Who Review: Horror of Fang Rock

After The Deadly Assassin, Phillip Hinchcliffe was fired from the role of Doctor Who's producer. He served out the rest of the season, and may or may not have had a hand in the original scripts for Season 15, but the BBC higher-ups were clear: Hinchcliffe, and the horror elements he'd brought, had to go.

And any scripts he might have set up for Season 15 fell through rather quickly. Horror of Fang Rock was a last minute replacement for a vampire story that Terrance Dicks was told he couldn't write because it would detract from a Dracula adaptation the BBC was doing at the time. (He put it on the backburner, though, and it eventually became Season 18's State of Decay.) So there was a clean slate when Williams started, and his sole mandate was "get rid of the horror."

Therefore it makes perfect sense that the first serial to be broadcast under the producership of Graham Williams is even more dire and grisly than The Talons of Weng-Chaing, Hinchcliffe's swan song as producer. This is a story in which (spoiler alert) nobody except the Doctor and Leela survive. An alien blob attacks a lighthouse, but because the lighthouse-crew alone can't carry the story, a boat crashes and four survivors join in the wacky murderous fun.

It's worth pointing out how well Leela's written here. The About Time books insist that she's caricatured to the point of parody in this serial, but think about it. She has no idea what the Doctor's talking about half the time. "Boiler pressure" is a phrase she's never heard before. For us to expect her to say "boiler pressure" and not "poiler bressure" would be like expecting an American tourist to be able to perfectly repeat a French phrase. It's entirely refreshing to have a writer who knows to write the companion as a character, and not as just some helpless damsel who screams every 25 minutes right before the credits come crashing in.

...which, funnily enough, is apparently exactly what Terrance Dicks, the writer, thought the companion should be. But he was a former script editor, and apparently Robert Holmes gave him a hard time on this story because he gave Holmes a hard time when he was script editor, so all the details are nicely ironed out and we find ourselves believing that yes, Leela really is not from our world. It's something that the new show has had to sacrifice in order to make Billie the Dalek Slayer, and it's refreshing now that Matt Smith is here to be mad and eccentric and alien. But speaking of eccentric, Tom Baker's kind of loopy here, especially right at the very end. Seven people have been murdered, and he's gleefully spouting eerie poetry. I've heard stories that he had a good working relationship with Hinchcliffe, and I've heard stories saying the exact opposite, but it's clear from his performances across his seven seasons that Williams simply had no control over him. Regardless of how harmonious or not the relationship between Baker and Hinchcliffe was, it worked in a way that subsequent Doctor-Producer relationships didn't - and not just through the end of Tom's run, but indeed all the way up through 2005 (there's a reason Eccleston quit after one season, folks, and fear of typecasting certainly wasn't it, or he'd never have taken the job in the first place).

So, despite the fact that the tone is almost exactly the same, the Doctor is now slightly different. Rumors suggest that Tom Baker was sliding into alcoholism right around this time; I can't confirm or deny them, but it's clear that he's not taking things seriously anymore.

The obvious comparison to make is between Horror of Fang Rock and Pyramids of Mars. In both stories, huge percentages of the guest-cast get slaughtered. But Pyramids is quite possibly Tom's best-ever performance as the Doctor, whereas Horror just features him gooning around. There are other problems. The first shot of the monster lacks any scale whatsoever, so we have no idea how big it is. The shipwreck is terribly unconvincing. There's some truly dreadful CSO throughout, to the point that during every scene set in the light room I just kept my eyes off the background entirely. This sort of thing was forgiveable back during Pertwee's run, but we're now looking at a post-Star Wars serial. Bad effects from here on out are no longer nostalgic; they're just embarassing.

One last thing needs to be pointed out. We've seen Hinchcliffe do "darkness" - by which I mean a lack of brightness in the image - correctly in both Genesis of the Daleks and The Talons of Weng-Chiang. When Williams gets a go at it, he superimposes videotaped fog effects over a filmed sequence, resulting in an incredibly grainy, distorted, dark image. Whoops.

Nevertheless, the script is great (though come on, this is Terrance Dicks edited by Robert Holmes. It was never going to be anything less than great). The execution's a bit of a let-down, but on the show's budget it came off about as well as can be expected. 8 out of 10.