My theories appall you, my heresies outrage you, I never answer letters, and you don’t like my tie.
Doctor Who under producer John Nathan-Turner draws heavily on the concept of the Doctor’s long life, filled with adventures that the audience knows nothing about; these lacunae add mystery and motivation to the stories we do see, with the peripatetic Gallifreyan having been to a planet before, altering its trajectory, or having previously crossed paths with a foe we’re only meeting for the first time. Marc Platt, in “Ghost Light” (Story Production Code 7Q), takes this device a step further, basing his tale of Victorian horror on a moment from a companion’s past instead of drawing on the Doctor’s history. Ace, as a thirteen year-old in Perivale, hopped the fence of a decrepit house, only to find something terrifying within; and the Doctor, for reasons that seem somewhat callous, takes her to that house in the nineteenth century to confront her fear. (After disregarding her coulrophobia in “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy” with nearly catastrophic results, one might think the Doctor would leave well enough alone.)
The setting certainly qualifies as eminently creepy, with a maid sliding a tray of food through a slot in a thick, barred metal door for unknown beasts; a mentally-addled explorer, Redvers Fenn-Cooper (Michael Cochrane) wandering the halls of the dimly lit manor in search of himself; large stuffed emus with glowing eyes at every intersection, seemingly watching all that transpires; and the lord of the house, Josiah Smith (Ian Hogg), flinching from light despite his sunglasses. Platt and director Alan Wareing take pains to develop a gloomy, uneasy atmosphere, giving viewers nothing solid to grasp (and very little to see), essential for horror to take root. Indeed, the three episode “Ghost Light” marks Doctor Who‘s first attempt at genuine, claustrophobic frightfulness since “Horror of Fang Rock,” notable for being confined, mostly, to a single indoor location, as with the present story.
The Doctor and Ace appear just as an envoy from the Royal Society, the Reverend Ernest Matthews (John Nettleton) arrives to take Josiah to task for supporting Darwin’s theory of evolution. Curiously, no one seems surprised in the slightest at the time travellers’ sudden presence, though Ace’s off-the-shoulder blouse causes extreme consternation. After a slight moment of dismay when Redvers, tied up in a straitjacket and locked in a barren room, is bombarded by light from his radioactive snuffbox, everyone seems quite content to sit down for a pleasant evening meal, looked after by the requisite evil Victorian housekeeper, Mrs. Pritchard (Sylvia Syms), and the head butler, Nimrod (Carl Forgione), who just so happens to be a Neanderthal. It’s that kind of story.
Upon realizing that the Doctor has brought her to Perivale, to the one house she never wanted to visit again, Ace runs away, blindly taking the lift into the cellar where the ominous metal door has been opened somehow. The inhabitants have knocked out Nimrod, who was operating a distinctly non-Victorian control panel beneath a glowing panel of lights, and they set their sights on Ace. Mrs. Pritchard, alas, has shut down the lift, leaving Ace to confront two of the most nattily dressed monsters since the Jagaroth…
The tuxedoed creatures, one with an insect’s head and one with a reptile’s head, lumber towards the plucky teen from future Perivale, only to be stopped by the awakened Nimrod, who wields a lantern, the light keeping them at bay. In the ensuing fracas once the lantern gives way, Ace manages to smash the giant lighted panel, releasing gusts of steam. Meanwhile, the Doctor and Josiah have made their way down to the cellar, where the Victorian recoils at the prospect of the light membrane being ruptured. Ace surmises, correctly if somewhat out of left field, that the cellar is really a “stone spaceship” whose owner will be somewhat perturbed when it awakens from behind the screen.
It must at this juncture be said that “Ghost Light” has the most convoluted, least explicable plot of any Doctor Who story ever committed to film. Comparatively speaking, “Ghost Light” makes “Underworld” seem worthy of a Hugo Award. The core of the story revolves around the concept of evolution, as signposted by the Reverend Matthews, with Josiah moving through successive evolutionary leaps that leave behind still-sentient “husks” like the well-dressed bug and lizard men. The Doctor suggests that Josiah is undertaking a “survey” of life on Earth in this manner for the owner of the spaceship, known only as “Light,” with a creature named Control (Sharon Duce) locked up in the cellar for reasons that remain unexplored. (Ostensibly Control is the static, unevolving control element in the experiment.)
But Josiah has a secondary desire—to assassinate the “crowned Saxe-Coburg,” Queen Victoria, to rid the British Empire of its lethargy and decay. To get close to her, he has enlisted Redvers, whose membership in the Royal Geographic Society grants him some sort of access to the palace. This entire notion of regicide is simply dropped into the story, unexplained and confusing; at no other point does Josiah have any explored connection to the world beyond the house, which apparently was built unknowingly on top of the spaceship. How a man with a reptile’s face managed to get a mortgage for a mansion likewise remains a mystery.
What starts out as horror descends into farce. An investigator from Scotland Yard, Inspector Mackenzie (Frank Windsor), is awakened from a two year slumber in an insect specimen case by the Doctor; the police officer proceeds to spend the remainder of the story walking around eating everything in sight, adding nothing else to the proceedings except some (very) minor comedic asides and some casual racism. The entire household goes into a state of suspended animation from six in the morning to six in the afternoon, each member carefully covered over with dust covers by the maids who flee the house right as evening falls. The sinister Mrs. Pritchard, who may or may not be a creature harvested by Light in the past, turns out to have been in a state of hypnosis, resulting in a tearful reunion with her daughter Gwendoline (Katharine Schlesinger), who did not know Mrs. Pritchard was her mother. And Josiah doses the Reverend Matthews with a de-evolution potion, reverting the fastidious creationist into a chimpanzee.
The remainder of the story only gets worse, with Light (John Hallam), an angelic-appearing creature in one of Doctor Who’s frequent nods to von Däniken, becoming frustrated that life on Earth has evolved since the survey began eons earlier, undoing tens of thousands of years of cataloging effort. Though many a librarian would commiserate, Light’s suggested solution, destroying all life on Earth to prevent any change, seems perhaps a bit excessive. The Doctor convinces Light that it cannot erase everything without first cataloging it, referencing all manner of mythological creature the cosmic curator missed. Finally, the Doctor points out that Light itself has changed, has evolved, and he essentially talks the luminous being into dissipating—Light cannot stand the hypocrisy of having changed when so roundly condemning evolution.
In the end, Josiah is defeated just as the Doctor and crew stop Light’s spaceship from exploding and killing all life on Earth, harnessing the power to the ship’s engines instead. Control, Nimrod, and Redvers take the stone craft out into the heavens, looking for new life to catalog—and, in Redvers’ case, to shoot, proper Victorian explorer that he is. The emotional denouement comes as Ace reveals that she burned the house to the ground when she was thirteen, having felt the residual evil that Josiah and Light left behind, giving closure to the traumatic event that sent her life spiraling and essentially explaining why Ace is, well, Ace.
Both Ian Hogg and Michael Cochrane stand out for their slightly over-the-top portrayals of Josiah Smith and Michael Cochrane, both shot through with Victorian propriety while channeling a hint of the old Hammer horror tradition. Hogg imbues Josiah with the air of entitlement so common in the upper class male of that era, such that the constantly evolving character practically rages at the slightest setback or hint of defiance. Cochrane, meanwhile, nails the explorer’s psychosis—caused by seeing the creatures in the cellar, apparently—giving off an air of uncertain menace alongside a streak of prim propriety. Their attitudes sell the Victorian setting just as readily as does the careful prop and costume design; and in truth, the entire mise en scène plays its part wonderfully. Director Wareing’s staging and cinematography further the effect, his discordant camera cuts and angles building up unease and confusion in keeping with the story’s discordant leaps in logic.
Sophie Aldred receives a hefty share of the script in “Ghost Light,” with its focus on Ace and her background. It’s just a shame that there isn’t more focus on Ace, on the trauma that drove her to bound the fence of the decrepit house in the first place, beyond a throwaway line about how racial animosity caused her friend’s flat to be firebombed. It’s a daring enough inclusion for its time, but the thread is just left there. Aldred gives her all to her portrayal of Ace here—the pain at remembering what it was like in the house as a young teen, at starting the fire to cleanse the evil, feels real and vivid—but the script gives her just too little to work with. There’s no real conclusion to Ace’s journey through that trauma other than her wishing she had blown the house up rather than set it ablaze, a pithy coda but not a genuine one.
The Seventh Doctor uses his words to good effect, talking an evil archivist to death, but that’s not to say Sylvester McCoy isn’t called upon to spit some venom. The Doctor is angry and aggravated in much of this story: short with Ace (and again compelling her to confront deep-seated fears without her consent), curt with allies, and cutting with foes. Again, McCoy can pull this side of the Doctor off, but there’s so little levity in the character in this story, especially important given the otherwise oppressive nature of the setting and overall atmosphere. His quips have barbs in “Ghost Light,” and while the character certainly feels “adult,” it’s off-putting, even given the generally darker tone of the Seventh Doctor’s stories for the past season and a half.
It’s important not to lose the forest for the trees. “Ghost Light” can be picked apart endlessly for its narrative shortcomings and wonky plotting, but at heart Platt is gamely trying to tell a story that Doctor Who is uniquely positioned to manifest. A long-lived alien librarian attempts to catalog all life on Earth, only for its efforts to be wasted after it takes a long nap and evolution changes everything, set against the backdrop of the Victorian era’s rancorous debates about Darwin’s theories? A conceit that should make for a rousing tale, filled with bright effects and luxe costuming from the BBC’s ample historical stores.
But the framing device of the “haunted” house that plagues Ace and forms an important part of her character—itself another solid idea—interferes with the central concept. Josiah, whose origins never gain clarity, needs must be a force of evil in a story that doesn’t inherently require a moral dimension, in order to imbue the house with the psychic residue of his malice that resonates for a hundred years, leading Ace to burn the mansion to the ground. These are two separate stories, jammed uncomfortably into three episodes, and neither comes to any sort of satisfying fruition. It’s noteworthy that John Nathan-Turner and script editor Andrew Cartmel signed off on this story, knowing full well its inconsistencies. A long-running series like Doctor Who should take chances on scripts such as these, which have strong conceptual potential, even if they don’t quite work on screen. Better a clever failure than yet another run-out for the Daleks or Cybermen. But Doctor Who in 1989 doesn’t have many—indeed, any—chances left.
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Post 163 of the Doctor Who Project