Episode Review: Arc 92, Horror of Fang Rock
Horror of Fang Rock
In which the Doctor fails Finding Brighton 101:
Right down to the title, the arc is a classic Victorian horror story, with hints of ghostly possession and something the Doctor tries to refer to a lycanthropy-it isn’t really, but who cares? It operates as a bit of a bottle episode, with locations confined to one lighthouse during a storm.
The actual threat of the episode-the Who science behind what functions as standard gothic horror-are the Rutans, trying to take earth as part of their ‘strategic retreat.’ Read: mad, territory-grappling fleeing from the enemy in a particularly bad stage of their long war against the Sontarans, which seems to last the length of the series, the outcome seeming as uncertain and immaterial as that of the war between Oceania and Eastasia.
This is, interestingly, the only time we see the Rutans-we don’t really get much about them, other than their preference for stealth, that would in any way indicate why culturally they and the Sontarans are so bitterly opposed. Which is fine, really, because anything to that effect would seem like a justification for the long, meaningless war that lingers in the back of Who canon, and the show in no way needs to provide such an argument.
The reasoning behind why the Rutans are killing in this drawn-out, suspenseful manner is kind of weak, but it’s really beside the point of the episode’s strengths.
The writer creates an interesting cast of well-drawn ensemble characters only to kill them all off over the course of the episode, the drive of the threat overcoming any pathos, outweighing any desire to linger over the dead.
The cast really consists of three separate groups: the lighthouse keepers, the passengers of a ship that crashes when the lighthouse malfunctions due to alien interference, and the Doctor and Leela.
The theme of technology encountering tradition and superstition is introduced by the lengthy discussion on the part of the lighthouse keepers on the merits of oil and electric lighthouses before the Doctor and Leela ever show up. They have an interesting, all-male Maiden-Mother-Crone dynamic, with the fresh young apprentice (Hawkins), the progress-minded, capable Principal Keeper (Ben), and the seasoned, lore-keeping old salt (Reuben) who resents the changing technology he’s being forced to adapt to and prefers the security of the old system he knows best.
All three of them are well-portrayed. The Principal Keeper dies first, apparently at the hands of the generator, and Reuben blames it on the fabled Beast of Fang Rock, which apparently struck this very lighthouse previously, killing two keepers and driving the last mad. No correlation is drawn between the previous violent events and those of the present: I like that the writer resisted the urge to too-neatly draw the story in and smooth it all out into one over-arching explanation.
There’s a conversation between Reuben and Hawkins about who will go shroud Ben’s mangled body, in which Hawkins resists having to go look at the corpse, and Reuben explicitly offers to do it in his stead to protect Hawkin’s innocence, to ‘keep him a boy’ rather than forcing a transition into manhood that seems to follow inexorably from witnessing death. This is interesting given Leela’s commentary about exposure to death in this episode.
There’s some concern with the walking dead (Ben) in this episode that’s well-handled. When Reuben gets possesses by the Rutan , he stands stock still in the locked room, glowing lightly. It’s a creepy image, and the fear element is deepened when the Doctor figures out from the degree of rigor mortis on the body that the Rutan isn’t possessing living flesh, it’s studying the dead by mauling Ben’s body and then operating Reuben’s corpse based on the knowledge it’s gained like a grisly puppet.
The second group in the lighthouse, the shipwreck survivors, only get their stories hinted at. A sailor who’s survived is bitter about having been unwisely forced to pilot the ship in the storm by the ship’s owner, a vicious financier traveling with his pretty, well-dressed secretary and a ‘friend,’ a former colonel. While the Pilot’s plight is pretty clear, and his resentment of the financier stalwart and commendable (he has a good scene of explaining to the financier that people are dead due to the financier’s poor judgment, and so no, the pilot won’t be helping him make it to the main land to wire his London offices, thanks anyway), the others’ situations are murkier.
The Pilot refers to the secretary as the financier’s ‘fancy woman’ and from her clothes and the fact that she’s traveling alone with two gentlemen in a professional capacity in about 1902 indicates that she might indeed be kept. There’s been some shady deal between the ex-Colonel and the financier, the details of which are never really fully disclosed to the audience, but the Colonel’s anxiety about how the deal has compromised his honor, as opposed to the financier’s ruthless bitchiness in the fact of his thwarted business aspirations, ensure that your sympathy entirely rests with the Colonel. The super-shady quality of it reminded me of Dizzy’s Seekrit Suez Canal pact or something lulzy like that. His remark about finding Leela attractive is met with derision from the Financier’s secretary, who asks how long he was in India, again? “Long enough, my dear, to learn to appreciate nature.” Imperialist, Jingoistic gold.
Leela really shines in this episode. And not just because she trades in her Victorian beach wear for a smoking-hot casual ensemble with black slacks, thigh high leather boots and a big cozy sweater. She pimp-slaps the hysterical secretary, but also kindly attempts to console the woman over her superstitious belief in astrology. Leela says that she too used to believe in Shamans, but now she believes in Science instead. This direct trade of belief in one system of Magical Thinking for another, with the Doctor as an object of her faith rather than simply someone she travels with, adds a strange dimension to her very visible loyalty to him-it’s interesting he’s not in the room to hear her explain herself in this way (I feel like Leela would have said the same thing even if he were, because Leela doesn’t care who hears her, she always means precisely what she says). I feel like he might not be comfortable with seeing himself in such a light.
That said, we do get a few Primitive Leela moments that actually I didn’t mind so much in this episode. Leela starts to undress to change in front of a VERY flustered young Hawkins: Leela apparently doesn’t get Western body-modesty, which is realistic, but kind of cute. She tells Hawkins to take advantage of his free time by consulting ofern with the elders of his tribe when Hawkins complains of boredom. She attempts to free possessed!Reuben by breaking down the door of the room he’s holed himself up in with a big hammer from the generator room, screaming, “Old One! Hear me!” in response to the Doctor having tried to explain to her that he might be in shock and non-responsive.
Her response to thinking she might be permanently blind at the end (she’s just dazed by the flash from the Doctor destroying the Rutan mother ship, which he accomplished by focusing the light of the lighthouse through a diamond from the financier-partly Leela’s good suggestion) is to hand the Doctor her knife and ask him to kill her, calmly and confidently. She would rather die than prematurely suffer the fate of aged, infirm dependents. It’s kind of a funny moment due to the dramatic irony that she’s going to be fine in 30 seconds, but the intensity of her conviction makes me really fond of Leela.
The Doctor doesn’t have a ton to do in this episode. He acts well, yells at the secretary to clear off twice with surprising, non-Doctorish force, and easily controls the situation to the best of his ability-though in the end his assurances that everyone would be alright if they followed his instruction and properly defended themselves are proved totally false. This is one serial, though, where his in-your-face confidence comes off as simply Doctor-ish rather than freaking annoying. I love the Doctor quoting a Gibson poem at the end. It is kind of odd, though, how thoroughly unphased he is by his failure to prevent all the needless death in this arc at its end.
In which the Doctor fails Finding Brighton 101:
Right down to the title, the arc is a classic Victorian horror story, with hints of ghostly possession and something the Doctor tries to refer to a lycanthropy-it isn’t really, but who cares? It operates as a bit of a bottle episode, with locations confined to one lighthouse during a storm.
The actual threat of the episode-the Who science behind what functions as standard gothic horror-are the Rutans, trying to take earth as part of their ‘strategic retreat.’ Read: mad, territory-grappling fleeing from the enemy in a particularly bad stage of their long war against the Sontarans, which seems to last the length of the series, the outcome seeming as uncertain and immaterial as that of the war between Oceania and Eastasia.
This is, interestingly, the only time we see the Rutans-we don’t really get much about them, other than their preference for stealth, that would in any way indicate why culturally they and the Sontarans are so bitterly opposed. Which is fine, really, because anything to that effect would seem like a justification for the long, meaningless war that lingers in the back of Who canon, and the show in no way needs to provide such an argument.
The reasoning behind why the Rutans are killing in this drawn-out, suspenseful manner is kind of weak, but it’s really beside the point of the episode’s strengths.
The writer creates an interesting cast of well-drawn ensemble characters only to kill them all off over the course of the episode, the drive of the threat overcoming any pathos, outweighing any desire to linger over the dead.
The cast really consists of three separate groups: the lighthouse keepers, the passengers of a ship that crashes when the lighthouse malfunctions due to alien interference, and the Doctor and Leela.
The theme of technology encountering tradition and superstition is introduced by the lengthy discussion on the part of the lighthouse keepers on the merits of oil and electric lighthouses before the Doctor and Leela ever show up. They have an interesting, all-male Maiden-Mother-Crone dynamic, with the fresh young apprentice (Hawkins), the progress-minded, capable Principal Keeper (Ben), and the seasoned, lore-keeping old salt (Reuben) who resents the changing technology he’s being forced to adapt to and prefers the security of the old system he knows best.
All three of them are well-portrayed. The Principal Keeper dies first, apparently at the hands of the generator, and Reuben blames it on the fabled Beast of Fang Rock, which apparently struck this very lighthouse previously, killing two keepers and driving the last mad. No correlation is drawn between the previous violent events and those of the present: I like that the writer resisted the urge to too-neatly draw the story in and smooth it all out into one over-arching explanation.
There’s a conversation between Reuben and Hawkins about who will go shroud Ben’s mangled body, in which Hawkins resists having to go look at the corpse, and Reuben explicitly offers to do it in his stead to protect Hawkin’s innocence, to ‘keep him a boy’ rather than forcing a transition into manhood that seems to follow inexorably from witnessing death. This is interesting given Leela’s commentary about exposure to death in this episode.
There’s some concern with the walking dead (Ben) in this episode that’s well-handled. When Reuben gets possesses by the Rutan , he stands stock still in the locked room, glowing lightly. It’s a creepy image, and the fear element is deepened when the Doctor figures out from the degree of rigor mortis on the body that the Rutan isn’t possessing living flesh, it’s studying the dead by mauling Ben’s body and then operating Reuben’s corpse based on the knowledge it’s gained like a grisly puppet.
The second group in the lighthouse, the shipwreck survivors, only get their stories hinted at. A sailor who’s survived is bitter about having been unwisely forced to pilot the ship in the storm by the ship’s owner, a vicious financier traveling with his pretty, well-dressed secretary and a ‘friend,’ a former colonel. While the Pilot’s plight is pretty clear, and his resentment of the financier stalwart and commendable (he has a good scene of explaining to the financier that people are dead due to the financier’s poor judgment, and so no, the pilot won’t be helping him make it to the main land to wire his London offices, thanks anyway), the others’ situations are murkier.
The Pilot refers to the secretary as the financier’s ‘fancy woman’ and from her clothes and the fact that she’s traveling alone with two gentlemen in a professional capacity in about 1902 indicates that she might indeed be kept. There’s been some shady deal between the ex-Colonel and the financier, the details of which are never really fully disclosed to the audience, but the Colonel’s anxiety about how the deal has compromised his honor, as opposed to the financier’s ruthless bitchiness in the fact of his thwarted business aspirations, ensure that your sympathy entirely rests with the Colonel. The super-shady quality of it reminded me of Dizzy’s Seekrit Suez Canal pact or something lulzy like that. His remark about finding Leela attractive is met with derision from the Financier’s secretary, who asks how long he was in India, again? “Long enough, my dear, to learn to appreciate nature.” Imperialist, Jingoistic gold.
Leela really shines in this episode. And not just because she trades in her Victorian beach wear for a smoking-hot casual ensemble with black slacks, thigh high leather boots and a big cozy sweater. She pimp-slaps the hysterical secretary, but also kindly attempts to console the woman over her superstitious belief in astrology. Leela says that she too used to believe in Shamans, but now she believes in Science instead. This direct trade of belief in one system of Magical Thinking for another, with the Doctor as an object of her faith rather than simply someone she travels with, adds a strange dimension to her very visible loyalty to him-it’s interesting he’s not in the room to hear her explain herself in this way (I feel like Leela would have said the same thing even if he were, because Leela doesn’t care who hears her, she always means precisely what she says). I feel like he might not be comfortable with seeing himself in such a light.
That said, we do get a few Primitive Leela moments that actually I didn’t mind so much in this episode. Leela starts to undress to change in front of a VERY flustered young Hawkins: Leela apparently doesn’t get Western body-modesty, which is realistic, but kind of cute. She tells Hawkins to take advantage of his free time by consulting ofern with the elders of his tribe when Hawkins complains of boredom. She attempts to free possessed!Reuben by breaking down the door of the room he’s holed himself up in with a big hammer from the generator room, screaming, “Old One! Hear me!” in response to the Doctor having tried to explain to her that he might be in shock and non-responsive.
Her response to thinking she might be permanently blind at the end (she’s just dazed by the flash from the Doctor destroying the Rutan mother ship, which he accomplished by focusing the light of the lighthouse through a diamond from the financier-partly Leela’s good suggestion) is to hand the Doctor her knife and ask him to kill her, calmly and confidently. She would rather die than prematurely suffer the fate of aged, infirm dependents. It’s kind of a funny moment due to the dramatic irony that she’s going to be fine in 30 seconds, but the intensity of her conviction makes me really fond of Leela.
The Doctor doesn’t have a ton to do in this episode. He acts well, yells at the secretary to clear off twice with surprising, non-Doctorish force, and easily controls the situation to the best of his ability-though in the end his assurances that everyone would be alright if they followed his instruction and properly defended themselves are proved totally false. This is one serial, though, where his in-your-face confidence comes off as simply Doctor-ish rather than freaking annoying. I love the Doctor quoting a Gibson poem at the end. It is kind of odd, though, how thoroughly unphased he is by his failure to prevent all the needless death in this arc at its end.