Classic Doctor Who - Season 3 - The Ark (1966) - Review

Starring: William Hartnell, Peter Purves & Jackie Lane

Written By: Paul Erickson & Lesley Scott

Directed By: Michael Imison

 

If I were to go to any news outlet, I'm fairly sure that I'd find at least one story about a new threat to our health or to our well-being. We always spend a lot of time worrying about our own futures and the future of the human race as a whole – will we pollute the planet to death, get wiped out by a meteor, or killed by an unforeseen pandemic? Our constant worry allows the sci-fi genre to explore what the future may hold for us, and as The Ark proves, Doctor Who is no exception.

 

Around ten million years into the future, the TARDIS arrives on a vast spaceship carrying the last of the human race to a new home seven-hundred years away. All is well onboard the ship until the Doctor, Steven and Dodo arrive, when Dodo's cold results in a deadly plague. Having found the cure for the common cold years ago, the humans, as well as their alien servants the Monoids, have no defence against the virus. Working against time, the Doctor must find a cure to stop the sickness, but could it already be too late to avoid the consequences?

 

The Ark was Doctor Who's first look as to what the future held for humanity, and while other more recent stories have explored this same concept, such as The Ark In Space, Utopia and The Beast Below, The Ark was something of an early first attempt. As first attempts go, The Ark is a success, and it can boast some really great ideas that were already verging on being ahead of its own time. By 1966, this was the furthest the Doctor and his companions had travelled into the future, and Paul Erickson and Lesley Scott's vision of human life millions of years into the future is pretty inspired for the time. With the Earth destroyed, the humans onboard the Ark are on a 700-year voyage to a new home, and aside from the Guardians who oversee the journey, most are kept in a miniaturized single-cell state until they arrive. They share the ship with their servants, the silent one-eyed Monoids, and this attention to detail makes everything feel real. There's even some shots in Parts 3 and 4 which show how they eat and prepare food, using pills that expand in seconds into full meals.

 

It isn't just humanity's future that the writers are hoping to explore, but also the implications of time travel. A great visual cue for showing this story's use of time travel is the statue being built over 700 years. When the Doctor, Steven and Dodo first arrive, the statue has only just begun construction and is designed to be of a human, but once they return 700 years late, they find the statue complete and now of a Monoid. However, an even better exploration of time travel's effects is Dodo's cold. Though incurable, we treat colds as a common illness from which we recover in just a couple of weeks, but to the inhabitants of the Ark, a cold is a fatal virus against which they have no defence, since it wiped out years before they were born. An effective comparison could be our lack of defence against from the plague or black death, if it ever returned. It's a brilliant and interesting idea, well-explored in the first two parts. Most of the time, the ideas and themes in The Ark are incorporated well into the story. Even so, there are some pacing issues as Part 2 grinds to a halt as the humans start arguing about to do with the Doctor, Steven and Dodo. That being said, the twist ending of Part 2 is done well, and the writers have stitched together two different stories to great effect (though the first two parts were the more interesting to me personally). 

 

The Ark often gets a rough ride because of the Monoids. Its a shame really, as the Monoids are very nearly a good design for an alien race, but get let down. The bodies look fine, and having their single eye being held in actor's mouths is a good idea. However, they're upstaged by two things in particular: the first being the hair. I understand the hair was designed to hide the top half of the actors' faces but its awful and makes them look like an alien version of the Beatles. In Parts 3 and 4, the Monoids are given translators so they can speak, but the voice lets them down as well. If the hair wasn't silly enough, the silly voices don't do them any favours, and are probably the reason why the Monoids aren't regarded all that well by the fanbase. Monoid 1's line “Take them to the security kitchen!” is also up there as one of Doctor Who's dialogue disasters.

 

Aside from some let-down with the Monoids, the rest of The Ark's production values are quite impressive. It's not too badly dated, and the clean futuristic aesthetic of the majority of the ship is well-realized. In Part 1, we're told that the Ark is a huge ship carrying different humans and animal species from across Earth (Dodo even makes the comparison to the tale of Noah's Ark), and while understandably we never get to see that, I still believe the vast scale of the Ark. In the main control chamber, we can see a vast amount of area in the background, and attention to detail like this goes a long way in convincing the audience of the Ark's size. The most impressive set has to be the jungle in which the TARDIS first lands. It's a fantastic set which director Michael Imison makes full use of, with plenty of trees, plants and other shrubbery and helped hugely by having actual live animals on set, even going as far as having an Indian Elephant.

 

While The Ark can boast about its great ideas and execution, it definitely can't do the same for its characters. Both the humans and the Monoids on the Ark are dull and interchangeable, ranging from uninteresting to annoying. The only noteworthy characters are a just and fair commander, his sympathetic daughter, and probably the worst of the bunch, deputy commander Zentos. Zentos quickly got on my nerves and never became anything more than unlikeable and overly serious and suspicious, doing little more than going head-to-head with Steven. Though William Hartnell's nearly always fantastic and underrated Doctor is as great as ever here, even his companions aren't particularly memorable either. Like most of the 1st Doctor's later companions, Steven and Dodo leave very little impression. Steven is really just Ian 2.0, and Dodo is probably the most forgettable regular character Doctor Who has ever known. At the end of the day, it's just William Hartnell's Doctor who makes for an endearing presence in The Ark.

 

In conclusion, The Ark may be rusty around the edges and not quite as impactful as it ideally should have been, but it still holds up. Yes there are some issues with pacing, the design of the Monoids and barely any noteworthy or engaging characters, but it was the first time Doctor Who had ever really gone in this direction. It still has fantastic ideas, a great twist in the middle and depicts the humans of the future not as advanced demigods but as flawed and with their own vulnerabilities.

The Ark
 

8/10