31 Days, 31 Screams: Day 8 (Doctor Who: The Ark In Space)

It's not easy being green.

You know, I really thought I'd have more to say about this. It turns out that when something is really, really, spectacularly good and there's no super huge underlying themes for me to pick at for a few hundred words each, I get tongue-tied. Still, we can find something to waffle about. Bullshitting about a given subject has been a gift I've cultivated for two decades now, and it's not about to change any time soon. So! This is the first of three (possibly four if something comes up) posts during our little project that will focus on Doctor Who and its forays into horror, so to speak. Here is a quick primer if you don't know what the deal with Doctor Who is, somehow (hey, a lot of you only know it from osmosis). Doctor Who is about an alien who calls himself The Doctor, and the Doctor likes to travel through time and to other planets in a spaceship permanently disguised as blue police telephone box from the 1960s that is bigger on the inside. He often likes to take humans along with him on his travels to show them all kinds of cool shit in space, but usually ends up getting into trouble and danger and having to stop alien monsters from doing bad shit. When he is mortally wounded he can regenerate and change his appearance into someone else, and in the previous story he was just getting over doing that as he had to stop some fascists from causing World War 3 and also had to stop their giant robot. Then he ran off to test out his phone booth time machine, accompanied by two other people; Sarah Jane Smith, a journalist, and Harry Sullivan, a naval doctor. Which leads us into... The Ark In Space.

Historically, The Ark In Space is a very interesting Doctor Who adventure. It's the moment when a new producer, Phillip Hinchcliffe, came in and put his own spin on the show. In previous years Doctor Who had sort of been an action man sci-fi secret agent sort of show, but Hinchcliffe had his own ideas. Namely, making a show that was a little scarier because he figured the prime audience was adolescent boys. Over his stint on the show, a whole mess of episodes that were pretty scary got made and stand out as bona fide classics of this particular era, sometimes known as "Hinchcliffe Horror". The Ark In Space is the first of those serials, and it's what we're looking at today. I picked today for it because... well, it's Alien before Alien! You have a big sprawling spaceship isolated from the rest of humanity, and an invading alien menace with different stages of evolution that uses human beings to spread itself and grow. You even have a nod to that deleted cocoon scene from Alien in how the aliens here, the Wirrn, work; they start as gooey green slugs who spritz you with some sort of slime, and slowly begin to transform you into a Wirrn as your thoughts are subsumed by the Wirrn hivemind. Conceptually, it's absolutely terrifying. In practice... well, here I have to tip my hand. I wasn't around to see this in 1975 when it first aired in Britain. I didn't even see any classic Doctor Who until 2010 or so. This didn't really scare me before, or any subsequent time I saw it. I acknowledge, though, that it must have been scary for anyone who saw it at 10 or so. If I'd seen it at 10 I'd probably be freaked out, but I was mature enough to mostly handle Alien at 12 so there we are. Part of it might be that the show isn't aiming for out and out horror. Its first episode is a chilled pace of our three mains exploring the space station and trying to figure out what's going on. Still, there are unsettling parts. Being locked in a room with no air and pounding on the door for your friends to let you out as you find it difficult to breathe? Really scary if you put yourself into it. Gradually we learn more about this place; it's a survival ark for a collection of specially selected humans launched into space after solar flares were predicted to wreck the Earth. Humanity lives on, indomitable as ever... but it won't for long, if the Wirrn have their way.

Ah yes, the Wirrn. The big rubber bugs look a little dodgy, but that's Doctor Who for you. In fact, everything here save the space station looks a little dodgy. It's the conviction that sells it, though. As has been stated many times before, the scene where the Ark's leader, Noah, pulls out his hand to reveal a green appendage that's a key signal of his descent into assimilation via Wirrn is creepy. It's creepy because of the actor's conviction, because what the effects team has done is wrapped his hand up in bubble wrap and painted it green. If you're 10, you probably don't notice this. If you're older than that, you do and the story loses some magic. Only some, because the actor sells it! You see more and more of the green shit overtaking him until he's this shambling zombielike thing running around and screaming, until eventually you see a full Wirrn running about, Noah completely taken over. Transformation complete. What follows is the Doctor and friends running about the space station, doing whatever they can to stop the Wirrn's advance and further assimiliation of what remains of the human race. We spent a lot of the Alien writeup talking about how pure the Xenomorphs were, and how they were basically just predators on the hunt. The Wirrn are nothing like that; since they assimilate intelligent life, they gain their thoughts and memories... and presumably speech. They explain why they're after humanity. They were driven off of their homeworld, forced to drift through space, because of humans. This is a revenge tale. Not an elegant one, but a messy and petty one involving alien slime and becoming the monster. In the end, though, humanity's indomitable will is the Wirrn's undoing. Noah-Wirrn, as their leader, drives them all into a shuttle in order to try and get the defiant humans running about the space station... and then neglects to perform a basic safety measure as the shuttle takes off, letting it explode in space. Oops.

I haven't even talked about our leading man, but do I need to? This is Tom Baker as Doctor Who, the longest running and one of the most popular actors to take on the role. He's all charm and curls, a charismatic man who you can't help but adore... but he has a bit of a darker side to him. The bit where he motivates Sarah Jane to crawl the rest of the way through a ventilation shaft by basically berating her and bringing out the fire in her to crawl the rest of the way through to give him a good smack is a bit of an example. Later Doctors would show more of those traits, but it only shone through with Tom sometimes. The space station set is very nice, but was expensive; hence, it was reused just a few stories later. It's a stark white, which is a marked contrast to how dark and gloomy the Nostromo was, but our aliens here are bright green instead of black so they'd show up anyway. All in all, The Ark In Space is fun. It's one of the classics of Classic Doctor Who, and its themes and imagery are well fitting for the spooky season if you give them a think. If you were 10 when you saw this, I feel for you. I really do.