The Christmas windfall has come, and yours truly has two new Doctor Who DVDs to take a gander at. First up, the serial that could have saved the show from cancellation in 1989, if only an accountant wasn't the producer.
In the four Season 26 scripts, the plot is like an iceberg and the Doctor is like Sherlock Holmes. By that I mean there's about a billion wheels turning, and the audience is only clued in to about three of them. Unfortunately, one of these scripts is a whole lot weaker than the other three, and despite the decision to spend most of the advertising budget on The Curse of Fenric, John Nathan-Turner then decided to air it third and put the subpar Battlefield first. And thus, the show was axed.
The plot of Curse is this: Admiral Wellington and his old academy friend, Dr. Judson, have concocted a scheme to poison the Soviets, who are on their way to steal the British Ultima machine. Jolly good show, I say. They also have a second plan to unleash the curse of Fenric, though how aware they are of the Curse and their role in it seems to vary from episode to episode. Bash Saward's tenure as script editor all you want, at least his stories could be followed by the average idiot; for all the credit Andrew Cartmel gets, it's damn near impossible to figure out exactly what Wellington's ultimate aim with the Curse is.
Anyway it all horribly backfires and we get an aesop about cooperating with the Soviets - all nice and good now that the cold war's ending, but Malcolm Hulke did it a lot better (though with considerably more "subtlety" - I have to put that word in quotes because even that wasn't really subtle) back in 1973.
Meanwhile the Doctor gets to be all mysterious for four episodes and Ace nicely calls him out on it - unintentionally foreshadowing some of the stuff Martha and Donna will rag on Ten about. Given how bloated the script was, with the Special Edition in hand it's kind of curious to see the scenes that got left in - Rev. Wainwright's monologue in the church could have been cut in order to make Episode 1 end where it should have, and there's some critical dialogue that unbelievably got left out of Episode 4.
And finally, the chess problem makes absolutely no sense. As far as I can tell, Sorin!Fenric knocks over the white king with a white pawn. Um, okay, I'm pretty sure "break the basic rules of Chess" is not one of the ways to solve chess problems.
Well that's the flaws in the story. As broadcast, it's a horrible jumbled mess that might just have saved the show if it had been broadcast first as originally intended. Unfortunately, the show was run by an accountant who thought it would be better to air the scary story around Halloween. I give that version a 7 out of 10.
The special edition (available on disc 2 of the DVD) ties up several loose ends (though it still doesn't explain why Ace can hear machinery in the crypt, or what that noise is supposed to signify - it's either Wellington's poison being manufactured or something to do with Fenric, but in either case, why can't the Doctor hear it?), stitches scenes back together, and makes the whole thing seem less generally disjointed. If I had to nitpick about the acting, I'd gripe about Sophie Aldred's overly dramatic collapse when she loses her faith in the Doctor... but I'm not an acting critic. I'm a writing critic, so let me just say that the dialogue in the scene where Ace distracts the guard ("Sometimes I move faster than the speed of light." "Faster than the second hand on a clock?") rivals that of Anakin and Padme for the uncoveted prize of Worst Romantic Dialogue in a Sci-Fi Saga Ever.
The special edition version gets an 8 out of 10. It's still far from perfect, and no amount of additional scenes can fix that.
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