The Ark: Ranking - 92

                                             The Ark

(Season 3, Dr 1 with Steven and Dodo, 5-26/3/1966, producer: 

John Wiles, script editor: Gerry Davis, writers: Paul Erickson and Lesley Scott (but see below), director: Michael Imison) 

Rank: 92

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   'Who built the ark? Humans! Humans! 

Who built the ark? Brother Humans built the ark.

The ark went into space so dark

As into space it lit a spark (That's right!)

Full of monoids large and tall

And animals both big and small

          They had everything but germ immunity

              That quickly cut off the community

       Then when the humans were going 'achoo!'

    The monoids took over and re-built their statue

          Who took over the ark? Monoid! Monoid!

   Who took over the ark? Brother Monoids took the ark!'

‘The Ark’ always gets short shrift from fans and I don’t know why – it’s clever, it’s sassy, it has a lot of powerful things to say, it pushes the 1960s budget to breaking point and it has one of the greatest twists of them all. I suspect had this been one of those stories wiped from existence like a lot of season 3, one that only existed in hazy folk memories of whacking big elephants on set, hundred foot statues and the twist in the middle (the only time the Tardis ever leaves a story and lands in the same spot immediately, 700 years having passed between episodes two and three), along with what’s quite an eerie soundtrack, then it would be one of those stories talked about in hushed voices. Instead people can buy this one on shiny DVDs or view it on shiny BBC i-player, can before they even start that it’s a four-parter, take a look at the crazy Monoids with their very 60s Beatle hair-cuts in the photographs and laugh. More than any other story, you can’t view this one from modern eyes – you have to go back to the perspective of, if not quite the Biblical ark, then a time sixty years ago when binge-watching meant staying up till 10pm when TV schedules finished for the day, safe in the knowledge that unless something weird happened repeat fees and contractual shenanigans meant that you would never ever see these stories again (the recent fuss over Anthony Coburn’s on refusing to allow ‘An Unearthly Child’ onto i-payer at the start where it belongs shows you how tricky negotiating rights for something ever meant to be broadcast once and one only can still be). For the magic trick to work you need to be the viewer of 1966 whose watching these episodes a week at a time when each series of Dr Who was viewed as one long story divided into little bits rather than a combination of serials that all ended in neat little rows. 

 This is another one of those stories that never quite goes where you think it’s going to go with wildly different themes between its two sets of two parters (so much so I’m willing to bet it’s a Steven Moffat favourite: his two-parters are always like this). If you go by just the synopsis then this is a simple revisiting of the ‘Ark’ tale of the Bible, taking humanity from a dying Earth across the stars, only instead of a boat saving humanity and various creatures in a very Dr Whoy way of taking what we know and giving it a scifi spin it’s a spaceship saving humanity and various animals from a broken Earth (and it’s the episodes that come in two by two not the animals). We’re as far into the future as the series has ever been, exploring the ‘57th segment of time’ (to put that in context it’s mentioned that Ancient Rome, Ancient Greece, the 20th century and even the first Dalek invasions of Earth all come from just the first segment of time, so even though we never get a set date we’re way way waaaaay in the future). It’s a very original idea rather that’s been ‘borrowed’ for several better known and more loved stories down the years, most obviously ‘The Ark In Space’ (which is another ark where the inhabitants were late waking up and that got over-run by giant wasps) but also ‘Frontios’ (a last Earth colony who did make it to a planet but got over-run by giant woodlice, ‘The Beast Below’ (yet another ark that’s helped by a giant space…whale, ha that surprised you didn’t it?!) and ‘The End Of The World’ (as The Earth blows up in the distance on a screen as a little aside – it’s front and centre in Russell T Davies’ story, which is presumably taking place at the exact same time). ‘Midnight’ is another story more heavily influenced by this story than you might think even though its not (as far as we know) set in the same era: there’s an enemy that starts off mute but soon uses the humans’ words against them, while a seemingly civilised bunch of people turn into a mob when scared, turning on the only people that can save them. If that story had started with David Tennant having a sniffily nose it would have been a slam dunk. And yet still ‘The Ark’ has been forgotten, even though it’s one of the most influential stories of them all. Why? Well other writers do make more of this concept, taking this story’s simple idea and running further with it, asking big questions about what mankind will be like by then – whether we’ll have learnt from our mistakes and created a utopia for ourselves, or merely fallen into the same old traps you can see cycling across our history. 

 ‘The Ark’ does that too, but it’s specifically preoccupied with how mankind treats people who ‘aren’t like us’. ‘Star Trek’ hasn’t made it to British TVs yet but the first year is a big hit in America and as another scifi TV series the people making this series must have at least heard about it, in the same way late 1970s Who never mentions ‘Star Wars’ or goes anywhere near the concepts directly but clearly someone involved has been to see it at the cinema and the entire 2005 production team seem to worship ‘Buffy The Vampire Slayer’. That show is a very 1960s utopian vision of the future, when mankind has defeated the prejudices and the cold war in-fighting of the 1960s and come together as a planet to face common causes in space (even if poor Uhura, the series’ best character, is basically still a glorified receptionist). Dr who is a series that never ever thinks like that. Sure the racism of the 1960s is gone this far in the future, but the old attitudes remain the same, being Dr Who’s first real polemic about slavery. This story’s alien race are the Monoids, tall lumbering beings with one eye and start the story mute and docile but slowly find their voice. They’re subservient in the first two episodes, apparently happy to work for the humans who assume themselves to be ‘superior’. But a revolution happens off-screen and the next thing you know it’s the Monoids who’ve developed the gift of speech and use it to silence the humans, enslaving them in the exact same way. Given that Dr Who is such a karmic series, right from the beginning, it seems like just desserts and it’s no surprise that the Doctor intervenes to try and make this a more ‘equal’ society (so maybe we do get that Star Trekkian utopia after all?) 

 The plot goes a bit loopy when a poorly Steven is put on trial (he really does get the worst of the time-travelling lark; of all the Doctor’s companions he’s the one who comes close to death most often) and its down to the Doctor to save him biologically and legally, a re-run of the last part of ‘The Keys Of Marinus’ but sadly less involving, while the ‘docile aliens’ aspect is very much a repeat of ‘The Sensorites’. Watch the third part after the first two parts too and it does seem as if DW have inadvertently put a repeat on and jumbled up some episodes together. However this story is more than just recycling: ‘The Ark’ has one great twist up its sleeve that makes one of the best uses of this being a time-travelling show in the series’ run. In one of the single best cliffhangers in the series (spoilers) the Tardis leaves at the end of episode two only to return 700 years later and instead of the happy contented civilisation we left behind The Monoids are now running The Ark with the Humans their slaves. The Doctor’s been telling us for nearly three years now of the dangers of changing history and how even the smallest changes can impact things for the future and as it turns out Dodo’s cold is a pretty big one(they’re probably glad that, even though everything else on the Ark is presumably two by two, there’s only one Dodo). The Humans have no immunity to it and are all but wiped out, leaving a power vacuum The Monoids fill, while full of anger and revenge for how they’ve been treated. The shots of the Tardis crew arriving and seeing the human statue that was being built in episode two finished but now with a monoid head in the cliffhanger into episode three is chilling stuff, a sign of things gone wrong that just gets worse and worse as the second half of the story unfold. Not the fact that it’s a ‘statue’ – even in the 1960s there was a growing feeling that maybe it was insensitive to have so many statues dedicated to people the youngsters would rather forget, slave plantation owners and far right politicians. You only need to look at our day and age to see how changing times can change history too and how people are seen compared to their own generation. The monoids go one stage further though and physically alter the statue. 

 Though it works well as a moral slavery tale I’ve always wondered too if there was something more to ‘The Ark’ than meets the (one) eye. This is, after all, 1966 and the year of Swinging London, when adults were more scared than ever before about the long-haired shaggy weirdoes their sons and daughters were turning into. For a generation that had grown up through unquestioning obedience, politeness and traditions this was the year when rock and roll went from being a short-lived fad to a scary insight into what the future might hold, transmitted halfway between two ‘delightfully out there/scariest’ (depending whose side you’re on) Beatle albums ‘Rubber Soul’ and ‘Revolver’. This story with its jute aliens feels like the old maxim that children should be seen and not heard and the fright that was creeping in about what the kids of the day might say once they found their ‘voice’. I mean, the monoids even have shaggy Beatle haircuts (in the publicity for the story one of the extras commented on how much they ‘look like Mick Jagger’ which is an odd thing to say about a species without any lips. Maybe they got their rock and roll band mixed up?) Dr Who had done this before (‘The Space Museum’ too is a story about the young taking over staid old traditions that have kept them in their place from atop glass cases) but the difference is that the elders aren’t tired bureaucrats keeping people in check simply because they’ve forgotten how to live; here everyone is scared of what the future might be with the young in charge when they rip up all those centuries of tradition. Instead of a museum though here we’re travelling aboard an ark that’s the last of the old ways dying out (with the Earth exploding on a screen), with literally the last of everything setting off for the future to rebuild; the ecosystem is so fragile it can’t survive a revolution and whereas ‘The Space Museum’ celebrates the end of oppressive tyrannies in a very Dr Whoy way, this one is more about mourning the loss of heritage and history. 

It might be stretching a point too but look how the Monoids’ base is now in the old kitchen, where they lock the humans and Tardis travellers up – where certain, ah, herbs are grown (because smoking them is what parents of 1960s kids thought they did all day, even though most working class kids especially never saw one the whole decade long). If this whole idea seems far fetched then, well, maybe but while every generation has its own generation gap to the ones that became before and after to some extent and it should be remembered that, in the 1960s it was a chasm; the parents of the day really did worry that their children were going to rip up everything of the old ways of life when they came of age. For good reason too: 1966 was the year when the Vietnam draft was big news and the youngsters were questioning their parents’ wisdom, creating their own ‘language’ that sounded like gibberish and meeting in mass huddles at rock festivals (we’re 13 months away from the first of these at Monterey). The humans have been in charge of this ark a long time: they built it, they established the rules, they ‘saved’ the monoids in some way we don’t see off-screen: they’ve appointed themselves the undisputed bosses and the monoids are, if you like, are their apprentices, working for less than the minimum wage. The monoids accept it, for now, but the last two episodes show a future that’s scary for all the parents as they not only take over from their parents as all children must do one day, they actively seek revenge over the way they’ve been treated. Many a parent watching in 1960s feared this sort of thing, troubled by the way their offspring refused to fight in wars they’d risked their lives in and believed in the sort of Star Trek utopian their parents considered daft. Never have the 1960s youth been more ‘alien’ to their parents, especially as they have their own ‘secret language’ (a sign language) their parents don’t understand. More than that, they’ve become a ‘monster’, in every DW sense of the word. Notably too Dodo, Dr Who’s token youth this in era, is treated like more of a child than Susan or Vicki ever were. Had the Monoids come in rocking to The Rolling Stones’ ‘Mother’s Little Helper’ (’What a drag it is getting old!’) this story couldn’t have made the point any clearer. 

How the monoids end up taking over involves the best use of the common cold in a scifi story since ‘War Of The Worlds’ as the Doctor’s new assistant Dodo has developed a bit of a bug and accidentally passes it onto the aliens (and poor Steven) – the only time, so far, that any Tardis crew has ever been poorly and passed it on to the characters (we presume the Tardis filters germs out, but Dodo has only been on the ship a few minutes, so rather than being a continuity error maybe the germs had spread too far in Dodo’s body for even the Tardis to stop it? Even so you think the Tardis would have put up a big red button when Dodo walked in or something). You only need to look at the covid pandemic (still ongoing folks!) to see how much illness reveals injustices in society: particularly in Britain where the people who could afford to stay well and those forced to go into work and be sick was so extreme (not helped by the government’s ‘I’m alright Jack’ approach to using the covid pandemic as an excuse to make money, rather than spend it on saving everybody’s lives the way they should). All empires fall eventually no matter how smug and nearly always because of events outside their control, just as the powers that be are congratulating themselves on how much control they have. Dodo’s cold is that unexpected event that they could never foresee and which kills indiscriminately. You might notice a similar feeling from most 1950s programmes, that same sense of ‘we know what we’re doing now’ post World War Two, but the 1960s is a decade that reveals this ‘power’ and control to be on shaky ground. Especially because, thanks to the post-war ‘baby boomer’ population growth, there are suddenly more young than there are old. We’re only thirteen months away from ‘The Monterey Pop Music Festival’ of 1967, the first big gathering of the youth together, but ‘The Ark’ is already afraid of what happens when the Monoids (who have more resistance to a human virus) outnumber the Humans. 

 Yes the Monoids look a bit daft now but they’re still creepily effective, especially their ping-pong ball eyes (that are moved by the actor’s mouths – the monoids are amongst the tallest Dr Who monsters until the Cybermen come along), particularly when they’re silent and threatening with their own sign language (things go awry a little when they start speaking and sound like every other angry alien with a grudge, albeit with more right to feel aggrieved than most). The jungle set is lush in the extreme and best of all the animals are really real – there’s a moment when you think they’re using stock footage again, like they did with the lions in ‘The Romans’, only the elephant they surely can’t possibly afford actually walks right up to Dodo and she pats him on the trunk, alongside a monitor lizard, a snake and a hornbill (not the creatures I’d want to save from extinction, but maybe those are all the animals we have left by then? Monica the elephant was on loan from Robert Fossett’s Circus and Zoo’ and had to be parked in a van in the director’s driveway because the BBC wouldn’t allow it on the premises prior to filming). That’s typical of a story that’s all about keeping us guessing and subverting our expectations, just when it looks as close to a run of the mill story as a series as young as Dr Who can have by 1966. There are some really clever ideas hidden away too: the ‘steel sky’ of the first title is just a ceiling (and an early ‘clue’ that we’re not on board an actual jungle planet when the Tardis first lands), the model shot of the Earth exploding is very well done in an era before computer effects (it’s a sphere hollowed out and filled with dry ice, made to look like The Earth) and I love the way that, like the best Hartnell stories (and unlike most other eras sadly) there’s time to explore this culture before the main plot kick in, allowing us to see a culture that have their own (rather odd) justice system and futuristic space-food. It really does feel as if we’re looking at our future, with a few millennia extra inventions, rather than just watching a load of extras in fancy dress. 

That’s all credit to the writers – or should I say writer? Because ‘The Ark’ is one of the most disputed writing credits of the lot. Officially it’s a husband and wife writing team of Paul Erikson and Lesley Scott (using her maiden name). Erikson was an old friend of producer John Wiles who’d worked with him on the office soap opera ‘Compact’ (‘Mind Robber’ author Peter Ling was one of its co-creators too). Scott was an established writer too, whose thought to have worked un-credited on many annuals (fans still can’t decide whether she’s the same ‘Lesley Scott’ who wrote for the Hartnell Dr Who annuals or whether that was a bloke of the same name who, confusingly, also worked for World Distributors on their annuals). If that credit is accurate then it means that Lesley Scott is a true pioneer, the first female writer for the series back in the days when television hardly ever featured women in roles beyond acting at all and a full seventeen years before Barbara Clegg writes ‘Enlightenment’ for the Peter Davison era. Only after the pair split up and they were, rather awkwardly, both contacted to write the Target novelisation of the story Erikson claimed that his wife hadn’t written a word but that he’d given her half the credit and wages for ‘personal reasons’. Lesley never spoke on record: Paul novelised the book alone without a mention of his ex anywhere in the credits. Backing this up director Michael Imison has said in interviews that he worked very closely with Paul to shape the script, but never even met his wife, while additionally surviving BBC paperwork only lists Paul initially till his request to include his wife too. But maybe she threw in some ideas while he was working on it and worked as a sounding board? Either way her credit’s there and there to stay, even though both writers neither work for this series again (sadly nor does the director due to an overspend which seems unfair – I mean, if the script calls for a jungle in a space ark you’re not going to do it properly and come in under-budget are you?!) 

In an era of great change this is also short-lived producer John Wiles’ last story and one of the few he oversaw himself from beginning to end, rather than inheriting from Verity Lambert (or forced upon him by BBC director Huw Wheldon). It’s a clue to where he wanted to take this series, in a more adult way with bigger concepts, having picked up on the fact that post-Dalek boom, the children’s audience was dwindling but the adult one was rising. However he lashed big-time with the series star as Hartnell considered the series as very much a children’s show adults happened to watch and thought they’d be put off by the talking and big philosophical points. As it happens drama boss Gerald Savory agreed with Hartnell, so the actor was forever going over Wiles’ head to the point where the producer just gave in (Savory was the one who over-ruled one last ditch attempt by the producer to write the star out for good in next story ‘The Celestial Toymaker’; Hartnell probably wished he’d stuck though, given that replacement Innes Lloyd has even more adult ideas for the show and turns it into more of a ‘horror’ series (much to Hartnell’s own ‘horror’). Hartnell also loses script editor Donald Tosh, his one last great ally alongside Peter Purves, who has become so close to Wiles he leaves out of loyalty (even though Wiles himself begged him to stay on and see their remaining ideas to fruition). The irony then: Hartnell ends this story of Earth’s survivors in space who are nearly overthrown due to a massive internal row that almost ended civilisation as pretty much the last ‘survivor’ thanks to a massive internal row that nearly ended the series. 

 Alas, like many a Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat story to come, the big downfall with ‘The Ark’ is that the tricks it plays on a viewer only really work the first time: on every repeat viewing the magic has been let out of the box and we know the Tardis is going to land in the same place come episode three. On first screening it’s one of the cleverest things the series can do: on every repeat viewing it’s just an interlude. Without that this is just another Hartnell by numbers, with what’s effectively two two parters in what are very nearly two different worlds, neither one given enough time to be properly explored. The humans and monoids aren’t really convincing as people in their own right however strong the props are and too much time is spent faffing around with the court case persecuting our heroes and watching the Doctor try to come up with a cure in hours (something our scientists still can’t do now!) rather than getting to know these people so well as individuals that we care what happens to them. There’s also an odd bit where the Doctor tries to tell Dodo off for using slang – as any English language student will be able to tell you language never stays still, it’s always changing, every generation adding and subtracting words to the dictionary or changing the meaning of others. It seems an odd thing for a time traveller to get hung up on at any time but especially in this, of all stories, about how mankind adapts and grows (plus the Tardis translator circuits would be updating this in Gallifreyan for him anyway, surely?) This story has more excuse for that than its 21st century cousins though: this was a story made safely in the knowledge that it probably wouldn’t be repeated and certainly couldn’t ever be owned and watched at leisure, because you just couldn’t do that with TV programmes in 1966. There are lot of other things you couldn’t do with TV in 1966 though and yet ‘The Ark’ does most of them: it’s one of the most inventive, imaginative and boldest DW stories of them all and one that’s criminally overlooked. No it hasn’t aged as well as the ‘timeless’ stories from this era, the ‘Dalek Invasion Of Earth’s or ‘Marco Polos’ that could have been shot today were it not for the lack of colour and the slightly slow approach. But if you’re prepared to see what ‘The Ark’ was trying to do rather than see how what it looks like now then you might just find yourself with a new favourite story to enjoy – it’s certainly an influential one. 

POSITIVES + A lot of thought has gone into this future world, more so than normal. The food we see people eat is basically ‘instant mash’ but for everything, while a lot of the diets come in pill form. Indeed, we see more of this world’s alien kitchen than we do any other room – or any other planet’s kitchen (till Bertie Bassett’s cousin The Kandyman in ‘The Happiness Patrol’ in 1988 anyway). This is also the first Dr Who story to feature what’s basically a ‘television’ showing the planet’s past too, a small bit of scene setting that will become the norm by the 1970s but is a rarity here: the idea that you could actually watch something back and view it again was about the most alien thing in this story to first time viewers. Once more it’s the sort of thing that would have made this story seem amazing on first viewing and just looks normal today now every story has built on this one’s foundations. Given their haircuts the Monoids have clearly been using that TV to watch the Beatle Cartoon series too! 

NEGATIVES - This is one of those stories you wish had been made earlier. The toll of being on the air for 3/4s of the year was really beginning to take its toll on its lead actor by now and there are more ‘Hartnell fluffs’ than ever before, even if he’s still by far the best actor here. You can see him really struggle, especially in scenes where its just him with Jackie Lane and she’s too inexperienced to feed him his lines the way he needs (and the way Peter Purves clearly does). Most of the time Purves can more than hold his own, but not here in a part that sees him sidelined or poorly for most of the story and his angst and bravado is a lot more clumsily written than it was for Ian in the similar scenes in ‘Marinus’. As for Dodo, I still don’t understand why the production team turned down the really promising character of Anne Chaplet for coming from the past (and having to have things the audience already know explained to them) for Dodo (whose so endearingly thick she has to have things the audience already know explained to her). Jackie Lane does a really good job of trying to be a blend of Susan’s childishness and Vicki’s childlikeness but Dodo just doesn’t have the same charm or personality and her constant glee, even when suffering from a cold and being locked up by aliens, soon gets on your nerves. She’s like a combination of all the worst people to be stuck on holiday with and the same goes for travelling through time and space with her. The Doctor might be chuckling when he talks about foreseeing oodles of trouble when she joins at the end of ‘The Massacre’ but he’s not laughing by the end of this story and you sense he’s already working out how to get The Tardis to drop her off somewhere out the way. Apparently the production team agreed: Dodo has one of the shortest runs of any companion, leaving in four stories’ time (and then midway through). 

BEST QUOTE: Steven - ‘The nature of Man, even in this day and age, hasn't altered at all. You still fear the unknown, like everyone else before you’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS:  ‘The Ark In Space’ is set in the same period and features another ark.

The Monoids return in the ‘New Adventures’ companion Bernice Summerfield spin-off audio story ‘The Kingdom Of The Blind’ (2005). Benny, suffering from sleepwalking, ends up sleep-flying her ex husband’s shuttle too much to his annoyance, waking up to find herself on the Monoid’s home planet. They’re a lot more brutal than they were in ‘The Ark’ (even the second half) and more like usual generic savages, although there is a neat scene where they show Benny round their ‘space kitchen come prison’, of which they’re justly proud.   

Previous ‘The Massacre’ next ‘The Celestial Toymaker’