Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...
Day 713: The Curse of Fenric, Episode Four
Dear diary,
The cliffhanger to yesterday’s episode, leading in to this one, must surely rank among the very best that the programme has ever done? It’s so firmly embedded on to my mind that I can’t help but quote along as it plays out - right down the the intonation of each word. It’s also quite telling that the use of the words ‘Time Lord’ here carry real impact. We’re in a period of the show where there’ve been several references to the Time Lords and Gallifrey quite vital to the stories (Remembrance of the Daleks and Silver Nemesis both go so far as to namecheck Rassilon and Omega, while inventing new parts of the Gallifreyan mythos), and yet somehow, the whole concept of the Time lords feels more distant than at any time since - quite possibly - the 1960s.
By the time Pertwee’s Doctor arrives on the scene, the Time Lords are always sending him off on missions, and they begin to lose some of their grandeur. Once you’re into the late 1970s, you’ve got the likes of The Deadly Assassin letting us actively in to their world, and then The Invasion of Time littering it with cheap plastic furniture. I’ve mentioned enough times in the last six months how much I dislike the 1980s version of the society, with its marble effect and pastel colours, but suddenly here it’s become something rather special again.
Our last actual contact with another Time Lord was the Rani at the start of Season Twenty-Four (and it’s strange how long ago that feels now - the programme really does evolve in to a different beast in these final two years), and then the season before that was littered with Time Lords, but we never get to visit Gallifrey because it’s in political turmoil. Suddenly, the idea that this entity knows that the Doctor is a Time Lord and can make the word sound so sinister - in a story where you’re so not expecting to hear it - is wonderful, and it might just be my favourite part of the entire story. I can wholeheartedly guarantee that I’ll have watched the closing moments of Episode Three several times over before I next watch The Curse of Fenric in its entirety.
Add to all this the fact that Fenric is really rather good, thank you very much. I love it when villains in Doctor Who are given a vein of comedy, and Dinsdale Landen plays the possessed Judson so perfectly. He manages to make the performance camp, but without pushing it too far. I love the way he reacts to the Ancient One not being around ready for his revival, and I’ve more than once used the line ‘don’t interrupt me when I’m eulogising’. Frankly, I find excuses to slip it in to my day-to-day life. I think the only issue that I have with Fenric is that he’s defeated very easily, isn’t he? We’ve had three episodes building up to his release, with the stakes (and the stress) growing steadily across those episodes. We then find out that he’s been manipulating other recent events in the Doctor’s life - citing the chess set in Lady Peinforte’s study and Ace’s arrival on Ice World as examples. He’s supposedly this great cosmic force, evil since the dawn of time… and yet he struggles very much with a chess problem until Ace gives him the answer, then he grandstands for a bit before being wiped out with a deadly poison. It feels as though he should be a bit more of a problem to dispose of…
Which brings up a point that I’ve been musing a bit in the last couple of weeks. As I’m making my way through the McCoy years, I’m becoming ever more determined to listen to all of the Seventh Doctor’s audio adventures. Don’t worry - I’m not suddenly going to be dropping them in to this marathon and extending it out by another year, but I’m certainly more eager than ever before to hear them all. I’ve dipped in and out of them from time to time, but I’d love to follow the continuing story, because it very much builds on what we see on screen in this period of the programme. I know, for example, that Fenric shows up again at one stage, and I’ve head an episode in which the Doctor and Ace manage to check in on little Audrey; there’s something very appealing about the idea of hearing this story continue to play out, and I think it’s probably going to be my next ‘marathon’ undertaking once this whole watch-through is over in a few months.
