Hogan Reviews

The Ark is another not-really-lost Lost Story based on an earlier draft of a later revised and filmed Fourth Doctor story, in this case The Ark in Space (and therefore has nothing to do with the First Doctor TV story The Ark, just to make the story’s title even more confusing!) I think The Ark does at least offer a greater difference to the TV story than Return of the Cybermen did but it’s definitely weaker than the TV story we did get (so good job there, Robert Holmes!) begging the question “why did they bother adapting a rejected script?” The answer? I don’t know, but I’ve listened to it now, so I’ll review it one way or another!

So much like The Ark in Space we have a space station containing cryogenically frozen humans who are the last hope to repopulate the planet after a great catastrophe, that bit hasn’t changed. What has changed (or rather what got changed, I guess) is the villains of the piece. In the TV serial it’s the insectoid Wirrn who lay their eggs in the sleeping humans for some good old fashioned bodyshock horror, here it’s a generic evil alien who mind-controls the people of the Ark, and travels around in a weird golf ball sized ship by shrinking itself down. A markedly different tone, that’s for sure. The alien, Narib (voiced by Terry “Davros” Malloy) is all cheesy “we will conquer the Earth!” dialogue and those who follow him do so unquestionably due to the whole mind control thing and due to that come across as rather plain, including the Ark’s leader Noah (voiced by Terry “Narib” Malloy), the only character whose name carried over to the original script. Viva (Yasmin Mwanza) is the only one who avoids being mind-controlled to start with, then later Mek (Cameron Johnson) is brought round without Narib’s influence, so at least they stand out … a bit.

There’s also a weird thing with The Doctor (Tom Baker) as this script was written before Tom was cast it had an air of Pertwee about it and upon hearing that Tom seemingly decided he’d perform it completely differently, but instead of doing a Pertwee impression he apparently thought that meant acting WAY over the top, especially in Part 1. Thankfully does calm down somewhat as the story progresses but it’s still very odd. Sarah (Sadie Miller) and Harry (Christopher Naylor) are at least nicely settled into their recast roles and have plenty to do here, with Sarah having to do a Die Hard-style vent crawl to the TARDIS and back, and Harry having to do a spacewalk on the outside of the Ark that includes having a bit of a scuffle with some of the crew under Narib’s control in order to save Mek. It has to be said though that the whole scene is hard to get across via Audio Drama and so it led to characters like Sarah and Viva to say what they’re seeing on monitors and through a port hole in order to get across some of the details, which is always off-putting. Also it would’ve been a nightmare to film, so I’m not surprised it was cut!

A nice cover, I always appreciate the extra effort of creating new alien species rather than leaving them off in favour of just old pictures of the main cast.

I’ve touched on it but the plot is that Narib’s race the Delc are looking to colonise the Earth and don’t care if its original inhabitants want it back, and to do so he’s growing a culture of his people on the Ark to take down with him and controlling the humans as they wake to help him out (he’s essentially a large headed creature with a small body in a hover chair, by the sounds of it…) Viva is first woken by The Doctor and avoided getting her mind controlled due to it but otherwise everyone else falls under his control until The Doctor and Viva manage to sneakingly wake Mek safely. The Doctor tells Sarah to retrieve a special puffball from the TARDIS that will help combat the growing Delc while Mek and eventually Harry go on a spacewalk to the launch ship that Narib wished to take down to Earth with his special goo in order to stop it. There’s a great cliffhanger of Harry being knocked into deep space but otherwise it’s a bit of a “run to here, do this, run back because we’ve run into an enemy” sort of script…

So I’ll hand it to the Ark that it does feel radically different to The Ark in Space, more so than Return of the Cybermen did to Revenge of the Cybermen, but it really shows that Robert Holmes knew what he was doing as this script is not only cheesy with a weird villain that would be hard to take seriously but also had lot of scenes that would’ve been hard to film with the BBC budget. Losing Ark in Space due to this would’ve been a tragedy, not that I would’ve known that had it happened, obviously…

The Continuity:

The original cover, presumably before the artist was informed that the Wirrn don’t appear in this story…

Well, I guess this is “outside of Continuity” as I’m sure as hell not replacing “The Ark in Space” with this script… If you want you can watch “Robot”, then listen to this followed by “Return of the Cybermen” from last year and get a “what if Robert Holmes didn’t recognise how poor the original scripts were” run going, which is an odd option we now have!

Overall Thoughts:

The Ark is another interesting “What If?” but once again the answer to “What if Robert Holmes didn’t re-write this story into something better” is “it would’ve been worse”. The tense horror of The Ark in Space is gone and replaced with something of a gag villain who has really cheesy dialogue, and a good chunk of the middle of the story is dedicated to a rather confusing and long spacewalk scene which didn’t translate well to the Audio Drama medium and I can’t imagine would’ve fared better on 70s TV! Oh well, it was still interesting to “see” one way or another but I doubt I’ll listen to it again…

Not much to say here. The puffball does its job and absorbs the Delc nutrients and Narib is similarly defeated and killed by the superior plant life. Noah and everyone else is therefore freed from Narib’s mind control and all re-dedicate themselves to their goals as The Doctor, Sarah and Harry leave in the TARDIS (so no teleporting down to the surface with time rings!). Mek is the only crewmember to die in the whole story, so… score one for Narib mind control, I guess!