This story had more than its fair share of things go wrong, but they tended to be behind the scenes rather than problems we might have seen on screen.
Graham Williams found himself taking over a series which had come in for a great deal of criticism from certain quarters for its horrific content. Mrs Whitehouse was claiming victory over a public acknowledgement that the cliff-hanger to The Deadly Assassin's third episode should have been cut by a few frames. The new producer was asked to reduce the horror and violence, and elected to use humour and fantasy to plug the gap.
(It's ironic that his very first broadcast story is very much in the style of his predecessor, one of the very few in which every single guest character dies, violently).
Another issue facing him was a hefty reduction in his budget - partly due to inflation, and partly due to his predecessor having blown his budget in a very big way. It was BBC policy that an overspending series had its budget cut for the following year.
Luckily Robert Holmes had agreed to stay on as script editor for six months, to allow Williams to settle into the job and find a replacement for him.
The producer had hoped to have a whole season with an overarching story involving powerful beings above and beyond the Time Lords, but this could never be ready in time. Holmes already had scripts lined up for Season 15, and the first of these was to be a tale involving vampires, from Terrance Dicks.
Known as "The Witch Lords" or "The Vampire Mutation", the story was all set to proceed when the drama department put the kybosh on it. One-time Doctor Who director Morris Barry was producing a big budget two-part adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, to star Hollywood's Louis Jourdain as the Count and Frank Finlay as Van Helsing. A Doctor Who story about vampires might be construed as spoofing this production, so Graham Williams was ordered to ditch it.
The Invisible Enemy was pulled forward to begin production first - causing its own set of problems which we'll look at next time - and Dicks was asked to come up with a replacement story in double-quick time. As he told it, Holmes handed him a children's book on lighthouses and told him to get on with it - mirroring the time that he had handed Holmes a children's book on castles and forced him to write a medieval story for Season 11 (which became The Time Warrior). "I dragged him kicking and screaming into the Middle Ages, and he dragged me kicking and screaming onto a lighthouse".
Another problem arose when it became clear that no studio space could be found for this story in London. For the first time, a serial would have to be produced at one of the BBC's regional studios - in this case Pebble Mill in Birmingham. It wasn't geared up for drama productions, or for the necessary VFX requirements, so a great deal of work had to be done to get the studio ready. Everyone was impressed by the commitment from the Birmingham teams, who were keen to see more drama filmed there.
Tom Baker had his routines, which invariably involved hitting the bars and clubs of Soho as soon as rehearsals or recording had finished, and he was not best pleased about having to spend time away from his usual haunts.
Additionally, his ego and his arrogance had grown considerably since he had last worked with Paddy Russell, who was a no-nonsense director. They had already sparked off each other during the filming of Pyramids of Mars when he had been reluctant to don the Mummy costume, but nowadays he had become very proprietorial about the role.
During rehearsals for Fang Rock he had been particularly offensive to John Abbott, who was playing Vince - accusing him publicly of not having learned his lines, before throwing the actor's script out of the rehearsal room window. Bullying, basically.
Once at Pebble Mill, Tom refused to take direction from Russell for a scene where the Doctor had to rush in through a door. He was supposed to pause as he came in, in order to be captured by the camera, but he kept moving forward. In the end, Russell simply ignored him and so the camera rested on Leela instead. His loss was her gain.
Russell had other problems - the cramped nature of the lighthouse set limited camera angles, and the glass walls of the lamp room caused further headaches.
As for the story itself, it has few flaws. A small group of people in a confined space, with a fairly straightforward plot, there's little that could go wrong. If the only things to worry about are the model of the ship looking too much like a model, or the claim that the fireball was red when we've seen that it was purple, then you have little to worry about.
The Rutan gets criticised - I think some people were hoping for the Creature from the Black Lagoon - but it's actually an okay effect, and the reason for it blobiness is perfectly logical. Dicks argued that, as the Sontarans were rigidly militaristic, then their archenemies would be the exact opposite - a more amorphous species.
Adelaide rushes off after one of her emotional outbursts - which is out of character. She goes off on her own when she knows there's a killer about, despite being the most frightened of all the guest characters.
Reuben is mocked for his distrust of electricity - only to have been proven right. Would the Rutan have bothered with the lighthouse if it hadn't been powered by electricity?
Did the Rutan mean to land here in the first place? If it has come to assess the planet for use by its military command, is an isolated building on a lump of rock in the middle of the sea a good place to pick? It could have been automated for all it knew, with no humans to assess.
What was the point of sending in a scout if the mothership is going to turn up in a few hours anyway?
There's still an intact Rutan ship in the sea off the south coast of England (no one says it crashed). What if the Rutan hadn't come alone? The Doctor just assumes that this is a lone scout.
The climax is unsatisfying. The mothership appears to be just a blob of VFX light, which can be destroyed by some other VFX light. What did the Doctor do to make a lighthouse lamp turn into a laser, with just the Edwardian tech he has to hand? Lucky the mothership was so vulnerable. How did the Rutans manage to survive their war with the Sontarans so long?
The Doctor quotes The Ballad of Flannan Isle at the end - but wouldn't the mystery of a lighthouse full of electrocuted bodies and a pile of green goo have prompted a ballad or two of its own? Maybe Torchwood hushed it all up...
When Colin Douglas made The Enemy of the World, Frazer Hines recalls him complaining about Doctor Who being beneath him and he would never make another one. What changed his mind? (The pay cheque, one presumes).
Like the Zygons, the Rutans can be shown in human form for much of the time, which is a cheap and effective way of delivering a story - so why did they never bring them back?
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