The Ark

 The Ark

(part 1)

Right, let's crack on with this one and see what it gives us.

It's a monitor lizard on a sandy floor.

The lizard stands so still you might think it was a recon photo until suddenly a toucan crashes down into the shot screeching. Roll over Exorcist III, we've got a new jump scare champion in town!

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Meanwhile, a one eyed alien watches over the trees and grumpy birds.

It walks around so we can see how big this forest set actually is. There's even a snake.

Longueurs and close lingers and smoky forest clearings, we've spent big on the set and we're going to see it.

We hear the TARDIS landing off screen, but it sounds like another creature's noise in this loud forest. Then it arrives properly.

Dodo rushes out, looks at the forest and immediately sneezes. She also tells Steven they are clearly at Whipsnade Zoo, and can get a bus home. Whipsnade is a wildfire preservation park in the South of England, where nearly all the animals can roam free, or, if that might be dangerous (the tiger who came to a buffet?) in their own wide enclosures. The focus being more on animal protection than human voyeurism.

I have been at Whipsnade. I was 8 at the time. Someone kept grabbing sweets out of my pocket, and I got annoyed, assuming it was my then 3 year old sister Cat, so I shoved them. Only to get shoved off my feet by the culprit, which turned out to be a penguin. A penguin stole my chocolates and hit me. True story.

Steven is more befuddled at Dodo's attitude than he was fighting Daleks.

DODO: I bet if you go down that path there, you'll come to the American Bison and the Tea Bar.

STEVEN: Look, we don't even know that we're on Earth.

DODO: Earth? Earth? Well, it couldn't be anywhere else now, could it?

Dodo points out a monitor lizard. Smaller than the one we saw on an island in Indonesia, which darted out and nicked Dad's lunch. They did become popular pets in the 1990s.

The Doctor shows up, and is all smiles like he's had a nice long nap. It looks and feels like Earth but something is wrong.

Meanwhile a one eyed alien works as a typist for a judge human, who sentences a human to miniaturisation. This is the Commander, who had a strange way of speaking his lines.

MELLIUM: Father, anyone can make mistakes. He's not likely to do it again.

COMMANDER: My child, we are the Guardians of the human race. You know our responsibilities cannot be taken lightly. Under Galactic law, the only alternative punishment would be expulsion.

MANYAK: Sir, the prisoner accepts the verdict and thanks you for your clemency in not imposing a harsher sentence.

Bit clunky.

The Prisoner appears to be the lover of the daughter of the commander. And now he's gone.

It turns out the Aliens do not speak, but communicate in sign language.

There appears to be stock footage of an elephant walking across a swamp. The camera zooms out to see the huge set, and the footage of the elephant, and the Doctor and then through close up and zoom we follow the Doctors team as they.... walk right up to the elephant and pat it on the trunk.

Warning! Warning! Budget overload!

Elephants are cool though.

So far this story is more interested in showing us how much money its spent rather than having a plot.

The Doctor notices this and points upwards, to show that instead of a sky, there is a steel roof running above their heads.

Dodo sneezes again. The Doctor orders her to use a hankie!

The Doctor says he'll have one more look around and then take Dodo to bed. No, not in that way.

DODO: Oh, you're not going to send me home, are you?

DOCTOR: Home? Ho, ho! What an idea. I couldn't send you home even if I wanted to.

DODO: Oh, that's all right, then. I think I'm beginning to enjoy this space travel or whatever it is.

She's talking this more in her stride than Tony Shalhoub in Galaxy Quest.

The Alien, who was following the Doctor, walks into the room full of people and uses sign language to point out the Doctor is there.

The humans look at the Doctor on their screen, and send a squad to find them.

DODO: Doctor, Steven, get a look at these fab pictures!

DOCTOR: Ah, fab, hmm. My dear child, if you're going to be with us for any length of time, you'll have to do something about that English of yours.

DODO: What's wrong with it?

DOCTOR: It's terrible, child. Oh, it's most irritating.

Doctor Who, not a fan of that youth boomer culture!

The Doctor realises they are in a spaceship, which took him a surprisingly long time to twig. The camera lingers long on Steven trying to stop Dodo sneeze.

The aliens find them.

The Commander talks to Steven, and they discover that Dodo has a cold which was made extinct on Earth centuries previously. They are all on an Ark, going to a future planet which is 700 years away.

COMMANDER: Nero, the Trojan wars, the Daleks. But all that happened in the first segment of time.

DOCTOR: Segment? To use your phrase, sir, what segment are we in now?

COMMANDER: The fifty seventh.

DOCTOR: Good gracious! We must have jumped at least ten million years.

"There's a virus on board! Fascinating!" says the not very convincing Commander. They've miniaturised the entire human race, bar a crew.

Mellium shows Dodo and Steven a statue they have started building.

Dodo's cold spreads among the humans and Monoids, and the Commander collapses. Zentos takes over and threatens to the kill the TARDIS crew.

Abrupt ending to an odd, but stylistic and visual episode.

Not a lot happened. But it looked great.

The Ark (episode 2)

There was a two month gap between watching Episode 1 and Episode 2. Defeated by The Ark? Defeated by real life, more truthfully. That and a crushing case of writers block!

So where were we? Ah yes, Dodo has just condemned what's left of humanity to death by common cold, for which they have no resistance.

"We're all going to die from the cold. It was pointless leaving!"

Dodo says the impending doom is her fault and the Doctor agrees with her. Steven asks if its possible the TARDIS passes viruses from civilisation to civilisation and the Doctor says that is too horrific a topic for kids TV to talk about and changes the subject.

A Monoid dies.

ZENTOS: That's another victim. Another death. And more human Guardians have also been taken ill. Thank heaven none of them has died yet.

MANYAK: What will happen if one does?

ZENTOS: It'll be disaster. Each man has his allotted task. No one had reckoned on this eventuality.

Do you detect the subtle hand of an analogy here?

Dodo says a Monoid funeral procession sounds like a bunch of savages. WTF Dodo? You know, if they rise up from slavery the humans only have themselves to blame for being ¤¤¤¤wits.

But seriously if you want to make a unsubtle point about apartheid or segregation, you can make your guest characters as willingly racist, or unrealising racist as you like. But when you have the Doctor's companion making quips then your story is in danger of siding with the intolerant society.

Zentos does a lot of yelling about his prisoners.

The Monoids are wearing face masks, showing practical common sense tactics to use in the face of a pandemic. Zentos doesn't wear a face mask, doesn't socially distance, and yells a lot.

Steven looks unwell and goes to speak at the trial. The Doctor says he will find a cure, but he seems to be standing around waiting for his cue instead.

BACCU: My contention is that it was no accident that this disaster has happened. I say that you came here intentionally to spread the disease.

STEVEN: But that's utter nonsense. I mean how can you possibly

BACCU: And that you are agents of the planet towards which this spaceship is proceeding. That you came here to destroy us.

STEVEN: Why? We're human beings like you are. Why should we?

So the cold sceptics think this Dodo Virus is a bit of a conspiracy.

ZENTOS: We can cope with all things known to the fifty seventh segment of Earth life, but not with strange diseases brought by you as agents of the intelligences that inhabit Refusis!

STEVEN: Are you still on about that? I've told you before. We know nothing of that planet.

ZENTOS: My instinct, every fibre of my being, tells me differently.

STEVEN: And that, unfortunately, tells me only one thing.

ZENTOS: What's that?

STEVEN: That the nature of man, even in this day and age, hasn't altered at all.

This episode dovetails between being dull, dodgy and surprisingly timely, and I'm getting a bit seasick.

Although the ailing commander commentating on things ("that's true!") like the Monty Python "It's..." man is very funny.

Zentos convinces the mob to destroy anyone who has a cure for the virus, which is deliberately infecting them thanks to enemy agents.

Luckily for humanity, Manyak shows up to point out that if the Doctor's team had the cold, he is the only person who can come up with a cure.

So maybe don't throw them out into the depths of space.

I'm confused as to why that's a lesser punishment than miniaturisation.

Wait, breaking news. One human has died from the cold. This is now a major incident. Never mind all those dead Monoids.

ZENTOS: So be it! They shall be taken from this place and expelled from the ship and the privilege of execution, in that they were the first to be struck by the fever, will be granted to the Monoids.

MELLIUM: But the verdict is wrong!

MANYAK: Yes, but it is the voted verdict. There is nothing we can do about it.

You know, there was quite an on the nose satire hidden away in this one.

William Hartnell is stuck looking fierce on TV screens. He does his best with what he's got, as you can imagine.

Steven apparently has no resistance for the common cold either. This is the least realistic bit of the story, that in the next 3000 years or so we eradicate the most common multiplying virus on the planet.

The Commander from his sick bed is all "Physician heal thyself" - or heal Steven first, to the Doctor.

The Doctor is in a rush to save Steven but still takes time out to correct Dodo's use of grammar.

The Doctor cures the common cold in Steven.

DOCTOR: Oh, thank you, thank you, yes. You know, I don't know what I would do without you.

That's the Doctor talking to his assistant Monoid and its worth noting that some 45 minutes into the story, the Doctor is the only person around who has treated any of them as individual characters in their own right.

The Doctor gets everyone to have their jab even if they didn't have the cold, so as to prevent further infection. And this concept of mass immunisation saves the day. Cold sceptics 0, medical science 1.

Earth dies on the screen, but it looks like a farting balloon..

Zentos apologises for the whole trying to murder the Doctor bit.

The TARDIS crew take off in the TARDIS.

Well that was a somewhat dull but moralistic tale. Shame about the whole slavery aspect.

The TARDIS lands in the same spot.

They investigate to look for their friends, but Dodo finds the statue from episode 1. It's been finished. And it has the head of a Monoid. Planet of the Apes, before Planet of the Apes.

Oh, OK, Pierre Boulle's book with the exact same twist came out two years before The Ark. You got me...

The Ark

(episode 3)

Dodo can't cope with the idea they travelled in time. She was so used to 57 million AD after all.

DODO: But we've only been gone a few seconds.

DOCTOR: Yes, I know, my dear. It's pretty hard for you to understand.

STEVEN: Yes, well the Guardians said it would take seven hundred years for this spaceship to reach the planet Refusis Two. If that navigation chart's anything to go by I'd say that they're almost there.

DOCTOR: Yes, I think you're right.

It's a small step forward in time by TARDIS standards, let's see how the descendants are getting on after Doctor Who sorted out their society for them.

Then they see one of the Guardians acting as the servant of some Monoids.

DODO: Yes and they're sort of slaves, aren't they?

Yes, the Monoids decided everyone was being ¤¤¤¤wits to them, and so overthrew their overlords. So far, so not unsympathetic...

They've discovered the ability to talk but this revolution was recent. So seemingly the Monoids took several hundred more years of being treated like ¤¤¤¤ before rising up.

The Doctor tries to tell them that he was there years ago, but the Monoid number 2 (he has a label) says the Doctor was only the friend of the humans. See, if you don't condemn a slave society, you will be written into the history as condoning it.

MONOID 1: According to the history scan you brought a strange fever that killed many of our ancestors.

DODO: But we also helped to find a cure, didn't we? I mean, the Doctor did.

MONOID 1: He thought he did.

DOCTOR: And what do you mean by that?

MONOID 1: You controlled the immediate impact of the fever, but a mutation of it developed later on that sapped the will of the humans.

DODO: You mean that it was our fault that you took over because of the fever?

MONOID 1: In part.

STEVEN: There were other reasons?

MONOID 1: The main reason was the Guardians themselves. They were a simple people. They actually encouraged the research from which we developed our voice boxes and heat prods. They were totally unprepared for the conflict when it came.

DODO: What happened to them?

MONOID 1: Many were killed. The rest are prisoners. A fact that you will shortly see for yourselves! Two, take them away to the security kitchen and then call a Grand Council.

If you want a point where this story starts to fall apart, here it is. The human Guardians, out of the goodness of their own heart, let the Monoids have voices and weaponry, and were then ousted. So not only do we have a bit of European colonialization (civilise the locals, it's for their own good) but the dumbest imperialists in history, happily arming the very people that would overturn their power.

Which come to think of it, is modern foreign policy since WW2.

But the fact that the Monoids are a bit too gleeful in "being evil" and the humans are blatantly the audience sympathy figures sort of crashes down on the whole thing like a wreckingball;

It's a mess.

Not even the appearance of the famous Security Kitchen can save it.

The humans immediately believe that the Doctor is the same Doctor from 700 years ago, because the plot demands it.

MONOID 1: In a short while, Refusis will be ours. We will land there. We will create a Monoid world.

MONOID 3: But One, what about the Guardians?

MONOID 1: I have a simple plan that will destroy them.

This is taking an unwelcome detour into conspiracy theories I don't want to deal with here.

DODO: Why don't you just jump on them? They're pretty slow moving creatures, Monoids.

Dodo's turned quite the reactionary in a hurry.

The Monoids decide the Doctor is a danger so decide to send the Doctor to the planet Refusius as a test pilot. Because if he dies, so be it.

They also send Dodo along with the Doctor, to stop her asking questions nonstop.

They also leave Steven on The Ark so he can start up a revolution.

Dodo has nearly started 2 genocides, has a reactionary streak and belittles others, and yet is probably the 3rd most intelligent character in this story beyond the Doctor and Steven. Which is damning. Not of Jackie Lane, who shines in the few scenes she gets to do anything (no one can act snivelling convincingly) but because the writer has dragged Dodo and all the guest parts downwards. Its apartheid for kids, but for that you need nuance and skill. Think The Aztecs. Whereas this is shallower than the kiddie pool in Munchkin land.

The Doctor has landed on the planet with Dodo and a Monoid.

And then we get by far my favourite moment in this entire story.

DODO - It's going to take you a while to get all the humans off the Ark.

MONOID - It may not take as long as you think. Hehehe.

DODO - Why, are you up to something?

MONOID - Uhm, err.... no.

Hahahahahahahahahahaha that Monoid has had a complete shocker here. Dodo utterly outwits it, and then explains the double cross so the human nearby can understand. But that's just such a hilariously stupid moment, I love it.

The Doctor finds signs of habitation.

The house appears to be deserted.

The Monoid starts destroying a vase of flowers to get the attention of the hosts, and the Doctor roars at him to "put that thing down" like a William Hartnell who has had ¤¤¤¤ all to do all episode and wants to put an exclamation mark on one of his very few moments.

It turns out the Refusians were there all along. They were invisible.

Twist!

The Refusian disarms the Monoid with help of the Radiophonic Workshop.

MONOID 3: What was the plan you had for destroying the Guardians and this spaceship?

MONOID 1: A short while after we leave, they will disappear in a cloud of fragmented pieces.

MONOID 3: You mean a bomb of some kind?

Admittedly as plans go, its very basic. Bung a bomb at it.

Maharis sees this and goes to tell everyone but no one believes he as he is a collaborator. Steven does, because he expects Doctor Who monsters round every corner.

MAHARIS: Yes! I overheard One telling another Monoid.

STEVEN: Do you know where the device is?

MAHARIS: No. I only heard them talking,

There was an opportunity for Maharis to go "I heard them overtalking" and he said it correctly instead.

Meanwhile the Doctor is engrossed in animated chatter with an invisible entity.

Monoid 2 tells Yendom to contact the other Monoids but he refuses and is shot dead. They must be serious about whatever it is they want if they're willing to kill Yendom. Whoever he was...

The Monoid rushes to the Ark in their machine. But then it explodes, killing our Krusty the Clown wannabe - he says the loud part quiet and the quiet part loud.

Dodo assumes they will be left on the planet forever.

Mess of an episode. What a waste of a starting point, a cliffhanger, Willian Hartnell, and a security kitchen.

The Ark

(episode 4)

MONOID 3: What has happened? Why does Two no longer give us his report?

MONOID 1: I don't know. It could mean a simple break in communications, or that he was attacked!

MONOID 3: But his report of conditions on the planet Refusis started favourably.

Not so much the Idiot Ball as an idiot bomb over the entire cast.

The First Monoid plans to bump off the Fourth Monoid later. And tells everyone the bomb is in the statue, in case people missed that last week.

Last week, the Refusians wanted humans to come to Earth and live in peace. This week, they blew up Monoid 3 and don't trust the humans.

DOCTOR: Yes, that's true my dear but, you mustn't think they were perfect. Oh, no. Sometimes they were extremely intolerant and selfish.

REFUSIAN [OC]: Is that why they were conquered by the Monoids?

DOCTOR: Exactly.

So remember if you find yourselves enslaved it may have been down to your extreme intolerance and selfishness...

"Is there any way out of this kitchen?" asks Steven, and Peter Purves keeps a straight face.

Maharis tells the humans the evacuation is soon but has decided to be a willing servant of the Monoids despite telling everyone about the bomb and knowing they plan to kill him.

The fight for the most idiotic character in this story is more hard fought than the Best Actor Oscar of 1972. (That's when Brando beat Olivier, Caine, Winfield and O'Toole.)

So Maharis is OK with being killed, the Monoids have a bomb set even without knowing the planet is safe enough to land on, and the Refusians want people to colonise the planet but also do not want this to happen.

They've set the bomb now.

The Doctor warns Steven about the bomb he already knows about.

The Monoids land on the planet and go to capture the Doctor and Dodo.

MONOID 3: Who is it that travels in that launcher? We have seen no one since we have been here.

DOCTOR: Well, to tell the truth, neither have we.

A Refusian has gone up to The Ark.

The Monoids do some more plotting.

The Monoids start shooting each other because now is the best time for a civil war. Number 6 is dead. He had no lines at all.

Maharis is moping, incidentally. Steven is fed up.

Maharis goes to the planet to find Monoid One and is shot by his master for his trouble. He summed up this episode.

The bomb is discovered and destroyed. Helped by the Refusians having super strength. Luckily.

This civil war kills off all the villains and exists solely as the writer had no idea how to solve everything in Part 4.

Then the Doctor tells the humans they need to forgive the Monoids. The Monoids have no say in this.

The Refusians decided they wanted to make peace with everyone again.

The TARDIS takes off only for the Doctor to vanish under "some sort of an attack"!

The Ark is frankly a complete mess with some amusing bits. But a muddled script and broken Aesops leaves us with the feeling the story is less than the sum of its parts, and those parts were meagre to begin with.