The Curse Of Fenric: Ranking - 66

 

The Curse Of Fenric

(Season 26, Dr 7 with Ace, 25/10/1989-15/11/1989, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Andrew Cartmel, writer: Ian briggs, director: Nicholas Mallett)

Rank: 66

In an emoji: 📿

   'Let me read from my Bible, Doctor, to convince myself that everything I see before me doesn't exist...'And in the beginning God said let there be Light...' 

'Oh yeah I know him, he's an alien cataloguing humans over in Gabriel Chase' 'Humph, alright then...On the Earth day I command to bring life'

 '...Well, technically that was the Racnoss. Big giant spider, heart at the centre of the Earth, can't miss it. Either that or the Fendahl, a sort of intergalactic slug'. 

'The Good Samaritan then' 

'Actually a mis-print: it should have been 'The Good Sontaron'. He turned the other cheek and got a janus thorn in the probic vent at the back of the neck' 

'The Garden of Eden'? 'Drug-smuggling spaceship' 

'Jonah and the whale?' 'Skarasen' 

'Ezekeil's wheel?' '...In space!' 

'The devil then!' 'Uhh...Met him. Twice. Here what about the Book of Enoch that got cut? That mentions aliens you know!'

 

Dr Who in the late 1980s felt as thought it was cursed: nobody supported it, barely anyone was watching it, most people from the BBC director general down were laughing at it and even when it did reach heights the series had never reached before it tended to be in fan-friendly stories like ‘Remembrance Of The Daleks’ with its nods to the past or brilliantly quirky exercises in postmodernism like ‘The Happiness Patrol’ ‘Greatest Show In The Galaxy’ and ‘Ghostlight’ (all brilliant, but not the sort of thing you want to show to your disbelieving friends to make them fall in love with the series – well, not without seeing a good hundred other stories first so they make sense). The holy grail for fans who were still hoping for redemption was a story that managed to be accessible yet to newbies was the sort of thing no other series except Dr Who could do, which also thrilled them by going to places no other DW story had been before without contradicting anything, the sort of thing that anyone stumbling across for this show for the first time and assuming it was new could fall in love with and which was as brilliant as any BBC drama made on the paltry Dr Who budget of 1989 could be. ‘The Curse Of Fenric’ is that story in more ways than probably any other at the end of the show’s run and you could almost hear the collective breath of relief from fans around the world when this one went out: it was properly scary like Whos of old, featured an impressive recreation of a bygone age that was perfect in every detail (even the mocked teddy bear that looks like a 1980s Superted toy is a genuine 1940s knitting pattern even though as someone who had that Superted toy it really really looks like one – Jon Pertwee was the voice of his friend ‘Spotty’), it was the sort of dramatic time-travelling aliens-making-the-ordinary-seem-extraordinary story no other series could ever do as well as Dr Who and yet, best of all, it felt like nothing else the series has ever done before, like a secret door suddenly opened up in a beloved cul-de-sac you’d been down so many times you thought you knew backwards. 

For most of its run Dr Who had never touched the second world war even though its well known background and high stakes action with emotion make it obvious territory for all drama series and particularly this one – mostly because, for much of Dr Who’s original run, it was too darn recent for a high percentage of the people watching, more present than history. We put it few times in these reviews that when it started and for much of its first decade Who was a form of conversation between parents and children, the one programme both sides of the generation gap regularly sat down to watch together. By now the children have become parents themselves and there’s been enough time for this to become a two-generation gap: a lot of ‘Fenric’ is about Ace, bolshie 1980s teen who hates her family, coming to terms with the horrors they went through which changed them (not least because she meets her own Nan and has to comfort her when she gets a telegram that her Grandad’s dead and meets her hates mum as an innocent baby). War was always seen as a last resort in Dr Who, something to be avoided at all costs by the mostly 1960s hippies who wrote for the series and the 1980s hippies who were so afraid of the cold war growing hot, but here it’s seen as something that couldn’t be avoided, a slice of evil that’s existed since the dawn of time living inside everyone waiting to erupt into life again. Here the Second World War isn’t the ego-trip of some dodgy politicians followed blindly by some hypnotised sheep but a last ditch attempt to make the world a better place. The decision to make the ‘enemy’ invading soldiers both human and Russians (rather than Nazis) might confuse history (the one historical detail ‘wrong’ is that they never made it to Britain’s shores, even undercover, mostly because they were too busy fighting Nazis on the other side of Germany) is clever: as well as getting away from the fact you still couldn’t use the term ‘Nazi’ on TV in 1989 (more of a problem for ‘Silver Nemesis’ where they’re ‘German paramilitaries’…honest!) it brings this story more in line with what the audience of 1989 are living through: a reminder that the Russians used to be our friends and that their soldiers are just as much pawns in the game of war as we are. 

In the modern series we seem to be in the 1940s every other week but Dr Who had never done this sort of thing before. They still have to be careful though: the story makes good use of Churchill’s Bletchley Park ‘Enigma’ codebreakers (the perfect setting for a Dr Who, which happened in secret so is only remembered by a few people and thus doesn’t change history or timelines) and particularly the original computer whizzkid Alan Turing (basically he’s the character Dr Judson is in this story), who’d been all but forgotten till this story long before he was ‘rediscovered’ by so many drama and documentary series in the 21st centuries (I even got extra marks in my history lesson for having heard of them and knowing they were codebreakers in the war I remember – and no I didn’t let on where I knew them from as, given Dr Who’s reputation back then, they might have been taken away again!) Only it’s still quite tricky, ethically speaking, to come right out and a) reveal in the Cold war that we had a whole team of our best and brightest cracking codes so nobody actually mentions Bletchley park, while poor old Alan Turing is still a deeply controversial person in this era due to his homosexuality at a time when it was illegal. Forget Churchill: he was our biggest war hero and it’s one of the great outrages of the 20th century the way he was treated after the war, sterilised as part-punishment, part-warning for anyone thinking of being like him. Given that Dr Who has become a source of pro-gay politics in the 21st century in the hands of Russell T Davies its pleasing to see the show tackling this subject before most people were, though it’s mortifying how recent this was and how they still were more or less banned from using his real name (Ian Briggs’ novelisation of his story is even braver, giving Judson and Millington a romantic past and adding the detail that the Commander is loyal to Judson long past the point most people stopped caring because he was chatting u another boy during a rugby game and indirectly responsible for the bad tackle that saw Judson disabled and put in a wheelchair; there might be another reason this story is so coy about it: producer John Nathan-Turner and production assistant Gary Downie were in a gay relationship but not beyond having flings with gay fans they met at conventions too, something not widely known until after the series was cancelled although it seems to vary just how many insiders did know about it at the time). 

‘Fenric’ could almost be a straightforward tale of spies and menaces, like other dramas that were finally catching up to doing the war, only Dr Who always sees the bigger picture of past, present and future. So they go and throws in Vikings too and a curse from centuries ago that’s discovered in an old church, with Fenric an old enemy of the Doctor’s (but previously unseen by us) whose been doomed to live out of time, it’s bodily remnants trapped in a bottle long buried, until accidentally woken up by the Russians. This in turn wakes up a beast known as ‘The Destroyer’ whose been sleeping since The Big Bang and his underlings The Haemavores who rise out of the sea in a cliffhanger that’s just like ‘The Sea Devils’ on paper but has a totally different feel: this is a dark brooding menacing horror film not a scifi invasion action-adventure epic; they’re a fog that overtakes us all, not a lightning strike that kills us in one knockout blow and all the scarier for that. The evil in this story is less jump-scare and more oozy menace, which means that for once the rubber suits and slow lumbering walk of the monsters has real power. The WW2 setting means that this is all happening in a broken world where nothing is quite right anymore, where evacuees have been uprooted from their families they trusted to keep them safe and soldiers aren’t coming home to their families and everyone is walking round traumatised with PTSD already, so it feels somehow right that a bright blue demon has returned to claim The Earth and that humans walking into the sea end up possessed and grow long fingernails –in the middle of the War that’s turned your life upside down seventeen times already just another one of those days. Everyone’s reaction is basically ‘yeah – figures’ rather than the panic and incomprehension of some Dr Who stories and that somehow makes it worse. 

Certainly the confusion is enough to make the local Vicar lose his faith and like the best Dr Who stories there are bigger questions being asked of belief and religion its similarly to magic, curses and evil spells (after all, those Viking Gods had to go somewhere – why not outer space?) For faith, blind trust in strangers, is the ‘good’ side of a ‘curse’, the belief that there is enough good in strangers that they will help you rather than hurt you. A war confuses that: the propaganda passed down from the 1940s to the 1980s and beyond is that it was a time when people clubbed together against a greater threat, that it was all heroes fighting all villains, but the war was full of chancers and opportunists on the make too. Much of the story takes place around a church and the Reverend Wainwright (who the novel adds is the son and grandson of a vicar also) is the person everyone in this village is looking up to in order to believe in good, but the horrors of war means he has lost his own faith, in God and humanity. By contrast Ace finds hers in the most unlikely of places, in the family she thought she hated, but is made to lose hers in her surrogate parent The Doctor (even before it becomes a plot point that the Doctor has to be nasty to her to make her lose it there’s already the moment in episode three when she does the unthinkable and turns on the Doctor for keeping her in the dark, the crossest we’ve ever seen one of the Doctor’s friends since Jamie in ‘Evil Of The Daleks’). Given that this is a story all about the power of translation, note that different versions of the Bible five the word ‘faith’ as either ‘charity’ or ‘love’. For love is the other side of faith and trust, something that makes life worth living but also a weapon that can be used against you and hurts you when you’re betrayed. It’s the word Wainwright can’t bring himself to say in his sermon because he’s fallen out of love with God, it’s the thing that makes teenagers in this story grow up (Ace included), it’s the unrequited love of Judson that pushes the man to become a monster, it’s the thing that Ace has never felt towards he dysfunctional family before realising that they were victims of war and dysfunctional out of circumstances not malice. Love is the thing that makes you – and breaks you when it’s betrayed or lost or unfulfilled (neatly enough ‘love’ is the genuine code word the Russians had planned for a chemical weapons attack against the West in the 1960s). Note that the Doctor himself takes his faith from all his companions: it’s subtle, but in the scene where the Haemavores attack the Church in episode three you can see him mouthing the names of his companions under his breath (‘Susan…yes my Susan!...Barbara, Ian, Vicki, Steven…’) much as Jo once defeated the Devil by believing in The Dr in ‘The Daemons’, the closest DW story to this but even that one has a very different, consider feel. 

Faith doesn’t seem to be a natural bedfellow with logic but that’s the other theme going on in Ian Briggs’ script too: this is one of several 7th Dr stories to feature chess sets but while the others use it as set dressing this one has the Dr playing a game across time and happy to sacrifice any pawn he needs to for the bigger picture; we haven’t seen him this callous in a long time; the fact that the code-breakers trying to win the war are doing much the same and being ruled by logic and consequences not emotions (with Judson aka Turing’s ‘logic machine’ the first unofficial computer and thus the ancestor of Wotan and BOSS in stories past) is a neat parallel about ordinary people struggling to do the best thing for everybody even when it hurts. The war is being played out as a game, down to Commander Millington trying to get into Hitler’s mindset so as best to work out his next move – but can you have faith in a game or is it won by chance? Throw in the idea of runes as the original computers ‘flip flop’ machines in the Dr Whoniverse, rather than language, because of the straight lines that branch out from different places like binary code, and you have one of Who’s most intricately crafted and layered scripts. 

 Most brilliant of all is the layer about growing up and how facing evil bravely and even more than that recognising evil when you see it and knowing when to fight back is one of the things that makes you an ‘adult’. Reverend Wainwright tries to give his sermon but stumbles on the verse about ‘putting away childish things’, because he doesn’t feel ready to face such a grown-up threat and wants the innocence of the world as it was, so he can go back to believing in God again. Kathleen, Ace’s nan, is roughly the same age as her grand-daughter here but look at how different they are: Ace assumes she’s a teenage mum with a side boyfriend but she’s married and looking to start a family, her husband at war, trying to cope alone: even though they’re similar ages they’re at very different parts in their lives. Ace ought to be right at home in a war, blowing things up, but the script cleverly makes her the focal point- the human face of all this anguish and where evil that’s inherent in man can’t be blown up with a stick of dynamite. Ace was a childish teenager when we first met her in Briggs’ ‘Dragonfire’ but has been growing up fast across her two seasons and never more than here, with Sophie Aldred note-perfect in grasping the nuances of the script. She starts ‘Fenric’ by muddling along with her fellow teenagers in the 1940s who seem like the mates she used to hang around with in Perivale (and who we meet for real in ‘Survival’) before realising that they’re too immature and reckless, ignoring the ‘danger – no swimming signs’ and that her time with the Dr has made her responsible in a way she never was before; she’s asked to play for time and seduces a Russian soldier like she’s a decade older to distract him; then at the very end Ace has to face the Doctor – the one person whose believed in her and seen the wise mature woman hiding inside this scared little girl – betraying her, confronting the fear that everyone pities her and nobody likes her which is more terrifying than any extra-terrestrial threat can ever be (spoilers: It’s all to break her faith in him, which the Haemavores are feeding off course and we kind of guess what’s going on, but for Ace who doesn’t its truly heartbreaking); mostly, though, its there when Ace learns to forgive the mother she’s hated all her life after seeing her as innocent baby and going back into danger precisely to rescue her without thought to herself, learning to be the bigger person (literally as her mum’s a baby) and forgive someone who would never forgive her. 

There are lots of hints, too, at sex – something they can’t come out and say in the 20th century as blatantly is in the 21st even in the show’s final original year. Underneath all the Viking and WW2 trappings this is a Dracula story at heart (the Haemavores were Vampires till late in the day, when producer John Nathan-Turner got worried about scaring little kids – off that he didn’t feel that way during ‘Sate of decay’ during his first term as producer in 1981 but still – although it’s probably for the best as vampires already existed as something a bit different in that story). They don’t quite come out and say where this story is set but by all accounts its Yorkshire – the same county Bram Stoker visited when he got the idea for his story in 1890, near enough a century before this story went out (some fans wonder if its Kent, which is where they filmed it, but the Vikings never got that far South). Pale creatures killed by faith who raise out of the sea who love sucking on blood, The Haemavores are, if anything, even more natural vampires than the ‘Great Ones’ from ‘State Of Decay’ though and the way they take their victims, turning them into people like the,, is straight of a Dracula film (say the 1979 one – which just happened to be Sylvester McCoy’s debut). ‘Dracula’ is really about a loss of innocence, of taking purity from virgins and corrupting them to become immortal. In this light sex is something that separates adults from children too, a rite of passage that allows darker animal impulses free reign, and while they can only go so far as innuendo in a Saturday teatime slot for a kiddies programme look how much of it there is: the teenagers at the start make lots of jokes about wanting to dive and get lost in the sea that eventually claims their lives, cackle about not being allowed in ‘maiden’s point’ once they lose their virginity while Ace herself starts falling in love with Sorin, the kindly dashing Russian soldier (trust Ace to fall for a man in the armed forces!) before using flirting as a distraction technique in a most odd conversation fraught with metaphors of sexual longing (although the original line – ‘I’m too hot, I can feel my clothes sticking to my skin’ made everyone laugh during filming in a freezing cold Winter so it was changed to ‘There’s a wind coming, I can feel it whipping up in my clothes’ at the last minute). ‘I’m not a little girl’ says Ace to the Doctor at one point, as if she’s only just realised that she can think for herself and have feelings of her own without brushing them away. 

 Going back to her nan, Ace says to her that she has always been dead set against a husband, but suddenly feels less sure, her maternal instincts kicking in when she sees a baby – the maternal drive the human ‘kindness’ that counteracts the darker ‘Fenrir’ primal instincts of sex. It’s more than that though, it’s responsibility: ‘there’s a time when you’d drop everything for a bit of excitement’ says the Doctor, surprised, as Ave runs from rather than towards danger, but she feels responsibility to her Nan and concerned for her safety (not even her own. The way it would be in some Who stories). This is the moment when Ace really comes of age, the moment she learns to think of people outside herself and want to do the best for them, like the Doctor always does (even if in this story that ‘always’ is tested rather). Indeed it’s challenging the Doctor, thinking for herself and balancing the right thing to do nstead of taking orders like a soldier, that really really makes Ace come of age and it’s a tragedy that Dr Who ends when it does, not just because it was getting so good but because they could have gone to so many different places with Ace’s character after this (the ‘New Adventures’ books that officially continue the story, good as most of them are for the 7th Doctor, are rotten for Ace: she becomes a soldier, an addict and a psychopath, sometimes at the same time and this throws away everything her character learns in this story. Sadly Ace’s return in ‘Power Of the Doctor’ rather fudges over how much she’s grown too). If ‘Fenric’ is Ace’s coming of age story then it’s notable that it ends with the Doctor encouraging her to dive into the sea’s deep waters at the end and meet the challenge head on; it’s a quirk of the running order, that was changed at the last minute to make this hammer horror story the one shown over Halloween but it actually leads into the hinted lesbianism of ‘Survival’ and a whole new world of sexual discovery for Ace really well. 

 The story makes even more sense viewed like that if you know the original draft. Briggs started with a story named ‘Wolf-Time’ that was much more about the beast inside all of us and based both it and ‘Fenric on ‘Fenrir’, the wolf in actual Norse mythology who was kept in chains by Gods for fear it would ‘corrupt’ humanity, only to get free. Funnily enough those Gods are the Ragnarok, the same ones from ‘The Greatest Show In The Galaxy’ from the previous season, but Briggs had no idea about this (what are the odds that a series that had run for 26 years would do this twice a year apart and never again since? There was clearly something in the air. Script editor Andrew Cartmel changed it to avoid confusion but, honestly, there’s not really a contradiction: Gods that needs to be entertained totally live off people’s badness. Which explains why so much telly that isn’t Dr Who is so bad). There aren’t all that many surviving Viking monuments but three of them all depict Fenrir as a wolf. However the producer dropped the wolf angle, perhaps because it was a layer too far, or because people would be expecting actual wolves that would be too costly to film, or maybe it ran a little too close to ‘The Box Of Delights’ (the superlative Christmas story of John Masefield that was a TV series many Who alumni worked on in 1984, not least Patrick Troughton and composer Roger Limb). That’s a shame: a vampire story works well with a werewolf story, as anyone whose seen Who writer Toby Whithouse’s equally superlative series ‘being Human’ will attest. Ingiger, the real name of the ‘Ancient One’, is an authentic Viking name by the way.

Sylvester McCoy is truly magnificent too in a story that’s now completely removed from the earlier adventures that made the Dr the spoon-playing comic relief in his own show rather than the hero, dark and brooding and believable as being a match to one of the most powerful creatures seen in Dr Who up to this point (he’d totally beat The Devil from ‘Satan’s Pit’ horns down, far more than the 10th Doctor). You really feel that this timelord is playing a game as old as time, that the stakes are at their highest and that he has to be grown-up too, making sacrifices for the greater good. The fact that one of these pawns is his own companion really tests him and McCoy is never better than showing guilt and anguish except perhaps when he’s staring down ‘The Destroyer’ in one of the biggest climaxes to any Who story. All the more impressive given that the McCoy family treated the location filming as a bit of an extra holiday: that’s Sylvester’s sons Same and Joe Kent-Smith (his real name) filming on the Kent coast as Haemavore extras in the ‘extended’ edits on video and DVD (sadly it got cut on transmission, which must have made life difficult in the McCoy household!) As for the well-behaved baby, he was actually a boy not a girl and the son of the proprietors of the Bush Hotel on Shepherd's Bush Green, right next to the Dr Who production office, chosen because he always stayed so still and calm even during the middle of a noisy happy hour filled with BBC personnel! Look out, too, for Pepsi, John Nathan-Tuner’s dog, who is in Miss Hardaker’s garden.

What we get across four tense episodes then isn’t just the usual Dr Who runaround or even the strong plot that builds up from episode to episode but a story driven by character and emotion more than it is events, one that asks a lot of its regular cast and very nearly breaks Ace into the bargain. There’s an edge to this story, a realism that none of the older Whos, even ones that are greater bits of TV than this, quite have. And it all looks amazing, making the most of all the 1980s recording techniques that have come along since the olden days when the series used to try ‘real’ things like this every week. Of course when you’re reinventing the wheel you’re always going to have problems with some of the spokes. You can tell that some of the actors phone in performances because its ‘just Dr Who’ (the series had a lot of remarks like that back in 1989) and only belatedly realise what a good drama this actually is and up their game. The extras playing the possessed Haemavore-Humans look as if they’re sleepwalking, with their hands stretched out in front of them, not the most evil creatures in the universe. A lot more could have been made of the curse: other than a shot of a Viking long boat there’s frustratingly little back story for how the curse got laid down in the church and how a curse can even work as an incantation to summon a demon in the first place (this is getting silly now; Vikings play a role in so many separate Dr Who stories and yet none are really ‘about’ them but have them as incidental characters to something else less interesting. Give me my Vikings!) The fight scenes are pretty awful: you can tell Sophie Aldred is throwing herself into the arms of the Haemavore extras who can’t see her in the siege at the church in episode three and every time somebody has to break into something close to a run it just looks silly in a story about slow lingering menace. It’s all oddly un-creepy, perhaps because it’s all lit in broad daylight without any shadows (because in this era the series simply couldn’t afford to shoot in the dark). 

As happened a lot with the stories being made in Dr Who’s final season of the 20th century every story went on so long with such a limited amount of episodes that a lot of thing got cut, including some scenes so necessary to the plot that watching ‘Fenric’ without them is almost incomprehensible (and for once even reading the novel or seeing the video with its six minutes of cut scenes didn’t help a lot, though the record twelve minutes added back into the ‘special edition’ DVD helps a little). For a time this story was mooted to be expanded into a five parter (though goodness only knows what other story this year could have afforded to ‘lose’ and episode and the BBC were so anti-Dr Who there’s no way they were going to move the schedules around for an extra week!) but Briggs felt it would take away the power of his cliffhangers so instead we get a story that sadly is still a bit too much of a muddle, where great ideas are raised but never seen through to fruition and one that doesn’t quite hang together all the way through. For all its timeless brilliance, for all its moments of perfection, there are other scenes where this story looks like what it really is: a hideously low budget story made in the 1980s with all those excesses on screen, with weird acting, poor costumes and padding (the destroyer is a pretty good monster compared to what we’re used to seeing, but still doesn’t seem like ‘The Evil One’ if you know what I mean). Maybe everything was so realistic there was a curse attached to this story too? The weather was much colder than it should have been and everyone got close to frostbite. Filming in the sea was delayed after an unexpectedly huge tide, the likes of which hadn’t been seen by the locals in years. The power went out during the flooded tunnel scenes, leaving everyone in cold water in the dark. And if the climactic battle looks oddly shot to you (and it always did to me) that might be explained by the fact a bunch of footage was accidentally wiped in mysterious circumstances: the director spent three days searching for them and all he found was a blurry shape where one might have been. He re-shot the scenes but without the camera staff, which means they seem far away without the close-ups he’d planned. 

 Even so, ‘Fenric’ is a story that ignores that curse and breaks another, the idea that Dr Who is unloved and largely forgotten, and really makes the problems in this story work for it. For a start it has great fun doing the sort of sexual and violent stuff that this show was never allowed to do when more attention was being paid to it and even the things it can only hint at go further than any other pre-watershed ‘family’ show in 1989. There are several techniques that seem normal to us now but which were truly ground-breakingly inventive back then, such as the Nicam stereo soundtrack (at a time when most televisions wouldn’t recognise it anyway) that composer mark Ayres really uses to his advantage, with one of his better (if still highly synth-heavy, with touch of Faure’s requiem) scores (rightly the first complete Who score ever released as a soundtrack CD and as such beloved by many), as well as the hand-cam that follows Ace as she climbs down a step-ladder from the church (all the better to show that wannabe Blue Peter presenter Sophie Aldred is doing her own stunts!) Even the amount of material cut helps this story for current viewers discovering this story sicne the comeback: in an effort to squeeze everything in there are scenes that have a very ‘modern’ fell to them, where characters from one scene talk about something over the top of another scene, something which makes particular sense when it’s the people from the future who’ve travelled back to a 1940s ‘present’ talking about a Viking ‘past’ (because Dr Who, as always, is a series about how all three are always connected and how our past affects how we act in the present and make other people act in the future). Equally the idea of a curse buried in an inscription that couldn’t be read until the invention of the computer seemed like the silliest and most far-fetched thing in the story back in 1989 I remember, but now after years of ‘The Bible Code’ (a semi-serious 1990s study that spawned three best-sellers and claims that the Bible contains exactly that) and ‘The Da Vinci Code’ (a preposterous book about the painter hiding hints in his work that relates to the Vatican and several conspiracies; sad to say one of the co-writers of ‘The Abominable Snowman’ ‘The Web Of Fear’ and ‘The Dominators’ came up with the ‘original’ version of this nonsense back in the 1970s) if anything it seems like such an obvious Dr Who idea it’s a surprise they bother to go there. One thing that nearly didn’t make sense till a clever addition to the script at the last moment was the weather: this is the only DW story outside ‘The Sontaron Experiment’ back in 1975 to be shot entirely on location and the Dorset coastline (Lulworth Cove location spotters!) and St Laurence Church in Hawkhurst are great locations that add an extra sense of realism to the story, a bit too real in the case of the weather, which changed by the hour; thankfully a last minute line about how Fenric was even affecting the weather covers up a multitude of sins (just as it did with ‘The Claws Of Axos’). The cellar scenes, where the Viking curse that started it all is buried, was in the grounds of local Bedgebury School – Sophie Aldred was struck on visiting that she knew it from somewhere but only later realised it was where her lacrosse team from her own school Blackheath High had played an away match! There are a handful of truly iconic moments that make up for any plotholes or padding too: the death of the Vicar, Judson’s transformation, the Doctor ambidextrously signing two official papers from two departments with two hands (such a great idea to move the plot along and avoid the ‘who are you?’ bit nearly all Who stories have) and some real gems in the dialogue (‘Don’t interrupt me when I’m eulogising!’ snaps Judson-Fenric, mid-transformation, utterly in character for both). 

 The result is a last-gasp mini-masterpiece that even the general public could enjoy without a long list of continuity references or allowances for dodgy effects and monsters; but, alas, Fenric’s biggest problem that even a story this great couldn’t solve was that the public had all but stopped watching. Had the BBC got behind this show, seen how well it was received by the most critical fanbase in science fiction in Dr Who’s most criticised era, shown it at prime time and properly advertised it, then this show would have been so popular it would never have had to have the 16 year rest (bar the TV Movie). More than any other story in that final run, though, it points the way to the comeback, with its focus on the companion and her feelings, it’s brutal depiction of war but with a deeper subtext and its sheer bravery at doing things that had never been done before. To think, it took a story about curses to lift the one that had fallen over the show – well in all ways except the viewing figures. This series had been getting good again for a while but now it was getting great in its final year, one last great twang of Who’s elastic format dice that delivered in whole new ways the show had never achieved before, until the curse of Michael Grade took all that momentum away. There should have been a lot more stories in DW like this one in the 1980s but, alas, ‘Fenric’ remains unique. Curse it! 

 POSITIVES + The show is stolen by three brilliant bits of acting that carry everyone else: Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred and..quiz show host Nicholas Parsons. What seemed on paper like the stupidest bit of stunt casting of them all turns up dividends as Parsons takes the chance to do some straight acting (he’d only ever done comedy before this – and most of that was thirty years prior) and Parson’s Vicar (if that’s not a clerical contradiction in terms; well my local village vicar growing up was called ‘Reverend Pope’, genuinely, so it makes sense to me!) is utterly believable, both as the do-good innocent who believes the best in everyone and the broken man whose had everything he’s believed about the world turned on its head, the downside of DW’s ordinary becoming extraordinary methodology. We all feared he’d be panting in the vestry and venting in the pantry but no, he makes the Vicar a man of nuance and complexity, someone who’d be totally different had we met him before the outbreak of war still trying to cling on to that innocence but who knows he can never go back. The shots of Rev Wainwright trying to repel the Haemovores with his faith, and failing, falling into their clutches as they cackle how ‘there’s no good in you’, is one of the most harrowing and memorable Dr Who scenes of them all not least because Dr Who is the sort of series where the kindly people played by guest names nearly always live and we don’t think they’ll really go there – but they do. Parsons based the part on his own dad, fittingly for a story about generational trauma, who wasn’t a vicar but was extremely devout. He must have been convincing too: a local, who hadn’t noticed the cameras or keep out signs, walked up to him mid-eulogy and asked about the date for the next Women’s Institute meetings before asking how long he’d been a vicar as she didn’t recognise him. ‘Only a very short time’ Nicholas deadpanned. 

 NEGATIVES - The Haemavores are the story’s weakest link. Not that they’re bad, just that they look like other DWy rubber monsters rather than the more ethereal esoteric menaces the script demands and a little too like the Marshmen from ‘Full Circle’ painted blue in a story that’s, otherwise, impressively low on the usual inter-series recycling. The shots of them wobbling out the sea have less impact than the ones in ‘The Sea Devils’ too somehow – this is one of those Who stories that might have been better without an alien at all, especially as the ‘possessed humans’ makeup (those long fingernails!) is so impressive. BEST 

QUOTE: Viking inscription: ‘We hoped to return to the North Way, but the curse follows our dragon ship... the Wolves of Fenric shall return for their treasure, and then shall the dark rule eternally’ 

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: This story was chosen as the 7th Doctor’s representative in the ‘Tales Of The Tardis’ series (2023), part of the 60th anniversary celebrations on BBC i-player that top and tail past adventures. An older 7th Doctor and Ace meet up in a ‘Memory Tardis’ a ‘special place where old friends come together’ filled by mementoes from adventures gone and fuelled by stories from the past. Ace naturally heads for a baseball bat before picking up the 7th Doctor’s panama hat, at which he whisks it off her and they talk about growing older. This pair are much quicker to talk about ‘darker truths’ than other pairings in the series, with a lot to get off their chests: Ace is still the abandoned teenager, worried that the Doctor moved on and forgot her and beams when he says he thought about her every day, before he smiles back when she admits she wished she’d never left and stayed with him ‘forever’ (how she left they gloss over, given that the ‘New Adventures’ novels and Big Finish audios have two different accounts!) Ace talks about the wind that first took her to Ice World and for an awful minute it looks as if the BBC are going to scare prospective new fans off with ‘Dragonfire' but no – she talks instead about being taken there by Fenric as the Doctor stares intently at a chessboard. Ace is still scarred, sad about the lives that were lost the day but the Doctor gently reminds her that ‘others were set in motion’ and hints at the idea of fate being unchangeable (as in so many 7th Doctor stories). Ace quips about ‘dangerous undercurrents’ before the Doctor takes her hand and says its better to ‘dive together’ before the story starts, the widescreen narrowing as if they’re both remembering (though really we’re moving from high definition to 1980s TV specifications!) Then 100 minutes or so later the Doctor apologises for not stopping to see how Ace was, being ‘always on the run and eager for the next adventure’. In return Ace says that she chose to keep her head down and ignore it all. The Doctor finally apologises, a quarter century late, for ‘using you’ while Ace admits to a form of PTSD from all the deaths, mentioning characters from ‘Fenric’ ‘Remembrance’ ‘Survival’ and ‘Greatest Show’. Then just as the mood is getting dark Ace says that the Doctor dropped her off in London, Ontario by accident and her problems getting home! Ace then tells us about making up with her mum Audrey as seen in this story, even though she couldn’t remember who Ace was until one day when she finally worked it out. The Doctor then says how proud she would have been if she’d known everything her grand-daughter got up to, saying that he likes checking in on his friend from time to time and promising ‘the best is yet to come’. Like the other five Tales (there never was a 4th Doctor or 8th Doctor onwards) it doesn’t add much to your knowledge or enjoyment of the story but it is very lovely indeed to see two old friends back together again, if only for eight minutes or so and it’s very Dr Who the idea that the people we love are out there still only a memory away. ‘Ace Of Hearts’ covers similar ground but this time by going back in time rather than forward, a 1998 short story from the original ‘Short Trips’ anthology by Mike Tucker and Robert Perry. The 7th Doctor crashes a family party and visits Ace as a baby back when she was still being called Dorothy. He meets her mum Audrey and leaves a ‘hint’ of who he really is by leaving an Ace of Hearts playing card in her photo frame of the baby, knowing she’ll remember the events of ‘Fenric’. It’s Ace the Doctor has really come to see though, apologising to the baby for all the manipulation and admitting that he finds it easier to say all this to her as a baby than when she’s a grown-up. It’s a sweet little tale that gives the Doctor a sense of closure following the events of the ‘New Adventures’ series and is in keeping with the idea in ‘Tales Of The Tardis’ that he’s been keeping tabs on Ace through her life, unseen. 

 ‘The Wolves Of Winter’ meanwhile is a 12th Doctor comic strip (one of the few to feature companion Bill) that goes way back – to a Viking encampment in the 9th century in fact. Though most of the story is about the Ice Warriors and not The Vikings at all (Agh! Honestly, when are we going to get that straightforward Viking story I’ve been longing for?!) there is a sub-plot about Fenric’s influence over the Vikings and the villain The Flood (mentioning how the grand plan replaces them with haemavores in time) as well as how, even this many regenerations later, the Doctor is still embroiled in a sort of game. 

‘The Turing Test’ (2000) is an 8th Doctor novel by Paul Leonard that finally puts Turing front and centre in a Dr Who story after the half-attempt here. A rather odd little book that features Graham Greene as a sort of spy and the McGann Doctor losing his memory (again!) it nevertheless has a lot of the same dark magic as ‘Fenric’. No Vikings or Fenric, mind, but lots more code-breaking. 

 A quick mention too for the ‘New Adventures’ novel ‘Set Piece’(1995) which is one account for how Ace left the Tardis: to monitor a time-rift after falling out with the 7th Doctor and in which she falls in love with Captain Sorin’s great-grandfather! Briggs must have approved as the book is really a fleshed-out version of his coda to his ‘Fenric’ novelisation published five years earlier, one of the more imaginative re-workings that also features a letter from Bram Stoker about being inspired to write ‘Dracula’ by sighting the haemovores and a school essay by Commander Millington. 

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