who twin dilemmas of never having enough time or money.  

And yet something about this story seems to have clicked in post-production. Terrance’s scripts, thin on his usual characterisation and detail, seemed streamlined and tense when all the scenes were stacked alongside each other, without the usual luxury of sub-plots or big themes getting in the way of a huge fight for survival. The acting, which nobody was taking that seriously in rehearsals, suddenly came alive when the scenes were edited. The tiny cramped sets, that were so uncomfortable when everyone was making this story, ended up making everything seem really claustrophobic and more atmospheric than anyone realised. And the five foot model lighthouse, which couldn’t be surrounded by water (because water and electricity in TV studios don’t mix) and which had to be replaced by the low-key effect of salt being rippled against black sheeting, blown by electric fans in slowed down film (an effect nobody said would ever work in a month of Edwardian Sundays) ended up being really effective. Against the odds ‘Horror Of Fang Rock’ ended up being one of Who’s most celebrated stories by fans who didn’t know that events behind the scenes had been almost as tense as on them.

One of the story’s biggest critics was Tom Baker, who regularly held up production to complain about the script, the production, his fellow actors, the director or all four. There’s a story that the director overheard the Pebble Mill employees (who only vaguely knew who he was) plotting to ‘accidentally’ knock him out with a crane for some rude remark before she stepped in and stopped them. This is also the occasion when Louise Jameson, riled by his constant put-downs and criticisms during her first three stories and reluctant to come back to the series at all until a kindly uplifting intervention from new producer Graham, finally had enough and snapped at him, with one of the biggest inter-actor rows in series history. And yet Tom is at his best in ‘Fang Rock’.

 This is the first chance Terrance has had to write for the 4^th Doctor he’d pretty much created three years before (give or take ‘The Brain Of Morbius’, a story so heavily re-written by Bob that Terrance said he recognised very little of his own work in there) and he makes him much like he was in ‘Robot’: alien, unknowable, living to a very different set of values to the Humans around him and making grim jokes at the most inopportune moments because he doesn’t understand social niceties anymore. He is, if you will, the polar opposite of Dick’s beloved 3^rd Doctor (whom the writer also pretty much created): no longer grandfatherly, with a cape to ‘mother hen’ lost companions’ and on a crusade to save everyone he can on his adopted home planet, instead this Doctor is truly alien and frequently callous, treating the people around him like pets on a different level to him. The 4^th Doctor is dangerous in a way the 3^rd never was, unpredictable and not necessarily an equal match for the latest foe (until he is, at the last moment). It’s a good match putting this Doctor, the one least likely to travel back to the past (The Renaissance of ‘The Masque Of Mandragora’ and a brief trip to see Leonardo Da Vinci in ‘City Of Death’ and that’s it) to a time when Humans lived by a code of behaviour that was stronger than ever, with respectability meaning everything to an English gentleman or Lady – and absolutely nothing to a giant green blob from outer space. Very few ‘Bakerisms’ survive this story, the director at loggerheads from the first (Baker took to calling the female director Paddy Russell ‘sir’): one that did is a good one though, the Doctor commenting that a weapon is an ‘early Schmeurly’ (it would have been too, with boat flares kept for moments of distress a Victorian invention by an inventor called Schmeur, as the well-read Baker knew well).  

This is the only time Dicks ever writes for Leela and that’s a shame because the writer nails her character too (give or take a few script revisions Louis asked for, mostly moments when Leela screamed in a very traditional way): she’s not like these class-ridden Edwardians either: she lives by her senses and hunter’s instinct, every bit the animal and savage the Rutan thinks all Humans are. As much as her character arc is about becoming more of a person and thinker (what a lot of writers miss is that Leela is highly intelligent, just inexperienced at anything that needs intelligence) ‘Fang Rock’ shows why she might be better off as an animal. After all, had this been a traditional companion, had this been Susan or Sarah Jane or better yet Harry you suspect they’d have been Rutan-food by the end of the first episode. Even so, Terrance makes her more vulnerable than other writers do: even though she’s the ‘savage’ she’s often the most civilised and caring person there (especially as the Doctor’s in one of his ‘moods’) and Louise Jameson adds a layer of warmth missing from the Doctor this week. It’s a big relief that they managed to persuade her to put up with Tom Baker’s moods a bit longer (though it was a condition of her new contract that Louise could drop the contact lenses she’s been using to make her eyes brown, which was thought to be more like a ‘savage’ for some reason, and which were giving her pain; Holmes very cleverly inserts a bit at the end of the story where she glances at the destroyed Rutan spaceship and the light is bright enough to change the pigment of her eyes ‘back’ to their natural blue).

Clearly if you’re going to have a low-budget story with few sets and not many cast members you need a big danger to put people into. Terrance has another great joke at Bob’s expense here, perhaps still miffed at the re-writes over ‘Morbius’ and decides to use his own unseen creations. Back in ‘The Time Warrior’, the story Bob really didn’t want to write, we were introduced to The Sontarons and their centuries-long war against The Rutans, an event that we were told had decimated Earth’s half of the galaxy with our own Mutter Spiral on the fringes of the war. Both sides were fierce warriors who had no interest in any of the neutral planets they came across in their endless fight and Terrance had always wondered why, if this was war so big, we’d never seen more evidence of it or indeed what The Rutans looked like. So he ‘reinvented’ them for this story, making them into everything he thought was the antithesis of the bulky, stocky, solid Sontarons. Instead of being chunky and immovable they were amorphous, instead of being land-dwellers they were amphibious, instead of brown skin they glowed bright green. It’s hard to imagine a Sontaron getting very far stomping round a lighthouse without accidentally blasting himself with his own gun, but a shape-shifting Rutan, sneaky and cunning and able to hide in dark corners, was just the thing. The Rutans aren’t what anyone was expecting – least of all Holmes probably, though he let this script through without many alterations. They are, in many ways, the weakest aspect of the story, looking just like a bunch of green bubble-wrap (again! See ‘The Ark In Space’) without any real set motivation or drive (it’s never fully explained in the script why a lone Rutan suddenly decides that Earth would be a good place to use in their ongoing war here, in this time period, or why they think studying Humans on a remote lighthouse is necessary, although it totally makes sense that their plan for invasion is to do things sneakily and stealthily, through research, where the Sontarons would go blundering in. Although interestingly they’re victims in a way, turning up on Earth by accident in the same way as the Edwardians. However ultimately the Doctor still fights them off after talking to one the way he always does, if only to stop the Sontarons intercepting their SOS and killing humanity instead; even so I’d be a bit miffed if I was a Rutan relative wondering what had happened to my green and blobby loved ones. They only get to speak properly and explain themselves once, when they’ve possessed poor lighthouse keeper Reubens, and they’re not the chattiest of monsters even then so we don’t get many scenes of the Doctor engaging with them. After three episodes of build-up, with really effective ‘Rutan point of view’ camera shots, many alien possessions and nasty deaths, you end up imagining more than the script can ever deliver and a green jellyfish doesn’t look like the biggest threat in the universe. Even then, though, there’s a certain look to the Rutans that’s really effective, the Pebble Mill technicians achieving the monster’s inner green glow by short-fusing the electricity from the next door studio in their lunch break to make it work (and rushing to put it all back before ‘Pebble Mill At One’ started!)

Talking of electricity, that’s how the Rutans kill their victims with great sparks, apparently making good use of the equipment stored in the lighthouse. Which raises an interesting point. Back in the Edwardian age electricity was still a fairly new invention – new enough that Reuben, the elder lighthouse keeper, is still complaining that it taint’ natural and how he’s worked with gas for most of his life. Adapting to your surroundings is a common theme of Dr Who and the Rutans, like many monsters, appear to have the upper hand by adapting a human’s environment against them (at least until – spoilers – the Doctor uses it against them, adapting the light into a lazer beam with the help of a giant crystal in one of the actually more logical endings to 1970s Who stories). Yet, for what must surely be the only time in a Who story, technology is a ‘bad’ thing. Presumably this story would never have happened if the Fang Rock lighthouse had stuck with gas (unless the Rutans could adapt that too, like The Gelth in ‘The Unquiet Dead’). Vince, the younger lighthouse keeper who fully believes electricity is the future and the sort of plucky young kid who usually survives through to the end, dies a horrible death at the hands of what he always believed would be the future. Clearly, too the Rutan-Sontaron war has got out of hand now that its spread to innocent planets that haven’t got a clue what’s going on. Is there a parable hidden in this story about the dangers of the ‘star wars’ arms race and the cold war? About how we would be better off living off instinct like Leela, rather than through supposed ‘civilised’ ideas like the Edwardians we meet in this story? Because to a Rutan all humans are lunch and of no account in the context of a bigger war, however intelligent and well-bred they might be. What’s interesting, though, is how the Doctor and to a lesser extent Leela extol the virtues of science throughout this story, claiming it to be better than superstition – there’s even a point where Leela ticks off Edwardian strumpet Adelaide for believing in horoscopes when they are a ‘waste of time’. And yet these superstitions are more ‘accurate’ in so many ways: had everyone heeded Vince getting the heebeegeejeebies at the beginning then the lighthouse staff at least might all have survived. 

The Edwardians are another of the weakest aspect of this story. That’s not, as Tom Baker made clear during filming, because they’re bad actors, friends of the director or newcomers he didn’t think were up to scratch because they very much are. The problem is with the script: Dicks has written himself into a corner, trying to invert the usual Dr Who thing of making the past come alive and have people seem like us but in fancy dress by having them all seem as alien to us as the Rutans (well, nearly). We’re meant to laugh, along with the Doctor, when a boatload of posh people end up washed ashore, their priorities totally wrong for the mindset of survival. After all, none of the things they’ve striven so hard for across their lives matters anymore. Palmerstone, the respected gentleman fallen on hard times whose worked so hard to claw his way back up the establishment and find work as an MP, apparently serving his constituency while really mostly serving himself, finds that all the class and breeding in the world won’t protect him from Rutan invasion. Skinsale is his polar opposite, someone that people of the day would put down as being ‘new money’ with more resources but none of the class, coarse and vulgar – yet he can’t throw money at the Rutans and make them go away. He’s the one character who had a chance of surviving this massacre and wastes it going back for the bag of diamonds the Doctor senselessly tosses aside in the big finale. Adelaide, meanwhile, is the wet (quite literally in her first scene) Edwardian Lady trying to climb the social ladder as Skinsale’s secretary, but you can’t marry your way to power with a Rutan (besides, bright green blobby things look rubbish in a tuxedo). All three are totally ill-equipped to deal with this crisis, which is the entire point of them. However Terrance has done his job a bit too well: they’re so unlikeable ‘Fang Rock’ is at its most heavy going when they’re on screen arguing amongst themselves and the Doctor or Leela aren’t; it’s rather a relief when Leela slaps Adelaide into silence from her hysterics and you only wish she’d done the same to the others (it’s a real slap too, not a pretend one: Annette Woollett grew close to Louise during filming and really encouraged to go all out during the take to make it look ‘real’).

There’s another sort of half-theme here, too, of communications. ‘Fang Rock’ is as isolated as you can get in the British isles. The lighthouse keepers only have occasional brief contacts with the land and don’t expect to see anybody except themselves (the wreck is a once-in-a-lifetime event even without Rutan invasions going on). The staff try to cling on to Edwardian civilisation, though, even while they’re so far removed from it, having a set hierarchy and full dress even in the most hostile of weather conditions, even though the sea cares as little for their welfare as a Rutan scout-ship. They can never be fully involved with what’s happening on the mainland, though, cut off as they are: back then news travelled slowly even across land never mind the sea. Their only link to the outside is morse code, another new invention that’s positively useless against Rutans. Their enemies, by contrast, are all ‘one’ – every Rutan has access to everything every Rutan knows and can pass that knowledge along, with a whacking big Rutan mothership not far behind the scout. This is what makes the Rutans such a threat: to defeat one you have to defeat them all, in contrast to the squabbling Humans who are all at each other’s throats in their own petty squabbles to begin with. If ‘Fang Rock’ is a cold war parable then are the Rutans the communist Russian army who all work as one? And if so are the Europeans/Americans so busy squabbling amongst themselves they’re not ready for them? It wouldn’t be the first Dr Who story to have a view like that.

Of course mostly ‘Fang Rock’ is just a story about survival and a highly gripping one at that. It’s a story that really makes the most of what little resources it has: while we only see a box room, a dining area, the lamp room and some stairs, that all adds to the oppressive atmosphere and it really does feel as if we’re crammed along with the cameras into a real tiny lighthouse rather than watching actors in a set in a TV studio. It’s a real shame that pebble Mill only ever made this one story because, basic as it is, they instinctively ‘get’ how to make Dr Who and lavish love and attention on it in a way the show hadn’t been given for years back in London. The result is like one of those nature dramas about the survival of the fittest and it’s pretty much the only time in Dr Who history where everybody we meet dies, except the Doctor and companion: all the supporting cast, even the monsters, are all dead by the end. No wonder they wrote poems about this lighthouse and the people missing, even though the Humans who discovered the empty building didn’t know the half of it!. This is one of those stories that arguably works better now than it would have done at the time too: it’s one of those rare Dr Whos best seen all in one go, rather than across four weeks as per 1977, with the tension mounting with every twist and turn and modern viewers know all about the concept of ‘escape rooms’ and having to escape a threat against a tight ticking deadline better than they would have done in 1977.

Despite the limited characters and resources the story is rarely dull (it does sag a little in the middle, but less than most four parters from the 1970s) and Dicks throws in lots of surprising twists and turns, especially which characters snuff it and in which order (an Agatha Christie fan, Dicks said he saw this as a variation on ‘And Then There Were None’, albeit with the murderer turning out to be a giant green blob rather than a body that apparently snuffed it early on). The story shows signs of being written in a hurry in places but also had some truly great lines (‘That’s the empty rhetoric of a defeated dictator’ the Doctor ticks off the green-blobbed Rutan at one point when he hears his full plan ‘And I don’t like your face either!’) and more jump-scares than most Dr Who stories (including some great cliffhangers – especially the third, when the Dr admits to locking the Rutan in with everyone instead of locking it out). The result is a story that doesn’t really do much that other Dr Who stories don’t do and often in a far simpler way, with the focus being squarely on ‘whose going to get out of this alive?’ Yet while not the deepest or most sophisticated Dr Who story ‘Fang Rock’ tells a strong simple tale with some style and panache. You’d never hold ‘Fang Rock’ up as being the series at its most ambitious, imaginative, or moving but it is an excellently crafted 100 minutes of telly with a unique atmosphere that really shines through the murky fog (and it’s really good, believable fog too,  better even than ‘Weng Chiang the story before). ‘Fang Rock’ is also impressively grim and sombre throughout, the irony being that, despite set in a lighthouse, this is the series at its darkest and the way people will do anything to survive when ordinary people are pushed to extraordinary circumstances, Humans and Rutans both.

POSITIVES  + The effect of the rutan-devoured bodies glowing green is subtle and simply done but very effective. The purple fireball which is the Rutan spaceship arriving in the opening minutes is a great model shot too that suggests from the beginning you’re in for something special. My favourite effect of all, though, is one Bob Holmes wrote in: when the model Tardis lands its blue light carries on flashing in just a way to mimic the lighthouse itself, as if the ship, too, is a beacon of light in a dark time for humanity on a far bigger cosmic scale.

NEGATIVES – Something that’s only actually negative if you were a Dr Who fan in Chicago watching a repeat of this story in 1987: you didn’t get to see all of it. Yes, this is the story that was infamously interrupted by a hacker wearing a ‘Max headroom’ mask at very great expense and technical knowhow (which he rather wasted babbling nonsense, drinking coca-cola, laughing at irritating ‘nerds’ and being spanked with a fly-swatter; no seriously) right at the point when Vince is offering to get Leela a hot drink and cutting back in to the episode at the point where the Doctor realises minor character Ben died from electrocution. The network WTTW, broadcasting on PBS, was one of the biggest in America at this point and nobody was doing this sort of this stuff at the time (when broadcasts were analogue: you wouldn’t get it at all in the digital age): at a quickly organises crisis meeting the only thing heads of the company and technicians could agree on was that it must have cost an absolute fortune to get the equipment needed to compete with such an official signal, never mind temporarily jam it. This was the only full programme interrupted this way, though it is thought there was a ‘trial run’ earlier in the day during the American Football game (which only partly interrupted the sound, not the picture); it was never tried again. To this day no one knows who did it or why they chose this story to interrupt (I mean, the next Dr Who story on was ‘The Invisible Enemy’ and interrupting that one would have done us all a favour). Maybe it was a Rutan cross at their portrayal who didn’t get the bodyprint quite right and had to wear a mask? Nowadays footage of it happening in ‘real time’ on youtube just looks like your everyday tiktok video, but in 1987 it was mad and yet somehow very Dr Who.

BEST QUOTE: ‘Gentlemen, I've got news for you: this lighthouse is under attack and by morning we might all be dead’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: After appearing in the rather confusing Bernice Summerfield audio ‘The Bellotron Incident’ (2003) and being mentioned in a few Sontaron stories The Rutans finally got a re-match with the Doctor proper in ‘Castle Of Fear’, number #127 in the Big Finish main range. A 5^th Dr and Nyssa story, it has the pair return to Stockbridge, the English village that features heavily in the Dr Who Magazine comic strips of the eras. There’s also something of ‘The Time Warrior’ and ‘The Crusade’ both about this story, as a Rutan ship crash-lands in the 12^th century as the locals are preparing to send an army to Palestine. The Rutan has been tracking Commander Lynx back to the middle ages but got lost, the Doctor arriving just as their reinforcements do. They capture Nyssa and appear to kill her in their attempts to break into the Tardis but (spoilers) she’s not dead and indeed has a solution for how to power up their spaceship and let them flee. One of the more action-heavy Big Finish stories this isn’t as deep as some but is nicely atmospheric.

As if the ‘wilderness years’ fan production ‘Shakedown’ wasn’t hard enough to find (a 3^rd Yeti/Professor Travers story – see ‘Web Of Fear’) there was an even rarer sequel ‘Shakedown: Return Of The Sontarons’ which (due to budget reasons) despite the title mostly concentrates on their arch enemies The Rutans (there are a couple of Sontarons but he seems anaemic and a bit yellow). Written by Terrance Dicks it stars Sophie Aldred as not-quite Ace (with spiky hair!), Michael Wisher as not-really Davros, two refugees from Blake’s 7 (Brian Croucher and Jan Chappel) and Carole Ann Ford as a sort of older vampish jealous Susan who gets infected by a Rutan and turned bright green during a trip on a cruise ship in space. Yep, it’s one of those stories! Though clearly made on a budget of about 5p (something that shows itself most in the muffled sound and sometimes dodgy camerawork) and with a script that’s typical fan fiction rather than one of Terrance’s greatest works it’s all still made with a lot of love and the actors all have a whale of a timer acting out of character and doing things they normally wouldn’t do (I mean, Sophie’s character is played as practically a glamour model!) Released o video in 1994 and not seen since, this one is long overdue a re-release and – unlike it’s predecessor – never even got a shiny Target novelisation to make it feel ‘part of the family’.

‘The Gunpowder Plot’ game (2011) was the longest by far of all the official BBC website computer games starring the Doctor and one heck of a lot of effort was put into it, not least by Matt Smith and Karen Gillan who spent hours not just reading out their lines but ‘acting’ and having computer images taken of their (often very distinctive) movements. Released in multiple ‘episodes’ I remember getting awfully stuck in part four (where the Doctor has to open a safe, in order…this game is for clever seven year olds. I was 29 at the time) to the point where I nearly abandoned it, but I’m glad I didn’t because its easily best of the five games releases this way (arguably the best Who computer game out of several really rum goes) and the story really gets moving when Guy Fawkes’ band of outlaws arrive, brainwashed by the Rutans weirdly (Ralf Little is excellent casting). Why the Rutans? Goodness knows (they seem an unlikely monster to care which King is on which throne), but the green jellyfish blob looks more impressive in the digital world than it ever did on telly and we actually get to see the Sontarons and Rutans in the same ‘story’ for the first time ever. Even if they don’t actually fight each other directly. Sadly they never made any more after this, even though the series was really popular. 

   

Previous ‘The Talons Of Weng-Chiang’ next ‘The Invisible Enemy’