Not a lot, is the obvious answer. It's a big fan favourite, often to be found in top tens lists of greatest ever stories. There are only a couple of issues I can see.
One thing about the story which has always really annoyed me, personally, is the extra in their sleep pallet who can clearly be seen blinking as they try to watch Tom Baker and Lis Sladen play a scene in the cryo-chamber.
There's a really obvious reuse of a Sarah "horrified reaction" shot.
Space station Nerva can be seen in close orbit above the Earth. The whole point of the "Ark" was to save people from intense solar flare activity. Wouldn't the flares have affected Nerva as well, if it was so close to Earth?
The defence mechanism instantly disintegrates organic material, like the Doctor's cricket ball and Harry's shoes - yet it only fatally wounds the Wirrn Queen. There's no sign of damage on the corpse and she's able to do an awful lot before dying.
Of all the sleep pallets that Sarah could have ended up in, she just happens to be placed right next to Vira, Noah etc. in the chamber where all the action is.
And how come there was a spare pallet anyway? Surely the Ark ought to have been full?
Noah believes the Doctor and his companions to be responsible for sabotaging the station. The Doctor and Harry showed Vira the dead Wirrn Queen, lying just a few feet away from Noah's pallet - so why didn't they show it to him as well?
Producer Philip Hinchcliffe elected to cut a corridor scene between the mutating Noah and the Doctor / Vira, due to the former pleading to be killed. This has left the scene as broadcast very disjointed. The door simply closes mid-conversation, for no apparent reason, and the characters just move away.
The Wirrn life cycle. They live mostly in space, visiting planets only to breed. How exactly do they land and, more importantly, how do they launch themselves back into space if they don't use spaceships?
If they can absorb knowledge from their victims, why aren't they a technological species by now anyway? It's suggested that they've been in conflict with humans in Andromeda for a while, so must have consumed a fair few of them by now.
The Doctor never does report back to Vira about the transmat, as he gets diverted to Skaro. How long does she wait before trying to use it?
Robert Holmes' scripts were the third attempt at this story. The first, called "The Space Station" was by Christopher Langley, and the second version was by Hartnell Historical writer John Lucarotti. He gave each episode a title - "Buttercups", "Golfball", "Puffball" and "Camellias". There were aliens (the Delc) who were just heads, and others who were just bodies. The Doctor ended up hitting the head-only aliens into space with a golf club...
It's no wonder that Holmes had to do a page one rewrite.
Nerva can indeed be seen in close orbit around Earth. So how come the returning colonists we meet still think Nerva is a myth? Did they just happen to approach Earth from the wrong side of the planet and not bother looking around at all? No wonder they got captured by Styre.
ReplyDeleteThe Andromeda reference is another example of sci fi writers having no sense of intergalactic scale. If humans have the technology to travel there, then why bother going to sleep for millennia to avoid disaster? Why not just go to Andromeda? Or one of the colony worlds? OK you could argue that the Earth people here are not-so-closet racists and don't want to mix with the colonials, but if you can travel anywhere then why not just set up a new Earth and have your descendants go back once it's safe?
Vira and co probably died of old age waiting for the Doctor's return.
I will be mentioning some of this under the next www entry - The Sontaran Experiment.
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