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Ghost Light (Doctor Who)

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153[1] – Ghost Light
Doctor Who serial
File:Ghost Light (Doctor Who).jpg
The Doctor muses about the events of "Ghost Light."
Cast
Guest
Production
Directed byAlan Wareing
Written byMarc Platt
Script editorAndrew Cartmel
Produced byJohn Nathan-Turner
Executive producer(s)None
Music byMark Ayres
Production code7Q
SeriesSeason 26
Running time3 episodes, 25 minutes each
First broadcast4 October–18 October 1989
Chronology
← Preceded by
Battlefield 		Followed by →
The Curse of Fenric
List of episodes (1963–1989)

Ghost Light is the second serial of the 26th season in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which was first broadcast in three weekly parts from 4 October to 18 October 1989.

Plot

In 1883 the mansion house of Gabriel Chase in Perivale near London is under the control of the mysterious Josiah Samuel Smith, who has subjugated the occupants via some form of brainwashing. It is a most mysterious place, where the serving women brandish guns and the butler is a Neanderthal named Nimrod. Other occupants include Gwendoline, the daughter of the original owners of the house who have now disappeared; the calculating night housekeeper Mrs Pritchard; the crazed explorer Redvers Fenn-Cooper; and the Reverend Ernest Matthews, opponent of the theory of evolution which Smith has done much to spread. For his pains Matthews is transformed by Smith into an ape and placed in a display case.

The TARDIS arrives at Gabriel Chase. It turns out that Ace had visited the house in 1983 and had felt an evil presence, and the Seventh Doctor‘s curiosity drives him to seek the answers. Something is also alive and evolving in the cellar beneath the house and when Ace investigates she finds two animated and dangerous husks. The cellar is in fact a vast stone spaceship with something trapped inside. The Doctor, meanwhile, works his way through the stuffed animals in Gabriel Chase and eventually finds a human in suspended animation, an Inspector Mackenzie, who came to the house two years earlier in search of the owners. The Doctor revives him and together they seek to unlock the mysteries of Gabriel Chase. He also encounters the evolving creature from the cellar, known as Control, which has now taken on human form. The Doctor helps it release the trapped creature from the cellar, a being known as Light who takes the form of an angel.

Thousands of years in the past, an alien spaceship came to Earth to catalogue all life on the planet. After completing its task and collecting some samples, which included the Neanderthal, the leader Light went into slumber. By 1881 the ship had returned to Earth. While Control remained imprisoned on the ship to serve as the "control" subject of the scientific investigation, events transpired such that Smith, the "survey agent", mutinied against Light, keeping him in hibernation on the ship. Smith began evolving into the era's dominant life-form—a Victorian gentleman—and also took over the house. By 1883, Smith, having "evolved" into forms approximating a human and casting off his old husks as an insect would, managed to lure and capture the explorer Fenn-Cooper within his den. Utilizing Fenn-Cooper's association with Queen Victoria, he plans to get close to her so that he can assassinate her and subsequently take control of the British Empire.

Light is displeased by all the change that has occurred on the planet while he was asleep. While Light tries to make sense of all the change, Smith tries to keep his plan intact, but events are moving beyond his control. Light turns Gwendoline and her missing mother, revealed to be Mrs Pritchard, to stone in a bid to stop the speed of evolution; while Inspector Mackenzie meets a sticky end and is turned into a primordial soup to serve at dinner. As Control tries to "evolve" into a Lady, and Ace tries to come to grips with her feelings about the house, the Doctor himself tries to keep the upper hand in all the events that have been set in motion. The Doctor finally convinces Light of the futility of opposing evolution, which causes him to overload and dissipate into the surrounding house. It was this presence that Ace sensed and which caused her to burn the house in 1983. Also, Control's complete evolution into a Lady derails Smith's plan as Fenn-Cooper, having freed himself from Smith's brainwashing, chooses to side with her instead of him. In the end, with Smith now the new Control creature imprisoned on the ship, Control, Fenn-Cooper and Nimrod set off in the alien ship to explore the universe.

Production

Template:Doctor Who episode head

Pre-production

Working titles for this story included The Bestiary and Life-Cycle.[2] As revealed in the production notes for the DVD release, the story was renamed Das Haus der tausend Schrecken (The House of a Thousand Frights/Horrors) upon translation into German.

The story evolved out of an earlier, rejected script entitled Lungbarrow. It was to be set on Gallifrey in the Doctor's ancestral home and deal with the Doctor's past, but producer John Nathan-Turner felt that it revealed too much of the Doctor's origins. It was reworked to make both evolution and the idea of an ancient house central to the story. Marc Platt used elements of his original idea for his Virgin New Adventures novel Lungbarrow.[2]

The working script was heavily edited, with a number of explanatory scenes ultimately being omitted. The result is a plot that, unusually for Doctor Who, generally needs to be viewed several times to be understood. In particular, the function of Josiah and Control is never clearly explained. The plot is only fully explained in the DVD special feature "Light in Dark Places." Even the cast and director of the story were confused by the script, and made repeated calls to Marc Platt for explanations.

Platt includes several allusions and references to late 19th and early 20th century literature. Among the most notable, Mrs Grose is named after the housekeeper in Henry James' short story The Turn of the Screw (1898). Control's desire to be "proper ladylike" is reminiscent of Eliza Doolittle from George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion (1912), particularly as Ace has her repeat a presumably misremembered version of the "Rain in Spain" rhyme from the play to improve her speech, and at one point the Doctor refers to Ace as "Eliza". When Control threatens to burn the invitation to Buckingham Palace Josiah boasts that he is "a man of property", referencing the first volume of John Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga. Redvers Fenn-Cooper makes several references to Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness (1902) and also one to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's novel The Lost World (1912), claiming that he had seen giant lizards in a swamp in Africa and that Conan Doyle did not believe him. As the serial is set in 1883, it can be inferred that Fenn-Cooper's story becomes the inspiration for the fictional version of Conan Doyle's novel. There is no indication that Fenn-Cooper is quoting from or referring directly to the "later" works themselves. There are also many references to Lewis Carroll's Alice. Gwendolyn calls Ace Alice, the Doctors refers to the elevator ride as "[down] the rabbit hole" and when he tells Light that not all forms of life are catalogued he starts naming imaginary creatures such as dragons and griffins, and then goes on to mention "the bandersnatchers, the slithy toves".

In the dinner scene, the Doctor asks rhetorically, "Who was it said Earthmen never invite their ancestors round to dinner?" This refers to Douglas Adams'[3] The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy – Adams had worked as a script editor on Doctor Who for one season of Fourth Doctor episodes, and wrote or co-wrote three stories in which he got away with several references to his other works. The Doctor makes a reference to the Fourth Doctor serial The Talons of Weng-Chiang, which also took place in Victorian England, and quotes the Beatles ("It's been a hard day's night").

Production

Ghost Light turned out to be the final production of the series' original 26-year run, with the last recorded sequence being the final scene between Mrs Pritchard and Gwendoline. It was not, however, the last to be screened — both The Curse of Fenric and Survival, both produced beforehand, followed it in transmission order.

This story is the first in what some have termed the "Ace Trilogy", a three-story arc that explores the turbulent personal history of the Doctor's companion, Ace. Such detailed exploration of a companion's earlier life was unusual in the original series, although it has become one of the main features of the new series. These three stories also linked to some extent by the concept of evolution, which features strongly in this story and Survival, and to a much lesser extent in The Curse of Fenric.

In print

Template:Doctor Who book A novelisation of this serial, written by Marc Platt, was published by Target Books in September 1990.

In June 2011, an audiobook of the novelisation was released, read by Ian Hogg.

The script of this serial, edited by John McElroy, was published by Titan Books in June 1993. Marc Platt contributed a chapter, written especially for this book, which rectified the omissions from the transmitted story.[4]

VHS, DVD and CD releases

Ghost Light was released on VHS in May 1994. A DVD release followed in September 2004, with many extended and deleted scenes included as bonus features. However, unlike the situation with The Curse of Fenric, these scenes no longer existed in broadcast quality and were sourced from VHS copies, some with burned-in on-screen timecodes. This made an extended edit, as had been prepared for the Fenric DVD release the previous year, impossible.

Soundtrack release

Untitled

The soundtrack album for this serial was released on Silva Screen Records in 1993 [5] [6] [7]

Track listing

  1. The Madhouse
  2. Goobledorf
  3. Uncharted Territory
  4. Heart of the Interior
  5. Enter Josiah
  6. Indoor Lightning
  7. Nimrod Observed
  8. Time to Emerge
  9. Burnt Toast
  10. Ace's Adventures Underground
  11. Where is Mamma?
  12. Loss of Control
  13. The Way to the Zoo
  14. The Memory Teller
  15. Lighting the Touchpaper
  16. Homo Victorianus Ineptus
  17. Out of the Shadows
  18. Light Enlightened
  19. Tropic of Perivale
  20. Tricks of the Light
  21. Judgement in Stone
  22. Requiem
  23. Passing Thoughts

References

  1. ^ From the Doctor Who Magazine series overview, in issue 407 (pp26-29). The Discontinuity Guide, which counts the four segments of The Trial of a Time Lord as four separate stories and also counts the unbroadcast serial Shada, lists this story as number 157. Region 1 DVD releases follow The Discontinuity Guide numbering system.
  2. ^ a b Template:Brief
  3. ^ Cornell, Paul; Day, Martin; Topping, Keith (1995). "157 'Ghost Light'". Doctor Who: The Discontinuity Guide. London: Doctor Who Books. pp. 351–2. ISBN 0-426-20442-5. {{cite book}}: External link in |chapterurl= (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help); Unknown parameter |chapterurl= ignored (|chapter-url= suggested) (help)
  4. ^ Platt, Marc (1993). McElroy, John (ed.). Doctor Who - The Scripts: Ghost Light. London: Titan Books. pp. 2, 5. ISBN 1-85286-477-X. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  5. ^ Doctor Who: Ghost Light (Media notes). Silva Screen. 1993. {{cite AV media notes}}: |format= requires |url= (help); Unknown parameter |publisherid= ignored (help)
  6. ^ Ayres, Mark. "Mark Ayres - Doctor Who Incidental Music". Retrieved 5 October 2008. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help) [dead link]
  7. ^ "Millenium Effect". Retrieved 5 October 2008. {{cite web}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to Seventh Doctor.

Reviews

Target novelisation

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