Enlightenment: Ranking - 21

 

Enlightenment

(Season 20, Dr 5 with Tegan and Turlough, 1-9/3/1983, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Eric Saward, writer: Barbara Clegg, director: Fiona Cumming)

Rank: 21  

   'It was the schooner Buccaneer 

That sailed the wintry stars 

Tacking from the Earth to eternity 

Via a stop off on Mars 

The skipper was a pirate 

With a fleet for company 

Of outlaws she's kidnapped 

From one of the Earth's seven seas 

Her rival was a gentleman 

Striking in nature and in name 

They both risked their crew across the blue 

All for a little game 

The treasure was Enlightenment 

Understanding was the prize 

With neither side deserving 

If you looked into their eyes 

No 'twas the timelord from Gallifrey 

Who saw through the reserve and hate 

And his cabin boy who claimed the prize 

Worth so much more than pieces of eight 

The eternals tried to claim their prize

Enlightenment to set them free

But they miss that the story’s in the journey

And not what’s out to sea

Such is the woeful tale of the Buccaneer 

The big loser in the race 

But such is the fate of all mankind 

To be left dangling in space, arr!' 

If you ask me Humans have got it all wrong. There we are living most of our lives in ‘space’, trying to fill up the world around us with things like overflowing bank accounts, status symbols and online followers, when really we should be living in ‘time’, making the most of our all-too-short lifespan because none of those things we spend our life chasing will matter in the slightest when we’re dead. The only real way anyone comes out of life a winner is if they filled their lives with meaning and purpose that create ripples so that we can be remembered after we’re gone, but only a few people are ever lucky enough to get to do that: it’s a sad sobering fact that, unless you’re involved in as timeless a series as Dr Who, you probably won’t be remembered at all once your great-grandchildren are dead. Dr Who knows that agonising truth of existential despair that gnaws away at the heart of human existence better than most series: the Doctor has been granted multiple lifetimes to explore the universe and make the most of every minute (even if those minute’s aren’t necessarily spent in chronological order and some of those minutes end up ‘undoing’ the work of other minutes) and yet you still feel if he lived forever it would never ever be quite enough to do all the things he wants to do. And if the Doctor struggles to make the most out of life when what chance do us mere mortals, stuck in one time and space, have? 

 Writer Barbara Clegg knew this better than maybe any other Dr Who writer and came up with The Eternals, one of my favourite alien species in all of Who, beings who get the ultimate blessing of being able to live forever, but unlike the Dr they can’t think what to do with their empty lives so fritter them away instead because without that rigid deadline to work to life has even less meaning or purpose, with days just a vacuum to be filled. Like Captain Jack and Ashildr to come, eternity is a curse not a blessing, with the removal of death effectively removing all sense of life because nothing matters anymore. The irony of ‘Enlightenment’ is that they gleefully waste the lives of the ‘Ephemerals’ (basically ‘us’, or any species with a shortened lifespan) in their own silly trivial quests, games and competitions, that none of them will ever remember in a few centuries’ time, because they think our lives are too short to be of any value or consequence – but are their lives any better or more important for being so long and yet so empty? The Eternals are one of the most casually cruel and detached races in all of Dr Who, but they have a motivation that’s more believable than most alien species who want to take over the Earth or destroy us all: sheer boredom. There’s something particularly chilling about a species that wants to kill you not because they hate you or because they want to convert you to be like them but because, well, it passes the time doesn’t it? And you were only going to die in what, forty, sixty, eighty years anyway? It’s not like you were going to do anything useful in such a short time. A lot of alien races look down on humanity for various reasons but tp the Eternals, especially, we’re insects with such an impossibly short lifespan our lives look like a complete waste of time. 

 Clegg was a radio writer who lost her job when Radio 2 dropped all their long running radio dramas including her pet project ‘Waggoner’s Walk’ (a sort of more plausible version of ‘The Archers’). A scifi fan, she won a gig adapting ‘The Chrysalids’ for Radio 4, John Wyndham’s seminal 1950s tale of prejudice and mutation that, of all his books, most feels like a Dr Who story. We follow David, the son of a family who have survived a nuclear war and are racially pure and like all others who resemble them convinced that they’re somehow special. David becomes close to a little girl from another family he treats like a little sister but is horrified to find out she has an extra toe and ‘isn’t like them’, that she’s ‘ephemeral’ with a life that doesn’t matter in the same way theirs do. He’s caught between going to the authorities and reporting her or helping her and eventually helps her and her family escape, while finding out he has super powers of telepathy himself so he can ‘talk’ to her from a distance and join with others like them, his entire world view overturned by actually getting to know one of the people he’s been taught to be so prejudiced about. Radio 4 Extra still repeat her version most years somewhere in their schedule it’s so good. Having got a taste for scifi Barbara then contacted Eric Saward, script editor of Who in this era, who she’d worked with in the past, asking for a job. 

 Being the ‘junior’ writer in season twenty Clegg was given the ‘difficult’ slot wrapping up the ‘Black Guardian trilogy’ (not part of her original script) and dutifully sat down to write it with plenty of time, but to her horror found that the time she’d put aside to write the first draft was when some distant relatives had ‘booked’ themselves into her house. They were from a far posher background than Clegg with no work to rush back to and she found them ultra-demanding and draining, as they insisted on being ‘entertained’ at all times and if they weren’t they got passive-aggressive in the way only posh people looking down on poor people can (sample line: ‘We don’t punish ephemerals, we just use them…kindly’. Yeah right!), adamant that she was wasting her time with a writing career when she could be doing something important. Like marrying for money and hoarding it. As the writer started waiting on her family hand and foot and re-acting in a dazed sort of way to their demands she began to think about the story she should have been writing and came up with a race that had imposed themselves on humanity in much the same way, expecting to be entertained but distant and removed from the people entertaining them, as if they didn’t really care. The Eternals are a great creation because they’re the opposite of what the Doctor stands for, his antithesis even more than a Master or a Dalek. The Doctor left Gallifrey partly because he has a passion to see the universe and has two hearts big enough to care for all the people he meets and the opposite of love and passion isn’t a Dalek-like hate, its disinterest. Gerry Davis and Kit Pedler had already gone down this route creating the Cybermen but they were more of a robotic-style distant caused by removing emotion chips. Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke, too, had created the timelords to be the Doctor’s detached opposites but in Robert Homes’ hands they’d changed into a race that had all the same passionate feelings like jealousy and anger but that these were all kept hidden. The eternals however have lost the ability to feel because, after living so long, they’ve become numb to feelings. For the Doctor life is beautiful and to be lived to the maximum however long you’ve got; to The Eternals life is something to suffer and waste on petty things. 

 The eternals are also the antithesis of mankind in many ways: our journeys into space have been all about furthering our species and trying to get a foothold on another planet or solar system before we accidentally snuff ourselves out, going to great lengths and through harsh difficulties so that our offspring might get to live that little bit longer, but the Eternals live long enough to master space travel almost by accident and have long ago turned it into a silly parlour game, the explorers of our world replaced by pirates who live for the treasure not the quest. Because Eternals have lived so long most times are the same to them, their lives a random grab-bag of images borrowed from other cultures including ours, having made no impact on the world instead of the people they take out of it. And so, almost by accident (Clegg almost certainly wouldn’t have seen it, not being a Who fan as such) we end up with the scenario for ‘The War Games’ all over again fourteen years on, only with naval personnel instead of soldiers, a clash of different eras and countries all racing against each other, hypnotised into not thinking anything is wrong, all for the amusement of a powerful race who holds power over life and death. 

 There’s a longstanding tradition in scifi and even in real space travel of having spaceships being just like the ships of the sea – we call them space ‘ships’ for starters – because it’s the obvious next stage we go to after exploring our oceans. ‘Star Trek’ for one was pitched as a series about being like the sea films of old but in space and have the same ranking system as well as a ‘naval whistle’ as their communications call. For the astronauts who set off into space, exploring it for the first time, are ‘our’ eras equivalent of the sailors of old who travelled the seven seas not knowing what they might find and still half-convinced they might fall off the edge of the world or meet dragons. Usually, though, writers have spaceships that are just treated like ships – in this story the space shuttles really do look like ships in space, racing around planets as ‘marker buoys’ and driven by ‘solar winds’ (a real scientific discovery still kind of new in the 1980s where all suns are thought to emit a stream of protons and electrons that can be detected in the atmosphere of a planet like Earth’s magnetic fields). The shot at the end of episode one, when we think we’re in a historical only to see, as the Doctor does, that we’re really in an Edwardian sailing vessel tacking through the vast emptiness of space and racing a Greek galley (with a motor to make the oars move in and out), a Chinese junk and a river boat from the early Americas is fabulously Dr Who, something semi-ordinary clashing head on with something extraordinary. The Edwardian setting is the perfect choice, a time when mankind was as removed from his fellow man as he ever was in our history, living to a rigid system of manmade codes of class and status and when a lot of posh humans were behaving like The Eternals on a much smaller scale, oblivious to the fact that, to an eternal, they’re all small fry too. The sailors taken in this story about how distant the officers are but how this is kind of normal – to them very little is different to how it would be in their real lives anyway, while the actors playing eternals are all coached to give deliberately vague, under-played performances, director Fiona Cumming hiring actors that were naturally blank-faced and were able to go without blinking for long periods of time. The brainwashed Ephemerals stolen from their own time (and surely answering a few maritime mysteries of missing men along the way) have no idea what they’re really doing of course and they’re in a daze and if they fall to their deaths into space from the rigging then, no problem, they weren’t going to live much longer anyway and there are plenty more humans to be plucked out of the sea. 

 Of course the Doctor’s going to be outraged when he finds this out and the story gives Peter Davison lots of room to be cross and emotional, while making the most of the contrasts between Dr 5’s youthful vigour and the Eternals’ aged blankness. We’re used to seeing the Doctor as a natural mediator between two factions at war but never quite like this, where he’s too long-lived to be an ephemeral and too short-lived to be an eternal (this story’s second best line: A lord of time? Are there lords in such a small domain?) JNT and Saward had decided between them to make the 5th Doctor more passive, in contrast to Tom Baker, but here the Doctor is back to being multiple steps ahead of everyone else, working the solution out just a little head of the audience as a good regeneration always should. 

 This is a great story for the two companions too though and this is a rare Dr Who story that could only have worked as well with these two aboard the Tardis. One of the richest sub-plots is when an eternal named Marriner becomes fascinated by Tegan’s rich but ‘tiny’ mind, so full of emotion and rage and confusion and life, so different to his own. It’s one of Dr Who’s weirdest yet most plausible love stories as he tries to woo her in the way he would any eternal, only to keep putting his foot in it by not quite understanding how her world or her mind works: he can’t see why she’s upset when he rummages through her memories and re-creates the bedroom she’ll never see again onboard his sailing ship for instance or her misery when she thinks Turlough has fallen overboard and she’ll never see him again. After all, her life is short too so why become so detached to things and people she’s going to lose anyway? He’s used to bending every mortal to his will, so finding someone this feisty and used to having to stand up for themselves, creating boundaries that she won’t let him cross, fascinates him. Janet Fielding is parked off to the side in too many of her stories, despite the richness and potential in Tegan, but she finally gets a non-Mara story to get her teeth into and really makes the most of it, playing up Tegan’s confusion and conflicting emotions – sometimes her emotions can get in the way but here they’re the whole story round which the plot pivots. It’s a clever idea that’s somehow both sweet and creepy all at the same time: we’re removed enough to see that mariner doesn’t want to cause upset but also involved enough to see why, to Tegan, it feels like stalking, invading her personal privacy even when she says ‘no’. The fact that the background is the Edwardian age and she’s wearing a very elegant Edwardian dress rather than her usual stewardess outfit (or her ‘boob tube’, one of the most contemporary bits of clothing in the series – the Doctor continues to be oblivious to human clothing by ignoring her when she’s all ‘tah-dah, didn’t I scrub up well?’), only underlines how very different this world is to Tegan’s and how far she is out her comfort zone. You feel sorry for Marriner, who is getting his first glimpse into how the other half live and how love and passion makes life worth living and sees his own as mere ‘existence’, confused but fascinated by someone so unlike himself. However you also really cheer for Tegan like never before as she basically tells Marriner where to get off, even as he looks at her with blank confusion and it’s pitched as being the age-old story of a ‘forbidden’ romance between upstairs and downstairs and a man with all the privilege trying to take advantage of it. Only the scifi twist means that, rather than being a fumbling awkward teen. Unused to feeling emotions, Marriner is impossibly old (being only the second story written by a woman in Dr Who – and the first, ‘The Ark’ is debatable whatever the credits say – you can also see ‘Enlightenment’ as a feminist statement, about the gulf between the impulses and standards of men and women). However Tegan copes with this better than most companions (she’s a trained air-stewardess after all, used to looking after haughty passengers who waste the equivalent of her year’s salary on ‘extras’ during their flights). There’s a particularly poignant moment when she sees the photograph of her Aunty Vanessa, who died in Tegan’s first Dr Who story ‘Logopolis’ and Marriner won’t understand why she’s upset to be reminded of someone she loved and who died before her time, because that’s going to happen to her one day soon too isn’t it? 

Death, specifically the Doctor’s, is the key theme of the ‘Black Guardian’ aspect of the plot too and after being sidelined in ‘Terminus’ we see the proper conclusion to the story of Turlough and the Black Guardian’s plot to kill our favourite timelord, in revenge for having been outwitted by him back in the days when he looked like Tom Baker. Like The Eternals Turlough found it much easier to try to kill the Doctor in his first two stories when he was a stranger who probably wasn’t going to live very long anyway (as the Black Guardian was surely going to kill him some way or another) – but now he’s no longer a stranger but a friend whose saved his own scrawny neck so many times already Turlough can’t be emotionless about his mission any longer, even if it means his own death. Knowing the Doctor personally really shouldn’t have made a difference of course – the Doctor was always like that (give or take the opening few stories where the 1st Dr’s a cantankerous old git!) and all life is precious, but then to the Black Guardian too all life is ephemeral and limited, even a timelord’s. In his first two stories Turlough is a pain, a coward whose afraid of what the Black Guardian will do to him if he fails, even though he’s the worst assassin ever, too scared to go through with the plan but too scared to tell the Black Guardian the deal’s off so caught in a sort of limbo. He’s mostly there to make the Doctor look more gullible than we’ve ever seen him (Tegan, by contrast, is far less naive than the 5th Dr for all her younger years and has been suspicious of him from the start, a rare case of a companion having one up on the Doctor). Clegg though has more sympathies for Turlough than his other two writers and re-writes more subtly, as a man in a job he hates and would do anything to get out of, but who doesn’t know how to ask for help to get out of it. 

 Turlough spends most of this story tormented by his big decision and the moment when he decides a better option than letting the Dr live or die is to kill himself by leaping overboard is another of the all-time great DW cliffhangers (the only time a companion’s dared throw their lies away without rescuing someone or being possessed) and in contrast to the Eternals Turlough is a survivor first and foremost who’ll do anything to live, which is why it’s so shocking: we know how much turmoil he must be in to end his life when he begged the Black Guardian to save it not so long ago. Mark Strickson gives his best performance in a script that gives him a lot to do, despite being in pain for a lot of it (the stunt with Turlough’s suicidal leap went wrong when the kirby wire he was on snapped, giving him a limp for several weeks afterwards). Turlough is a survivor even in death though and after being rescued, rather than go through with it again, he throws his lot in with the rival pirates to see if that does any good. Wrack is a fascinating character: she’s an Eternal too but whereas Marriner and his captain Striker drift in and out of life she’s living it to the max for all the wrong reasons, getting fully into character in this odd human world of the past, reckless because she can’t be hurt. She’s much more like the Doctor in that regard, but still can’t see the bigger picture that life is for more than fun and luxury, wasting lives in her quest for an ‘enlightenment’ she’s too blind to see. Who’s first(ish) female writer enjoys making Wrack one of the strongest (and indeed strangest) female characters seen in the series, a lady whose not very ladylike and living in a men’s world that ends up with her being more manly than any of the men, a force of nature to be reckoned with. She’s a far more convincing women pirate than Madam Ching from ‘Legend Of The Sea Devils’ (at least as depicted on screen), someone whose working for The Black Guardian too and far more natural at it than Turlough is (what with a female director too ‘Enlightenment’ is arguably the most ‘equal opportunities’ story of the entire original run of Dr Who – it won’t be until ‘The Witchfinders’ thirty-five years later it happens again). 

Producer John Nathan-Turner deliberately picked Cumming to work on this story, figuring it was right up her street (a character-driven scifi with no aliens or other planets) and he’s quite right: Cumming clearly ‘gets’ this story whereas too often in the Peter Davison era directors are just doing a job. She’s excellent at casting: Lynda Baron makes the most of the middle of her three Who roles (so very different to the lounge singer of ‘The Gunfighters’ and the shop assistant of ‘Closing Time’) just the right side of hammy (mostly!) and Christopher Brown deserved a much bigger career after playing the part of Marriner (sadly it doesn’t look as if he did much TV after this). Credit too to two of the actors who were only cast at the last minute as replacements, following yet another industrial strike at the BBC (this time for electricians) that delayed the filming and meant the originally cast actors were pre-booked and couldn’t appear. I’d love to have seen what Peter Sallis would have done with the part of Captain Striker, returning to the series fifteen years after ‘The Ice Warriors’ had he not had commitments riding a tin bath down a Yorskhire hill in ‘Last Of The Summer Wine’ - don’t ask - but Keith Barron is a more than capable replacement and while Leee John (that’s really how he spells it) gets a lot of stick from fans but isn’t that bad. He did the part was a favour: he wasn’t an actor at all but a singer with pop band ‘Imagination’ and a big Whovian, who was on a break from Top Of The Pops when he heard someone from the Dr Who production team drowning their sorrows in the BBC bar about the need to re-cast immediately and said he’d love to be in the series whenever they needed him; he’s a lot better than he’s usually given credit for considering he’d had almost no rehearsal time and no acting experience and besides he’s a pirate’s mate – he’s meant to be over the top. The script gives the characters nautical names for extra sailor-spotter points: ‘Striker’ isn’t, as some fans think, a reference to the union strike that scuppered this story but a steam-boating term for an engineer’s apprentice, ‘Marriner’ is from the word ‘mariner’, ‘Wrack’ was originally ‘Wreck’ as in ‘Shipwreck’ and Captain Davey took his name from ‘Davy Jones’ locker’. While Wrack’s ship was always ‘The Buccaneer’ it was realised very late in the day that Striker’s shipdidin’t have a name and they needed it to build the lifeboat props: Clegg’s on-the-spot solution ‘The Shadow’ is perfect for a crew that’s halfway between the Black and White Guardians (though on first viewing many fans assumed it was a clue to the Black Guardian’s ‘Shadow’ assistant from ‘The Armageddon Factor’). 

 There are lots of lovely moments that stay in the memory long after the story has finished, full of very Dr Who juxtapositions of the ordinary and extraordinary banging up against each other, while there are lots of great twists and turns in the script that’s forever keeping you guessing what will happen right up until the last showdown. If there’s a problem then it is (spoilers) that last showdown (allegedly added by script writer Eric Saward and not by Clegg at all, though to be fair to him some of the scenes between the sailors making everyday conversation, added to pad out a story that was under-running at rehearsals, are his too and they’re some of the best he ever wrote): most fans can see the real prize of ‘enlightenment’ coming a mile off and it’s a bit of a cheat that the Doctor refuses it and gives it to Turlough, who uses it to rid himself of the influence of the Black Guardian, not to mention the unnecessary maguffin of the red crystal Wrack smuggles into Tegan’s tiara that ends up being the ‘focal point’ of the weapon Wrack has trained on Striker and Marriner’s ship (it really is amazing how many special properties crystals have in the Dr Who universe, though at least this one doesn’t come with lots of overgrown spiders attached). Enlightenment, you see, is not the tangible treasure everyone thought they were racing for, it’s knowledge...Yeah great, I’ve won non-prizes like that in raffles too. It doesn’t match a new fangled solar toaster or a holiday on the Moons of Poosh now does it?! In Clegg’s original draft it was made clearer that ‘enlightenment’ or knowledge was a very different thing to ‘wisdom’ being more the experience of what to do with that knowledge, with all those extra years the Eternals spent idly drifting through space failing to help them to see the right thing to do, which is a lot more in keeping with the overall mood of this story (and an idea she took from the Book of Genesis and the tale of how humanity was kicked out of the garden of Eden for apple scrumping from the ‘tree of knowledge’ without knowing what it was they were taking). It’s a bit of a mess when you think about it though: if the Guardians are all powerful they must know that the Doctor can see through this, The White Guardian’s cryptic messages of warning are no help at all and the Black Guardian has no reason to side with Wrack (she’s clearly going to double-cross him the first chance she gets). And why doesn’t The Black Guardian simply kill Turlough anyway out of pettiness? We’ve seen how he can cause physical harm to the boy and rejecting a crystal shouldn’t change that. To be fair I don’t know what else they could have done with Turlough’s story, which was a bit of a non-starter to begin with given that he was never going to kill the Doctor for real so was always going to have to learn to be ‘nice’, but it all feels too easy a way to defeat someone whose supposedly the root of all evil in the universe and whose story we’ve been following for twelve whole episodes (as long as ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’). It’s unfortunate too that we see both guardians on screen in this story for the first time: I rather liked the fan idea that they were really one and the same person in a different mood following their original appearances in ‘The Key To Time’ (because you can’t have good without evil, which would have been much more in keeping with the usual Dr Who ethos). The ending becomes even more stupid when the Doctor ends up in the middle of another similar quest, this time for ‘eternity’, at the end of ‘The Five Doctors’ in two stories’ time without apparently noticing. Asking Peter Davison to smash a pretty substantially built crystal prop first time, against a rug and some rubber flooring standing in for decking, is also asking for trouble. 

Still, that doesn’t get in the way of a story that’s much bigger and more important than just what’s going on in this particular era of Dr Who: it’s a dark and complex mood piece high on atmosphere asking bigger questions about what it really means to be alive and making the most out of the short time we have. The result is a story that feels as if a lot of love and thought has been devoted to it, from the script to how its shown on screen, with the usual high standards of a BBC historical costume drama, even if we aren’t strictly back in time at all but in the future. All the more impressive, really, given how making this story about sailing was the opposite of plain sailing in so many ways. It’s funny how a lot of the best stories in the Dr Who run were hit by strikes (see ‘Shada’ and ’The Greatest Show In The Galaxy’) while others turned out to be the worst (such as last week’s ‘Terminus’): that extra pressure, of everyone having their backs up against the wall to make this (before Peter Davison has to rush off to appear in JNT’s regular Christmas pantomime, which this year was ‘Cinderella’), seems to have inspired the best out of everyone and you can’t see any signs of the rush with which this story was made on screen. There are no flimsy scenes, no hammy acting, no mundane direction – even the scenes added at the last second because it was under-running (the sailors chatting to Turlough) feel as if they belong and are necessary (although I’m still confused by the sailor joke that a pig can’t be a sailor because it can’t look upwards: surely there are bigger reasons, such as its tiny hooves and the fact it can’t keep a hat on. Not to mention the fact it can’t take orders and would probably eat all the ship’s biscuits). Everyone is trying their very hardest to make this work and for once they’re doing it from a rock solid ground with the original script which is a thing of beauty with more opportunities to be still and breathe (despite the constantly ticking clock) and properly get to know these characters and this strange world instead of just rushing off to follow the plot again. Legend has it that JNT, who never quite understood this story, considered scuppering it altogether to make the planned season finale (which became ‘Resurrection Of The Daleks’) despite the fact that all the models had been made and location filming done, before Saward pointed out that they couldn’t afford to leave the ‘Black Guardian’ trilogy hanging. To me there’s no contest: we would have lost precisely nothing is that hodgepodge of recycled ideas had been lost forever, but this one? It’s genius. Thank goodness ‘Enlightenment’ prevailed, in all senses of the word. 

 The Eternals alone are a strong enough concept to deserve a return to the series (what happened to them in the time war between the timelords and Daleks for instance if they cannot be killed in the usual way?): I can also see why the idea of an upper class who cared so little for the lives of the underclass would have made such an impact at the time Margaret Thatcher was prime minister and the same ideas would work just as well now sadly, in a 21st century when we all seem to have been left behind by the rich people in power looking after themselves (I can totally believe our government is made up of Eternals, even more than I can believe they’re all Slitheen or Autons). This is a story with so much cope we barely scrape the surface inside four episodes and of all the writers who only ever given one shot at writing for Dr Who Barbara Clegg is one of the most deserving of a second go, with an ability to write believable characters in unbelievable but magical surroundings and worlds I’d love to see more of. The story goes that a lot of people making this story were disappointed with it: despite being friends Saward was very dismissive of the script (which he thought had nowhere to go past the first cliffhanger), JNT thought it a filler episode between the bigger action tales he wanted to make and even Peter Davison said it’s the script that confused him the most from his three years working on the series (quite the statement given his run also includes the two Mara stories and ‘Castrovalva’!) They’re all wrong: from the first fans ‘got’ that this story is exactly what Dr Who is meant to be for, putting things together from other series that normally wouldn’t go and weaving an emotional, moral tale around them. In any era the imagination seen in ‘Enlightenment’ (and no I don’t just mean Leee John!) would stand out as something special, but in an era when Dr Who was playing things so safe and as consistently ordinary as it had been across 1983 it stands out even more, a story to make eternity bearable, that lives on in your memory eternally long after more ephemeral stories have been forgotten. 

 POSITIVES + The model sailing ships are gorgeous. The revelation at the end of part one that we’re not in an actual Edwardian sailing ship but out in space is arguably the most memorable part of the entire story but would have fallen flat if the model shots hadn’t matched up to the glitz and glamour of the set. Thankfully, they’re superb: it really does feel as if we’re gliding out into space and that the infinite cosmos really is just the other side of the rigging. Or at least they are on the ‘original’ version of this story – they’ve been ‘updated’ for the 2009 ‘special edition’ omnibus released on DVD and overseen by director Fiona Cumming where – despite the higher budget and computer graphics – look far more dated, with that peculiar unreal computer style that was all the rage back then. Most of them were borrowed from the National Maritime Museum and are bigger than you might think, coming up to the height of most modellers’ waists judging by production photographs, apart from the Greek galley which is a specially built prop complete with mechanical oars that went in and out. For all ships the sails billowed thanks to tiny fans that were hidden in the set.

 NEGATIVES - By the end the Doctor knows, as we at home do, that the ship he’s on is an illusion, a figment of the imagination held together by the sheer willpower of the Eternals. The same goes for everything that exists inside the ships. So why does he choose this moment to stick a second whacking great stick of celery in his lapels to replace the first one? And why doesn’t it disappear the minute the Tardis leaves the ship? (For that matter why didn’t the first one, picked up in similar circumstances in ‘Castrovalva’?) While I wouldn’t fancy touching celery on a spaceship full of terminally ill lepers either (so previous story ‘terminus’ is out) if the Doctor’s that desperate to be warned about praxis gasses that might kill him (by making his celery turn purple) wouldn’t it have been easier to ask the Brigadier for some in ‘Mawdryn Undead’? Or during recent stop offs at Heathrow or Amsterdam?! 

BEST QUOTE: Marriner: ‘I am empty. You give me being. I look into your mind and see life, energy, excitement. I want them. I want you. Your thought shall be my thoughts, your feelings, my feelings’. Tegan: ‘Wait a minute. Are you trying to tell me you're in love?’ Marriner: ‘Love! What is love? I want existence’. 

 PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘Professor Bernice Summerfield And The Heart’s Desire’ (2005) is, as the title suggests, part of the series of Big Finish spin-offs starring ‘New Adventures’ companion Benny which have by 205 reached as far as series six, a sort of cross between Ace and River Song with just a dash of Rory. In this story Benny is investigating a pulsar that beats in Morse Code when she discovers a shard of ‘Enlightenment’ and meets eternals named ‘Hardy’ and ‘Barron’ (presumably a gag about Keith Barron and Lynda Baron both acting in this story, as well s a pun on their ‘barren’ empty lives!) It all gets a bit complicated, given the revelations about previous stories and places Benny has been to within the series that all turn out to be illusions made by the eternals, but ends up following much the same plot as the TV story, albeit without the Black and White Guardians and with Benny hurling enlightenment out an airlock, something which causes the eternals to end up mortal because of the tie they’d spent in the human world. Or something like that anyway. This story makes the Black Guardian trilogy seem ‘normal’ and easy to follow. Still good though! 

We’ve mentioned it before, but the comic strip ‘Time and Time Again’, made for the 30th anniversary of the show in Doctor Who Magazine and features all sorts of changes made to the Doctor’s storyline. It’s all caused by The Black Guardian seeking revenge for what went wrong in this story and he’s not a happy bunny, unravelling the Doctor’s timelines bit by bit from his 7th incarnation backwards until he never leaves Gallifrey to travel. The White Guardian puts it all right by the end, though the Doctor loses his Tardis instruction manual in his haste to leave, causing no end of problems later on! It’s a sweet indulgent nod made for a fanbase starved of reasons to celebrate in 1993 and feels a lot more like ‘proper’ Dr Who than ‘Dimensions In Time’ does! 

 Previous ‘Terminus’ next ‘The King’s Demons’