By 1979, Doctor Who had gone about as far into outer space as it ever would. Season Seventeen, which this is a part of, has only one story set on Earth; the season before it has half as much as that. In its opening scenes, Nightmare of Eden seems to be more of the same. A (not-great) spaceship model makes an (actually quite well-realised) jump through hyperspace, and it materialises in the same place as another ship, fusing them together like Jeff Goldblum and that pesky fly. It’s an interesting, original problem to solve, but already something else is happening. Despite this disastrous situation, the ship’s co-pilot Secker is distracted, spacey, giggling softly at the mess. This is because writer Bob Baker is using the props and style of late-Tom Baker space opera to tell a story about something unusually grounded for any era of Doctor Who, let alone this one: drug addiction.
There is a corner of fandom that finds Graham Williams’s tenure as producer to be frustratingly lightweight, devoid of any purpose bar showing off Tom Baker’s comic timing. You’d expect Nightmare of Eden to be a favourite of theirs, especially considering the unexpected source it comes from. Back when he was one half of a writing partnership with Dave Martin, Bob Baker was arguably less involved with the Earthbound format of the Jon Pertwee era than any other writer. Baker and Martin began with an Earth-set serial – The Claws of Axos – which was noticeably more flamboyant and surreal than that season’s lone story set on an alien planet. After that, they spent the rest of the Pertwee years in outer space. One of those space-set stories, The Mutants, could be described as an “issue-led” story in the same way Nightmare of Eden is, but it was an outlier. Their standard mode is something like The Three Doctors, a story which is about nothing connected to the viewer’s reality, and which exists in large part to show off its dizzying range of ideas.
Which works very well, so long as the ideas are good. Unfortunately the ideas have been quite poor for a while by this point, but it turns out losing his writing partner has revitalised Bob somewhat. Nightmare of Eden is noticeably more tightly structured than most of the Baker and Martin scripts – and the script editor at the moment is Douglas Adams, who tends towards the Baker-Martin model of maintaining a steady flow of brilliant concepts over rigid structure, so it would be fair to assume the standard of plotting here is Bob Baker’s. The initial situation is an eye-catching one, the drug problem is an unexpected complication, and the cliffhanger of episode three serves notice that they’re going to dovetail in a satisfying manner. You have the ticking clock of the extremely dangerous attempt to separate the two ships, you have the moral issue of the drug smuggling, and the final episode is laser-focused on both of them causing the Doctor and Romana maximum stress.
It becomes harder to get lost in the serial’s better ideas when you know you’re probably only three minutes away from a jump scare involving something that looks for all the world like a giant cuddly frog killing someone by hugging them to death.
Given, then, that there is a lot in here that works, why isn’t Nightmare of Eden remembered as a classic? The usual answer is the monsters, and it’s true that the Mandrels overshadow a lot of Bob Baker’s better ideas. They don’t look that bad in stills, but in practice they can do very little other than wave their arms. There are plenty of examples of late-period Tom Baker stories whose monsters are less monstrous than is initially assumed – the story immediately preceding this, for one – and perhaps a similar twist might have rescued Nightmare of Eden. Unfortunately the script becomes more invested in its monsters as a dangerous threat the longer it goes on. It becomes harder to get lost in the serial’s better ideas when you know you’re probably only three minutes away from a jump scare involving something that looks for all the world like a giant cuddly frog killing someone by hugging them to death.
It does, however, feel cheap to condemn a Doctor Who story just for having bad monsters. Scaroth’s mask doesn’t look great either, and yet City of Death is the one Season Seventeen story that even Williams’s most dogged critics will admit is great. The obvious reason for this is that City of Death is saved by being very funny, and Nightmare of Eden probably has less deliberate comic relief than any other Season Seventeen serial. But there’s something more, something that cuts right to the heart of Bob Baker’s belief that Doctor Who can be a vehicle to talk about drug addiction.
Think of Tom Baker’s Doctor. Think of his character, his affect, his morality. Can you imagine him hating – genuinely hating – drug dealers? He wouldn’t approve of them, certainly. And there are Doctors who you can easily imagine being morally affronted by drugs. The Third Doctor would definitely be angry. The Fifth Doctor might, too. The Tenth Doctor did have a scene where he blew up at drug dealers, in Gridlock, and it felt perfectly in-character. But the Fourth Doctor was created as a riposte to his predecessor’s Earth-bound concerns. He was born aloof, immediately bored and unengaged with human concerns, and as we noted at the start he’s only gone further and further away from planet Earth every season. To go back to The Mutants, that story was an allegory for apartheid, but in Nightmare of Eden there’s no allegory: the drugs are drugs. Fictional alien drugs, certainly, but the criminality still seems too small-scale to rouse a Doctor who repeatedly tried to sack off finding the segments of a key that could control all of time and space.
In the final analysis, I think it just about gets away with it. Nightmare of Eden isn’t as jarring as that infamous post-9/11 Marvel comic where Doctors Doom and Octopus, two men who plan a new 9/11 every week, were moved to tears by the destruction of the Twin Towers. But the underlying problem is the same; there is a story ingredient that has to be treated with gravity because it’s a serious issue in our universe, but it can’t earn its place as a serious issue in this fictional universe. Doctor Who has tackled difficult subjects before, and it will do again, and perhaps it could have managed it here if it had offloaded the moral judgments off to Romana, who as the next serial proves can be a lot quicker to anger than the Fourth Doctor. But Nightmare of Eden is one of the weaker scripts of the season in terms of giving Lalla Ward interesting stuff to do (and her outfit is easily her worst, to boot). In terms of convincingly grounding this head-in-the-clouds era of Doctor Who, the result is close, but no cylindrical container of addictive substances.
Next: The Horns of Nimon (1979-80)
Worth noting that when Bob Baker joined Nick Park as co-writer for the “Wallace & Gromit” feature films, Park credited Baker with teaching him about story structure!
I didn’t know that, but it fits! A Grand Day Out hangs together about as well as it needs to, but there’s a definite leap in ambition on the script front once Baker joins.