Doctor Who has long been my favorite show, but it’s been a couple of years since I’ve actually watched anything but the newest episodes. Before that, I was making a respectable run at getting through the original series, most of which I haven’t seen for decades. For various reasons, lately it has felt like it’s time to get back into it. 

Ghost Light

Starring Sylvester McCoy as the Seventh Doctor
Companion: Sophie Aldred as Ace

Written by Marc Platt.  Directed by Alan Wareing. Produced by John Nathan-Turner. Script edited by Andrew Cartmel.

Format:  3 episodes, each about 25 minutes long
Originally Aired:  October 1989 (Episodes 5-7 of Season 26)

Fun fact: this is the last story in classic Doctor Who to have been produced. Filming wrapped on August 3rd with the scene that saw Light turning Mrs. Pritchard and Gwendoline into stone–the very last bit of the classic series to be shot (unless you count the voice over of Sylvester McCoy at the end of Survival, which was recorded later). It’s also one of the later classic Doctor Who stories for me to watch for the first time, having viewed it for the first time on VHS, I think, maybe in the late 90s sometime, long after I’d made my way through most of the show. I have to say I didn’t really understand it back then. Now I have rewatched it for the first time–do I understand it any better? Let’s see.

Spoilers Ahead!

There is no shortage of Doctor Who stories that don’t feel like they make a lot of sense because the plots don’t hold up to scrutiny or the ideas aren’t consistent or the characters lack motivation. There were stories like this from the beginning, and there have continued to be stories like this all the way to the present day.

A less common problem is where you wonder if the story didn’t make any sense simply because it’s told in an inherently confusing way. These are the stories that send you to the internet to read plot summaries or even full transcripts because a simple watch of the episode didn’t lead to understanding, but you think if you just paid close attention to every bit of dialogue and every story moment, it might all hold together. This is the feeling that you get after watching Ghost Light.

Like I wrote up above, this is only the second time I’ve watched this serial, and the first was probably 25 years ago or so. I mostly got it–a spaceship arrived on earth untold time ago with an alien that was really into cataloging things. After doing a survey of all life on earth, he went to sleep, and has now woken up to the disappointing news that things have evolved and changed, and he isn’t taking it well.

Except that the alien, Light (as he is known) doesn’t wake up until the third of three episodes. Before that there’s a thing about this other alien creature from Light’s ship (the internet tells me he was known as “Survey”) who evolves to match whatever the dominant form of life is in his surroundings, who has thus who has turned into a Victorian gentleman named Josiah Samuel Smith. Smith wants to take over the British Empire by assassinating Queen Victoria. In pursuit of this goal he taken a famous hunter prisoner and brainwashed him into committing the murder. But also he has mind controlled some people into his creepy slaves, he keeps one guy unconscious in a drawer, and he evolves another guy into an ape. Why? I’m honestly not sure.

And also there’s another entity that came from the ship who has been locked away–a being called Control who has basically evolved into Eliza Doolittle from My Fair Lady. Not literally of course, but the comparison is pretty explicit–she looks and sounds like a lower-class Victorian woman who wants to become a lady, and at one point even recites “The rain in Spain.”

Now, I can always go digging through the story’s transcript in a moment to see if I can understand all these elements, but the point of course is that I shouldn’t have to. I’ve read that writer Marc Platt said he kept things purposely oblique because he thinks that drama is more rewarding if you don’t get it all handed to you on a platter, but I don’t fully agree. Of course, I don’t think things should be predictable and obvious, but you still gotta give your audience what they need to understand why the story is interesting., and you should do that with clarity. You don’t want the audience to imagine that the story is good because they aren’t sure if they understand it; you want them to know it’s interesting because they do understand it.

(And I think a risk with classic Doctor Who is trusting that things will be clear because you’ve included some piece of information in some line of dialogue somewhere. When you are dealing with the production standards of this show–the directing, the way actors deliver lines, even the quality of the audio recording and mixing–you just don’t know if that little bit of context you are trying to slip in there is going to come across or not.)

Now with all this criticism, Ghost Light does succeed well in the areas of tone and atmosphere. There is a lot of creepy stuff going on in the old house that the Doctor and Ace are exploring that hearkens back of classic ghost stories, but almost none of it is done in a way that seems obvious or clichéd.

The story has its own approach to all of those elements, which helps to keep things engaging, even if they are not easily understandable. In the last episode, the general sense of tension gives way to full-on existential horror, as the Light doles out all sorts of gruesomeness–dissecting a minor character to see how she works, turning some other characters into stone, and devolving another one into primordial soup!

And there is a lot of good character work with the leads. The Doctor gets a fun moment where he pretends a radiation detector is a gun, for instance, but the real highlight is the relationship he has with Sophie Aldred’s Ace, which both she and Sylvester McCoy play very well.

Ace really is the prototype for the modern companion–a character whom the adventures are frequently about in some way. So even while the Doctor drives the adventure, the companion is its heart. In this case, Ghost Light has the Doctor deliberately taking her to place that she hates, where she was traumatised as a child, in order to understand what was happening and to help her face her own fears. It helps to anchor the otherwise busy story.

Ghost Light is only three episodes long, which means that the pace remains brisk and there is always something happening–although arguably it’s too brisk. The serial could have been expanded to make things clearer, but I think the better solution would have been to thin out one or two of its elements. I feel like the business with Reverend Matthews is kind of superfluous, and all the thematic and story links to Victorian England never come together like you want it to. If there was just a little bit more time for things to breathe, while maintaining the tight pace and runtime, I think the story could have been a lot stronger.

Other Thoughts:

• There are some nifty lines of dialogue, mostly from the Doctor. At one point Gwendoline says, “I think Mr. Matthews is confused,” to which the Doctor replies, “Never mind, I’ll have him completely bewildered by the time I’m finished.”

• There’s also some good stuff where the Doctor lists things that he hates: “I can’t stand burnt toast. I loathe bus stations. Terrible places, full of lost luggage and lost souls…Then there’s unrequited love, and tyranny, and cruelty…We all have a universe of our own terrors to face.”

• At the end of the serial, the three most likeable guest characters (in my opinion)–Nimrod the evolved Neanderthal, Redvers Fenn-Cooper the English hunter, and Control the whatever-she-is being who has evolved into an English low-class lady (who is herself trying to evolve into a higher class lady) all take off on Light’s ship for whatever adventures in cataloging awaits them. Given how obvious the set-up is, I can’t believe that it doesn’t look like anyone has ever tried to chronicle their adventures in some sort of spin-off, akin to Counter-Measures or Jago & Litefoot over at Big Finish.