Powerplay – a matter of Life and Death
‘A chance action by Ace brings the TARDIS to Earth in the early 1940’s: Coventry in the Blitz, black rain falling out of the sky and pulverising all hope and humanity.
But it was no accident brought them here – just as it was on accident that carried out Ace off to Iceworld in a time storm, where she met the Doctor. They were moves by the Doctor’s nemesis in a terrible game played between the Doctor and his nemesis. The game has been played before and it will be played again. This time it is being played with Ace…
The contest is not the mere struggle between Good and Evil. The Doctor and his nemesis go beyond that. This is the eternal contest between Life and Death. The Doctor is Life; his nemesis is Death. Neither can win – the conflict is eternal, to be played out at different times in different places – but for the Doctor and the innocents who get caught up in it are more than just pieces in a board game.
A winner can only emerge if one of the players default, and this time, his nemesis skilfully manoeuvres the Doctor into the position of having to choose between treating people as pieces in the game, or abandoning the game.’
Story proposal for ‘Powerplay’ by Ian Briggs
So, from the original story outline it is clear that for his second script for the show, that Ian Briggs had in mind a high concept drama, with a central image – the chess match between Life and Death taken from Bergman (‘The Seventh Seal’) – so you can’t fault his ambition. In some ways it reminds me of a Bob Baker and Dave Martin story outline, in particular their original proposal for the ‘The Three Doctors’, that the Doctors should battle against the personification of Death. So, like many of the ideas of the ‘Bristol Boys’, Ian Briggs’s outline is high on concept and ambition and yes, pretension, short on recognition of the state of the budget of the show. However what emerges from the scripting process I think is really rather good, yes it has some moments that feel slightly cringeworthy and some that are overblown and a bit pretentious, but I overlook or rather accept these because, well I really rather like the story. For me, it successfully manages to marry a new and different approach with a traditional Who story of monsters rising from the sea in a remote, cut-off location.
The switch of location from Coventry during the Blitz to the Naval camp was, I think necessary and not just because of the ability of the shows budget to depict the Blitz at this time. In 1989, possibly even now, I think that setting would have been problematic. London is routinely depicted on film and TV, but the Coventry blitz is a very specific thing, at that point in time survivors and those who lost loved ones were still alive, so to depict it as a mere backdrop for a game between higher beings, well doesn’t feel right to me even now – I’m not sure why, given that is what ‘The War Games’ does 50 years after the end of the First World War – I think probably because of the impacts on the civilian population of a relatively small city. I just can’t see that getting past JNT, even if the location had been realisable.
I make it around 25 times that ‘Evil’ is used in the script, sometimes up to 3 times in a scene. If ‘evil from the dawn of time’ isn’t your thing then you might struggle with this one. I don’t actually have an issue with the use of evil in this way, so long as the series uses it very sparingly and that the Doctor is pitted against it in a very specific way. To me the Doctor is someone who in the middle of a quest that he is sent on by the personification of Light and ‘good’, gets bored and decides to go fishing instead. He isn’t a god himself, he is someone who is very clever, but faces up to ‘evil’ or at least oppression with his wits and a screwdriver. When pitted against ‘god-like’ figures such as Sutekh, Omega, ‘The Beast’, Azaal or the Black Guardian – beings with stupendous powers, it gives his fight a scale, a little man with a good-heart and quick wit, fighting against the odds when he’d much rather be fishing or reading a book or tinkering the TARDIS or Bessie. Pitching the Doctor as another God, misses the point somewhat, but I think on the whole the end-version of ‘Fenric’ walks the right line on this. I can just about get on board with Reinette’s ‘Lonely Angel’ as a religious image for the Doctor, fallen from his own people with a good heart, trying to his best to help others, but a god no, not for me.
I will talk more about the Good vs Evil, Life vs Death aspect later in the review, but this as a concept, is something that the new series walks a very fine line on. I think that starts here in the Cartmel era and his ‘Masterplan’ for ‘The Other’, but really comes from the Virgin New Adventures. In these books, pretty much from the 4th in the series, Paul Cornell’s ‘Timewyrm:Revelation’, where the Doctor dances with the personification of Death on the surface of the moon, the Doctor becomes ‘Time’s Champion’. Now this doesn’t do much for me. If it is your sort of thing, fine, I prefer the wandering boffin with a screwdriver, a robot dog, a daffy yellow car and some nice friends, who was bored and stifled by his own society and left to see the universe and ended up trying to make it a better place, just because he couldn’t bear to stand by and watch bad things happen to people who didn’t deserve it. Somewhere between the two extremes though there is some fertile ground to be explored. And well, I rather like high-concept TV dramas, when they are done well – from ‘The Prisoner’, via ‘The Second Coming’ and ‘Life on Mars’ and ‘Ashes to Ashes’, so it seems churlish to complain.
The Norse Way
‘We hope to return to the North Way, carrying home the oriental treasures from the Silk Lands in the east, but the dark curse follows our dragon ship. Black fog turned day into night, and the fingers of death reached out from the waters to reclaim the treasure we have stolen. I carve these stones in memory of Asmund, Grimvald, Torkal, Halfdan, brave Viking warriors slain by the curse. We sought haven in Northumbria, and took refuge at a place called Maidens’ Bay, but the curse of the treasure has followed us to this place.’
‘Vozravschayetes ve Norwegiouss akrovisichem. We return to Norway, the North Way, bearing the treasure’
I am tempted to say that I return from Norway bearing a review of ‘The Curse of Fenric’, as I started writing this review on my way from Svalbard far inside the Arctic Circle – travelling to Tromso. I was looking for an appropriate story with an Arctic setting to watch and review along the way, ’Cold War’ didn’t really fit the thread and then I remembered ‘Fenric’ with it’s blend of Vikings and Soviet Russians, it was a good fit for the thread as well – vampirism and possession and change of a different kind. Svalbard is an interesting place, whilst under Norwegian control, there are also the abandoned Soviet era coal mining settlements of Barentsburg and Pyramiden, with their busts of Lenin and Soviet-era murals, rather like the training base in ‘Under the Lake’. So, although ‘Fenric’ is not actually set in Norway, it is set on the coast that was frequently raided by Vikings and where Harald Hardrada (a Viking leader who also spent time in Constantinople as part of the Varangian Guard for the Byzantine Emperor) landed in 1066. Their sagas and mythology underpin this story and form one of the elements that provide ‘colour’ and ‘scale’ to ‘Fenric’.
A question of versions
For me, the best version of ‘Curse of Fenric’ isn’t the one that was transmitted in 1989. It isn’t even the ‘Special Edition’ DVD which is definitely a lot better – for example it re-instates much of the missing, useful material that would have helped the broadcast version. No, the best version to my mind is Ian Briggs’s Target novelisation. It is a rich brew of myths and stories that give the contest between Fenric and the Doctor a real sense of scale and in the process explains some of the gaps or areas that I failed to grasp in the original story. In the process it blends Norse mythology, ‘Tales of One Thousand and One Nights’, the story of Enigma and Bletchley Park, the origins of ‘Dracula’ and well ‘Doctor Who’.
The main content of the novelisation matches the TV story with a few exceptions (more later), but in between we get extracts from the wider story from various sources. We get the tale (with some terrible puns!) of El-Dok’tar the traveller playing ‘the game of traps’ with the evil Jinnee Aboo-Fenran – weakening him in a contest that lasts 40 days and finally trapping him in a bottle, the saga of Hemming the Viking pirate who left his wife in Norway for a copper haired maiden in Northumbria – in the process bringing the dark curse of the flask on his men, dying one by one, before he buries it with his fallen comrades on sacred ground and a letter from Bram Stoker to his wife from Whitby, whilst on a tour of Yorkshire with actor Henry Irving, concerning the murder of a young woman who strayed from the path of virtue at Maidens Bay and was found drained of all blood, the inspiration for a different story.
The Target novelisations are often better than the televised stories at this point in the show’s history. There are a number of reasons behind this – firstly these young writers were just bursting with ideas – sometimes too many for a 3 or 4 part story. This is exacerbated by an inexperienced but very bright script editor, who loves his writers and backs them – so we don’t really get the ruthlessness to cut plot strands that are interesting, but not required to service the narrative. In fairness, I really like a lot of these scenes and plot elements and would miss them if they weren’t there. However this leads to episodes overrunning and important material being lost. For example in the case of ‘Ghost Light’ they forget to explain a crucial part of the plot – failing to consider that ‘Control’ is a word that has lots of different usages and connotations. Some of the stories crammed into 3 or 4 episodes have enough plot strands for a series – Fenric falls into this category. I will talk about this in the main review – but ‘Fenric’ has really helped me to understand how much ‘detail’ is important to me in the stories that I love, that the modern approach of stripping out anything that is deemed unnecessary to driving the plot forward really isn’t for me.
The other factor is budget and the ability or will of the BBC to deliver a show that matches the imagination of the scripting team. This last factor becomes really important at this point in time. TV screens are starting to become larger, most households had a VHS recorder at this point – so the show could no longer get away with low budget production values. The location work on something like ‘Battlefield’, looks so poor at times that it looks like a 1980’s corporate training video that Peter Purves might have narrated. And that last point is a shame – it is as if the show just ran out of runway and couldn’t really continue in that form without an injection of money and well, a bit of care form the powers that be. They didn’t care, didn’t support the production team and so whilst a vibrant coda to the classic series, it sometimes feels desperately cheap. In the end, the show wasn’t cancelled, it just wasn’t being made any more, with the excuse that they were looking at using an independent production house, which might have seemed an obvious solution, had the BBC themselves not worked so hard to damage the reputation of the show in its final years.
The Wolves of Fenric
‘Curse of Fenric’ has an interesting structure, in some ways it mirrors ‘The Five Doctors’. Using a trick that Terrance Dicks employed to get himself out of trouble when he had far too many plot element and characters to juggle and needed a framework to hang these off. Here, rather than being foisted on the writer it was the founding central image, so this structure is by design. A framework like the ‘gamesmaster’ playing a game and extracting players across time is probably one of the few ways that so many elements could stand any chance of working without some serious pruning or a much longer runtime. In this case, the game between Fenric and the Doctor, brings together seemingly un-related, disparate ‘chess-pieces’ together in Northumbria (or is it North Yorkshire?) at a designated point in 1943. In a similar plot device to the time scoop in the Dicks script, in Fenric we have the time-storm plucking Ace from Perivale and delivering her to Ice World into the path of the Doctor and bringing ‘The Ancient One’ back from the future poisoned, ravaged Earth to the Earth’s past, to Romania to follow the Viking merchant and the flask to Northumbria.
We also have those touched by the ‘Curse of Fenric’ through their bloodline – the ‘Wolves’ (Fenrir or Fenris is the great wolf of Viking mythology, chained by the other gods) the Russian commandoes lead by Sorin – a descendant on his mother’s side from the Vikings, Judson and Millington – with their local family connections, and Ace’s grandmother and mother. Out in the waters of Maidens Bay lie the remains of the Viking longship and the Viking crew and their descendants converted into Haemavores by Ingiger (another Viking name according to Ian Briggs) – the Ancient One. He (or possibly she) has waited for centuries to free Fenric so that he can return to the future. Buried under the church by Hemming the Viking is the flask containing Fenric – protected from release by the Haemavores by virtue of being buried on ‘sacred ground’. So the ground where the Vikings are buried with the flask becomes the site of the contest between The Doctor and Fenric and the ‘Wolves’ the pieces on the chessboard.
Does this all work? Well sort of, and maybe not quite. Add in Nurse Crane, Jean and Phyllis, Reverend Wainwright , Miss Hardaker, the marines and Russian special forces and the signals ‘girls’, that is an awful lot of characters – but strangely none of them feel especially undercooked for me. Through this plot structure we learn small snippets of the personal stories of many of characters – their beliefs and lives and their relationships with the other characters. We are intended to learn more about them, as the novelisation attests. My opinion on this aspect of the story may be clouded by the fact that I only ever watch the special edition of the story with extra material or that I’ve read the novelisation, but I always feel that I know the characters in this story.
Good and bad at games – Judson and Millington
The story of Doctor Judson and Commander Millington was intended to be one of two public schoolchildren, their lives fatally entwined together. They are intended to be two gay characters, whose lives have been entwined since childhood at public school. The TV story hints at this, but the novelisation covers this more fully – Judson’s ‘accident’ was during a rugby match at school, resulting in Millington breaking Judson’s spine in the process.
‘The cold mud of the rugby pitch. The shouts and calls of adolescent young men as they ran and chased. The expression Millington saw on Judson’s face as Judson smiled across to one to the other players, a tall blond boy with clear blue eyes and a strong body. The sharp, stabbing jealousy that surged through Millington. The black anger that filled him as he ran towards Millington’
From that moment Judson has control over Millington.
‘Judson looked up from the hospital bed, and Millington saw the answer in Judson’s black eyes . ‘You’re mine now!’ said the eyes. Mine forever.
You don’t need to know this to understand the characters though, it is enough to know that Millington has a guilty secret with regard to Judson. According to Ian Briggs, Judson’s disability was a metaphor for Alan Turing’s treatment as a gay man. Judson though is much more unpleasant, sly character than Turing – even before his possession by Fenric he is pretty unlikeable – about 8 on the Stahlman scale. Dinsdale Landon is really very good – firstly as the snappy academic, railing against ‘Nanny’ and later as Fenric – taking pleasure in his revenge in a very human way.
Stepping back, I find it interesting that the show is referencing Turing so early – this is 1989, before his story was quite so widely known. Although in 1986 Derek Jacobi played Turing at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in ‘Breaking the Code’ – this was adapted for TV, but 7 years after ‘Fenric’. In some ways Turing is a brilliant figure for the show to explore – his story resonates with many of the fanbase at this point in time, gay or not – he is white, clever, slightly repressed and one of the bullied. His story is explored, to some extent, in the Eighth Doctor novel ‘The Turing Test’, but would have made an interesting TV historical, I’d loved to have seen Russell write about him in an alternative version of the revived show, a more adult one with more time for a nuanced story.
Millington on the other hand has simply lost his mind – he has descended into a world where Viking legend and battles amongst the Gods are as real to him as the actual war he should be fighting. Again he is a really unpleasant character – his story ‘We could hear men screaming behind the bulkheads for nearly an hour, and then the screaming stopped.’ as a fire swept through a naval ship he was serving on is really chilling. His plan to drop chemical weapons on German cities or detonate them inside the Kremlin is just insane. By the end of the story he really doesn’t care who is dying – British or Russian it really doesn’t matter. In the novelisation Millington has been obsessed with Viking legends since childhood – writing a school essay on the ‘The Fall of the Gods’ – wolf-time, his teacher nothing that ‘it is almost as though young Millington really believes that these myths will come true one day’. It is an odd, distracted performance by Alfred Lynch, one that somehow works.
Red Army Blues – Sorin’s story
I will talk about Sorin a little more later, when I will look at faith and the Russian involvement in this story. However Sorin really is the hero of this story – he is the military leader who is flexible enough in his thinking to understand what is going on fairly early on (echoes of another young Colonel many years earlier). Given the end of the cold war, it is an interesting time to be doing this. Sorin rescues Ace and becomes the love interest in the story – she is clearly besotted with him. Given that he is the hero of the story, his ending – possessed by Fenric – is really rather sad. There is a coda to this in the novelisation, a future Ace, having left the Doctor, meets him again in the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris 1887. She tells him she is in love with a young Count from St Petersburg – Count Sorin – the image of his great-grandson.
The man who fell to Earth – Ingiger’s story
DOCTOR: Thousands of years in the future, the Earth lies dying, the surface just a chemical slime.Half a million years of industrial progress.
HAEMOVORE: I am the last. The last living creature on Earth. I watched my world dying with chemicals and I could do nothing. My world is dead.
The Ancient One – Ingiger – was transported by Fenric to 9th century Romania. He followed the flask along the spice routes to Scandinavia, where it was stolen by Viking raiders. In the book this is rather artfully told, the Doctor trapping the evil genie (Fenric) in a flask in a story from 1001 Nights, the Viking Saga of the merchant buying the flask in Constantinople and Hemming and his Vikings stealing it and amongst a spate of deaths bringing it to Northumbria. In the TV version we get:
DOCTOR: You’re very patient. Carried back thousands of years in a time storm to ninth century Transylvania and waiting till now.
HAEMOVORE: Without the flask I was trapped
DOCTOR Oh yes the flask I trapped him like an evil genie
HAEMOVORE Only he can return me to the future
DOCTOR: And so like a faithful servant you follow the flask
HAEMOVORE: A merchant bought it from Constantinople I followed him through Europe. I followed the Viking pirates who stole it and I followed it here.
DOCTOR: Another of Fenric’s games. He carries you back in a time storm to destroy the Earth’s water with chemicals, to destroy your future. Think on it. Your Earth, your world, dying of a chemical slime. This act will be the beginning of your end.
The Ancient One becomes the source of the Dracula legend – transported by Fenric from an alternative future timeline of a diseased, polluted, dying world. Apparently Ian Briggs retrospectively realised that this part was inspired by ‘The Man who fell to Earth’, the alien who’s world is dying and has possibly watched his wife and child starve in a drought. The Ancient One is beautifully realised, genuinely unsettling and one of a series of rather terrific monster sculpts (see ‘The Destroyer’) by Sue Moore and Steve Mansfield. It is an imaginative take on the vampire myth, Ingiger is another Viking name and the Ancient One is one of the ‘Wolves of Fenric’ linked to the original Viking crew as much as Sorin or Ace.
Making the Ancient One look quite so horrific – a personification of the dark evil and a bringer of death to the Vikings and then making him a tragic figure and offering redemption at the end through his sacrifice to destroy his future and Judson/Fenric is an interesting take and shows again the attempts to expand the storytelling in show. In this vein the use of a ‘story’ told through words rather than images is a wonderfully cheap way of giving the story an epic mythology that the show cannot afford – a technique that the show has employed for years – in that respect it is similar to the writing of Robert Holmes, but it is of course a technique that goes much further back than that.
Over the Rainbow – Ace’s Story
In the introduction I largely said what I wanted to about Ace’s story arc across the season – actually it stretches back to the end of season 24, when she is transported and stranded like Dorothy a long way from Kansas/Perivale – the Wicked Witch of the West is even referenced in this story. Part of Ace’s story is her growing up, becoming a young woman, her developing sexuality, but also confronting her past – her relationship with her mother – the baby of Kathleen Dudman here. It also clears the air between her and the Doctor – he causes her to lose faith in him, but by the end he convinces her of why he had to say those things to her and that he would have given anything to avoid hurting her. That should really have been an end to that particular story strand.
Fenric has selected her as a suitable companion for the Doctor (much as Missy did with Clara years later) and has brought them together to deliver the Doctor to this point. Ace though is far from grown up, it is her ‘teenage’ cockiness and desire to get one up on Judson and Fenric that gives away the solution to the Doctors enemy not once, but twice – the Viking inscription as computer program and something that I’ve never understood – the chess move in which pawns of opposite colours join forces. At the end of the piece she is somewhat reconciled with her Mother and it feels like she is ready to move on. This aspect feels like an early attempt at what is now known as ‘Young Adult’ fiction. It does just about hold together, I rather like that the fact that she is responsible for her own mother ending up in London.
Out of the black fog – Horror in Fenric
‘Dark legends . In the story of Dracula, this is where he came ashore.’
‘No, not vampires, haemovores. They are what Homo sapiens evolve into thousands of years in the future. Creatures with an insatiable hunger for blood.‘
At its core ‘Curse of Fenric’ is a horror story. Monsters rising from the waters amongst a black fog (at least in Ian Brigg’s imagination the BBC don’t quite stretch to that), soldiers, priests and old women drained of their blood by vampires, young women corrupted and enticed into wicked ways, paying the price and becoming the undead. Faith and religion used to ward off evil – vampires killed with stakes through their black hearts.
In horror terms, we have a vampire film mixed with something like ‘The Fog’. Although the reference to the ‘The Fog’ is filtered via ‘Doctor Who’s’ own back catalogue of monsters rising from the water – the likes of ‘The Sea Devils’, ‘Fury from the Deep’ and ‘Full Circle’. What is it about that image of monsters rising from the sea? It is an image that has worked across generations, so there must something in it? Is it the ‘unknown’ aspect of the sea? An unconscious memory of our ancestry? A metaphor for birth? Or a combination of these?
Almost every generation of Who viewers/fans has their own ‘moment of horror’ that they remember from their childhood, something that enthralled, excited and scared them. For some, the 30 or 40-somethings reading this, ‘Curse of Fenric’ will be exactly that. Without this element of the horrific and scary, I think the show misses something important that, although maybe this wasn’t part of Sydney Newman’s original conception, has been in place since Barbara wandered down some deserted metal corridors on Skaro to be menaced by a sucker on a stick. It isn’t enough just to have adventures in space and time for all the family – we also need horror stories for children, a touch of the dark stuff.
In ‘Fenric’, the Haemavores also fit rather well into ‘Doctor Who’s’ usual MO of a rational, scientific explanation (not matter how far-fetched) for almost everything that might appear supernatural. From robotic figures of Frankenstein and Dracula in ‘The Chase’, via ‘living’ Mummies – just service robots, a representation of the Devil that is just the last member of an advanced alien species or a living dismembered hand that is the remains of a silicon-based lifeform – there are many more. At one stage the Haemavores were explicitly going to be called vampires. As I mentioned in previous parts of this review – the choice of location was inspired by the literary horror of ‘Dracula’ landing at Whitby. However, JNT had been around long enough (nearly 10 years by this point) – long enough to remember the use of vampires in his first season in charge in ‘State of Decay’. So instead they become Haemovores – creatures from a future Earth – mankind corrupted and mutated by chemical pollution. Horror driven by evolution gone wrong and environmental degradation on a vast scale. Which is much more interesting and also fits with the dystopian future of a polluted Earth – massively over-populated, gutted by corporations, then left behind as mankind spreads out amongst the stars. The stark future from the Barry Letts/Terrance Dicks era of the show. The Haemavores also get to be vampires though – even down to the use of wooden stakes by Sorin’s men to kill them on the church roof – a case of the show having its cake and eating it again.
And then we come to Fenric – a supernatural force – ‘evil from the dawn of time’…
‘There’s evil here. Can’t you feel it cold against your skin.?’
‘The dawn of time. The beginning of all beginnings. Two forces only, good and evil. Then chaos. Time is born, matter, space. The universe cries out like a newborn. The forces shatter as the universe explodes outwards. Only echoes remain, and yet somehow, somehow the evil force survives. An intelligence. Pure evil!’
‘Evil has no name. Trapped inside a flask like a genie in a bottle.’
‘For seventeen centuries I was trapped in the shadow dimensions because of him. He pulled bones from the desert sands and carved them into chess pieces. He challenged me to solve his puzzle. I failed. Now I shall see him kneel before me before I let him die.’
Fenric is another evil nemesis/God-like figure to add to the likes of the Toymaker, Great Intelligence, Azaal, Omega, Sutekh or the Black Guardian. He is the late 80’s generation’s version of those figures from the past. Like the Toymaker, the Doctor has had an unseen past encounter with Fenric (covered in the novelization through the Tale of Aboo Fenran and El Dok’Tar), trapped by the Doctor in the ‘shadow dimensions’, who now wants revenge. I should say that I have no real problem with ‘dark evil’ beings with god-like powers in the show (only boring, benevolent ones making pronouncements in robes), I know that others do, but for me so long as it is used sparingly and in an interesting way, I am fine with it. It is a tradition across most cultures – the Satan/demon/trickster/evil god figure – from Christian/Eastern/Egyptian mythologies through to Norse sagas. Although, I much prefer the usage of these types of images to be ultimately underpinned by the scientific/rational ideas rather than the supernatural or religious – so Omega is a stellar engineer trapped in the black hole he created after he detonated a star and Sutekh a second-son consumed by hatred and jealousy of his brother who develops his own mental powers to a level where he almost (but not quite) becomes a god. The show gets to have its cake and eat it – wear the supernatural trappings of the horror genre and of mythology, but within the framework of a ‘rational’ or ‘explicable’ universe, not matter how mad the explanations are – they are explicable – not just ‘the devil’ or ‘anti-christ’.
That isn’t quite the case with Fenric – like ‘The Beast’ in ‘Impossible Planet’ – it is a force from the beginning of the universe, we are never quite told what. In some ways, Fenric isn’t really an interesting figure in his own right (although nicely played by Dinsdale Landen and Tomek Bork) – more a high concept framework to hang a load of mythology on – the image of the Doctor playing chess with death from Bergman’s ‘The Seventh Seal’, the Arabian mythology of the evil genie trapped in the bottle, the Viking myths of Fenris the wolf and Loki and the middle European concept of vampirism via the story of Dracula. Ian Briggs original inspiration was the chess match, the Doctor playing his old nemesis in the ruins of Coventry during the blitz, so Fenric was a core part of the original story conception. Although he possesses Judson and Sorin to the extent that they are lost – their self never to return, Fenric knows them, has access to their thoughts and how they feel. With Sorin he plays on the knowledge that Ace has feelings for him, enticing her into giving away the secret of how to win the game (although one that doesn’t actually make any sense!). With Judson he knows the resentment he feels towards Nurse Crane – taking delight in her death. His spite is personal.
So, what does Fenric add to the mythology of the show? Well probably no more or less than a figure like Sutekh, he is a one-off character – only returning in a BF story arc. Within the Cartmel era though and within this story, Fenric pulls together the strands of the story. He links the stories of Ace, Sorin, Judson, Millington, the Vikings and the Ancient One and brings them together at this place and point in time. We get possession (Judson, Sorin) and a spiteful vindictive cruelty – principally to Ace and Nurse Crane, although he is unpleasant even to the Ancient One and other Haemavores (‘I’d hoped for something a bit more Aryan’). Outside of this story he gives a reason (not a great one it has to be said) for Dorothy being carried over the rainbow from Kansas (or at least Perivale) to Iceworld and dumped in the Doctor’s world. The chess match also links, in some un-specified way, to Lady Peinforte and her squire time travelling in ‘Silver Nemesis’.
This storytelling across 3 seasons in some way pre-figures Steven Moffat’s approach to the show and is something that we hadn’t really seen before, possibly because there are only a few occasions (Dicks, Holmes and Saward) where we actually have the same script editor for any number of years, but also because ‘Doctor Who’ tended to be a more self-contained series of stories, every episode one a new jumping on point. Delivering workable scripts for production was problematic enough without worrying about complex multi-season story arcs. Also, these arcs only really work for the dedicated viewers or fans and can start to alienate more casual viewers if they aren’t done well or light touch enough. Personally, I really don’t really need them, I like a neat call-back, but these arcs are never that satisfying and often have the air that they have been cobbled together on the fly, even with a single authorial figure such as RTD or Steven Moffat – I think mostly because they are.
So, within this era, Fenric is a significant figure, rather like the Black Guardian from season 16-20, an influence across seasons that rarely actually appears. In comparison though, the sparing use of Fenric, increases the effectiveness I think and preserves the mystery. Not having him appear with a stuffed Raven on his head probably helps as well..
And the greatest of these is love – Faith, Religion, Love and War
Religion and faith are other key themes in this story. These themes manifest themselves mostly through the crisis of faith of the Reverend Wainwright, but also through the Old Testament morality of Miss Hardaker.
Wainwright is an interesting character. He is supposed to be younger than the casting of Nicholas Parsons would indicate. A young man, who has taken over the Parish early due to the death of his father. This is referenced in the form of his use of the passage from Corinthians concerning becoming a man and on the subject of love:
‘When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child. When I became a man, I put away childish things. Now abideth faith, hope, love. These three. And the greatest of these is. And the greatest of these is …’
If one part of this is lost in the casting (I think Nicholas Parsons is rather good though), the main point still stands. Wainwright is losing faith that there is love in the world. He is wracked with doubt, the war testing his faith, guilt at the deaths of German civilians in the British bombing campaigns in Germany. His faith tested at the horror he sees in the world – not uncommon I suspect amongst many at the time, but his views on the bombing of German cities would I suspect have not found much support on an island where the blitz had destroyed large swathes of British cities (and those elsewhere in Europe) and taken thousands of lives. Nobody that I have spoken to who lived through those times and lost their homes and loved ones, had much in the way of sympathy. For a different view on that though, the following article on Operation Gomorrah – the bombing of Hamburg. The testimony of one of the bomber crew reminded me of a key point in ‘Day of the Doctor’ – the thought of innocent children losing their lives
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-43546839
The madness unleashed during a time of war is another key, recurring theme of the story – from the references to the British bombing campaign, through to the use of chemical weapons and again was a core part of the central image that Ian Briggs had at its conception. Arthur Harris’s views are not a million miles from Millington’s in this story and he is surely an influence on the character. Although Ian Briggs was writing this and I was watching it from a very safe distance in 1989, even a few years earlier I am not sure he could have written this without a lot of criticism from a generation who lived through the war. Without living through it, I am not sure I am qualified to have a view, I have simply not had to deal with the horrors of war first hand in my lifetime – long may that continue. Ultimately, loss of faith is Wainwright’s downfall. When Jean and Phyliss return as Haemavores, he cannot summon up enough belief to repel them. They exploit what they have become – black-hearted, innocence(?) corrupted – to weaken his resolve and he dies literally in a crisis of faith.
Miss Hardaker is on the face of it, a representative of old religion. Fierce (Janet Henfrey always was), offering threats of eternal damnation to Jean and Phyllis if they stray from the path of virtue. However, the intention was that this should have arisen from her own experience. Not just the superstition (actually true in this case) of the fate that awaited girls who strayed at ‘Maidens Point’. She is actually right – although I’m not sure if that was the point that Ian Brigg’s intentionally wanted to make! In the novelisation, she also strayed from the ‘path of virtue’ many years ago and had a child out of marriage. Her religion and harshness with Jean and Phyllis are born out of that. Her faith though isn’t enough to save her, maybe she never really believed all of that fire and damnation stuff either?
I’ll look at Sorin’s faith in the Russian revolution separately, but in a similar vein we have the Doctor’s faith in his companions (he mutters their names when using his faith to create a psychic barrier against the Haemavores) and Ace’s faith in the Doctor. Different variations on faith as a concept – but interesting none the less. Ace’s faith in the Doctor especially mirroring our own faith as fans that he is a force for good and an influence on our own lives and morality.
‘I believe in the Revolution’
I recently reviewed ‘The Quatermass Experiment from 1953, which along with its sequels was inspired by the then new Cold War and fear of the bomb. ‘Fenric’ was written in 1989, at the other end of the Cold War – a point in history when the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc were falling apart. As ‘Curse of Fenric’ aired in November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. Poland went first – in June that year, Solidarity won in the first elections, then Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and then finally Romania. It was a momentous year across Europe, the effects spreading as far as China. The old order of the first 20 years of my life ripped up in less than 12 months.
So, given the timing (it was filmed in April 1989 – so at the start of the second ‘Year of Revolutions’ or ‘Autumn of Nations’), the treatment of the Red Army commandoes in this story – Sorin is effectively the hero of the story and love interest of Ace, is interesting. The use of faith, in any flavour to repel the Haemavores opens this up beyond just religious belief and Sorin shows his absolute faith in the Russian Revolution – an equivalence to religion or the Doctor’s faith in his companions or Ace’s in the Doctor. It is something that is not portrayed often these days, but people did believe passionately in communism as a force for good in the west in the days prior to Hungary and the Prague uprising, some still do despite everything that happened. It is easy to imagine this being intensified in a bitter war where the Soviet Union is fighting for its existence. Like Wainwright’s loss of faith in God, most communists in the west, had their faith in communism challenged by subsequent events – Orwell and Spain for example, many intellectuals after Hungary and Prague and revelations about the truth behind Stalin’s regime. To have Soviet heroes in a children’s programme at this time is an interesting choice and works surprisingly well I think. They are portrayed rather well, in particular Russian speaking Polish actor Tomek Bork, who does a good job as Sorin. Ace is obviously very attracted to him and in the novelisation she meets his bourgeois relative Count Sorin in 19th century Paris – so it clearly isn’t just the revolution she’s interested in…
Stepping back though, the Soviet involvement in this is a little left-field, it is interesting because of that, but like quite a few things in Fenric, it doesn’t actually make much sense. Aid to Russia from Britain and its allies (principally Canada) via the Arctic convoys (my Grandad served on those for a while) through Archangel was important, especially early in 1941 and 1942, for example in the defence of Moscow. So, it is difficult to see them risking that to launch an armed raid on the coast of Britain. Given the point in history that this was written, it is part of a general re-appraisal of the Soviet role in the war? One other facet omitted from the TV serial, but re-instated in the novelization is the role of Nurse Crane. At the start of the novel, a figure is seen on the cliff-tops at Maiden Point with a light signalling to a Russian submarine off the coast. This is later revealed to have been Nurse Crane, a soviet agent spying on Judson and reporting back to her Moscow handler. So in amongst the war, religion, love and death, we also have a spy story!
Warning Dangerous Undercurrents
Message from Captain Subtext: Warning, very subtle subtext alert!
Another key theme is ‘coming of age’, and loss of innocence. We have the dangers of this represented by Jean and Phyllis and to some degree Ace. We also have an acknowledgement that Ace is growing up, she is no longer just interested in blowing things up. Throughout this season (Battlefield aside), she comes to terms with the problems of her teenage years – the house at Gabriel Chase, says goodbye to her old gang in Perivale and in this story also reconciles herself, to some degree with her mother.
This is an aspect of ‘Fenric’ that whilst something new for the programme is also somewhat clumsily portrayed. There certainly are dangerous undercurrents at Maidens Point and oh my do we need warning. I am tempted to give the writers credit for trying to expand the vocabulary of the programme, but this leads to some really cringeworthy scenes. Ace’s ‘seduction’ scene is rightly held up as the nadir of this and watching it again, it is quite terrible – an effect not dissimilar to a sex scene suddenly appearing from nowhere when watching a film or TV programme with your parents. The vampire girls likewise. Oh dear, even had I been cooped up with a load of male soldiers in a submarine from Murmansk to Northumbria, I think I’d just about manage to resist their ‘seductive charms’.
Later on, we have Haemavores fondling Ace’s breasts and a flash of thigh above her suspenders. What would Bill Hartnell have said – ‘young Lady you deserve a jolly good smacked bottom for showing your bloomers like that!’. Captain Subtext (‘Coupling’ reference if you haven’t seen it) is none to subtly engaged again at the end of the story as Ace plunges into the waters of ‘Maidens Bay’ a girl and emerges as a woman. Subtle it isn’t. Look it might be clumsy and a bit embarrassing, but I’m happy enough to cut it some slack for the freshness of it and for attempting to move the show on a bit. I don’t think I would want the show to go much further in this direction, but it does signal a change that bridges a gap between 1960’s/70’s Who and the new series This may be hypocritical as I might not have been so forgiving in other stories that I like less, but I wouldn’t be a fan without a touch of hypocrisy.
Ace’s treatment across this season is interesting and I will return to it in the next reviews. However, one thing that I hadn’t really thought about before is despite not always being written or portrayed especially well, she is in one respect quite an accurate portrayal of a teenager, in that she is massively inconsistent – a stroppy hormonal teenager in ‘Battlefield’, all over the place emotionally in ‘Fenric’, angry, weepy, lustful, over-estimating her own abilities. We haven’t really had this in the show before this point – the nearest strangely is probably Adric – who again is a fair (if not always well performed or written) representation of a type of teenage boy – a sometimes stroppy, lazy, arrogant, know-all swot. I had just turned 20 when I first saw ‘Fenric’ and so was much closer to being a teenager and closer to Ace in age (how old is she supposed to be? 16 in Dragonfire? Sophie is actually 6 years older than me). I can’t say that I ever saw Ace as being particularly realistic then – so maybe this is me just getting old and forgetting what it is like?
Final thoughts
I have managed to write an awful lot about this story. So, it is fair to say that ‘Fenric’ isn’t short on ideas or themes or character work or horror, if it is guilty of anything, it is over ambition, trying to do too much and not knowing when to cut even good stuff. There are however, worse faults to have. I haven’t even spoken about Sylvester’s Doctor, but I will talk more about that in one of the next reviews, but just to quickly say I think by this point he is really rather good – a blend of the physical comedy, sleight of hand, likeable empathy and darker moments. After the children’s entertainer of season 24 and before ‘Time’s Champion’ of the ‘New Adventures’ – two excesses, neither of which I like that much in isolation. He is still rather limited as an actor, but for the most part he works well this season. The rather lovely relationship between Sylvester and Sophie also shows on screen in their lighter moments. If you ignore the cringeworthy parts – which most of these stories, including this one have, then there is an awful lot to enjoy here. ‘Curse of Fenric’ is pretty much my favourite of the era, although the next story I’m going to look at pushes it close.
A Journal of Impossible Things 