Doctor Who A-Z #23: The Ark (1966)

Doctor Who is a fantastical show, so much so that every time a character does something banal, your ears prick up. When Dorothea “Dodo” Chaplet, the Doctor’s newest companion, steps out of the TARDIS on her first voyage and immediately sneezes, we know there has to be some reason for it. Sure enough, she ends up exposing an ark full of humans fleeing an uninhabitable Earth to a terrible plague from their past. It’s the flu, and since the future humans no longer have herd immunity the Doctor must synthesise a vaccine. By the end of episode two, everyone is cured and the Doctor, Dodo and Steven take off for another adventure. Except…

Doctor Who is also a show about monsters. It wasn’t meant to be, famously, and even in its third year it still hasn’t fully transitioned away from the semi-educational, historically focused brief it originally had. But by now, every time the TARDIS lands in the future or on another world the audience expects something monstrous, even if that expectation is subverted. In this case it’s the Monoids, a voiceless slave race used by the humans to perform menial tasks. They have reptilian skin, a single boggly eye and Beatle wigs. They look, in short, ridiculous, but that’s hardly a unique problem in the Hartnell era. What is a problem is that, straight after the Doctor and his friends have left the ark, the TARDIS lands them back on it several hundred years later. The humans have been weakened by exposure to the cold virus, so much so that now they are slaves to the Monoids.

This is played as a frightening, tense situation, and had the story began at Episode Three the viewer would surely agree. Coming after two episodes in which the Doctor, Dodo and Steven have barely expressed even the most token concern about the Monoids’ enslavement, though, it leaves a very sour taste in the mouth. Why is human slavery seen as more unjust, more unnatural, than Monoid slavery? The only possible answer is that the Monoids are monsters and the humans are not. The intended threat of The Ark comes from a formerly oppressed people (literally) finding their voice and gaining power – the same fear Enoch Powell would tap into two years later when he spoke of “the black man having the whip hand over the white man”. In a less fraught time, maybe this could be seen as an unfortunate accident, in the same way that The Unquiet Dead was interpreted as having an anti-immigrant subtext that couldn’t be further from writer Mark Gatiss’s actual politics. But The Ark was written at the same time as the Civil Rights movement was gathering pace.

It’s time, then, to play everyone’s least favourite parlour game: to what extent should the unbelievably awful politics of this artwork affect our view of it? And in this case, I’m minded to say a lot. The Talons of Weng-Chiang has a surface veneer of flip, thoughtless racism that can unfortunately make it harder to appreciate its towering brilliance in the fields of dialogue, plotting, acting, directing and everything other than racial sensitivity. The Ark, by contrast, is a mid-tier story that’s spoiled by a deep if subtextual undercurrent of racist paranoia. The Underwater Menace is artistically a worse serial than this, but it does at least have a genuine conviction that Zaroff’s enslaved Fish People should unionise and rebel. Surely that’s what Doctor Who is meant to be about?

The main asset that The Ark has is the director Michael Imison. He never returned to the show, but he does a sterling job here. He has a fine control of pacing and uses the studio space in a genuinely dramatic, dynamic fashion. Despite the daft design of the Monoids, he still handles the effects sequences well, and the serial as a whole looks more cared-for, more lavish than the often overreaching space operas of the Hartnell era. There is a fantastically subtle visual gag at the start as Dodo explores the ark’s wildlife; Imison inserts a cutaway shot of an elephant, then cuts to a reaction shot of Dodo, leading you to believe the animal is a piece of stock footage before an overhead shot reveals that no, they managed to get an elephant in BBC television centre this week.

Full marks for the elephant, then, but the elephant in the room remains a problem. Writers Paul Erickson and Lesley Scott do, at least, try and give the newly empowered Monoids some sort of personality, and the ending isn’t as simple as just killing all the monsters. It also introduces a third race who are native to the planet the humans are trying to resettle on, which brings up the issue of colonialism, and that’s far too much to tackle for a serial that’s already busy making a total hash of discussing slavery. The Ark at its peak suggests the kind of knotty ethical dilemmas and political allegories that a Pertwee-era script would lavish seven episodes on, and there’s enough redeeming material here to suggest that version of the script might have worked. At four episodes, it’s a botch job.

This is the last serial produced by John Wiles. He has a fine reputation among fans, albeit one based more off what he didn’t manage to do than what he did. Wiles had taken note of the audience research showing that Doctor Who had more adult viewers than had previously been supposed; he wanted to take the show into more philosophical, hard SF areas that William Hartnell found unpalatable. Wiles’s most legendary story idea was The Face of God, in which a spaceship breaking the light barrier would find itself confronting an alien deity. That sounds a lot more adventurous than the stories Wiles actually got made, none of which broke the mould of Hartnell’s era: a comedy historical, a Dalek epic, another historical and this. We fans are prone to extravagant daydreams of what might have been, and The Ark feels like a check against getting too starry-eyed about Wiles. Out of all the serials he produced, it is closest to his dream of challenging, ideas-led SF. Unfortunately the ideas aren’t all good ones.

Next: The Celestial Toymaker (1966)

Graham’s Archive – The Ark

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