Behold, the end of the war.
For all the historical periods Doctor Who has mined over the course of a quarter century, the series waits until the bitter end to visit the 1940s, World War II in particular, in Ian Briggs’ “The Curse of Fenric” (Story Production Code 7M). Given the number of period dramas (and comedies) the BBC has set in that era, it’s rather surprising that this specific setting lies dormant for so long—the costume closet from Dad’s Army is available to plunder the whole time, after all. Perhaps the relative seriousness of the topic, and the still somewhat fresh memories of the conflict, keep the series at bay, especially in an era of increasing international sales for Doctor Who, and it’s telling that Briggs’ story hews away from the strictly historical to present instead a tale of ancient horror with a distinctly Nordic twist.
The Seventh Doctor and Ace arrive at a secret Royal Navy base in Northumbria, likely around 1943 given clues about the state of the war, right at the same time that several rafts full of Soviet commandos storm the beaches at nearby Maiden’s Point, suggesting that perhaps the base isn’t so secret after all. The Doctor strolls right in, his air of authority such that several guards with rifles simply let him saunter to the office of Dr. Judson (Dinsdale Landen), a cryptographer working on deciphering German naval ciphers using his “Ultima” machine, an analytic proto-computer that can work through “[m]ore than a thousand combinations an hour, with automatic negative checking.” Like the Doctor, the Soviets also seek the scientist, but their sealed orders further include references to the engraved runes found in the crypt of the local parish church, built, as such things occasionally are, on the remains of an old Viking cemetery.
Briggs and returning director Nicholas Mallett deftly build up the tension in the first of four episodes, establishing a wide cast of characters while drip-feeding the development of the titular curse, one laid upon a group of Vikings forced to land on the British coast when “the fingers of death reached out from the waters to reclaim the treasure we have stolen” from far off lands. Their descendants go on to populate this corner of the British Isles, passing the curse down through the generations. The production team uses the various locations (scattered across England from Kent to Dorset) to excellent effect, much as “Delta and the Bannermen” benefits from its copious and lush location shooting. Several scenes shot underwater, looking up at passing boats and swimmers (in an undeniable homage to Jaws), plus excessive use of a fog machine, keeps the audience on edge, waiting for the creature responsible for the grisly deaths of several Soviet soldiers to finally reveal itself.
Dr. Judson and the camp commandant, Commander Millington (Alfred Lynch), share more than a steely desire to defeat the Nazis, the latter so engrossed that he has turned his office into a replica of “the German naval cipher room in Berlin,” giving viewers the initial thought that, shades of “Inferno,” the British are under fascist control in an alternate universe. (And indeed, it’s an exceedingly odd red herring to throw at the audience, a thread that never goes anywhere beyond signaling that Millington takes his job perhaps too seriously and/or is somewhat unhinged.) The two old school chums also harbor a deep-seated fascination with old Viking legends, collaborating in deciphering the runes in the crypt, which, as it turns out, were partially translated by the grandfather of the current vicar, the Rev. Mr. Wainwright (Nicholas Parsons). The ancient carvings tell of the day when “[t]he Wolves of Fenric shall return for their treasure, and then shall the dark evil rule eternally,” all because the Vikings stole a vase from the Far East. Granted, the squat ceramic flask does hold the incorporeal, sentient essence of all evil…
Doctor Who is no stranger to riffs off Norse mythology, from the Vanir and Garm of “Terminus” through to the recent invocation of the Gods of Ragnarok in “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy,” the latter a quite useful point of comparison. Here, the incarnation of evil is given the name Fenric—a play off the Fenrir wolf who ushers in the Ragnarok apocalypse—by the Viking plunderers, but Fenric finds itself bottled up like a dime-store genie in the first place thanks to the Doctor. As in “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy,” and indeed “Remembrance of the Daleks,” “Silver Nemesis,” and “Battlefield” as well, the entire plot of “The Curse of Fenric” hinges on actions taken by the Doctor before the events of the present story, events the audience knows nothing of. The whole reason the Doctor shows up in 1940s Northumbria, with Ace in tow, is to finish what he started with Fenric some “seventeen centuries” prior, a motive we don’t learn until halfway through the tale.
This insistence by producer John Nathan-Turner and script editor Andrew Cartmel on deepening the mystery behind the Doctor by hinting at adventures yet unseen certainly achieves its goal of making the Doctor unknowable, but it also makes him an unreliable narrator, for better and worse. The trope of the Doctor acting inscrutably can pay dividends; when the Fourth Doctor seemingly betrays Gallifrey in “The Invasion of Time,” the audience not knowing why drives the story’s interest. But, as with the Sixth Doctor’s manic and callous behavior in “Mindwarp,” this uncertainty runs the risk of the Doctor becoming not just unknowable, but unlikable. Sylvester McCoy’s Seventh Doctor mostly avoids that trap, though Ace calls him out for it:
Ace: You always know. You just can’t be bothered to tell anyone. It’s like it’s some kind of a game, and only you know the rules.
Still, the character’s continued tinkering with Ace’s psychic baggage as part of his machinations (q.v. “Ghost Light” and “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy“) brings him repeatedly close to the precipice of unforgivable behavior.
As noted, the descendants of the original Viking inhabitants of the area around Maiden’s Point carry the curse with them, and Ace just happens to be one of them through her mother, whom she meets as a baby (Aaron Hanley), the child of a cipher clerk on the base, Kathleen Dudman (Cory Pulman). Ace can’t stand her mother, for reasons never explored, and she has a fear of the sea, the latter at least easily tied into the curse’s aquatic origins. All of the story’s main players—Judson, Millington, Wainwright, and Soviet Captain Sorin (Tomek Bork)—carry the lineage, summoned by Fenric’s power to do its bidding, though granted three of them live within a stone’s throw of the crypt where the vicious vase pops out of a stone wall all on its own. Ace, too, has been called in a way, for Fenric reveals that it pushed her through time to Ice World, where the Doctor meets her during the events of “Dragonfire,” also written by Briggs. So, once more, the Doctor deliberately brings Ace to a situation that puts her, specifically, in a dangerous situation in order to bring about a greater good, with the side “benefit” of confronting the very traumas that have turned her into who she is. One might want to check his psychiatry license…
Ace and the Doctor uncover the Fenric flask inadvertently in the crypt, after assuaging Wainwright about his encounter with delinquent teenage vampires. (Oh, right there are vampires in this story, too. For a four episode story, “The Curse of Fenric” contains several jarring inclusions that receive very little explication, a common theme over the last few (dozen) seasons of Doctor Who.) Hæmovores, to be precise, “what Homo sapiens evolve into thousands of years in the future,” according to the Doctor, the final inhabitants of an Earth destroyed by chemical poisons. The very last of the hæmovores, the Ancient One (Ray Trickitt), from some half-million years in Earth’s future, also carries the curse, and like Ace, Fenric pulls him through time. Via feeding, the Ancient One creates an army of hæmovores all waiting in the sea near the sunken Viking longboat at Maiden’s Point, the source of the age-old warnings about not swimming there. They serve as a convenient impetus to action and give rise to several scenes of running and fighting and clawing and biting. And where does the poison that eventually turns humans into hæmovores come from? Fenric.
Millington and Judson have discovered a fount of natural poison of incredible potency in the crypts beneath the church, which the Doctor links to the “Well of Hvergelmir,” a spring full of poisonous snakes at the foot of the World Tree, an axis mundi of sorts in Norse mythology. Ostensibly the work of Fenric, the two military men turn over the venomous wellspring to the British government, which promptly decides to make war-ending bombs out of the poison. The obvious analogy is to the atomic bomb, and to emphasize the point, Rev. Wainwright undergoes a massive crisis of conscience over the British bombing campaigns over Germany, with the concomitant loss of civilian life forcing him to question his faith. Whitehall also authorizes the pair to put a poison bomb in the Ultima machine, which they will allow the Soviet commandos to steal and take back to Moscow, in hopes to decimating Soviet leadership after the war. The entire thread, of hæmovores and poison and Soviet saboteurs, feels tacked on to the story, even as it adds quite a bit of color and chaos to proceedings, an acceptable if slightly bewildering bit of padding in a four episode story.
Apparently under thrall to Fenric, or at the very least seduced by the promise of “all the dark powers of Fenric,” Millington and Judson hook up the old flask to the Ultima machine, leading to Fenric’s freedom. The runes turn out to contain an algorithm that enables the Ultima machine to break the seal on the flask, a fact Ace inadvertently reveals to Judson, and the malevolent entity possesses the cryptographer. The incarnated Fenric has a score to settle with the Doctor, very pointedly calling him a “Time Lord.” No further examination is made of the conflict between Fenric and the Doctor, nor indeed of Fenric’s background, beyond the suggestion that the Doctor tricked it into “the shadow dimensions” via a chess puzzle (shades of the games-as-serious-business notion, with binding rules, introduced in “The Celestial Toymaker” decades earlier). It’s simply a struggle between good and evil, a stark moral binary of the type much favored by Nathan-Turner and Cartmel for the Seventh Doctor’s run. (But the series has previously posited vampires as age-old foes of the Time Lords, with the Gallifreyans engaging in a drawn out intergalactic war against the Grand Vampires, who, per the Fourth Doctor in “State of Decay,” are responsible for vampire legends across the known universe. Sadly, the relationship, or more likely the lack thereof, between hæmovores like the Ancient One and the Grand Vampires remains unexplored.)
So how does the Doctor defeat Fenric again? By setting up a chess board once more, proving that Doctor Who villains never quite learn from their mistakes. (Tellingly, though, Millington orders all chess sets on base to be destroyed and even booby traps his own set with explosives and poison gas, to prevent such a repeat performance; the only way he could know to guard against such perfidy by pawn would be if Fenric were operating through him prior to being fully freed, which helps explain his obsessive behavior throughout the story.) Fenric becomes so absorbed trying to solve the puzzle—even though it had seventeen hundred years in exile to work out the solution—that the Doctor is able to convince the Ancient One not carry out Fenric’s command to poison the Earth’s waters with the British military’s massive stockpile of chemical weapons, pointing out that this very act would start the planet on its long spiral into a poisonous wasteland in the far future.
When Ace sees Royal Navy Captain Bates (Stevan Rimkus) and the Soviet saboteur Vershinin (Marek Anton, more recognizable here than as the big blue Destroyer in “Battlefield“) work together to defeat Millington, she solves the chess puzzle: the opposing pawns work together. How one might write that down in chess notation remains an exercise for the viewer, but she reveals the solution (again!) to Fenric, who has, unbeknownst to her, taken the body of Sorin. Fenric lords its “victory” over the Doctor, demanding his supplication in exchange for Ace’s life. The Doctor’s response? “Kill her.”
Herein lies the danger in casting the Doctor as unreliable, as unknowable. Too far in that direction, and viewers might believe the Doctor actually means what he says when he castigates Ace as a “social misfit,” having brought her along from Ice World only because he knew her to be one of Fenric’s curse-borne Wolves. We’ve seen enough of the Seventh Doctor’s positive side, his essential care for Ace, to know that he’s up to something, as with the Fourth Doctor in “The Invasion of Time,” but it’s a close run thing, particularly after two seasons of a morally ambivalent and frankly callous Sixth Doctor and the Seventh Doctor’s own flirtations with genocide. As a narrative tool, the brief moment of uncertainty works to great dramatic effect, but it’s a tool best used but scarcely. In the event, the Doctor needs to shake Ace’s unwavering faith in him, since faith keeps hæmovores at bay, signposted throughout the story by Wainwright’s wavering belief in God which, when it falters, turns him into vampire chow. Once the Ancient One is free to act when Ace’s faith-driven psychic barrier drops, he forces Fenric into a sealed test chamber in the chemical weapons lab where the final confrontation takes place and kills the embodiment of evil, along with himself.
Dinsdale Landen and Alfred Lynch stand out amongst a fairly full guest cast for their portrayals of Dr. Judson and Commander Millington, if only because the best roles on Doctor Who always feature characters who are possessed, either by a malevolent entity or with a malevolent ideology. Both men have hints of single-minded mania from the get-go, with each successive episode ramping up the volume of their delusion and grandeur. By the time Lynch is quoting from the Viking runes appreciatively, reveling, “The chains of Fenric are shattered. The gods have lost the final battle,” it’s a believable (if slightly unexplained and decidedly absurd) transition from the martinet we first meet strutting about the base. Likewise Landen, who imbues the Fenric-possessed Judson with a strangely affecting pathos, finally free and yet still utterly trapped at the same time. The key to a successful guest appearance on the series is to overact ever so slightly, and both Landen and Lynch understand the assignment quite well.
Once more, Sophie Aldred carries the emotional weight of the story, with Ace’s warehouse of trauma full to the brim, rather almost too much so for a character not yet out of her teens. Aldred gamely shifts Ace from glee at playing with the baby Audrey to revulsion at realizing that the child is her mother, and she weathers the whiplash change from scrappy explosives expert still delighted at big booms to ingénue who leads a solider away from his post with a come-hither look. With so many facets to cram into one character, Aldred manages to keep Ace grounded; the “acting” doesn’t peek through, despite the wild tonal variations that the teen from Perivale must endure. Ace has turned into one of the most well-rounded companions yet, helped in part by being a solo traveller with the Doctor and also by the quite extensive focus on her history and background, a real rarity for the series.
Nathan-Turner and Cartmel seem to have finally gotten the balance right with the Seventh Doctor, the hard-edged warrior of “Silver Nemesis” and “Remembrance of the Daleks” being leavened here by a more intellectually focused crusader. Sylvester McCoy seems at peace with this version of the character as well, and “The Curse of Fenric” represents perhaps his best performance in the role. The Seventh Doctor is cruel, to be sure, when he tries to break Ace’s faith in him, but it’s counterbalanced by his nearly apoplectic apologies immediately thereafter, a recognition on the character’s part, played heartbreakingly by McCoy, that he knows he went too far; making a hard choice for a good reason does not make the choice any less painful or regrettable, a valuable lesson indeed.
Quibbles about an overcomplicated plot and half-a-dozen loose narrative threads aside, “The Curse of Fenric” represents vintage Doctor Who, a fast-paced yet still cerebral adventure unspooling a story only this particular series can tell, with the Doctor prevailing through cleverness and wit rather than any more martial means. The effects, particularly the hæmovore makeup and outfits and the underwater camera work, blend brilliantly with the period appropriate locations and the BBC’s deft hand at historical costuming and set design. Throw in solid acting from the cast, regular and guest, and it’s a delight, even as one might wonder just why there are vampires in a story about a Viking curse. Fourteen episodes like this a season and Doctor Who could never be cancelled. Unfortunately, we get only four episodes like this in Season Twenty-Six, and none (of any quality) in a future season that never comes…
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Post 164 of the Doctor Who Project