Old Who: The Curse of Fenric (revisited)
Much as I love The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, they aren't my favourite Dr. Who adventure in a WWII setting. And though it's hard to be objective over one's favourites, I think there are a couple of reasons why I love Curse of Fenric, a story starring the Seventh Doctor and Ace, just a bit better, and it's not that I saw it first.
It's almost a rule of genre tv: if there is a WWII story, it features either the Blitz in London, or heroic resistance fighters in France, or some mixture of both. (Why We Fight in Angel's fifth season being something of an exception, and it's one of my favourite s5 episodes.) The Curse of Fenric avoids these popular elements entirely. For a start, it's set in the English countryside, not in London; secondly, there are no Nazis around. The difference in spirit is perhaps best summed up in this: in The Empty Child, the Doctor has this little speech about the plucky couragous islanders resisting invasion. In Curse of Fenric, early on, there is a moment when Vicar Wainwright, a decent man, tries to fend off the secondary monsters of the story. They tell him they're not thwarted by symbols but by human belief, and Wainwright has lost faith "when the bombs started to fall". "I'm not afraid of German bombs," he replies defiantly. "No, you are not," they say. "You stopped believing when English bombs started to fall in German cities, killing German children." And as the impact of that devastating sentence sinks in, we see they are indeed telling the truth.
The location for most of the action is a military base where there is a early computer, clearly modelled on the Enigma code breaker, which decyphers German codes. Yet the Allies in this war are already preparing the next (cold) one: there are Russians here in a mission to steal the machine, while the English have boobytrapped it in a way that will change it into a weapon of mass destruction to be released within Russia at their convenience. Yet the story has a cautious optimism regarding human nature: Russians and English soldiers are still able to bond with and protect each other when faced with senseless cruelty. Faith, the monster-deterrent, is presented as a neutral quality: the Russian Captain has it in his own cause, and thus he is protected when facing the pseudo-vampires, with hammer and sicle being as efficient as the cross in traditional stories; the Doctor has it in his companions - the scene where he quietly recites the names of past and present Companions is one of my all time favourites - and the closest thing the story has to a human villain, the base commander, has it in his own righteousness. Faith can be fanaticism, not just salvation. And loss of faith does not make you a villain. The sympathetic Wainwright is one example; another, in the climactic scene, is Ace. The scene in question is exhibit A as to why the Seventh Doctor has his reputation for (intelligent) manipulativeness and ruthlessness, and the darkness that go with it (a very different kind than the Ninth Doctor's post-Time War trauma), because he quickly deduces that the only way to defeat Fenric is by breaking Ace's faith in him, the Doctor - and doesn't hesitate to do so with a series of chilling remarks that work so well because you can see the kernels of truth in them.
Ace - who as opposed to the great majority of characters on tv, either male or female, has Mommy issues, not Daddy issues - has her own emotional arc through the story. Again as opposed to the way such things usually go, the fact that she protects and saves a young woman and her baby and later finds out the young woman was her grandmother and the baby her mother, doesn't solve her issues: as she tells the Doctor, she still hates her mother. But she's willing to open herself up to other people anyway, risk the literary and metaphorical undercurrents. Her fondness for explosions, a read thread though all of Ace's appearances on Dr. Who, isn't presented as something she needs to be cured of, on the contrary; it's a trait that helps saving the day more often than not. And while the scene where the Doctor breaks her faith in him is, as mentioned, devastating, Curse of Fenric also displays a lot of tenderness between them, perhaps best epitomized in the scene where they clean each other's faces without a trace of self-consciousness.
As far as villains go, Fenric - aka Evil! From Before the Dawn of Time! - shares more than one trait with the bad guy from Impossible Planet/ Satan's Pit, including the body possession gambit, so much so that I wonder why they didn't make the two the same in the New Who episodes, which only would have necessitated some slight changes. Aside from Ace devastation and symmetric to that, he's foiled by the Doctor taking the trouble of seeing Fenric's chief monster as an individual, with its own mind, and pointing out to said chief monster just what Fenric's plan will result in. The identity of the monster brings up something which Terry Nation - who had nothing to do with Curse of Fenric, of course - loved to play with on both Blake's 7 and in his Dr. Who episodes, and which get a recent outing in the recent Torchwood episode during the conversation between Owen and Mark - the idea that humanity/a species will not evolve, but devolve; the monster being in reality none other than one of the last creatures left on our completely poisoned planet, several thousand years in the future. And yet, as I said, Curse of Fenric is cautiously optimistic about human nature: the creature hears the Doctor's appeal and realizes that by sacrificing itself, it may be able to stop this future from happening.
Trivia: the not-so-special effects are par the course for the show back then, and the vampires/zombies look as if they escaped straight from an Ed Wood movie with their nails, but who cares? Also, I'm curious whether the runes used were actual runes - where is Tolkien when one needs him?
It's almost a rule of genre tv: if there is a WWII story, it features either the Blitz in London, or heroic resistance fighters in France, or some mixture of both. (Why We Fight in Angel's fifth season being something of an exception, and it's one of my favourite s5 episodes.) The Curse of Fenric avoids these popular elements entirely. For a start, it's set in the English countryside, not in London; secondly, there are no Nazis around. The difference in spirit is perhaps best summed up in this: in The Empty Child, the Doctor has this little speech about the plucky couragous islanders resisting invasion. In Curse of Fenric, early on, there is a moment when Vicar Wainwright, a decent man, tries to fend off the secondary monsters of the story. They tell him they're not thwarted by symbols but by human belief, and Wainwright has lost faith "when the bombs started to fall". "I'm not afraid of German bombs," he replies defiantly. "No, you are not," they say. "You stopped believing when English bombs started to fall in German cities, killing German children." And as the impact of that devastating sentence sinks in, we see they are indeed telling the truth.
The location for most of the action is a military base where there is a early computer, clearly modelled on the Enigma code breaker, which decyphers German codes. Yet the Allies in this war are already preparing the next (cold) one: there are Russians here in a mission to steal the machine, while the English have boobytrapped it in a way that will change it into a weapon of mass destruction to be released within Russia at their convenience. Yet the story has a cautious optimism regarding human nature: Russians and English soldiers are still able to bond with and protect each other when faced with senseless cruelty. Faith, the monster-deterrent, is presented as a neutral quality: the Russian Captain has it in his own cause, and thus he is protected when facing the pseudo-vampires, with hammer and sicle being as efficient as the cross in traditional stories; the Doctor has it in his companions - the scene where he quietly recites the names of past and present Companions is one of my all time favourites - and the closest thing the story has to a human villain, the base commander, has it in his own righteousness. Faith can be fanaticism, not just salvation. And loss of faith does not make you a villain. The sympathetic Wainwright is one example; another, in the climactic scene, is Ace. The scene in question is exhibit A as to why the Seventh Doctor has his reputation for (intelligent) manipulativeness and ruthlessness, and the darkness that go with it (a very different kind than the Ninth Doctor's post-Time War trauma), because he quickly deduces that the only way to defeat Fenric is by breaking Ace's faith in him, the Doctor - and doesn't hesitate to do so with a series of chilling remarks that work so well because you can see the kernels of truth in them.
Ace - who as opposed to the great majority of characters on tv, either male or female, has Mommy issues, not Daddy issues - has her own emotional arc through the story. Again as opposed to the way such things usually go, the fact that she protects and saves a young woman and her baby and later finds out the young woman was her grandmother and the baby her mother, doesn't solve her issues: as she tells the Doctor, she still hates her mother. But she's willing to open herself up to other people anyway, risk the literary and metaphorical undercurrents. Her fondness for explosions, a read thread though all of Ace's appearances on Dr. Who, isn't presented as something she needs to be cured of, on the contrary; it's a trait that helps saving the day more often than not. And while the scene where the Doctor breaks her faith in him is, as mentioned, devastating, Curse of Fenric also displays a lot of tenderness between them, perhaps best epitomized in the scene where they clean each other's faces without a trace of self-consciousness.
As far as villains go, Fenric - aka Evil! From Before the Dawn of Time! - shares more than one trait with the bad guy from Impossible Planet/ Satan's Pit, including the body possession gambit, so much so that I wonder why they didn't make the two the same in the New Who episodes, which only would have necessitated some slight changes. Aside from Ace devastation and symmetric to that, he's foiled by the Doctor taking the trouble of seeing Fenric's chief monster as an individual, with its own mind, and pointing out to said chief monster just what Fenric's plan will result in. The identity of the monster brings up something which Terry Nation - who had nothing to do with Curse of Fenric, of course - loved to play with on both Blake's 7 and in his Dr. Who episodes, and which get a recent outing in the recent Torchwood episode during the conversation between Owen and Mark - the idea that humanity/a species will not evolve, but devolve; the monster being in reality none other than one of the last creatures left on our completely poisoned planet, several thousand years in the future. And yet, as I said, Curse of Fenric is cautiously optimistic about human nature: the creature hears the Doctor's appeal and realizes that by sacrificing itself, it may be able to stop this future from happening.
Trivia: the not-so-special effects are par the course for the show back then, and the vampires/zombies look as if they escaped straight from an Ed Wood movie with their nails, but who cares? Also, I'm curious whether the runes used were actual runes - where is Tolkien when one needs him?