Ghost Light (Doctor Who)

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157 - Ghost Light
Doctor	Sylvester McCoy (Seventh Doctor)
Writer	Marc Platt
Director	Alan Wareing
Script editor	Andrew Cartmel
Producer	John Nathan-Turner
Executive producer(s)	None
Production code	7Q
Series	Season 26
Length	3 episodes, 25 mins each
Transmission date	October 4–October 18, 1989
Preceded by	Battlefield
Followed by	The Curse of Fenric

Ghost Light is a serial in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which was first broadcast in three weekly parts from October 4 to October 18, 1989.

1 Synopsis
2 Plot
3 Cast
4 In print
5 Production
6 Outside references
7 DVD and video release
8 References
9 External links
- 9.1 Reviews
- 9.2 Target novelisation

[edit] Synopsis

The Doctor and Ace visit a mysterious house in nineteenth century Perivale where alien forces are perverting history, and Ace faces up to her fears as Light breaks and a day of judgement dawns.

[edit] Plot

Referring to Light (or critics): 'File under, "Imagination--comma--Lack of"'.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

In 1883 the mansion house of Gabriel Chase in Perivale near London is under the control of the mysterious Josiah Samuel Smith, having subjugated the occupants via some form of brainwashing. It is a most mysterious place, where the serving women brandish guns and the butler is a Neanderthal named Nimrod. Other occupants include Gwendoline, the daughter of the original owners of the house who have now disappeared; the calculating night housekeeper Mrs Pritchard; the crazed explorer Redvers Fenn-Cooper; and the Reverend Ernest Matthews, opponent of the theory of evolution which Smith has done much to spread. For his pains Matthews is transformed by Smith into an ape and placed in a display case.

The TARDIS arrives at Gabriel Chase. It turns out that Ace had visited the house in 1983 and had felt an evil presence, and the Seventh Doctor‘s curiosity drives him to seek the answers. Something is also alive and evolving in the cellar beneath the house and when Ace investigates she finds two animated and dangerous husks. The cellar is in fact a vast stone spaceship with something trapped inside. The Doctor, meanwhile, works his way through the stuffed animals in Gabriel Chase and eventually finds a human in suspended animation, an Inspector Mackenzie, who came to the house two years earlier in search of the owners. The Doctor revives him and together they seek to unlock the mysteries of Gabriel Chase. He also encounters the evolving creature from the cellar, known as Control, which has now taken on human form. The Doctor helps it release the trapped creature from the cellar, a being known as Light who takes the form of an angel.

Thousands of years in the past, an alien spaceship came to Earth to catalogue all life on the planet. After completing its task and collecting some samples, which included the Neanderthal, the leader Light went into slumber. By 1881 the ship had returned to Earth. While Control remained imprisoned on the ship to serve as the "control" subject of the scientific investigation, events transpired such that Smith, the "survey agent", mutinied against Light, keeping him in hibernation on the ship. Smith began evolving into the era's dominant life-form -- a Victorian gentleman -- and also took over the house. By 1883, Smith, having "evolved" into forms approximating a human and casting off his old husks as an insect would, managed to lure and capture the explorer Fenn-Cooper within his den. Utilizing Fenn-Cooper's association with Queen Victoria, he plans to get close to her so that he can assassinate her and subsequently take control of the British Empire.

Light is displeased by all the change that has occurred on the planet while he was asleep. While Light tries to make sense of all the change, Smith tries to keep his plan intact, but events are moving beyond his control. Light turns Gwendoline and her missing mother, revealed to be Mrs Pritchard, to stone in a bid to stop the speed of evolution; while Inspector Mackenzie meets a sticky end and is turned into a primordial soup to serve at dinner. As Control tries to "evolve" into a Lady, and Ace tries to come to grips with her feelings about the house, the Doctor himself tries to keep the upper hand in all the events that have been set in motion. The Doctor finally convinces Light of the futility of opposing evolution, which causes him to overload and dissipate into the surrounding house. It was this presence that Ace sensed and which caused her to burn the house in 1983. Also, Control's complete evolution into a Lady derails Smith's plan as Fenn-Cooper, having freed himself from Smith's brainwashing, chooses to side with her instead of him. In the end, with Smith now the new Control creature imprisoned on the ship, Control, Fenn-Cooper and Nimrod set off in the alien ship to explore the universe.

[edit] Cast

The Doctor — Sylvester McCoy
Ace — Sophie Aldred
Josiah Samuel Smith — Ian Hogg
Redvers Fenn-Cooper — Michael Cochrane
Nimrod — Carl Forgione
Control — Sharon Duce
Rev Ernest Matthews — John Nettleton
Gwendoline — Katharine Schlesinger
Inspector Mackenzie — Frank Windsor
Mrs Grose — Brenda Kempner
Mrs Pritchard — Sylvia Syms
Light — John Hallam

[edit] In print

The Target novelisation by Marc Platt

A novelisation of this serial, written by Marc Platt, was published by Target Books in September 1990.

[edit] Production

Working titles for this story included The Bestiary and Life-Cycle.^[1] As revealed in the production notes for the DVD release, the story was renamed Das Haus der tausenden Schrecken (The House of a Thousand Frights/Horrors) upon translation into German.
The story was originally called Lungbarrow. It was to be set on Gallifrey and deal with the Doctor's past, but producer John Nathan-Turner felt that it revealed too much of the Doctor's origins. It was reworked to make both evolution and the idea of an ancient house central to the story. Marc Platt used elements of his original idea for his Virgin New Adventures novel Lungbarrow.^[1]
Ghost Light was the last serial of the original series ever produced, with the last recorded sequence being the final scene between Mrs. Pritchard and Gwendoline. It was not, however, the last to be screened — both The Curse of Fenric and Survival, produced beforehand, followed it in transmission order.

[edit] Outside references

In the dinner scene, the Doctor asks rhetorically, "Who was it who said that Earthmen never invite their ancestors round to dinner?" The answer is Douglas Adams, in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Adams worked as a script editor on Doctor Who for one season, and wrote or co-wrote three stories (The Pirate Planet, City of Death and Shada).
The character of Josiah Samuel Smith, with his acute physical sensitivity, seems to be influenced by Roderick Usher from Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Fall of the House of Usher (1845); Mrs Grose is named after the housekeeper in Henry James's short story The Turn of the Screw (1898); Control's desire to be "a proper ladylike" is reminiscent of Eliza Doolittle from George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion (1912), and at one point the Doctor refers to Ace as "Eliza"; and Redvers makes several references to Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness (1902) (both are anachronistic, although it is never implied that either Redvers or Control are actually quoting from these works).

[edit] DVD and video release

The serial was released on VHS tape by BBC Worldwide in 1994. A DVD release followed in September 2004, with many extended and deleted scenes included as bonus features. However, unlike the situation with The Curse of Fenric, these scenes no longer existed in broadcast quality and were sourced from VHS copies, some with burned-in on-screen timecodes. This made an extended edit, as had been prepared for the Fenric DVD release the previous year, impossible.
Densely packed with exposition and literary in-jokes and references, this serial is often accused of being too confusing as well as being tailor-made for video tape (claiming the story only makes sense with repeated viewing). The confusion may arise because, unlike many other Doctor Who adventures, neither the Doctor nor the other characters take the time to explain everything as the story escalates.^[2]

It was also argued that many of the extra features are only there to explain the story