What's Wrong With... Ghost Light

"It's not clear. It's not clear at all..." The Doctor (The Dalek Invasion of Earth).

I've been reading some old issues of the Doctor Who Bulletin recently, covering Season 26. The majority of letters were in favour of this story, but with a significant number objecting to its clarity of plot. Even the favourable ones mention certain aspects of the plot being obscure, or admit they had to watch episodes several times - rather undermining their insistence that they "got" this story.

(Personally I think it was very much a case of the Emperor's New Clothes - or the Doctor's lyre-playing).

I also looked at the extras on the DVD and can't help but notice that Andrew Cartmel often responds along the lines of "Well I know what the writer meant...".

Well, he would - wouldn't he, having had ample opportunity to discuss the story thoroughly with Marc Platt, as that was his job. We lesser mortals didn't have that opportunity. We have to go by what appears on screen, as it appeared on the evening of broadcast.

Some of the issues are small ones - imagery which appears to have been included simply because it looked striking and weird. 

What, for instance, is the business with Fenn-Cooper's snuffbox? Is Light inside it? What is the light which it emits? Isn't Light supposed to be hibernating down in the spaceship in the cellar? Then there's the glowing eyes on stuffed birds and animals. Are these supposed to have video cameras secreted inside them? Why do they suddenly make noises, when they're dead and stuffed?

How can desiccated and definitely dead insects come back to life?

Why does the candle suddenly flare up in front of Josiah Smith?

He manages to devolve the Rev. Matthews into a monkey - but by what means? Smith does things, but they are never properly explained.

How can his discarded husks have any animation for a start? We know that they were only included at JNT's insistence to give the story some traditional monsters, but some sort of reasoning behind their inclusion and subsequent actions might have been useful - apart from providing a cliff-hanger.

Who undressed Ace and put her to bed, and why can't she recall it happening? Did she beak into the drinks cabinet the night before?

Charles Darwin published his On the Origin of Species in 1859. Other natural philosophers had written along similar lines prior to this, with some evolutionary theories going back to the 18th Century. This story is set in the 1880's when the arguments between Creationists and Darwinists were hardly topical.

The way Matthews talks, Smith's "blasphemous" views are new.

Apparently the writer had intended the story to be set a couple of decades earlier - but JNT intervened as he preferred the frocks of the later Victorian era...

Smith does not want Control to evolve for fear she will supplant him - so why does he permit Mrs Pritchard to deliver her a copy of The Times every day?

(Understanding what's going on isn't exactly helped by the fact that we can hardly make out what Control is saying half the time).

What exactly is the point of the day staff, if everyone in the house appears to be nocturnal? Mrs Grose claims that you'd never catch anyone staying there after dark. If the house is that scary, why doesn't she just leave? Positions in service were ten a penny at this time - it was only with the mass casualties of the First World War and subsequent influenza pandemic that the days of the wealthy having huge households began to draw to a close.

And who - or what - are the maids who only come out at night? They look the same, so are they clones, or androids? There are four of them, but we don't see what happens to them all by the end of the story.

If the day staff are employed just to keep up appearances, then Smith is running quite a risk that Mrs Grose and the other servants might say too much about what they see / hear in the house. Perivale is pretty much still a village on the edge of London at this time, so gossip would be rife about everything.

The Doctor and Ace turn up at the house out of the blue. Instead of being arrested as trespassers, or simply killed as intruders, they are accepted and treated as guests, as though they were expected all along. If Smith knew who or what they were, it might explain this behaviour.

Smith thinks that human beings are the ultimate evolutionary forms on Earth - hence him wanting to be the top dog of the British Empire. But there are animals and insects which are far more successful than us - many insects like the cockroach, or animals which sit at the top of the food chain which would happily prey on humans. Some plants are even better at adapting than us.

If evolution is a constant process, with plants and animals adapting to conditions ever since life on Earth began, why hasn't Light ever noticed it before? It drives him insane now that he's awake, but it should have been obvious to him from the start. Didn't they have similar natural processes where he originated from?

Why did he hibernate in the first place - and why for so long? Why not complete his survey and simply move on to the next destination, or retire?

Ace got probation for committing arson. Highly unlikely even today but almost impossible in the 1980's. It was considered such a dangerous crime that a custodial sentence was almost guaranteed, minimum 5 years, but some people were jailed - or committed to mental hospitals - for life as the risk was always that they would do it again. Ace ought to have found herself in Feltham - the Young Offenders Institution south west of London. As someone who constantly rebels against authority, hers would probably have been a lengthy stretch.

Ace tells the Doctor that in her time she felt a sense of evil about Gabriel Chase, which is why she burned it down - but the Doctor must have already known all this - otherwise why did he specifically bring her here in the first place?

What's Wrong With... Battlefield

When a story's own author - Ben Aaronovitch - says there's a big issue with it then you really can't argue about the problems of Battlefield. (He even struggled with the novelisation and someone else had to step in and write it).

Season 26 suffered from a particular problem throughout - and that was poor work on the part of Andrew Cartmel. A good script editor knows how many characters to have, how many sets / locations are needed, and that the story then has to fit into the allotted time slot on the day, ensuring that all the salient plot points needed to satisfy the viewer are present and correct. Robert Holmes and Terrence Dicks understood this, as did most of Cartmel's predecessors. (They also knew not to use the exact same plot twice in the same short season, less than a month apart).

Just about every episode of Season 26 over-ran in terms of the scripts and rather drastic cuts had to be make to ensure the episodes fitted their evening time-slot. (We've now seen a lot of this material as "Special Editions" of the stories).

This had been going on since Cartmel arrived. At a DWAS convention following Season 24, one writer answered almost every question put to him by telling the audience to read the novelisation. If the episodes as broadcast can't tell you what you need to know, and you have to rely on buying a book to understand the plot, then there's something very wrong with how the story was structured and presented.

And a lot of that is down to the script being edited efficiently in the first place.

Battlefield's main issue was that it just about worked as a three-parter, but Aaronovitch had to stretch it to four. It's not just a case of dragging out or padding the plot, this upsets the whole story structure.

As for that plot...

There are far too many characters included for a start. As well as incorporating Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart we have to introduce a second Brigadier, an archaeologist, the archaeologist's assistant, a pub landlord, the pub landlord's wife, various UNIT underlings, a demon, a heroic knight from another dimension, a villainous knight from another dimension... and his mum.

There's so many characters but we can't have them all meeting at once, so some can only appear in the first half then be shunted out of the plot, and the more significant characters have to wander about a bit so that they don't meet up too early, because they're needed for the climax.

It is high summer by the looks of it, yet a scenic location with lake, forest and ruined castle isn't teeming with tourists.

We visit the pub a couple of times and yet it doesn't appear to get many visitors - local or tourist. Warmsley and Shou Yuing appear to be about the only customers. 

Whilst the landlady, Elizabeth, gets a small part to play in the plot - a bit of character development for Morgaine - there is absolutely no point of including husband Pat in the story.

We know how Morgaine and her knights get through to our world, but how exactly did Ancelyn manage it, and why didn't he bring any support with him?

Attempts to discuss the concept of military honour are another inconsistency. The scene between Morgaine and the Brigadier at the war memorial is very good, but she kills the unarmed Laval, before then restoring Elizabeth's sight just to pay for a round of drinks. 

Brigadier Bambera fails to have the Doctor and Ace instantly locked up when they try to access a restricted area with outdated UNIT passes. It's only afterwards that she's told about the mysterious scientific adviser from Lethbridge Stewart's time. How did she ever achieve that rank without knowing about the Doctor anyway? Why are UNIT doing mundane military work when they were set up to deal with alien threats in the first place?

Being a great fan of Time Team, the archaeological dig bears little resemblance to fact. The idea that a single individual, with just one assistant, would undertake a site of such a scale (and supposed importance) is unrealistic. The site really ought to be crawling with student volunteers, or at least a few local ones. There are groups all over the country.

Vortigern does not necessarily mean "High King". Vortigern was a king who, according to Bede and other early chroniclers, invited the Saxons into Britain to help repel attacks by the Picts and Scots, rewarding them with land in Kent.

The Doctor deduces that the spaceship will open at his command as his future self would have programmed it to obey his voice - and yet he doesn't think to tell the automated defences to stop attacking him. And what exactly do these snake-like defences do, apart from bumping into people?

And if he arranges all this in the future, why doesn't he remember then to make sure not to do something silly like endanger his earlier self who is going to blunder into this?

You can see the notorious crack in the glass when Ace almost drowns.

The script is inconsistent on the effectiveness of the knight's armour. Bullets bounce off when the script needs them to, but the knights die from ordinary gunfire when it doesn't. 

And just how does 1980's UNIT manage to defeat a warrior class of knights, armed with futuristic weapons, anyway?

Does the Doctor know that he's going to meet a demon who is susceptible to silver? How does Ace know about the bullets' significance?

The Destroyer is one of the most impressive monsters ever seen in the series, yet he doesn't get to do a lot. Maybe a bit of destroying might have come in handy to make his inclusion more worthwhile.

One of the biggest issues for me was what happens to Morgaine at the end. She can summon demons, traverse dimensions, teleport around, and bring down helicopters with her fingers, so I hardly think Holloway Prison is going to hold her for long. Was it too much to ask to see her and Mordred banished back to their own dimension at the end, instead of that painful sit-com walkdown at the Brig's house? They could have been honour-bound not to return to this dimension, just to draw a line under their involvement.