“The Hellwood Inheritance” is a story with a great premise and four episodes to tell it, but somehow “Jurassic Park with ghosts” falls apart in the middle and its second half just feels flat with little to do with the concept (beyond ghost-like beings anyway). Ah well, it’s been a little while since we’ve had a just Fourth Doctor / Leela story and both were on good form at least… Let’s take a look!
The story opens up with a nerdy man called Edgar Elwood (James Meteyard) returning to his family home of Elwood and finding that his stepmother Anita (Rosalie Craig) had turned the estate into a theme park called the “Hellwood Manor” and claims to have captured actual ghosts and kept them in pens around the surrounding land. Edgar is understandably upset but Anita claims it’s the only way to pay the bills. It’s at this point that The Doctor (Tom Baker) and Leela (Louise Jameson) appear in an enclosure and run into a ghost, who runs his blade through Leela’s gut, only for Leela to feel cold and collapse but otherwise be fine. It is just a ghost after all! The Doctor and Leela are saved by Anita and co. who arrive when the intruder alarm goes off and they’re brought back to the manor where we soon meet “parapsychic investigator” Joan Stone (Tamzin Outhwaite) and a rather nasty ghost called Betty (Rosie Day) who seemingly doesn’t want to go along with the whole theme park thing, unsurprisingly leading to a mass breakout just like… well, yeah, Jurassic Park.
The Doctor finds out that the “Ghost Catcher” isn’t a silly gimmick and in fact is pulling people’s souls, for a lack of a better term, moments after they’re executed at several points since the manor was first founded in the 16th century and ends up pulled back to that exact moment at the end of Episode 2. While Leela and co are dealing with the ghost invasion in the present The Doctor meets the first Earl of Elwood (still voiced by James Meteyard), who is searching for a fabled Witch that lives on the island, as well as its buried treasure, curse be damned (which is a weird way to put it but I’ll stick with it) Everything changes when The Doctor finally meets the apparent Witch…
As I mentioned, it starts off fine, everyone is on full comedy mode which suited the “Jurassic Park with Ghosts” part of the story but made the more dramatic and grizzly moments in the second half feel very odd, especially as Anita and Edgar, as well as The Doctor, never stop making light of situations with comedy lines and never sound like they’re worried about anything, which really hurts the plot as it tries to do something a bit more serious. Trying being the keyword because there are just one or two more twists than really needed, which hurt it even more overall.
The Continuity:
Nice split colours effect, but otherwise not the most exciting cover, but then neither story in this set is particularly exciting, so I guess they nailed it?
Not much to speak of, really. I mean there have been plenty of Doctor Who stories involving ghosts, both actual but mostly the result of alien technology like this one, but I’m not going to sit here and name them all…
Overall Thoughts:
“The Hellwood Inheritance” starts off with a good premise and fun, light-hearted performances from the main cast, but at the half-way mark it starts going off in a new direction and throws in some serious twists but continues the light-hearted direction much to its detriment, then adds in a few unearned plot twists for good measure, causing the whole story to fall apart by the end. I’ll give it a three for the first half and the good (if sometimes unsuited) performances, but I won’t be listening to this again…
The Doctor finds out that the ghosts aren’t random people’s souls being pulled into the future as ghosts but they were actually turned into ghosts by an alien machine brought to Earth by the so-called Witch, who turns out to be Joan Stone, whose has lived this whole time (or from this time to the present I guess) because she wanted to build an unstoppable ghost army to take on her own alien foes. The Doctor manages to head to the present day and reunites with everyone, and eventually Betty and the other ghosts decide to finally get some revenge and attack Joan instead as a rather predicable finale. Anita, who spent the whole near-death experience talking about the resale value of the property and generally ways to make money, is also dealt with, allowing Edgar to take his inheritance back in full… what’s left of it, anyway. For the record Tamzin Outhwaite did a really good job as both comedy ghost catcher and cheesy villain, so add her to the good performances list too.
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