Ghost Light

[mmcirvin]

Through the magic of DVD we just saw Ghost Light, a peculiar serial in the last (1989) season of Doctor Who's original run on the BBC, when Sylvester McCoy was playing the Doctor. Though it wasn't the last aired, it was apparently the last original-series story produced, when the series was probably already doomed, its ratings were down, and its makers may have thought they had nothing to lose with a story that was so relentlessly quirky and complex.

I hadn't seen it before, but I think it might actually surpass or at least rival the Logopolis/Castrovalva arc¹ (in which Tom Baker regenerated into Peter Davison) as my favorite story from the original series; it embodies the kind of densely whimsical science-fantasy writing that I've always wanted the show to have, but that it only occasionally achieves. Mark Platt's script for Ghost Light is to evolutionary biology what Christopher Bidmead's Logopolis was to statistical mechanics and cosmology: outrageously inaccurate if considered as a hard-SF treatment of the subject, but terrific as a sort of fantastical evocation of scientific themes. Ghost Light might have been a little more comprehensible as a four-episode serial instead of three, and there's some stuff in it that is just not explained on screen; but to me it never got as muddled as, say, The Curse of Fenric, which really needed to jettison a couple of subplots just to make a vague kind of sense.

I'd just been reading some arguments over the extent to which the supposed "essentialism" of pre-Darwinian biology—the notion of beings falling into types defined by some immutable essence or ideal form, with variation as mere noise—really existed or was invented later by triumphalist historians of science. I don't know if biologists were essentialists before Darwin, but the mad alien taxonomist in Ghost Light clearly is one, and the story veers into a nice exploration of the pitfalls of the idea. (Bob Brodman says something similar on this page of spoileriffic reviews.)

¹Strangely, current fan consensus on Logopolis seems to be that fan consensus rates it too highly. Nobody likes it—it's too overrated.

Comments

[secretive-bus.livejournal.com]

I hate Ghost Light. With a passion. It's so far up itself that it hurts to watch it. The dialogue is never more than pretentious and most of the acting is subpar, particularly the two leads.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Given our other tastes, I kind of figured we'd disagree about this one. The style of the dialogue is just of a type that I go for, as unnaturalistic as it may be.

[secretive-bus.livejournal.com]

I don't always mind unnaturalistic dialogue - mainly in literature, it must be said. But by pretentious I mean the constant referring to of various "themes", like "Is this a metamorphosis?" chucked in there for little reason, and most of the Doctor's dialogue, along with Ace's. It's like a teenaged writer desperately trying to show off how clever he is by throwing as much as he can at the script. And as a teenaged writer who often tries to appear clever, it strikes me as bloody irritating. :-p

[aderack.livejournal.com]

Yeah, this is probably my favorite serial; it's either this or Tomb of the Cybermen. As you say, this is the kind of thing that I wish the original series did more. The mystery in particular is hinted at in most of the run, though only occasionally surfaces.

The acting is about as strong as it gets, here (especially the guest cast). The characters are about as evolved and interesting as they come, in the original series. The atmosphere is sort of the ideal that I think of when Doctor Who comes to mind. And then the pace and plotting -- I actually like it in three episodes. It's one of the only serials that I can pick out that goes off in its own direction and has the confidence to assume that I'll be able to follow it on my own. I like that; not having my hand held. And it's not like it's confusing on a basic level. If I miss out a detail here or there, it doesn't matter too much. Heck, it probably even helps the tone the story's trying to set.

You probably know that this story was originally to be Lungbarrow. Cartmel thought that was just a little too weird to pounce on the audience, though, so the story's focus was shifted to Ace instead of the Doctor.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Tomb of the Cybermen is great fun and about as scary as the Cybermen ever got; it's definitely one of the stories that stands up best to repeat viewing. Though the portrayal of the one black guy as a hulking simpleton (albeit an ultimately heroic one) is kind of jarring, and part of the fun is laughing at the rocket pilot's fakey American accent.

The thing I find fascinating about Tomb, though, is the way the Doctor behaves: even more than usual, he keeps driving everyone around him straight into trouble apparently for no reason other than to satisfy his own curiosity. It's as if he can't help himself. "To open that door and let out all the scary Cybermen, which you definitely shouldn't do, flip that lever and that lever and that one and then push this large red candy-like button here. ...But if I were you, I wouldn't do it! Here, let me give you a hand!"

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...I remember what else I was going to say: Though I like this kind of without-a-net, no-handholding writing, it probably isn't conducive to their remit of making a scary-fun show for family viewing; it's candy for a particular rarefied taste.

So though I like Ghost Light, I have a feeling it would be a disaster as an episode of the new series. The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances did have a lot of stuff going on, but it took pains to let the viewers in by the end.

On the other hand, as some of those reviews on Outpost Gallifrey mentioned, at least Ghost Light wasn't going on about series continuity from ten seasons back, or machinations on Gallifrey. It's part of Ace's season-long character arc, but I think it would stand up pretty well on its own even if all you knew of Doctor Who was the basic premise. Which was probably deliberate on Platt's part if it started out as Lungbarrow, which is about as inside as you could get.