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