So here we are, the first serial to bear a screenwriting credit for Eric Saward. To say his rise was meteoric would be an understatement; not yet forty and without a Doctor Who story to his name, he’s already the script editor at this point. The happiest thing to note is that, on the evidence of The Visitation, it’s easy to see why he got the top job. The plot maybe hangs together better if you squint, and in retrospect this could have been a sign that he didn’t yet have a good enough grasp of his own craft to instruct others. But the main thing Saward is doing – very successfully – with this story is what Russell T Davies did when he brought the series back in 2005: giving people the Doctor Who they remember, rather than the Doctor Who that existed.
In this instance, what that means is a story about aliens interfering in Earth’s history, a story type that dates back to William Hartnell’s second series but which the show still hasn’t actually done that often by 1982. The fact that most of the previous examples came during the first half of Tom Baker’s era gives this story type a comforting aura of quintessential, quality Who, but there still aren’t that many of them, and the second half of the Baker years saw the show getting further away from Earth than it ever has. The fact that, from this point onwards, they turn up with increasing frequency can therefore be largely laid at the door of The Visitation: if this idea wasn’t revived so successfully, it might not have been revived at all.
This is a more creative relationship to the series’ past than the one that becomes the norm for the rest of Saward’s time on the show. It’s possible that, if it wasn’t for the double-whammy of Earthshock and the anniversary season convincing the production team to bet big on nostalgia, this would have been the norm for 1980s Who: reinventing, rather than simply referencing, the show’s history. It’s very easy to tick off the basic influences of The Visitation. Its plot bears a close resemblance to The Time Warrior, while the character of Richard Mace – salvaged from an old radio play of Saward’s – is the kind of theatrical, larger-than-life rogue who frequently popped up in Robert Holmes’s scripts for Tom Baker. But there are also new elements coming in around the edges, ones that are surprisingly ahead of their time.
The most obvious new twist to the formula comes in the TARDIS scenes at the start, where the Doctor, Adric, Tegan and Nyssa take stock of what just happened to them on Deva Loka. Along with Turlough’s initial arc, this is one of the few points where John Nathan-Turner’s idea of the TARDIS crew as a kind of mini-soap opera really comes to life. There’s no reason why Tegan’s possession by the Mara shouldn’t leave a mark on her, particularly when the Terileptils nearly pull the same trick on her in this story. Even in the 21st century, when it’s standard procedure for series to have character arcs worked out early on, stories like The Idiot’s Lantern and Let’s Kill Hitler are still guilty of moving companions on from traumatic events too quickly, so it’s a pleasant surprise to see the early ’80s series avoiding the same mistake.
The Terileptils are another interesting, forward-looking ingredient. Again, you can see the influence of The Time Warrior on them, and there’s also perhaps a bit of the Zygon leader Broton in the idea of monsters who are peevishly causing destruction because they’ve been caught out of their depth. The recurring monster the Terileptils most resemble, though, is the Slitheen, and not just because their facial animatronics don’t quite come off. Like the Slitheen, the Terileptils cut against the series’ usual, rather eugenic, belief in essentially evil races. The Silurians had been introduced as a morally ambiguous race, but this was quickly forgotten, while the Ice Warriors switched allegiances largely as a surprise twist – there was no real explanation of what forces in Ice Warrior society could produce such good and evil citizens. In The Visitation, by contrast, the Doctor characterises Terileptil culture as defined by a love of war and a love of art, admitting that he can’t understand a civilisation that can encompass both. To which you might add, he clearly hasn’t been paying attention to human society – but this really is unusual for Doctor Who aliens. When we finally see some Terileptils other than Michael Melia’s leader in the final episode, they don’t even look the same. There’s no reason to believe the Terileptil leader is representative of anything other than his own individual corruption, and it’s a shame we didn’t get any more appearances by these aliens to explore this further.
Admittedly this strand of the story is undermined by the Terileptil leader having no name other than “Terileptil leader”, and there are a few other instances where Saward doesn’t really execute his good ideas successfully enough. Richard Mace is a terribly entertaining character, played beautifully by Michael Robbins, but he’s a star turn rather than the sidekicks who inspired him. Jago and Litefoot were plenty of fun, but they also balanced each other out and gave the Doctor and Leela a way into Victorian society. Mace’s status as a highwayman – the kind of trickster figure who doesn’t normally fit easily into a Doctor Who story, largely because that role is taken by the Doctor – means he doesn’t have any connections that might bed him more comfortably into the plot. He’s there because Saward loves this character, and he’s over-indulged as a result.
The most telling moment, in regards to this, comes right at the end. The Doctor realises that the fiery end of his battle with the Terileptils has, in fact, caused the Great Fire of London, so he bundles his companions into the TARDIS and leaves Mace in the middle of the inferno. And Mace isn’t even slightly put out by this, waving the Doctor a cheery goodbye. It’s simply impossible to imagine Mace coming to any harm, because his function in the story isn’t tied to danger or tragedy. The problem is, he acts as if he knows it. It’s one of the things that ultimately makes The Visitation slightly hollow compared to its inspirations, that despite Peter Moffat’s atmospheric direction and the gorgeous location shooting, this still somehow all feels less like a real world than even the cheapest of the Hartnell-era historical stories.
Still, if Saward has fallen slightly too much in love with Mace, he has refrained from structuring the story beats around the guest star, as he later would to catastrophic effect with Lytton. We can also, slightly cheekily, see this as a precursor to those Steven Moffat Tenth Doctor scripts where the regular companions take a back seat while the Doctor hymns the wonders of the latest sassy female guest star. And even there, the comparison doesn’t harm The Visitation as much as it should do: Mace pushes the rest of the guest stars to one side but the common criticism that he also elbows the TARDIS crew out of the way struck me as overstated. Nyssa, in particular, gets one of her lamentably uncommon showcases, blasting the Terileptil’s android to death with her bass-blasting subwoofers, then calmly using a fire extinguisher on the remains. It’s cool and responsible. You never saw Ace clearing up after herself when she smashed a Dalek to bits.
Next: Black Orchid (1982)
