Ghost Light Part Three

The one where the Doctor defeats Light with Darwinism...

Many people say they don't understand Ghost Light. I get why they say it, because it's not an easy watch, but the basics of what the story's about are present in the transmitted story, albeit tricky to catch. Basic explanations are given in the opening dialogue of part 3, when Light emerges and the Doctor explains who's who (as does Ace, who seems remarkably well informed).

"It's called Light," the Doctor tells Inspector Mackenzie. "It's come to survey life here... And while it slept, the survey got out of control." It's all a big experiment to catalogue life on Earth. Josiah is the survey, Control is, well... the control, and Light is an intergalactic David Attenborough. Light came to Earth in the stone spaceship, and while it slept, the survey and control got out of hand. Nimrod, a specimen of the Neanderthal race taken from pre-history, was released from his quarantine cubicle by Josiah as he climbed the evolutionary ladder and craved servants.

Granted, it's not clear. But it is there, in the murk and confusion of everything else. The workprint on the blu-ray is an improvement as it adds deleted scenes back in which explain things further, but the ultimate version is by far Marc Platt's novelisation, which gives the complete picture and makes everything much clearer. You still have to concentrate, but it makes Ghost Light complete. Platt's story was just too broad and too deep for the small screen!

Light bursts out of the lift in the form of an angel, possibly the highest physical form it could take in this God-fearing Christian world. John Hallam gives an unusual performance, switching from a gruff, threatening voice to a more angelic, sing-song delivery, and this juxtaposition works well in making Light an unsettling presence.

Light doesn't seem to like change. It came to Earth to survey it, but evolution played its trump card and allowed organic life to develop, change, renew, mutate and grow. Nothing stayed the same, so Light's Catalogue of Life was never accurate and never up to date. It's a bit like me trying to keep on top of my Doctor Who Cast and Crew site every time a new series of Doctor Who is shown! It's never finished, just an ever-evolving project.

But Light wants closure, it doesn't like the fact its catalogue will never be finished. What puzzles me is that it must surely be aware of evolution on the other planets it's visited? Evolution is not a concept unique to planet Earth, so why has it come as such a surprise now? Doctor Who spin-off fiction tells us that Light is actually an Eternal who took it upon himself to record all organic life in the universe (it's one way to pass endless time, I suppose). So why is evolution on Earth so vexing for him? Surely he's come across this before?

Light wants the change to stop, so decides to destroy all organic life in a firestorm, eradicating all life on Earth so that it can no longer change, and his catalogue will at last be correct. But if he does this everywhere he goes, there won't be any organic life to record in his catalogue, so it seems to me a rather self-defeating plan.

Light aside, there's plenty else going on in this episode, including the developing evolution of the Control creature, which has gone from a savage monster in part 1 to an Eliza Doolittle "lady-like" played by Sharon Duce. It's a rather thankless role for Duce, but she pulls it off well by adding to her performance with each passing scene, until she ends up dressed in a Victorian frock and speaking as eloquently as the next lady-like. Control and Smith swap places, with Control doing the evolving and Smith eventually regressing. I'm not sure why that happens. The final scene in the spaceship where Control just says "Stop!", the husks' heads blow up, and Smith collapses into a base heap seems to happen without reason. The book probably explains, but on screen it's confusing.

There are some tense action scenes as Gwendoline and her zombie-like maid chase Ace around the house with a hankie soaked in chloroform. Gwendoline wants to send "dear Ace" to Java, but the peril from Perivale is having none of it, and it's great that Sophie Aldred gets a proper "girl fight" as the two actresses roll about (love the fact Ace has her boots on under her dress!). The scene where Ace shoves the maid in the room with Gwendoline, then locks them both in, is great - and then Gwendoline smashes her way through the door with an actual scythe, like something out of a slasher flick!

It's all great stuff, including the beautifully surreal scene where Ace is left alone by the Doctor and she starts to experience some kind of waking nightmare. The stuffed birds and insects that decorate the house start to come alive. We hear birds squawk and beetles chomp, and the house seems to turn on her, accusing her of her future misdeed. We find out Ace burned the house down in 1983 after sensing the residual evil left behind by Smith, so maybe Gabriel Chase - somehow enlivened by the energy from Light's ship - is pointing the finger at Ace, its arsonist-in-waiting. This explains Ace's guilt complex, and the wonderfully surreal use of police sirens and blue lights. It's a masterfully directed scene by Alan Wareing, who then manages to frame Gwendoline in front of a wall-mounted display of peacock feathers to make her look like an angel of death.

Another of my favourite scenes is when everybody gathers for dinner ("I knew it was a trap as soon as I walked into it"). "Don't have the soup," the Doctor warns Ace, very wisely it turns out as the soup would appear to be the reduced remains of Inspector Mackenzie, "the cream of Scotland Yard". It emerges over dinner that Smith has befriended Redvers because he has an invitation to Buckingham Palace, and Smith wants to be his plus-one. Smith's plan is to assassinate Queen Victoria (the crowned Saxe-Coburg) and restore order to the Empire. Somehow. Smith says there is no directive from the throne, which possibly means the Queen wasn't giving much guidance to her Imperialist lackeys in the 1880s. It's true that Victoria saw the British Empire as a benign, civilising institution, once writing: "It is not in our custom to annexe countries, unless we are obliged and forced to do so." Maybe those men who ran her Empire thought differently, including, it seems, Josiah Samuel Smith.

I've never been sure why Smith thinks assassinating Victoria would restore order to the British Empire. Maybe he thought it would be better to have her son (a man) in charge instead?

There's some welcome closure for Gwendoline too, who finally finds her long-lost mama when the Doctor jogs Mrs Pritchard's memories with a locket containing her photo as Lady Pritchard. They find one another in an upstairs bedroom, and reminisce about the good times before Lady Pritchard remembers that Gwendoline sent her father away to Java. It seems Gwendoline was mesmerised by Smith first, then Lady Pritchard, leaving Gwendoline to send her father to Java when he saw what was in the cellar. Recognising the change in their relationship, Light decides to call a halt and turns the mother and daughter to stone (this is the final scene recorded for classic Doctor Who). 

In a perfectly Seventh Doctory way, Light is defeated by the application of human creativity. Light's "imagination comma, lack of" means he struggles to understand the concept of imagination, one product of which is fiction. The Doctor asks Light whether his catalogue includes mythological creatures like basilisks and dragons, or fictional creations such as bandersnatches and slithy toves (from the work of Lewis Carroll), calling into question the veracity of everything else Light's supposedly catalogued. The idea that his catalogue may never be completed overwhelms Light, and he finally disperses.

Down in the cellar, the energy Light intended to create the firestorm is redirected into powering the stone spaceship, which now has a new crew which intends to explore the universe at the speed of thought, captained by who else but Redvers Fenn-Cooper. It's a spin-off waiting to happen isn't it? The further adventures of Lady Control, Redvers Fenn-Cooper and Nimrod the Neanderthal aboard a stone spaceship, with a "most unhappy creature" in the form of a devolved Josiah as prisoner. Sadly, Nimrod actor Carl Forgione has died, but Big Finish could certainly have a bit of fun if they recast him and employed Michael Cochrane and Sharon Duce to reprise their roles. Maybe even Ian Hogg could return as the survey creature?

The final scene sees the Doctor start the grandfather clock ticking again. "The house will remember, just the ghost of an evil memory lingering," he tells Ace. "A dark secret after the candle is out." It's a nice way to draw an end to this surreal, crazy, overblown whirlwind of ideas and concepts which writer Marc Platt struggles to contain in a traditional three-part story structure. There's basically too much of Ghost Light. It's too rich and clever-clever for its own good, and as a result suffers terribly in the edit. Ghost Light would have been much better as a novel in the first place, and a TV version should have paired back the concept to make it clearer. There's so much ambition in Platt's script that Doctor Who was never going to fulfil it properly. In a way it's the greatest failing of script editor Andrew Cartmel that he didn't recognise Ghost Light needed weeding and edging before it was committed to film.

Ghost Light is a triumph of style and substance, but there's too much of it crammed into too small a space to make it classic. It needed to be simpler so its themes and ideas could be appreciated fully (eg, why was the snuff box full of light?). My tip: watch the workprint, then read the book. In many ways, the TV version of Ghost Light is defunct because the story's told much better elsewhere.

As an aside... I've always wondered what happened to the house following the events of Ghost Light. According to the 2013 book The Doctor: His Lives and Times, Gabriel Chase remained locked and shuttered for many years, avoided by the local villagers until, in the 1920s, a priest tried to exorcise the haunted building, but was scared away by the sight of a "fiery angel with piercing eyes and wings like thunder" (Light may have dispersed, but the "living house" still remembered). It remained abandoned and derelict until the 1980s, when Ace burned it down in anger after her friend's flat was firebombed. The council then tried to bulldoze the site, but workmen reported dangerous subsidence (a big hole where a cellar should be!) and infestations of aggressive tropical insects. Because of these insects, the site was declared a Site of Special Scientific Interest and became a conservation zone. It's begging for a sequel isn't it, especially if Light is still there, somewhere...

First broadcast: October 18th, 1989

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: Ace's living nightmare, with the taxidermy coming to life and the police sirens wailing.
The Bad: The fact they forgot to overlay a special effect on the Doctor when he's facing Light in the drawing room does poor Sylvester McCoy no favours, what with his gurning face and googly eyes.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★★★★☆☆ (story average: 7.7 out of 10)

Ace says "Professor": 86 

NEXT TIME: The Curse of Fenric...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Part One; Part Two

Find out birth/death dates, career information, and facts and trivia about this story's cast and crew at the Doctor Who Cast & Crew site.

Ghost Light is available on BBC DVD. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Ghost-Light-DVD/dp/B00029QXBO