I enjoy this horror/sci-fi yarn from classic Who’s final season. It’s atmospheric and creepy, with some good body horror, and I like some of the ideas presented. Although the Seven era isn’t my favorite overall – I don’t dislike it, but not a lot of it really stands out to me – this is a pretty decent serial from that period.
The Seventh Doctor and Ace walk out of the TARDIS into a Victorian house peopled with a variety of mysterious and/or sketchy inhabitants. There’s an imposing head of the house who’s a little too insistent in his house guest invitations, an explorer who Saw Too Much and lost his mind as a result, a butler who may or may not be a Neanderthal, and secrets hidden in the house’s dark corners. In other words? Total H.G. Wells/Mary Shelley horror scenario in a classic haunted house. The Doctor wants to investigate, but Ace is having none of it.
Overall, I think the serial does a nice job creating a sense of menace that runs through the whole story. Although many of the characters – and indeed, the house itself – are pretty standard-fare for this kind of tale, they’re effective in adding to the tension of the piece. I’d say that the more out-there characters who appear in the final leg of the serial don’t come off quite as well, though. I like the idea just fine, but the execution feels a bit off to me.
However, like I said, the ideas are pretty interesting. I’m a sucker for a good sci-fi period piece, and this one mixes both space and time in with more conventional drawing-room suspense/horror. It’s fun to watch the details slowly slide into place, getting bigger and wilder as the story goes along. What initially feels like a bit of a spooky mishmash winds up fitting together surprisingly well, and there are some good genuine creep-out moments.
This is an important story for Ace, and I like getting more of a look into her past. She’s an intriguing character to me because the “home” the Doctor finds her in isn’t really where she’s from, and so she has this whole background that we’ve heard about but don’t get much chance to see. In this story, the time period is off, of course, but the house holds a significance for Ace, and we get a few glimpses into her life before the Doctor. It’s also important for showing a very different side to Ace. She’s such a brash, bold character that it’s unusual to see her really, truly scared, and angry at being scared.
But the result of digging more into Ace’s past is a less-flattering serial for the Doctor. Between this story and “The Curse of Fenric” directly after, we see Seven at what’s perhaps his most manipulative. I appreciate that, with Seven, the show tries to do something different, and it has its moments, but for the most part, I’m not a fan of Seven being a dark, mysterious puppet-master. For one, I feel like it makes the Doctor a little too powerful and mythic, and I never like it when the show goes there. Yes, the Doctor is amazing, but they’re also just a madman with a box running around the universe trying to help, and making them too important/connected/“prophesied”/etc. undermines that characterization. More importantly, though, having the Doctor work his machinations on Ace – whether it’s for a good reason or not – gets in the way of the Doctor-companion relationship, which I think is one of the worst things a Who writer can do. I really feel for Ace here, and that makes me resent the Doctor for playing these games with her.
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