What’s this? Reviewing a story in the month it was released?! I know, it’s been a while playing catch up… Anyway, “Pursuit of the Nightjar” is frankly a sleeper hit as I had no real excitement about this release but it blew me away with its writing, setting and over-arching plot, so let’s take a look!
The story opens up with The Doctor (Peter Davison), Tegan (Janet Fielding) and Nyssa (Sarah Sutton) arriving in the cargo hold of a spaceship and it doesn’t take long for The Doctor to realise which one and to start getting giddy like an excited schoolboy. They’ve landed on the “Nightjar”, a ship that famously spent three years travelling through the most dangerous parts of space to deliver medical relief to a far-off planet in the middle of a galactic war constantly being pursued by a rival ship called the Nemesis. The story of the perilous journey and its heroic Captain Goben (Paul Thornley) inspired a young Doctor at the start of his journey, to the point where he happily added a model of the Nightjar to his TARDIS library. It doesn’t take long however for The Doctor to figure out something is going wrong as the ship is damaged so the trio head to the bridge and meet the Captain, who while obviously assuming his rival captain Eslo (Fenella Woolgar) had sent them on board to sabotage them, does at least treat them well.
It’s here that we find out that Goben and Eslo are actually pretty friendly to each other, three years of only the other’s company via radio will do that to you. As Eslo confirms they’re nothing to do with her Goben tells The Doctor about the gravitational anomalies that have been rocking his ship, leading to Tegan and Nyssa vanishing off to the engine room while The Doctor helps Goben with the steering until tragedy strikes and a big wave sends the massive steering wheel onto Goben, killing him. The Doctor says that he assumed he was here to fix the anomalies and then see the Nightjar on its way, but now he didn’t know what to do with his hero lying dead. To make matters worse the anomalies turn out to be weird shadowy ghost-like figures that appear, crush the surroundings with amplified gravity and then leave again, one such incident nearly throwing Tegan and Nyssa out into space. As things get progressively worse The Doctor takes the words right out of my mouth by saying “I assumed I’d have to take over from Goben and be the man in the spacesuit who famously delivers the supplies” but as it turns out the Nightjar is too far gone and is moments away from crashing into a “space knot”.
It was not only a great story with plenty of exciting moments and twists (I genuinely did think it was going to be The Doctor delivering the supplies, so even though I figured out who it would actually be pretty quickly after that I enjoyed having my expectations subverted) and each episode opens with a conversation between the two Captains that are really well acted, you did get a genuine feeling the two became good friends and perhaps more, seeing their deadly game of chase as more of just that: a friendly competition rather than a story of relief supplies so dazzling that it ends a galactic war. The Doctor going from giddy schoolchild to despondent and desperate as his favourite story becomes a nightmare was great as well. Good acting from all involved, frankly.
The Continuity:
Great cover but the overall box title of “In the Night” is so incredibly generic that it really makes me think they should drop them in favour of just the two story titles with a “/” in the middle…
Not really anything to speak of, beyond Nyssa and Tegan assuming the ghostly shapes were similar to The Watcher from the Fourth Doctor’s finale “Logopolis”.
Overall Thoughts:
“Pursuit of the Nightjar” has come out of nowhere to be perhaps my favourite Who story this year, it’s clever, well written and frequently exciting with a great cast living up the roles. Well worth the cost of the box by itself, so whichever way I end up feeling about the second story in this box I already feel I’ve got more than my money’s worth.
The Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa get into the cargo hold and jettison it, sending a coded message to Eslo on the Nemesis to “claim her prize”, which she does. Sadly the gravitation anomalies also follow them on board but before Eslo can toss them off her ship The Doctor has a private word with the Captain and tells her the future, that the delivery of the goods ends the war and brings peace and that the anomalies are people from the future using a crude form of time travel to desperately see the amazing story they’d read about for themselves. It’s enough to convince her to play the role of what was technically her rival but in reality her close friend and land the Nemesis as the Nightjar and claim to be Coben, allowing whispers and exaggerated reports to fill in the rest for the sake of the history books.
The Doctor, Nyssa and Tegan land the TARDIS from a distance to where the ship lands and watch the famous delivery, knowing that most people will never know that the “evil rival” Captain Eslo was actually just as heroic as the Nightjar’s actual pilot.
Hogan Reviews 