Doctor Who A-Z #127: Enlightenment (1983)

By the end of Peter Davison’s second season there is an unbridgeable gap between what the show does well and what the production team and the fans both want it to do. What it does well – and what it’s been doing a lot of recently – is produce cerebral mysteries, often themed around mysticism or time travel, which delve into the companions’ back stories and show off the Fifth Doctor’s pensive, empathetic qualities to fine effect. What people want it to do is a big gun battle with some old monsters where all the guest cast die. Come the next season this will turn out to be a schism that rips the show in half; even at the script stage, a series which shows more confidence in Warriors of the Deep than it does The Awakening is a series which doesn’t know what it’s good at. For now, we have Enlightenment. The lone Doctor Who story written by the series’ first solo female writer, Barbara Clegg, it is bettered only by Christopher Bailey’s Mara stories as a look into a parallel universe where the Davison era went sensationally right.

There is a definite feeling that Clegg is sneaking something under the noses of producer John Nathan-Turner and script editor Eric Saward here. The serial only aired in this slot because Saward was having problems with Pat Mills’s script for Song of the Space Whale, specifically its class politics. While he tried and failed to sort that one out, Clegg produced a script which all but demands Marxist and queer readings. Her stated inspiration for the Eternals, the serial’s main alien race, was a group of upper-class relatives who she felt treated their poorer relations as sources of mean-spirited entertainment. Sure enough, the Eternals treat their “ephemerals” – creatures who die like you and me – as sources of cheap labour and, it is heavily implied, transgressive sex. The Eternal Marriner’s attempts to seduce Tegan are neatly paralleled with Turlough’s ongoing struggle with the Black Guardian trying to use him as an instrument to kill the Doctor, a storyline which comes to a head here.

It’s a strange metaphor for the show at this point, given Nathan-Turner’s famous squeamishness around romance and sexuality. But it is as nothing compared to what happens halfway through the story, when Turlough – the show’s first queer-coded companion, remember – is taken on board a ship whose senior staff are played by Open All Hours‘s Lynda Baron and Leee John from the camp synth-pop band Imagination. Let’s just say it’s a party ship: immediately Turlough is chained up by Baron’s bosomy Captain Wrack (to misquote Clive Anderson, one letter too many but never mind), a lusty space pirate queen who could sail straight into a Richard O’Brien play without much adjustment. Baron is fabulous, unable to even pull a door handle open without a saucy wiggle of the eyebrows. John is often criticised for not being much of an actor, and he isn’t, but his fey, hyper-emotional delivery is the right kind of bad to fit in with the actual good performances here. As befits their aristocratic inspiration, the Eternals are strange, distant people, closer to the abstractions of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Black and White Lodges than conventional science fiction aliens. In a delightful subversion of expectations, they recognise the Doctor is a Time Lord – and, unlike any other alien species the series has given this realisation to, they declare themselves airily unimpressed. Which makes a certain witty sense: why should immortals, who will witness every moment in history themselves, be excited by time travellers?

That said, the Doctor grabs a replacement for his stick of celery from an Eternal ship here, which seems to code him as a character more aligned with these odd mythical mariners than anyone else he might meet. Remember that the original stick was taken from Castrovalva, an imaginary world created by the Master, and you begin to see this as a precursor to Steven Moffat’s insistence that the Doctor is a fairytale character at heart. Indeed, Enlightenment is perhaps the oldest Doctor Who story that you can imagine being aired under Moffat, Russell T Davies or Chris Chibnall without being altered for anything other than run-time.

Sometimes this ahead-of-its-time quality can be very strange. The resolution of the Black Guardian plotline reminds you that the White and Black Guardians, who previously regarded the Fourth Doctor as a servant and an irritant respectively, are now actively wrestling over the Fifth Doctor’s fate. It feels like a first step towards the more Messianic Tenth and Eleventh Doctors, ones who frequently ended up right at the centre of universe-spanning mysteries. That said, Clegg’s decision to centre the plot on the regular characters delivers several quieter, eerier triumphs. One secondary mystery revolves around a photo of Tegan’s late Aunt Vanessa turning up on a spaceship she’s never visited before, anticipating the 21st-century series’s focus on the companions’ families as a running part of the show. Equally, some of the show’s positive qualities hark back to the series’ earliest days, not least its Hartnell-era joy in exploration. I was initially confused about why Turlough enters Wrack’s secret chamber (careful!) in episode three; only later did it strike me that he did it because someone told him not to go there. That’s an essential Doctor Who motivation, really – it just isn’t indulged often enough in this era.

Davison, too, is enjoying the change of pace. He’s given one of his rare opportunities to display real moral indignation when he realises how the Eternals are exploiting their crew; again, a core Doctor Who emotion that the Fifth Doctor’s era too often avoids. He’s also very good at slowly unpicking the plot, particularly in episode one, which ends in a big reveal – the ships are sailing through space! – that only opens up more delicious questions. Realising that the Davison era is working against its better instincts allows you to read some of the period’s misfires in a more forgiving way: it was a good idea to return to pure historicals at this point in the show’s evolution, it just wasn’t a good idea for Terence Dudley to write it. But Enlightenment requires no such special pleading. It is a distinct, decadent pleasure that’s off charting its own course from the main series.

Next: The King’s Demons (1983)

Graham’s Archive – Enlightenment

Full Doctor Who Archive Here