>>> What were the aliens, why were they there, what happened!? :)
>>>
>>> All I know is that the Doctor and Ace were there, and that she'd
>>> burned down the house when younger, in the future, due to a
>>> lingering sense of evil or something. _That_ I understand. The
>>> rest... not so much.
>
>> Light, Control and Josiah were the - crew? - components? - AI
>> entities? - of a vessel from another reality. One in which things
>> didn?t evolve. Sent to study Earth and getting accidentally stalled
>> through time, they experienced the reality of evolution and went a
>> bit mad in different ways. And then ?
>
> Oh, totally missed that other reality bit.
I may have picked that up from the novelisation. Looking back I don’t think
it was made clear in the show (mind you not much was).
>
>> Oh who am I kidding? Cartmel and Pratt were too inexperienced to
>> carve a coherent story out of their script in the allotted time and
>> JN-T was as useful as a chocolate teapot in this department as usual,
>> being too busy making sure the music was shit, turning up the colour
>> palette to play school level and generally trying to lower the tone
>> back to season 24 levels.
>
> Lol. Ghost-lighting the viewers!
>
> Don't know those names though, and Google didn't really help.
Marc Pratt was the writer, this was his first Doctor Who story (and the
only one televised to date though he has become a prolific and excellent
writer for Big Finish - including the very best Cyberman origin story to
date, “Spare Parts”, a Fifth Doctor adventure.
Well worth a listen even if you aren’t usually into radio plays.
John Cartmel was the new script editor. He famously had a “master plan” to
make the Doctor more Machiavellian and mysterious, with origins well before
the Hartnell incarnation - and he was supposedly grooming (in the not
creepy sense of the term) Ace for admission to the Time Lord Academy, hence
the various “tests” of her in this season, in Ghost Light and The Curse of
Fenric.
JN-T is John Nathan-Turner, the man who in my opinion ran Doctor Who slowly
onto the reefs of oblivion as producer since Tom Baker’s final season. He
it was who introduced Tom’s burgundy coat, and wanted Colin Baker’s costume
to be hideously flamboyant and the character to become obnoxious. He was
responsible for the loud electronic background music, the over lit primary
colours of everything, and for choosing a diminutive obscure Vaudeville
comedian with no acting skills as the Seventh Doctor, as well as the masses
of guest appearances from comedians with varying degrees of success - from
the sublime Tony Selby as Sabalom Glitz to the ridiculous Beryl Reid in
Earthshock and the pointless Hale and Pace in Survival.
>
>> Result - a colourful, incoherent, confused mess. One of three stories
>> in this season that fell short of their promise, the exception being
>> ?Survival? and that?s because there wasn?t much promise in that
>> concept to begin with.
>
> The story after Ghost Light (the Curse of the Fenric) wasn't that
> coherent either. The third is the Greatest Show in the Galaxy? Wait,
> that was season 25.
>
> I liked the one where they'd dug out Brigadier Steward again. :)
Battlefield. But how did Arthurian knights cross realities to fight here?
And why? Why was the Doctor Merlin (and when?) And why was the sword
fighting so shite?
There is a cinematic re-edit of Fenric that’s a bit more coherent - I think
it’s the version in the Tales of the TARDIS wrapper on iPlayer?
--
“The timelines and … canon … are rupturing” - the Doctor