Ghost Light
Story 153, Episodes 686-688, Season 26 Episodes 5-7
Doctor: Seventh Doctor
Companions: Ace McShane
The Doctor tries to get Ace to conquer her fears in a story that scarcely makes any sense.
The Review
I’d heard before watching this story that Ghost Light famously was incomprehensible. I am glad to say that is absolutely the case. Really, I can kind of see what they were going for here, but this is the rare classic story where I think we really could’ve used another episode. The Doctor takes Ace to an old house in Perivale 100 years before she saw something there that seriously frightened her. The Doctor is curious about a malevolent presence she sensed there, but in a deeper way wants Ace to fight her fear. That plot thread doesn’t quite get realized because the whole thing is just kind of a mess. It’s a story about evolution, albeit in the most bizarre way possible, starting by featuring a reverend who finds Darwin’s theory absolutely absurd, and gets de-evolved into an ape because of it. There are so many tiny plot threads its hard to keep track of them all, such as that our main villain Josiah is occupying the house after displacing and brainwashing the previous resident.
Light, the glowing guy, is the leader of some survey expedition of Earth. There’s also Control, a weird woman whose purpose I don’t quite understand. Several people like the Neanderthal Nimrod were preserved for millennia before being reawakened by Josiah, an intergalactic collector. Somehow he has ‘evolved’ into a Victorian gentlemen, the time’s apex predator, and wants to assassinate Queen Victoria herself. Light is upset that life keeps evolving making his survey of it incomplete, there’s some parallel with him and the captured moths Josiah has, but it isn’t completely borne out. Really, the story is just incredibly confusing, overstuffed, and unclear. It’s a shame because I am just loving everything Sylvester McCoy is doing, it is such a fresh take on the Doctor, unimposing but extremely cerebral and a fiery edge to him. If only I knew what was going on.
Ghost Light is about evolution being good, and how we’re all evolving and changing, and then a whole bunch of Victorian gobbledygook thrown in there.
7.5/10 I can’t give it a much higher score if I don’t know what’s going on, can I?
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