Day 56 — February 25th 2021
The Return and The Bomb
The Return (The Ark — Episode Three)
I’m still feeling like this is going to end up being my ‘guilty pleasure’ Doctor Who story. It’s rubbish, surely? The monsters are blokes in ill-fitting rubber suits, the guest cast are wearing silly costumes and have names like Dassuk and Yendom, and it’s got hammy dialogue the likes of ‘I had a fission device made secretly and it is ready to be detonated at any time!’
And yet I’m having a whale of a time watching this! It’s a bit like Galaxy 4 — I’m really enjoying spending my time in front of these episodes. I’ve said before that the worst crime a Doctor Who story can commit is to be boring, and the flipside of that is that the best Doctor Who therefore is the kind that just entertains, and that’s The Ark.
I think it’s telling that I’m enjoying this one, because it’s doing things that I’ve hated elsewhere and I’m loving them here. Take for example, the moment that Monoid Two gets caught out;
Dodo: ‘Are you up to something?’
Monoid Two: ‘Er… no.’
The other week I complained like anything about The Daleks ‘umming’ and ‘erring’ their way through an episode, but I proper hooted at this! I think perhaps it helps that the Monoids aren’t supposed to be the most terrifying beings in the universe, and it sort of acts in their favour when they’re a bit bumbling and incompetent. Even the baggy rubber suits work in that context!
It certainly helps, too, that Michael Imison continues to be an interesting director for the series, frequently livening things up with shots that feel totally alien to Doctor Who. There’s lots of high shots looking down at the cast, and even the slow pan up the statue to reveal the Monoid head feels like it works better than it has any right to. I should have mentioned it yesterday, really — another one to add to the ‘best cliffhangers in Doctor Who history’ list, I reckon.
Between The Massacre and this story, I feel like we’re starting to see the first hints of the idea that the TARDIS doesn’t just land somewhere at random, but actively takes Doctor Who to where he needs to be. In the last story the TARDIS rocks up on Wimbledon common to give Steven hope that Anne might have survived the slaughter (the probability of her descendent 400 years later having the same surname notwithstanding), and here it beings the crew forward in time so they can finish resolving the problem they caused. We’ve had the ship being sentient before — all that faffing around in The Edge of Destruction for a start — but this feels like something new, even if it doesn’t get spelled out on screen.
The Ark is the last story to be produced by John Wiles, and so we get another jungle to add to the list here; it’s the fifth distinct jungle we’ve encountered across his four stories in charge. I’ve noticed another hallmark of his tenure in this episode, too. Invisibility! We had invisible creatures in The Daleks’ Master Plan, we’ve got a different breed of invisible creatures here, and while he didn’t produce the next story he had a key hand in the commissioning and development of it and that features an invisible Doctor Who!
It probably isn’t the best episode of Doctor Who ever made, but I’m bloody enjoying it. 8/10.
The Bomb (The Ark — Episode Four)
This is one of those occasions — and I’ll warn you that there will be many before the year is through — where I so wish Doctor Who was all shot on film. The Ark has been particularly good for film sequences, and it seems to have had a fair proportion of them compared to video footage, but today is an especially good example.
The fight between warring factions of Monoids is shot on film and it look fantastic — it even makes the Monoid costumes which I’ve previously noted as a bit ropey look really good! I’m also impressed by just how many Monoids seem to turn up on film, too. I don’t think it’s clever editing as we appear to have lots all in one continuous shot, and it feels unusual when I’m used to the same four aliens going round in circles! It’s especially noteworthy because I’d written down ‘The Monoids have all gone! Every one of them!’ as something to slightly mock… but it’s not as silly as it seemed in the moment!
I’ve also come to really like their numbered collars, and the design of their weapons is brilliant, too. There seems to be a lot of that in Doctor Who at the moment — the Dhravins had great weapons earlier in the season, and the SSS agents sport some fab designs too.
I don’t have an awful lot to say about this episode without simply repeating everything I’ve said for the first three. It continues to be a story which feels like I should be giving it a low score and complaining that it’s rubbish but I’ve loved it. Indeed with the 7/10 rating I’m giving this episode it’s my highest-rated story of Season Three so far*, averaging 7.5 across the four episodes, and just beating The Massacre to the top spot.
*I’m discounting Mission to the Unknown’s 9/10, as it seems unfair to compare it to a single episode!
The fact that this has been my favourite of the year bothers me, but not because I don’t think it deserves to be there. It bothers me that I feel like I should dislike it. I’ve said plenty of times before that I love Doctor Who and I hate when I get a run of episodes I’m not enjoying, so it’s silly that I should feel shy about standing up and saying ‘The Ark is brilliant and I really enjoyed it’. I wonder if it’s because this is a story which doesn’t really get very much attention by fandom? It’s overshadowed by the mammoth Daleks’ Master Plan, the general love of The Massacre and the (bizarre, but we’ll come to that tomorrow) deification of The Celestial Toymaker. Stuck in the middle, The Ark just sort of gets overlooked.
I’ve just double checked, and in the 2014 Doctor Who Magazine poll this story came out 184th of 241 stories, suggesting it’s a little unloved (though there’s ten Hartnell stories below it, so he doesn’t seem to rank very high on the list at all). I think it’s time the story was reappraised and enjoyed. I’ll definitely be watching it again pretty quickly once this marathon is over.
