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.

Enlightenment

Starring Peter Davison as the Fifth Doctor.
Companions:  Janet Fielding as Tegan Jovanka and Mark Strickson as Turlough.
Special Guest Stars: Valentine Dyall as the Black Guardian

Written by Barbara Clegg. Directed by Fiona Cumming. Produced by John Nathan-Turner. Script edited by Eric Saward.

Format:  4 episodes, each about 25 minutes long.
Originally Aired:  March 1983 (episodes 17-20 of Season 20)

Enlightenment is the third part of the so-called “Black Guardian” trilogy that ran through the bulk of Doctor Who‘s 20th season. This is where the Black Guardian, a villain from the show’s 16th season returned to wreak revenge on the Doctor for his defeat after the whole “Key to Time” saga. That saga had highs and lows, but one of the lows was (going on memory here, I haven’t seen it in years) the way it wrapped up–it was abrupt, underdeveloped and not especially satisfying. Will the Black Guardian get better treatment in this follow up? Let’s find out!

Spoilers Ahead!

In its conception, Enlightenment is a crazy sort of story which really demonstrates, and I’d say advances, the sort of wild imagination that Doctor Who was capable of. I’ve often felt like one of the greatest moments in the whole franchise for highlighting this kind of outrageous creativity was in 2014’s Mummy on the Orient Express, specifically the moment right at the start where we get the image of the train flying through space. Well, it turns out that Mummy didn’t do that first, because it’s right here in Enlightenment with all of the sailing yachts making their way through the stars.

(Of course, Mummy didn’t even do it second, since you also have the Starship Titanic in 2007’s Voyage of the Damned, but my point still stands).

Of course, there are reasons why the Mummy example stands out to me more strongly than Enlightenment–two reasons in particular, one of which was perhaps unavoidable, but the other of which was certainly not.

The unavoidable reason is simply that the visual effects in Enlightenment are not as good. The image of the ships is achieved through the classic combination of model shots and composited images (I presume, actually, I don’t know actually know the inner workings of the production) and as a result has got the wonkiness we associate with this series. The effect isn’t bad for its time, but it doesn’t have any of the dynamic zaniness you get in Mummy of the train zipping along in outer space.

But classic Doctor Who was always punching above its weight in terms of its production ambitions, and I consider that a strength and not a weakness. Sure the show was made on a shoestring budget, but that never seemed to stop it from portraying sentient viruses, giant volcanoes, or whole armies of invading aliens attacking London. This was a show that didn’t let its inherent limitations define its scope, which is a wonderfully, ridiculously audacious attitude toward storytelling.

But that leads to the avoidable thing that diminishes the impact of the big “sailing ships in space” reveal, which is to do with the storytelling and pacing, especially for the first episode.

The script saves this big reveal for the end of the first episode, which in a way is a creative decision I can understand. It certainly is the story’s first big punch, and thus the first cliffhanger seems like it might be the place for it. The issue is that the rest of the first episode suffers as a result. Without the knowledge that we were flying through space, very little of interest can actually take place.

Or at least, little of interest does take place. Once we know the White Guardian is involved, we get some fairly uninspiring sequences of the Doctor and his companions moseying around and talking to confusing sailors, and introducing Marriner’s infatuation with Tegan. A basic storytelling principle is that things are more engaging after we have enough information to understand why a situation is interesting then before we do, but with Enlightenment there’s not enough to care about at the start to keep my interest. There is a race and the race is important, but that’s it. It’s not until I see the ships in space that I really sit up and pay attention–but really the episode needed something like that about 10 or 15 minutes earlier. Or otherwise it needed a more effective way to build interest in what was going on than it did.

After that, almost inevitably, the story improves quite a bit. The setting is interesting and the dynamic between the Doctor, Tegan and Turlough works well as they run around the confines of these odd ships. The whole idea of these celestial beings who somehow are still dependent on humans for imagination and purpose is worth exploring. The story paces out pretty effectively, and there is some decent tension built as we meet the crazy Captain Wrack and her plot blow up all the competition.

Captain Wrack, is, by the way, by far the most memorable of the serial’s guest characters. She’s such a critical part of the story that I was surprised to discover she doesn’t even appear until the third episode. I’m of two minds about her–she’s colorful and lively in way that none of the other Eternals are, but Lynda Baron’s performance is so over-the-top that it threatens to derail the rest of the story’s tone. I probably would have preferred a slightly more balanced character, but certainly you need the character, if just to keep the whole thing from ending up too dour (in the same way that the previous story, Terminus suffered).

Whatever one thinks of Wrack, the character’s end is certainly disappointing. The Doctor and Turlough are under threat of being chucked off of her ship, and then we cut away to another location where computer data indicates two people have been thrown out into space to their death. Then after a little bit, the Doctor and Turlough arrive and reveal that it was actually Wrack and her first mate who were killed. It’s a weird bit of storytelling as it seems that the intention was to create suspense about the Doctor’s fate, but the “twist” is so obvious that really there is no suspense at all.

Maybe the thought was that a fight scene where the Doctor pushed his enemies to their doom was too much to show? I’m not certain, but it heralds an overall anticlimactic conclusion to the whole Eternals storyline. When the Black & White Guardian show up for the show’s final sequence, all the rest of the Eternals are just whisked away, as if they didn’t really matter at all. I like how unmoved Tegan is by Marriner pleading to stay with her, and how unimpressed she is with him in general, but the removal of these characters is all just a little too easy to be interesting.

This brings us to the other major aspect of Enlightenment, which as I mentioned up above is that it serves as the conclusion to the trilogy of stories in which the Black Guardian has enlisted Turlough to serve as his agent in getting revenge on the Doctor. References to this storyline are peppered throughout the serial, but it all comes to a head in the back half of part 4. To answer my question from way up above, it’s all more satisfying than the wrap-up of the Key to Time plot, but it’s still not great.

The Doctor actually winning the race ends up being something of an afterthought, and is mostly mentioned just so he can turn down the prize and Turlough can be tempted. Enlightenment turning out to be represented by a big glowy diamond is a bit hokey, but it does give the chance for Mark Strickson to to stand over it looking utterly deranged, and he certainly gives it his all as an actor when he has Turlough hurtling the jewel at the Black Guardian, rejecting the potential deal of getting the wealth and power it represents, as well as the TARDIS, in exchange for the Doctor’s life.

And meeting Strickson (and also Lynda Baron) in the delightful over-acting department is Valentine Dyall as the Black Guardian. He does an outstanding job exuding evil, using his incomparable voice to inject every moment that he has with gravitas and menace. If nothing else, this whole trilogy of stories gives us a chance to have a whole bunch of Dyall’s Black Guardian than we would have had otherwise, and for that it might be worth it. The promised “third encounter” never took place (at least not on TV) but Dyall’s amazing “dying scream” (you have to see it to believe it) is a pretty good note to say goodbye to the performance on.

Still, like I said the whole story beat could have been a lot better. This actual temptation and Turlough’s choice all occur too quickly for the weight of it all to really sink in, but the bigger weakness is just that it’s a bit hard to make sense of. It’s never explained, at least as far as I am aware, why the Black Guardian needs Turlough to do his dirty work at all. And it’s never clear exactly what the Doctor understands about Turlough’s role in all that has been happening.

And his acceptance of Turlough at the end, given the guy almost gave him up in a deal to the devil, comes across more simplistic than you want it to be, and needed further unpacking. Tegan’s objection to the Doctor’s ease of believing Turlough (“You’re mad,”) looks good on paper but the whole scene is directed with both her and the Doctor seeming blandly disinterested in the proceedings–it really robs things of the dramatic impact that it should have had, in spite of all that Dyall and Strickson give to it.

Still, even with the poor pacing of the first episode and the underwhelming climax, Enlightenment isn’t bad. The setting is novel, the ideas are wild and entertaining, and the leads have got good stuff to do. And in spite of its limitations, there is a game effort to give the Turlough / Black Guardian storyline a meaningful conclusion, which is appreciated.

Other Thoughts

• This is the first time in Doctor Who history that a story was written by a woman, Barbara Clegg, and thus also is the first time that it was both written and directed by women. This is the last time the latter would be true until The Witchfinders, more than 35 years later.

• The Eternals are connected to lots of different aspects of Doctor Who lore thanks to various expanded media stories, but to my knowledge the only explicit reference to the beings in a future televised story is in Can You Hear Me? where one of the villains compares himself to them, although he doesn’t go all the way and identify himself as one (though he still sounds quite similar).

• In a nice bit of continuity, the room the Eternals make for Tegan out of images in her mind includes a picture of her dead Auntie Vanessa, who appeared in Logopolis before being murdered by the Master. Actress Dolore Whiteman was actually hired for a day to take the photo.

• At the end of the story, Turlough expresses an interest in going home to his (unnamed) home planet, which reminds us that we still don’t know anything about what he was doing on earth in Mawdryn Undead in the first place. The Doctor seems to agree that taking him home is a good idea, but from my memory there is no direct reference to this in the following story, The King’s Demons, although the characters do wonder if their unexpected arrival on earth has something to do with the Black Guardian. In the end, Turlough’s backstory wouldn’t be revealed until his departure story a full season later, Planet of Fire.