The Curse of Fenric [Classic Doctor Who] – Blue Towel Productions

Doctor Who has long been my favorite show, and after a long time of not really watching it very actively, lately I’ve been deliberately working at rewatching all the available episodes of the classic series, and writing up my thoughts on each adventure. But there are a lot of episodes! So it’s taking a while. For extra fun I’m mostly watching them completely out of order.

The Curse of Fenric

Starring Sylvester McCoy as the Seventh Doctor.
Companion:  Sophie Alfred as Ace

Written by Ian Briggs.  Directed by Nicholas Mallett. Produced by John Nathan-Turner. Script edited by Andrew Cartmel

Format:  4 episodes, each about 25 minutes long
Originally Aired:  October-November 1989 (Episodes 8-11 of Season 26)

Generally I have been watching these old Doctor Who‘s in as random an order as I could muster, but that’s the case here. One of my daughters has decided she’s quite the fan of the Seventh Doctor and Ace, so when we are able to find the time we’ve been going through them relatively systematically, and have now arrived here–at their second-to-last story, and the second-to-last classic Doctor Who overall.

Spoilers Ahead!

There is a lot that makes The Curse of Fenric interesting. It’s arguably one of the best stories from classic Doctor Who‘s latter days, with good performances, solid direction and strong design work. And in some ways, it is one of the most narratively ambitious that the series had ever attempted.

A lot of that ambition has to do with Ace. As I rewatch her stories, I am continually impressed with how clearly she shows the qualities that we are used to with the companions of the revived series. More than any other of the classic regulars, Ace gets involved in adventures in which she is not only an audience-identification figure, and not just a co-adventurer with the Doctor but which are actually about her. Or at least in stories which take the time to show what the adventure means to her. And the impact of this is set up to deliberately build over time. In The Curse of Fenric Ace is forced to confront her fears, her prejudice against her mother, and the question of whether her absolute faith in the Doctor is really warranted. I love the bit where the Doctor has to undermine her faith in him to achieve his victory (even if one wonders why he can’t just tell her to move out of the way), and the choice to have Ace cry out to her mother that she’s sorry as she’s about to be executed says a lot. There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on there.

And this extends to the plot as well. Indeed, for the first time in all of Doctor Who history, there’s a stealth story-arc going on over the course of multiple serials which gets resolved in The Curse of Fenric. It turns out that the current battle is something that the Doctor has been building to since back in Dragonfire at least, as we finally get explanations for Ace’s bizarre backstory (the way she was transported through time and space via a chemistry experiment gone awry) as well as some of the stuff going on in Silver Nemesis.

These revelations about the way Fenric has been manipulating things, including Ace’s very existence, were unheard of back in the classic days of Doctor Who, but if all of this had happened over a single season of thirteen 45 minute episodes, The Curse of Fenric would feel exactly like a modern day series finale.

And indeed, it would have been better as a modern day series finale, simply because the stories would have been packaged as more of a unit. As it is, it it’s a really cool idea that doesn’t land anywhere near as it could, because it’s dealing with stuff the show hasn’t taken the time to build properly. Dragonfire had come out almost two years earlier, and Silver Nemesis about a year after that, and none of the relevant story points had been mentioned at all in the intervening time. It’s unlikely anyone but die-hard Whovians would even be aware of any of this set-up, and even they might have struggled to remember it. But looking back at it I am still appreciative of the effort.

The other way that The Curse of Fenric is ambitious, and ultimately the most important way, is with just how much story they work to fit into this serial’s four episodes. Seriously, there is a lot going on, from Russians rowing in the mist to Commander Millington’s deadly trap hidden inside the ULTIMA code-breaking machine to ancient runes carved in a church basement to vampiric monsters emerging from the sea to a big fish-creature that has been pulled back in time from the distant future. In all of this, time is taken to give all the principle guest cast interesting bits of personality–ie Millington’s obsession with understanding his enemy, Judson’s struggles with his disability, Wainwright’s loss of faith and more–as well as all the stuff with Ace that I already mentioned. And mostly the story holds all these elements together well, and certainly it never lets up on the excitement and momentum of the story.

With that, it must be said that the breakneck pace doesn’t always give room for every moment to land fully, and there are some bits where things seem edited abruptly.

There’s kind of a romantic tension, for instance, between Ace and Captain Sorin that comes up out of nowhere. It’s so abrupt that I had to double check that the characters hadn’t met earlier in the tale and I’d just forgotten. Also, Dr. Judson-as-Fenric apparently becomes so immediately obsessed with the Doctor’s chess-puzzle that the Doctor is able to just leave and find the Ancient One to conspire with him. And what exactly is the role of the ancient flask that pops out of the basement wall at one point?

But none of this is too distracting, and ultimately does not detract from a story so rich in plot, character and themes as this one is.

And some of the drama’s oddities are actually justified by the story. Ace, for instance, keeps giving people information that she’d be better withholding. She tells Judson that the symbols are a flowchart for an ancient computer. She randomly picks up Fenric’s flask so that it can get into Millington’s hands. And she informs Fenric-as-Sorin the answer to the whole chess puzzle that’s plagued him for centuries. But of course, it’s revealed here that Ace is one of Fenric’s “wolves”–people who have been genetically coded from birth to serve his purposes. So it makes sense that she is inadvertently serving him.

All of the busyness and complexity of The Curse of Fenric would not work at all if it were not for the fact that Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Alfred are both really strong here. Their dynamic is one of the show’s best–fraught with tension, but also characterised by deep love and loyalty. It is perhaps more volatile than many iterations of the TARDIS crew, but as a result it’s one of the most interesting.

I also want to give a quick shout-out to the story’s monster design. The Haemovores, though a little confusing as a concept (descendants of an otherwise extinct humanity from a distant future who nevertheless fed on human blood?), are pretty well realized on screen. They are appropriately scary even if some of their movements are obviously designed to be more suitable for a younger audience, like the way they dramatically envelope their clawed arms around their screaming victims rather than actually just slashing at them. The on-screen presentation of the Ancient One is particularly effective. And the choice to make Jean and Phyllis, the two teenaged girls, into the Haemovore spokespeople (for lack of a better term) is a good one–they are far more unsettling than if it had been a couple of Russian soldiers, for instance.

By the time The Curse of Fenric came along, the classic era of Doctor Who was coming to an end. This is a real shame, because The Curse of Fenric demonstrates that the show had a lot of life to it. It’s a well put-together action thriller with some thoughtful themes and a real sense of consequence for the main characters,

Other Thought:

• It’s been a while since we watched the last Ace story, Ghost-Light, so my daughter was surprised to remember all the things she loved about the character here. She loved the fact that Ace is carrying around with her a rope ladder and also her own home-made explosives.

• Having said that, Ace flirts weird. And Sgt. Leigh is a bit of an idiot for letting himself be led around by her. But who knows, maybe she’s exuded some kind of Fenric-inspired psychic influence over him, even if she’s not been turned into a Haemovore, like the ways Phyllis and Jean drew that one Russian dude into the water to be killed.

• Some recognisable revived Doctor Who actors in this story include Anne Reid, who plays Nurse Crane, was Florence Finnegan in Smith & Jones (she’s killed by a blood sucker in the earlier story, and is a blood sucking killer in the latter one). And Janet Henfrey, who plays Miss Hardacre, was also Mrs. Pitt, the first victim in The Mummy on the Orient Express.

• When I was younger, I was put off by subplot of Reverend Wainwright and the way one of the show’s only overtly Christian characters doesn’t find the faith to ward off being killed by the Haemovores. It doesn’t bother me as much anymore, not because my opinions about such things has changed but maybe because I have now seen just so much negativity toward Christians in the media (and in real life, deservedly or not) that this just doesn’t feel like a big deal.

Having said all that, I think Nicholas Parsons does a good job portraying the character, and I think his particular struggle–having begun to lose faith when he realized the suffering that his side was causing in the war, is an interesting one. Ultimately, Wainwright is overwhelmed because he cannot find it in himself to believe that “good” exists. If I were talking to him (and he were a real person, and we were not being attacked by Haemovores at the time) I’d probably try to exhort him that faith in goodness–as a concept or a character quality or a force in society–is misplaced. We’re called to put our faith in God, a person, who is himself good. Anyway.

• There’s a lot I like about the episode, but the Doctor’s “chess puzzle” is absolute nonsense (the game is won when the pawns from both ides just team up). Apparently the solution is just to cheat, and not follow the rules of the game. Coming up with such a puzzle is pretty easy, as is coming up with such a solution, once you know what sorts of possibilities are on the table. It doesn’t even have to be a game as complicated as chess–I could just fill up a tic-tac-dough board with X’s and O’s and then declare that the two sides work together to win, and it’d amount to the same thing.