But this is the end, Doctor.
It is a sad irony, or perhaps even an overt statement of defiance, that Doctor Who‘s final story, by Rona Munro, bears the title “Survival” (Story Production Code 7P). And to what far-flung, interstellar destination, to which era-defining period of temporal change, does the last tale take us? Ah, that would be 1989 Perivale, a small suburban outpost in Ealing, a conurbation of London, home to Ace, who has begun to miss her friends since her abrupt leave-taking prior to the events of “Dragonfire.” After twenty-six seasons of alien landscapes and distant times, the quotidian charm of an unhurried residential street with a lad in a period appropriate rugby shirt tucked into jeans washing a car feels shocking, almost subversive, such that it’s a relief once he vanishes after being hissed at by a barely-adequate animatronic black cat.
Doctor Who often shines brightest when set amongst familiar trappings—from Cybermen marching in front of St. Peter’s Cathedral to Autons bursting forth from shop windows on the high street—the better to highlight the oddities on offer, and “Survival” benefits from its down-to-Earth setting. Ace, again, grounds the story in some sense of reality, and we finally see what happens when a companion returns after so long away. Her friends have almost all disappeared, the old haunts sit abandoned, and her mother, last seen as a baby in “The Curse of Fenric,” filed a missing persons report on her months back. Once a busybody Territorial Army sergeant at the youth center, Paterson (Julian Holloway), remembers her as the “waster” who burned down a creepy mansion (q.v. “Ghost Light“), it’s not hard to see why Ace wasn’t terribly upset about being swept into the future and away from Perivale. The scene seems set for some rumination on the costs of traveling with the Doctor, but instead we learn that Ace is not the only Perivalian to journey through the cosmos without a spaceship, or even a souped-up police box.
Immediately upon arrival, while waiting with rather visible impatience for Ace to find her friends, the Doctor takes an interest in a particular (and certainly quite peculiar) stray black cat, leading him to purchase all manner of cat foods from a corner market (paid for by Ace’s winnings from the fruit machine in her local) with which to entice said feline. Ace, meanwhile, has no trouble finding the cat, picking it up on a nearby playground; when it scampers from her grasp, she finds in its stead a bipedal, humanoid cheetah riding a horse, one of the most surprising “monster” appearances ever on Doctor Who—which, after over a hundred and fifty stories, is saying something. That the concept is a mash-up of Planet of the Apes and, alas, Cats does not detract from the sheer audacity of the presentation; director Alan Wareing, helming his third story, fully embraces the moment and does not shy away from showing the costuming, which holds up reasonably well under close inspection.
After a series of less-than-thrilling near escapes up kiddie slides and through jungle gyms in the playground, the cheetah finally runs Ace down, sending her with a flash to another planet, where she finds several black cats gathered around the dead body of the car washer (Damon Jeffery). When the cheetah on horseback also appears, Ace makes a futile effort to flee, only to be saved by her friends from Perivale, who pull her into a thicket and explain that they have been brought to this place as prey for the cheetahs to hunt down—and eat.
The scene is thus set for an exploration of the titular “survival of the fittest,” as established by Paterson, who bullies his charges in the youth center, all to toughen them up, to eat rather than be eaten. Alongside such duties, he also moonlights as the neighborhood watch, focusing his attention on the Doctor, who has been rather unsuccessful in trapping his own prey but somewhat too successful in irritating the local householders. Just as the Doctor is about to apprehend the black cat, having clambered atop a stone fence to reach it, Paterson grabs him. Another flash translates them to “planet of the Cheetah People,” which the Doctor notes has been scarcely researched since no one lives long enough to learn much. A whole tribe of the cat beasts surrounds them, pushing them towards a tent, where a glib smile welcomes the Doctor like the old acquaintance he is…
Of all the foes to bring back for the very final story, none could be more fitting than the Master. Anthony Ainley has not portrayed the renegade Time Lord since the end of the Sixth Doctor’s run, and the fallow period lends even more potency to his presence, revealed as the first cliffhanger of this three episode story. The Master too echoes the story’s title. He seeks not domination over the galaxy nor conquest of Earth’s past; he’s just trying to keep the Cheetahs fed so they don’t eat him instead, a far more reasonable scheme than his usual convoluted conspiracies. The Master uses his hypnotic powers to mind link with the “kitlings,” the small black house cats, to seek out sustenance. Both they and the full-blown felines possess the ability to teleport between locations, finding prey on different worlds which is then brought back to the Cheetah planet, to be hunted at leisure.
The anthropomorphized big cats serve as a force of nature in “Survival,” simply following instinct. “Kill or be killed,” shrieks Paterson, just in case the audience didn’t get the idea. They eat when hungry, play with their food when not, bask in the sun, and, um, ride horses, like normal cats. So when Ace aids one, Karra (Lisa Bowerman), who falls off her mount after Ace beans her with a rock, that she starts speaking to the bewildered teen changes the dynamic entirely. Not only are the Cheetah People sentient, but the very strong implication is that they were once “normal” individuals, brought from various places, who succumbed to the planet’s strange allure. The crumbling world with fuchsia skies “bewitches,” according to the Master, turning those who stay—who survive—into Cheetahs. Paterson’s claims that he’s “a hunting animal” threaten to prove quite true. Survival of the fittest, by this story’s telling, means descending to the animalistic and abandoning that which makes us human—a steep price to pay despite the possibility of endless afternoon naps in warm sunbeams.
Sadly, the scenes on the Cheetah world fall flat in comparison to those shot on location in real-life Perivale. The wan purple CSO sky against a quarry-like backdrop, quite overused back in “Mindwarp,” feels garishly fake, and seeing too many of the Cheetahs at one time reveals the seams, as it were, in the costumes, much as parades of Daleks always show the ones with wonky roundels and off-centered slats. Luckily only one episode takes place there in full, for the Master has gambled correctly once more that the Doctor will rescue him from his own dilemma. The Cheetahs instinctively drag their prey home, the Doctor realizes, so they “need an animal whose home is Earth” to escape. That animal just so happens to be Ace.
It’s striking how thoroughly the final three stories of Season Twenty-Six—”Ghost Light,” “The Curse of Fenric,” and “Survival”—revolve around Ace, not just in terms of her pivotal actions but more so as the very basis of the stories themselves. “Survival” might not be an analysis of the cost of journeying with the Doctor, but it is an examination of what it takes to endure an urban, or perhaps more accurately, a suburban jungle, with Ace as the apex survivor. Compared to Perivale, the Cheetah planet doesn’t seem quite so grim to Ace. (Though in fairness Perivale looks a quite fine, if sedate, place to live, with ample green space and pleasant rows of houses, from the evidence on film.) She finds a kindred spirit in Karra, and begins to show signs of succumbing to the planet’s animalistic allure, helpfully signposted by glowing yellow eyes.
As in the two prior stories, the Doctor must (or, arguably, chooses) to use Ace to bring about a resolution, but here at least he offers the plucky teen from Perivale both a choice and a full recounting of the risks:
The Doctor: You can do what they do. You can carry your prey home. You can help us escape.
Ace: Yes?
The Doctor: But if you do that, you may never change back. You’ll become like the Cheetah People forever.
Ace: What shall I do? Tell me, Doctor. I trust you.
The Doctor: The choice is yours.
She uses her new powers to send herself, the Doctor, Paterson, and her purloined pals Shreela (Sakuntala Ramanee) and Derek (David John) back to Perivale. Her other missing friend, Midge (Will Barton), is already there. Having absorbed Paterson’s “lessons” about channeling his inner beast to survive in an eat or be eaten world, Midge kills a Cheetah with a sabre-tooth tiger fang and descends rapidly into animality, a condition the Master harnesses to escape to Earth himself. But the rogue Time Lord, too, has begun to change, bearing the fangs and yellow eyes that are the harbinger of the transformation. Though able to temporarily push the metamorphosis back, he is clearly slipping towards becoming a Cheetah, and he vows to destroy the Doctor as his last conscious act. (How the Doctor is involved at all in the Master’s fate seems narratively tenuous at best, and never explicated. One assumes the Master sent kitlings to Perivale knowing of Ace’s connection to the place, waiting for the dynamic duo to return to her home at some point. Such untidy leaps in plot are one price of the three episode story.)
Paterson, whose response to being whisked to another planet and nearly eaten by six-foot tall anthropomorphic felines is to write it off as a bad spell of drinking, decides to carry on with normal life, not even bothering to change out of his tattered clothes. When the Scottish sergeant shows up to run another self-defense class, he encounters instead Midge, who has donned the leather-armed suit of a very late ’80s rock star, the better to test Paterson’s theories of survival of the fittest. The Territorial Army’s finest, alas, is not fittest. The Master knows the Doctor will be looking for him, and he is attempting to unleash Midge’s full animal potential. Ace, too, still suffers from the affliction, and if she wields her new strength to protect the Doctor, she runs the risk of changing permanently, which would be an even sweeter victory for the Master.
After the Doctor and Midge collide in a clash of motorcycles (yes, really), Ace thinks the Doctor dead, whilst a group of boys from the youth center hypnotized by the Master descend upon her. She cries out for help, knowing the cost of fighting back, when Karra appears on horseback with the characteristic flash of the Cheetah People. The lads scatter, but the Master holds his ground, stabbing her with Midge’s sabre-tooth tiger fang. As Karra dies, she reverts back to her original self, a young woman, ostensibly human. Her parting words to Ace, “Good hunting, sister,” bear heavy meaning, for Ace will always carry the latent power of the Cheetah People within her.
The Doctor, alive if somewhat ruffled from being flung into a fly-tipped sofa after his moto-jousting, tracks the Master down as he attempts to break into the TARDIS. The two tangle, with the Master claiming that he has harnessed the power of the Cheetah planet. They flash back there, and the Master, fangs bared and eyes blazing yellow, gets the upper hand, until the Doctor gains the same strength. When the Doctor, his own eyes yellow, is about to crush the Master with a skull, he realizes that he must stop, that they will kill themselves by killing each other. The Master refuses to yield, and just as the renegade is about to land a fatal blow, the Doctor is whisked back to Earth, unharmed and unchanged. The cats in Perivale go back to normal, and the Doctor and Ace jet off to another adventure, or so we hope.
Though the guest cast is rather hefty, including a brief comedic aside in a corner store by Norman Pace and Gareth Hale (then starring in an eponymous skit show on ITV), Lisa Bowerman and, of course, Anthony Ainley stand out. Bowerman’s invocation of Karra carries with it a startling animal grace, and though she has but few speaking lines, the overall effect of the character transcends the costume; Bowerman embodies a thinking, once-human cat, crucial to selling the entire premise of the story. Aniley’s portrayal of the Master finally reaches apotheosis in “Survival,” as the Doctor’s life-long foe finally seems both willing and able to kill his nemesis once and for all. He’s over the top, as usual, and unlike most of the actors who are fitted with the yellow contact lenses and fang appliances, Ainley looks rather at ease with them. There’s rather less of the usual wit about the Master in this story, alas, but it was about time the character nearly reaches his eternal goal.
Sophie Aldred suffers from the same issue as Lisa Bowerman, in that the script does not provide a surfeit of lines, but that in no way takes Ace out of the center of this story. “Survival” is Ace’s tale, start to finish, from a return to Perivale to a confrontation with the choices she must make to survive and still be the person she wants to be. Aldred carries it off beautifully, her wistfulness as Ace contemplates running forever and joining the hunt quite compelling in suggesting that Ace feels Karra’s command to “[s]mell the blood on the wind,” to become one with her inner nature. She doesn’t need the Doctor to save her from transforming; she makes the choice herself, and in so doing, Aldred’s presentation cements Ace as the strongest of the companions. Producer John Nathan-Turner and script editor Andrew Cartmel’s decision to focus the majority of Season Twenty-Six on Ace pays dividends.
Sylvester McCoy, by contrast, seems curiously at odds with the Seventh Doctor in “Survival,” many of his lines somewhat mumbled and even his gift for physical comedy performed in a perfunctory manner. There’s little real focus on the character in this story—and indeed, it is a tale that would work without the Doctor’s presence, a rarity for the series—with the Doctor called upon mostly to point out the obvious as Munro works through her thesis about the costs, overt and hidden, of surviving. Which is not to say that it isn’t a delight, as ever, to see McCoy at work, particularly in concert with Ainley; but one would wish to have seen an extended verbal sparring match between the two overly-wordy adversaries rather than a rough-and-tumble bash’em up.
And thus ends Doctor Who, with the Doctor and Ace walking off into the distance, McCoy’s voice over acting as coda:
The Doctor: There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, where the sea’s asleep and the rivers dream. People made of smoke, and cities made of song. Somewhere there’s danger, somewhere there’s injustice, and somewhere else the tea’s getting cold. Come on, Ace, we’ve got work to do.
Per Paul Kirkley’s Space Helmet for a Cow , the closing lines, courtesy of Andrew Cartmel, were added in post-production, when it became evident that, despite protestations to the contrary by BBC Head of Series Peter Cregeen, Doctor Who was not coming back after a hiatus of any length. The words are both rousing and, oddly, comforting, reminding us that the Doctor endures, even as Doctor Who does not.
(Previous Story: The Curse of Fenric)
Post 165 of the Doctor Who Project