Doctor Who and the Ark

The Ark - Story 023

Doctor Who - The Ark

Goofy monsters? Check. Whacked-out time travel? Check? Morally-imbued plot? Check. Yes, this is Doctor Who of the 1960’s. Before the Hammer Horror era of the 1970’s or the plastic rayguns of the 1980’s there was this, the Doctor and his companions getting wrapped up in some science-fiction adventure in deep space with rubber monsters. A story featuring Doctor #1 William Hartnell but without his initial companions Barbara and Ian may seem alien to many. This is in large part due to the fact that the many of the stories with the following companion team-up of Steven and Dodo are lost (aside from Steven’s brief introduction in The Chase and Dodo’s final story the War Machines). As such, The Ark is one of the few opportunities to see what this pairing of companions was like along side the first Doctor.

The Ark (part 1 of 12 ten minute segments)

An adventure that is neither loved or derided by fans, The Ark is an odd story for many reasons. The only Doctor Who story penned by Paul Erickson, the plot is heavily laden with science fiction concepts such as viruses and the future of mankind as well as contemporary ideas such as slavery and racial harmony. Set in the distant future, The Ark opens with the Doctor and his companions arriving on board a vast spaceship containing the survivors of a doomed Earth along with the aliens known as the Monoids, likewise without a home. The strangely paired races are supposedly living in harmony but it is plain to see that the Monoids are viewed as inferior to the humans and used mainly for slave labor. The humans are even using the Monoids to build a sculpture of a human being to pass the time on their journey to their new home, Refusis.

What cheek!

New companion Dodo has a slight cold and mistakenly passes it to the humans on board, thus dooming the entire remainder of the human race to death by a virus that they had not encountered in centuries. Great job, Dodo.

Let me take this opportunity to talk about two of the most unloved of Doctor Who companions since Adric and Nyssa… Dodo and Steven. An astronaut from the near future, Steven Taylor is a large lumbering oaf who is neither clever nor dim but often bull-headed. He means well, but you can just feel the Doctor’s disdain for the man. Physically imposing, Steven is hilariously useless most of the time in his adventures with the Doctor as a keen wit is often more helpful than a strong back. Dodo Chaplet is a pair of legs in a skirt with a swinging sixties London attitude. A character that is so forgettable that her departure is off-screen, it’s no wonder that few fans of the series have ever taken the time to develop an opinion of her.

Dodo (Jackie Lane) attacked (?) by a Moinoid

Put on trial for damning the whole of two races, the TARDIS crew is indeed in a pickle. The Doctor manages to concoct a cure for the common cold using cells from the Ark’s microscopic menagerie and saves everyone’s bacon… again. Seeming to depart for a new tale, the TARDIS dematerializes and appears back on the Ark, some 700 years in the future. The sculpture is completed, but it is not a man, but a Monoid. It appears that the mute slaves of Mankind had staged a coup and used the common cold virus to weaken their human captors in order to take control. No longer without voice, the Monoids have developed vocal devices and are thoroughly enjoying their dominance of the weak humans until the Doctor and company set things straight.

As an adventure, this one has a lot going for it as it contains time travel concepts that show cause and effect in one story (why have we not seen that again in 40 odd years of Doctor Who??) and depicts relationships with an alien race as being rather more complicated than we had seen before where aliens are either good and peaceful or mad-eyed on destruction. In the Ark, the Monoids are as flawed as the humans, an idea that is rather sophisticated if not a bit dull for entertainment’s sake. This is the real downfall of The Ark, the pacing and direction are somewhat lacking. Even for 60’s era Who, The Ark is rather dull. That’s not to say it’s not well written or visually interesting because it is, but it is also in danger of putting the viewer to sleep. This is not helped by the wooden companions who add nothing to the story. I understand that the role of the classic companion is to shadow the Doctor and ask what’s happening, but after the excellence that was Barbara and Ian, I often feel cheated by Steven and Dodo. It would take the arrival of Jamie and Zoe to set things straight, and that was years away.

The 1966 story The Ark is sure to not top a Doctor Who fan’s list of favorite stories, but it is also not in danger of ousting Time and the Rani out of the place of worst story, either. It just… is. Aside from the Monoids and time travel aspects there is little memorable about this tale which is a shame as it is one of the few ‘middle period’ Hartnell adventures that is still in print (many of the others burnt in the 1970’s). Why did the Ark survive and not Myth Makers of The Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Eve? Alas, we will never know.

One of the few remaining Hartnell stories left to be released on DVD, The Ark is a middling adventure. And when you’re talking about a program such as Doctor Who, capable of telling any kind of story it wants to… that’s just awful.