The Ark In Space
(Season 12, Dr 4 with Sarah Jane and Harry, 25/1/1975-5/2/1975, producer: Phillip Hinchcliffe, script editor: Robert Holmes, writer: Robert Holmes (original idea by John Lucarotti, uncredited), director: Rodney Bennett)
Rank: 91
'The insects came in two by two, Hurrah! Hurrah!
There was nothing on board they didn't chew, Hurrah! Hurrah!
They ate the shuttle and part of the crew
They tried to eat poor Noah too
And they ate their way through the ark
It was humanity's lesson Wirrned'
In an emoji:🐛
It turns out that ‘The Ark’ of the Hartnell years wasn’t the only future human colony sent flying off into space. The idea was so good they tried it again nine years on, but with a very different outcome: instead of a parable about slavery, prejudice and justice that looked at mankind as a flawed being of intelligence this one is an out and out horror story that looks at mankind as meat, a tasty dinner for alien life that doesn’t care at all for his or her principles and cleverness. ‘The Ark’ is what happens if we let the worst of our natures take over; ‘The Ark In Space’ is a primal fear of what might happen if the worst of nature is unleashed on us. Though it’s not a sequel as such (I’m willing to bet few if any of the people who made ‘Ark In Space’ even knew about the Hartnell story, given that it was nine years old in an era when it was assumed you were never going to see any of these things again) but it makes for a neat mirror of how DW as a series has changed in a near-decade, from existential horror to horror movie. Where ‘The Ark’ led to the viewer doing most of the work ‘Space’ is an action tale that’s one of the best ‘straightforward’ DW stories out there, a grim behind-the-sofa horror that’s one of the series’ most chilling, despite being made on a budget of nine-pence and whose most memorable moments come from an infestation of green-coloured bubble-wrap. It’s a clever idea: we’re clearly in a space and time different to ours but it’s an idea we can relate to, especially if you’ve had an infestation problem or rodents have chewed through your precious power cables when you’ve just filled a freezer full of food or when Dr Who was about to come on. Both Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat have quoted it as a favourite story (Steven once said it as his very favourite story) which is a surprise actually: it’s very different to anything either showrunner will go on to write, a story that rather than being food for thought like so much of their run, packed with twists and turns, has just one over-arching plot: don’t be food to the creepy crawly things trying to eat you (by the way Russell was 11 when this was on, Steven 13, what many would call ‘an impressionable age’, although honestly there isn’t an age for watching a series like Dr Who that isn’t impressionable).
It’s hard to believe that this is only the third 4th Dr story to be made and only the second to be screened, not to mention the first to officially be fully made by the new production team (although ‘Robot’, the first, was a sort of ‘take your office junior to work to see how it’s done’ kind of a story. This is the first story Phillip Hinchcliffe was fully boss on and it immediately sweeps the Barry Letts/Terrance Dicks era out with a clean sweep – not a cruel disrespectful contradictory way but one that suggests both new producer and new script editor have too many ideas they want to share about where to take this series in the future to waste a precious minute thinking about the past . Everyone hits the ground walking across this story – well crawling and slithering anyway – which has a confidence and belief that just pulls you through the screen. It already feels so ‘right’, with Tom Baker’ more alien portrayal already so firmly in control that Jon Pertwee’s action hero already seemed like a distant memory despite his five years in The Tardis and its hard to imagine ‘his’ era ever facing a story quite like this one, which swaps the bureaucrats and thinking aliens of old for a slimy alien insect. It’s more than though: the Letts vision of the universe was a place where karma reigns and everything is in balance, eventually, with a bit of help from the Doctor. But here the Doctor is largely powerless and while he saves lives along the way it’s indiscriminately because he can. In the Letts era bad things happen to bad people and good things happen to those who do good, but this is different: the Wirrn care nothing for morality and to them every human is potential lunch, from the biggest villain to the greatest minds of the day. It’s worth comparing this story to ‘The Green Death’, a story just two years old and known forever as ‘the one with the giant maggots’ (not that far removed from ‘the one with the giant wasps’. They even share a plot about people turning green. That story though, was an ecological tale caused by man’s greed stopped by clever selfless people where the horror mostly happens to people we don’t know and largely off-screen while the Doctor gets to debate the environment; this story is about the horror and powerlessness of being taken over and the Hinchcliffe years will be about that till the end (to the producer’s downfall in the end: even Mary Whitehouse couldn’t complain about a story that’s all about mankind’s greed, but she can and will object to one about insects eating people being passed off as entertainment).
There are more basic differences too: recycling. In time the Hinchcliffe era will have a default setting of raising great works of fiction and film for its big hook, so that even when done really well and mixed with a Dr Who setting you can never quite shake off the feeling that you’re admiring a cleverly made treatment of somebody else’s work. Usually the Letts/Dicks era only tended to recycle from itself. Admittedly ‘Robot’ is the crossover of that era (a Terrance Dicks tale that in many ways doesn’t feel like a Terrance Dicks tale, with its giant robot as King Kong scenario) but this is the first story you can point to and say ‘ah yes, I see where this was coming from’. This story is clearly ‘The Fly’ (George Langelaan’s eerie tale of a scientist who tries to create a transportation beam to take him across space only to get his human DNA spliced with a fly that entered the machine at the same time, enjoying the special powers it gives him until the ‘fly’ part of him starts to take over his human brain; it was turned into a film in 1958), with shades of Franz Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ (where a salesman wakes up one day as a cockroach, a more existential tale of how society thinks of the working classes).‘The Ark In Space’ lies somewhere in between: it’s a story where the Wirrn (giant space wasps) have their human cake and eat it too, where the horror is two-fold and comes from both having your insides physically eaten by alien larvae and the psychological horror of feeling your humanity be taken over by something that isn’t part of you, with the ante upped by the fact that this isn’t just about the lies of the people on board the Nerva spaceship but potentially the fate of all of mankind. There’s also very much a Bible feel: The Ark of course. There’s even a man in command named Noah. Note also though High Control’s speech ‘if land be arid you must make it flourish, if it be stony you must make it fertile’ is straight out of the old testament and ‘flood’ stories, adding to the feel that civilisation is cyclical. Oh yeah and it’s also a direct steal of ‘Quatermass and the Pity’ right down to a hand infected with alien spores turning green (seriously, again?!)
Naturally our adventurers are under suspicion from the first, given that they’re the only other people around, and it doesn’t help that the Doctor’s chosen this moment to go all alien and distant (as good as Tom Baker was at all the comedy in his debut story ‘Robot’ here’s even better here, where he moves from jokes to being cold and angry in a heartsbeat, unpredictable where Pertwee’s Dr was utterly reliable). Though Harry, too, is only in his second story this is the adventure where Robert Holmes has most success in making this Tardis trio feel like a team of old friends: The Doctor knows Sarah well enough to know that making her cross is what will give her the extra fight needed to get out of the ventilation shaft she’s stuck in, Harry tries to protect everyone and bring a sophistication and gentle gentileness to a situation that’s as primal as they get and Sarah is using the sarcasm against monsters we all remember her for. They all get the others out of scrapes, cover their tracks, make excuses, risk their lives and that underlying friendship drives everything. They feel like they’ve been bouncing round time and space for years already and the opening episode, where our three heroes are the only people we see, gives us and them a welcoming breathing space to settle down following all the changes in ‘Robot’. The supporting cast are strong too, cold and distant compared to the warmth of the regulars and for 1975 its a brave and under-appreciated move effectively putting Vira, a woman, in charge of the humans that are left (Wendy Williams’ slowly melting ice queen really makes the episode, not least because the man she has the hots for turns into a Wirrn himself by the end, another of those big huge humany feelings thrown aside by an insect’s primal base needs to survive).
Like ‘The Ark’ it’s a very different view of mankind’s future to the utopian ideal seen in ‘Star Trek’ and other American scifi series. In this story humanity has been freeze-dried for their long journey into the future (which takes far too long for them to live through it) where mankind hopes to create a brave new future, but man being man they’ve made mistakes in trying to leave behind their old one. The cargo of sleeping humans think they’ve been so clever and have every possible event covered, but they’ve forgotten about the insects they thought they’d wiped out years ago who, given thousands of years to roam, have made their home in the space shuttle and even inside the bodies. They’ve also eaten through humanity’s alarm clock, so they’ve overslept: all those years they could have been populating the stars themselves instead insects have been populating inside them, using them as incubators to hatch their young. As ‘indomitable’ as the Doctor calls mankind at one stage in this story in a much referenced quote, really it’s the insects who are unstoppable, because they don’t pause to think about things and be concerned with the guilt of the past, the worries of the present or the fears of the future – they just get on with surviving, because that’s all they know how to do. For Noah the single scariest thing they do to him is take over his mind, not his body, erasing his memories and intelligence so that all he can think about is surviving at all costs, in a way that’s both very insectty and very Cybermen. Noah saves everyone (spoilers) by having just enough humanity to sacrifice himself but for me it’s a shame when he blows the Wirrn up (with the Doctor’s blessing) because, really, unlike many a Who villain, the insects have done nothing wrong: they’ve just done what comes natural, reproducing in a vacuum which at the base of it all is all mankind is doing too. While we’re on about Star Trek, though, note how uniform the people of the future are: rather than keeping their individual nationalities they all think and look much the same, in similar uniforms. They even speak with the same clipped BBC posh English. Even before the Wirrn eat them and take over their minds and absorb them they’re like insects in that they have a ‘hive mentality’ and swarm rather than think for themselves (is following a list of commands set out by high command any different to how insects work?)
Of all the scripts in Tom Baker’s first year this was the one that Holmes and Hinchcliffe had the biggest hand in, their predecessors Barry and Terrance wanting to make this huge crossover as painless as possible, hiring the new Doctor and commissioning most of the scripts for the first year (most of them from tried and tested Who writers who were known to be reliable and with returning monsters to make sure fans kept watching post-Pertwee), Terrance writing the first Tom Baker story ‘Robot’ himself. ‘The Ark In Space’ should have been another of these stories: John Lucarotti, who’d been writing for the series since the Hartnell days, was asked to write a story about a space ark in the future over-run by…something. Even though it was a long way out of his wheel-house (he’s a character-driven writer strong on research and amazing at historicals, not a natural writer of jump-scares and monsters) Lucarotti gamely tried. He came up with a script that starts out much like ‘The Ark’ (a story he no doubt saw on transmission, given that it followed his own story ‘The Massacre’), with a floating garden in space that’s ‘the size of Kent’ and which has been over-run by fungal creatures, the Delc, that look like ‘puffballs’, divided into ‘minds’ and ‘bodies’ that control different functions. His is a very 1960s Who story of exploration, of the Tardis crew wandering around trying to work out where all the people are and how this garden is still running itself with such lush bio-diversity, celebrating how aliens that don’t like us still have a right to live. A few hurried and worried letters from the production team later to make it more in line with the way the series was shaping up and he’d made the Delc more ruthless and animalistic, with a main head that split into lots of little spores that made them grow in numbers every time they were attacked, the Doctor finally dispatching them at the end in a comedy scene where the Doctor plays golf with the main puffball head and dispatching it into space where it did no harm. This wasn’t Holmes or Hinchcliffe had in mind either (even though it’s perfectly in keeping with the Hartnell stories when Lucarotti was mostly still writing for the series) and they were running out of time with this story due to go before the cameras within a month. Lucarotti, his script having been delivered, set off for a Mediterranean cruise far away from phones and letters – and even when he was sent a panicked message asking him to have a re-think a postal strike meant Lucarotti never got it. Uncharacteristically for Lucarotti, too, he wrote in a lot of effects that would have been hard to pull off in a TV centre in 1974, even though he was experienced enough a writer to know much of a role budget plays in TV. With no other option Holmes wrote the whole thing again in just eighteen days, with Hinchcliffe then taking over his role as script editor (a job he’d done on other series), using the basic foundations but adding his own touches on top. The original script is much more interested in the new alien life; the re-write in mankind’s reaction to it. As such, it’s the story in season 12 that the pair have the biggest creative input into and it rather sets the tone of what’s to follow: stories designed to scare the target audience and make them think, solved by a Doctor whose less of an action hero and more of a thinker, that asks big questions about mankind if you want to go there or just grips you and scares you if you don’t. The production team got lucky: Holmes was often at his best when working to a tight deadline: he’s such an instinctive writer that he tended to say what needed to be said best in his first drafts, without nervy production teams watering his ideas down and re-writing them to fit with a series format.
In many ways this is Holmes’ ‘purest’ script, concerned with his two favourites themes: man as an animal, with raw primal needs just like all the rest of nature (and thus a space ark is the perfect setting - presumably carrying flora and fauna too though we never see it, probably for budget reasons) combined with man as an over-thinking animal with ideas above his station who creates too many problems for himself (of all the big scary monsters in Holmes’ stories there are few bigger than petty uncaring bureaucracy). The heart of this story comes right in the middle when Earth Control is delivering her big passionate waking up speech from centuries past about the wonderful future that lies for mankind now they’re awake – as heard by Captain Noah with absolute horror as he watches his infected arm turn green. Note, too, the way that on awakening and being told there’s a problem the colony’s response is more along the lines of ‘oh great, what’s gone wrong now?’ rather than ‘but we’re perfect!’ (Douglas Adams will pick up on this theme and really run with it during his time as script editor). Really, though, is the glorified message to humanity, the ‘pep talk’ as Harry puts it telling them to flourish in space, really so different to the instincts that drive the Wirrn on? Is man just a more cerebral (and fallible) version of the wasp? Note that High Control doesn’t even know the crew’s names, even though there aren’t all that many of them (even with half of them turned into insect food). We’re back to Kafka and Langelaan again: to bureaucracy everyone is a bug. But to a bug all bureaucracy is lunch. Humanity is just a bunch of DNA that got lucky with its cerebral cortex.
‘The Ark In Space’ is a highly popular and influential story amongst fans, even before the showrunners started quoting it, and it’s one of those stories that gets closest to the ‘heart’ of what this elastic series is, with enough basic horror to keep you awake while it’s on and enough existential philosophy to keep you awake in bed later when mulling it over. Even at the time part two of this story was the fifth most watched anything on TV that week (a record it held all the way until the Christmas specials starting with ‘Voyage Of the damned’ a whole thirty-two years later) and its 13.6 million viewer rating for that episode will only ever be beaten by ‘City Of Death’ (and mostly then because an ITV strike meant there were only two channels showing anything and BBC2 had a really boring sounding documentary on at the same time). It’s a story a lot of non-fans remember for good reasons and bad. I’m willing to bet, too, that one of its viewers was Ridley Scott (the film director who started his career as a BBC designer and at one stage was down to draw The Daleks until a production clash meant Ray Cusick got the job instead). I’m not the first reviewer to point out the similarities between this story and the ‘Alien’ trilogy which started in 1979, where an alien insect makes its home inside John ‘The War Doctor’ Hurt’s tummy. You have to say though, for all its bigger budget and success, ‘Alien’ can’t compete with ‘The Ark In Space’ when you know them both because ‘Alien’ is just a survival horror story - Who is telling a much bigger story about mankind’s place in the universe, wondering about our possible futures. Just take Holmes’ much quoted speech about ‘indomitable humanity’ exploring the galaxy despite all the things that tried to kill them off a favourite on Dr Who t-shirts and merchandise for good reason: like the best of this series it gives us hope for the future, without ignoring the difficulties in getting there. As for alien, the most quote I’ve ever seen on a t-shirt is ‘Here kitty kitty kitty’.
In this context it’s interesting to note another of Holmes’ favourite themes: feminism. Despite his image as a pipe-smoking man from a bygone era who occasionally wrote condescending scenes for his characters, mostly Holmes was remarkably forward-looking for his day and from his first script for ‘The Krotons’ on has been writing juicier parts for actresses than most of his fellow writers. While I will die on the hill that says Dr Who was always stronger at feminism than its reputation suggests, going right back to Barbara (who more than hols her own against the Doctor back in 1963, far more than Ian actually) it’s clear that the two leading female companions on his watch, Sarah Jane and Leela, are more than the traditional cliché of a screaming female peril monkey. This is the story where Harry goes from being an old duffer out of his depth to being truly condescending, referring to Sarah as ‘nurse Smith’ to his doctor and commenting to her that of all the things that shock him about the future most is that High Control is a girl. Given his comments in other stories and his fondness for the character I’ve often wondered if Holmes was writing Harry as his ‘voice’ (the way Russell T will Donna to some extent, big of heart and mouth both, and Steven Moffat Amy, Scottish and feisty yet vulnerable), slightly out of touch with a rapidly changing world but trying to do his best anyway. It’s interestingly though, how much the fanbase love Harry despite the way he so often puts his foot in it, literally and metaphorically both (giant clams!) There’s a real affection and awe for Sarah at least underneath all his jibes so that what he says is because of his background, not his character. Here, for instance, he rapidly changes his mind from treating Sarah like his kid sister who needs protecting to the person he knows will help him get him out of trouble. As for feminism in general, note how Vira is everything its detractors paint feminists as being: cold, hard, aloof, sterile and how, in scifi stories from earlier times (including some Dr Whos) this would be the character’s downfall that gets everyone killed. Not here. Vira is the one who arguably does more to save everyone than the Doctor does, holding everyone together by enforcing rules and hierarchies and refusing to give in to panic as she takes her responsibilities seriously (and she’s not heartless; she’s clearly in love with Noah). She’s also very much not on a ‘straight line’ from Sarah our ‘present day’ representative (give or take the odd UNIT dating that sometimes moves everything up a decade or so), who is frequently scared and emotional, to the point where the Doctor relies on her feisty response to calling her nicknames to get her out of a ventilation shaft she’s tuck in, but who is as brave as any companion we see in the series.
Of course this is Dr Who so not everything goes smoothly. While the fully-grown Wirrn looks as decent as any costume made for a TV story in 1975 can (particularly when dead and lifeless) the baby Wirrn is just stuntman Stuart Fell slithering around in bubble-wrap painted green. They could have gone with a much more alien design rather than something that just looks like an insect we recognise – after all, the Wirrn aren’t from our cosmos but from Andromeda. Oddly the Wirrn looks much like the Vespiform, which makes you wonder why there are two such similar but apparently unrelated insects in the DW universe (three if you count The Tritovores’ from ‘Planet Of The Dead’, although at least they’ve got legs). I’m not sure I altogether buy the Doctor’s ‘fusing himself with dead bodies so he can see what they last saw’ trick: this was a real tradition from the Victorian era (and particularly amongst travelling gypsies) that a human retina would keep a ‘scan’ of what it last saw at the point of death, which is a nicely spooky idea but makes little sense in a series based on ‘hard’ (or at any rate faintly plausible) science. I understand why it needs to be there – in common with many mute animalistic creatures in Dr Who it’s not as is the Wirrn can sit down and have a cup of tea and a slice of cake with the Doctor as they talk about their great ambitions, so there’s no one who can tell their side of the story – but it feels like a cheat. Plus if the Doctor can just hook himself up to dead bodies and alien insects it would make a lot of the other Who stories around it very very different.
Even so, a lot more goes right than it foes wrong and ‘The Ark In Space’ is popular partly because it’s a story you can happily show non-Whovians without getting too embarrassed or having too many of those ‘well, it was made a long time ago’ type conversations. One of the biggest awards should go to designer Roger Murray-Leach working on his first story and what could have been a very boring, clinical set of sets feels as if they’re being made by someone whose clearly relishing the chance to design more than everyday houses and office interiors. Cleverly this story shares a setting (and a budget) with ‘Revenge Of The Cybermen’ with the same space station in two different centuries and thanks to that extra money it looks highly realistic and unlike ‘Revenge’ this story makes good use of the spaceship location, with the Wirrn plausibly hiding in all the nooks and crannies and ventilation (there’s actually relatively few DW stories that feature ventilation shafts, despite the long running joke that they all do – it’s a measure of how much impact this story made that so many people seem to remember it and think all Who stories are like this one). In the script the humans are all cryogenically frozen lying down, but it was Leach’s idea to have them go to sleep standing up so he could fit more of them into shot and make it seem as if there are hundreds – it really suits this story’s extra layers that this design just happens to make them look as if everyone’s a congregation in a Church too, rather than merely in a big hospital room, reminding us of the culture and society that’s put us above the Wirrn and which counts for nothing when we become a tasty snack. Though it’s really quite a small set the clever camera angles make it seem much bigger, shooting from the top and bottom for the most part and only being at ‘actor height’ for close-ups (it helps that this gives an insect’s eye view, at least until we see the Wirrn are human-tall).
The result is a very strong, very watchable story and one that’s probably my favourite from Dr Who’s most beloved ‘horror’ era:: this is one of those rare DW stories that’s well written and well presented on screen, to make an excellent escapist 100 minutes of telly and its inventive too – there’s a joke every few scenes (the Doctor measuring gravity with his yoyo is my favourite!), a genuine creepy moment every other scene (and occasionally the same ones) and as much as these distant humans are reserved and clearly not like ‘us’ they’re well drawn enough to make you care for them. If there’s a fault with this story – a fly in the ointment as it were, or a Wirrn in the shuttle – it’s that, ultimately, ‘Ark In Space’ is no more than just a great escapist story – it won’t change the way you think about the way the world works the way the very very best DW stories do, it doesn’t raise any big important issues (except, perhaps, the importance of pest control in space), it doesn’t play with the formula and give you things no other series on TV except Dr Who could and it has no ambition or drive beyond entertainment. There’s no moral message, except perhaps the theme that it’s not just humans that want to survive and live forever – and that the things we see as being at the bottom of the food chain have the same drive. By DW standards that’s small fry. The elephant in the room compared to ‘The Ark’ is that there is no elephant in the room anymore, no extras that embellish the script and make it seem bigger than it really is. Sometimes, though, entertainment is enough, especially when it’s entertainment delivered as well as this. If you’re the sort of fan who’d rather feel than think and would rather be scared witless while watching by threatening monsters and wondering if your arm’s about to turn green than scared witless by the threat such monsters represent then this story is for you. In case you haven’t noticed this many reviews in I’m not one of those people which is why this story is maybe a tad lower than where most fans would put it (showrunners included), but I still know a well crafted story brilliant when I see one and ‘The Ark In Space’ is one of the best examples of a DW story where everything works without the caveats of budget, resources, acting or last minute scripting problems getting in the way. In any era this story would be a triumph – for a story written in 18 days it’s a masterpiece (no flies on Robert Holmes!)
POSITIVES + Noah, the character most in control of his feelings and set up as the grand evolved future for humanity, is infected by the Wirrn and slowly turns into a green blob of goo. What could, in other hands, be a stupid idea is one of the most horrible bits of all of Dr Who as he goes from being exactly the sort of person you’d pick to save humanity, all prim proper and invulnerable, to being the prey of a mere insect. Kenton Moore’s performance as Noah gets that slow slide from gentleman to animal just right. Watching him break down further, episode by episode, unable to comprehend being eaten by the sort of insect he would have squashed without thinking in centuries past, is the drive that keeps the momentum of the second half of the story moving and you (and secretly he) all know he’s going to end up a mess of green goo by the end. Horrible, in all the best ways. Normally I’m sad when people high-ups get involved and insist on scenes being cut, but on this occasion a call from the BBC heads of staff that perhaps Noah pleading with his lover Vira to kill him rather than let be turned into a full creature is probably the right one. Given what did make it to screen it would maybe have been a moment of horror too far.
NEGATIVES - They name a character on board an ‘Ark In Space’ Noah and no one seems to find this funny or comment on it. Even The Doctor. Which is not like him at all. It’s also perhaps a little too on the nose for what this story is really about, as if waving a giant alarm bell that this is a ‘metaphor’ we should watch out for – like I say, things have moved on a lot from ‘The Ark’. I mean, going for ‘Noah’, that’s like calling an experiment that’s secretly about extending life ‘Lazarus’ or naming a planet scarred by a nuclear war ‘Skaro’ (oh wait...)
BEST QUOTE: ‘Homo sapiens! What an inventive, invincible species! It's only been a few million years since they crawled up out of the mud and learned to walk. Puny, defenceless bipeds. They've survived flood, famine and plague. They've survived cosmic wars and holocausts. And now, here they are, out among the stars, waiting to begin a new life. Ready to outsit eternity. They're indomitable... indomitable’.
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: 1st
Doctor story ‘The Ark’ features another last spaceship from Earth, even if it looks
very different to this one and isn’t cryogenically frozen (as far as we know –
maybe everyone woke up on time?!)
‘Placebo Effect’ (1998) is an early 8th
Doctor novel with the unique mixture of companions: his regular Sam (a human
girl from the 1990s), Stacey Townshend (a Human woman from the 23rd
century) and her future husband Ssard (an Ice Warrior!) The Wirrn are one of a
number of plot elements in a story about the Intergalactic Space Olympics with
the revelation they have come to the milky way from the Andromeda galaxy, which
they’ve over-run.
’Destination Nerva’ (2012) is a Big Finish story
that returns the 4th Doctor to the space station which also links up
to ‘The Talons Of Weng Chiang’. The only story to feature Romana I and Leela
together, it’s confusing, but fun.
‘Wirrn Dawn’ (2009) is a rather odd 8th
Doctor Big Finish story that somehow chucks the Wirrn into the First World war
to mixed success.
‘Wirrn Isle’ (2012)
is #158 in the Big Finish monthly range and is set 40 years after this story.
The 6th Doctor and companion Flip find that the Nerva satellite has
re-populated the Earth, but that the Wirrn have come with them and populated
Loch Ness! Not one of the best Big Finishes and with a script that goes pretty
much where you’d expect it to, but it has its moments and its always
interesting to find out what happened to the 6th Doctor following
‘Trial Of A Timelord’ and before his regeneration. None of the same characters
appear.
Previous ‘Robot’ next ‘The Sontaron
Experiment’
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