You Must Think My Head Zips Up the Back

"Oh look, a Christmas monster!"

I'm horribly behind with the Doctor Who DVDs at the moment, so much so that I've only just got round to watching Image of the Fendahl, released in May 2009. Obviously, I've seen it before a few times and enjoyed it, broadly agreeing with its reputation that it's a solid but unspectacular yarn and the last gasp of the "horror" style the series had been following for the previous few years. I hadn't realised in the past, however, what a shaggy mess it is.

Broadcast in the autumn of 1977, it was intended as a technological ghost story, in which the use of an experimental time scanner has allowed the discovery of an apparently human skull, albeit 12 million years old. Further tests at the scientists' base at a remote country house make little progress, but strange forces are afoot, forces that shaped the human race and could equally destroy it.

The most obvious problem with the story is the parallel that can be drawn to Quatermass and the Pit. Originally produced as a smash hit BBC serial in 1958 and remade as a film in 1967, it too tells the story of the discovery of an unnaturally-old human skull that points to alien intervention in human development. While Quatermass develops further in other directions, another television script by the same writer picks up the slack. The Stone Tape, shown on Christmas Night 1972, sees a group of scientists working at a remote country house on experimental technology and awakening an ancient evil force. Said writer, Nigel Kneale, might have been a little miffed to find this out, especially since he had refused an offer to work on Doctor Who, dismissing it as a children's programme.

Michael Bryant in The Stone Tape, preparing
to join the audience in soiling himself.

Now that the basic elements of the story are in place, it's only left to add a few extra elements to tie them together. Except they do nothing of the kind. The Doctor and companion Leela are drawn to the area by the use of the time scanner, which can cause serious damage with long-term use. After this, the scanner is effectively irrelevant to the story until the climax, when it provides the means of blowing up the building. The first person they meet is a shifty local, who in a cut scene fiddles with a charm around his neck. So, a suspicious yokel type then.

This connects later to the action in the house, where the characters are drawn from stock. If you were to meet someone called "Maximilian Stael", you'd think "What a great name for a villain". So when a character with that name appears, suspense evaporates like hydrogen on a hot day. The project's chief is one Doctor Fendelman, supposedly one of the world's richest men, whose name is referred to as odd in two scenes, but not developed further. Meanwhile, it takes little imagination to work out that "Adam Colby" is the heroic type, or will at least survive the longest, while "Thea Ransome" probably won't. Incidentally, Thea was to be played by Wanda Ventham with her natural blonde hair. BBC executives decreed that she wear a wig, as no one would take a blonde female scientist seriously.

Stael is somehow involved with a local cult, which is in turn connected to white witch Ma Tyler. Ma has psychic powers, which the Doctor comments are due to living next to the time fissure in the nearby wood all her life. The time fissure and the time scanner are supposed to be connected, one imagines, but yet again, this never goes any further, and neither do references to local legends of hauntings. If the hauntings are connected to the fissure, then fine. But if that's supposed to be a red herring for what's really going on, it doesn't make sense since the skull was found in Africa and only brought back recently.

The Fendahl Core. Very disco.

Back to Stael's cult. It is never stated, in any way, exactly what they plan to do. At first, they seem intent on reviving the Fendahl, a gestalt being that evolved on the long-destroyed Fifth Planet of the solar system and consumed life energy itself, effectively making it Death incarnate. The Time Lords destroyed the planet to prevent the Fendahl escaping, but it was able to project itself astrally to Earth and influence Man's development until we reached a point where we could bring it back to life. So Stael drugs Thea, intending that she will be the Fendahl Core, while the other members of the sect put on robes and get chanting. Then the Core starts turning them into Fendahleen, of which 13 are needed to make the creature complete, and Stael starts freaking out. What was he expecting? The embodiment of death to not kill everyone?

Fendelman, having been tied up for no reason, gets shot by Stael after realising that all his ancestors have lived only to bring the Fendahl back. I didn't realise surnames lasting 12 million years with that little consonantal drift. Colby gets tied up too, but then freed, while the Doctor hands a despairing Stael a loaded gun so he can blow his brains out.

Yes. Let me say that again. The Doctor helps someone commit suicide. It could be regarded as euthanasia, under the circumstances - Stael is starting to transform into a Fendahleen himself - but it's a huge ethical minefield that seems to be glossed over rather quickly.

Meanwhile, rock salt turns out to be the way to hold off the Fendahleen - hence the superstition of throwing salt over your shoulder, again something that has survived 12 million years - and the Doctor and Colby rig the time scanner to self-destruct, imploding the house and taking the Fendahl with it. The skull, locked in a lead-lined box will be dropped off in a supernova, ensuring its destruction.

This seems like a pretty fun story, and the individual elements are tried and trusted. But they don't fit together. Even with the above summary, they are still gaping holes in the story. The Doctor gets locked up as soon as he arrives in the house, but escapes with the door swings open, apparently of its own accord. The question of who frees him appears insoluble as all the characters are either busy or elsewhere. Terrance Dicks's novel adaptation corrects this by having the lock shatter when the Doctor kicks the door out of sheer frustration.

Some padding.

In Part Three, Leela and the Doctor take a trip to the Fifth Planet to look for a way to defeat the menace, only to find that it's not there anymore. Still, it fills on a few more minutes of plot. In the final episode, there's a brief, unscripted shot of the Core itself turning into a Fendahleen, but it later appears as the Core again, without any explanation as to what's going on. Even then, the final episode barely runs for 20 minutes.

Although superficially entertaining, Image of the Fendahl is really a dog's breakfast of a story, with elements added to a script because either no other means can be thought of for connecting A to B - Stael's cult - or because they simply ought to be in this sort of story - Colby, who one fan writer referred to as "Johnny Squarejaw", and Fendelman having a German accent for no apparent reason. Maybe watched as disposable television, with one episode a week, these flaws aren't noticeable. But if the standard of writing were higher, they wouldn't be there in the first place.