"The Ark"

You must travel with understanding as well as hope. I said that to one of your ancestors, once; a long time ago.--The Doctor

Monoids

"The Steel Sky", 5 March 1966
"The Plague", 12 March 1966
"The Return", 19 March 1966
"The Bomb", 26 March 1966

Written by Paul Erickson and Lesley Scott
Directed by Michael Imison
Script editor: Gerry Davis
Produced by John Wiles

William Hartnell as the Doctor
Peter Purves as Steven Taylor
Jackie Lane as Dodo Chaplet (earliest extant appearance)

In the prior (no-longer extant) story, "The Massacre", Steven became involved with a kind serving girl in sixteenth-century Paris, Anne Chaplet. Anne turned out to be one of the victims of the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre, and when the Doctor and Steven escape the Massacre at the end of the story, the Doctor failed to bring Anne along with them, insisting that saving her would have changed history. Steven was so enraged that, when the TARDIS rematerialised (in 1966 on Wimbledon Common), he stormed outside, leaving the Doctor alone.

Just as Steven is about to leave for good, however, a teenage schoolgirl shows up--and she's the spitting image of Anne Chaplet, and she introduces herself as Dodo Chaplet (short for "Dorothea"). Steven concludes that Dodo is some long-lost descendant of Anne, and the three of them enter the TARDIS and head off to times unknown.

That's where we are, then, at the beginning of "The Ark", Dodo's first adventure. The TARDIS materialises in a tropical forest teeming with life. Dodo--whose character is essentially that she's always blithely cheerful, almost always unflappable, and refuses to take Steven seriously when he attempts to put his foot down as a parental authority--at first refuses to believe they've travelled in time, or even very much in space, guessing that the Doctor has taken them to Whipsnade, a zoological garden outside London.

But she's soon forced to abandon that hypothesis. For one thing, all the animals here roam freely amongst each other--Gila lizards and tropical birds and even elephants. For another, the sky over their heads is made of metal. The Doctor concludes (correctly) that they're aboard a generation ship, an interstellar colony ship that takes centuries to reach its destination solar system, so the ship is equipped to allow the original colonists to grow old and die while they're aboard, being replaced by their descendants, and eventually by their descendants' descendants.

Soon, the TARDIS team are ambushed and arrested by the ships' crew, the Monoids. These are a man-shaped alien race, completely green, with no mouths and only a single, cyclopean eye in the middle of their faces.

A word about the Monoid makeup. Given the limitations under which the 60s production team were labouring--a shoestring budget, basically, that prevented any sort of waste whatsoever--the Monoids are, I think, a brilliantly creative achievement. Their "eye" is a ping pong ball, painted with iris and pupil, then held in the actor's mouth. The actor then dons a Beatles moptop wig and positions it so that it covers the upper half of their face, which both makes the "eye" look well-proportioned and obscures any facial features that would break the illusion. It's a great idea, and it has only one failure (a real shame of a failure, really)--the very first time a Monoid appears on camera, he's shown in extreme closeup, to better drive home his startling appearance; but the closeup is so extreme that it's impossible not to notice that his eye socket is actually his mouth.

The Monoids take the team to the ship's main living area, which is much more metal-corridors-and-spaceshippy than the animal and plant habitat. There, they discover that most of the people aboard are actually human. They are, in fact, the last humans; the Earth, visible on the spaceship's viewscreen, will shortly be destroyed as it falls into the sun. The Doctor calculates that in order to see the end of the Earth, the TARDIS must have travelled at least ten million years into the future.

The humans and their Monoid allies have come up with a plan so that their races can survive the Earth's destruction. They have identified a distant planet, Refusis II, of a size and gravity and atmosphere entirely similar to the Earth, orbiting a star very much like the Sun. But it will take them seven hundred years to travel there, so they have shrunk the entire human and Monoid populations down into their constituent parts, essentially preserving them. The populations will be restored once they reach Refusis II. In the meantime, a skeleton staff mans the spaceship; they're called the Guardians, and they and their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren will guide their two races to salvation.

Of course, something soon goes wrong. Dodo has a cold, and both the Monoid and human populations quickly start catching it. Bacterial and viral infections were wiped out literally millennia ago, and Guardian science has no recollection of how to deal with them. On such fertile territory, the virus quickly mutates, and soon enough, both Guardians and Monoids start dying from it.

This is an even more serious problem than it would be other times, since the operation of the ark spaceship is so finely balanced--if one crewmember unexpectedly dies, there's no one to take their function. And of course, the ark's second-in-command--who takes charge when his superior is the first to fall ill--is deeply suspicious of the TARDIS team, and concludes that they have infected the humans intentionally. He therefore imprisons them rather than allow the Doctor to research a cure, and of course, soon Steven falls prey to the mutated virus. The whole thing has strong echoes of "The Sensorites".

You can, of course, guess how things turn out. The Doctor is released and develops a cure, saving both Steven and the crew of Guardians and Monoids, just in time for everyone to witness the Earth's final disintegration on the ship's viewscreen. The team head back to the TARDIS and depart.

And that's when we discover "The Ark"'s central conceit: that's it not actually one four-part story, but rather two two-part stories, set on the same sets, but hundreds of years apart. For the TARDIS rematerialises once again in the ark's zoological garden, but when the team make their way to the main habitation section, they discover that seven hundred years have passed. The ark is about to reach Refusis II.

This is conveyed through a neat little piece of storytelling. The Guardians are building a massive statue of a human male, about the size of the Statue of Liberty. They're using the "old methods" of construction, building by hand; it will take seven hundred years to complete. In the first two parts, only the feet have been completed, but now the team find a finished statue. Only, something's changed: instead of a human head, it bears a Monoid head.

That's not the only thing that's changed, though. The Monoids have risen up and established themselves as an overclass, following a bloody revolution; the Guardians have been reduced to a small group of slaves. The Guardians have been led to believe that they will accompany the Monoids to Refusis II and serve them there, but the Monoids secretly have a different plan: they will leave the humans on board the ark, which will then be destroyed when the fission bomb they have hidden inside the giant statue's head explodes.

The TARDIS team are taken prisoner and added to the Guardian slave labour force. The Doctor and Dodo accompany one of the Monoids down to the planet, as advance scouts. They discover a verdant forest world. In a valley, they find a luxurious house, but they see no signs of intelligent life.

It turns out the Refusians are disembodied psychic beings. They have known of the ark's approach for some time, and have welcomed the idea of humans and Monoids living amongst them--they built structures like this house for just that purpose. But now they have discovered the violence and oppression that marks Monoid rule of the earthlings, they're having second thoughts.

That problem is about to take care of itself, though. The Monoids start arriving on the planet in numbers, but one of them, named Four, is plotting to overthrow the ruling Monoid, named One. A civil war breaks out against the Monoids, and pretty soon, both sides have annihilated each other.

This leaves only the problem of the fission bomb hidden aboard the ark. The Doctor and Dodo have learnt from One that the bomb is in the massive statue's head, but the statue is so heavy that there's no way to move it before it explodes.

One of the Refusians takes care of that. He heads up to the ark and, as a disembodied psychic force, has no trouble lifting the statue into the ship's launch bay, from where it tumbles out into the vacuum of space and harmlessly explodes.

The Guardians then begin the process of moving the Earth's miniaturised population down to the surface so they can be repopulated. The Refusians agree to let them live on their planet, so long as they and the few remaining Monoids can make peace and live in harmony.

What Lisa thought

The high-concept idea that forms the basis of "The Ark" is an intriguing one--the Doctor coming back after centuries and being forced to deal with the consequences of his first visit to a location. The programme will tackle it again, in the 1970s ("The Face of Evil") and 2005 ("The Long Game" and "The Parting of the Ways").

But the results of this first treatment, Lisa and I are both agreed, are fairly disappointing. What we end up with, by splitting the serial up into a pair of forty-five minute stories, is an early cautionary tale about the length of Doctor Who adventures--a lesson (two lessons, in fact) about how limiting the forty-five minute format can be for a programme that has to spend the first twenty minutes of every tale setting up a brand new milieu, and that Who is generally able to provide much deeper, more satisfying stories if given ninety minutes to tell them, rather than forty-five.

The first two-parter has absolutely no twists or subplots. Dodo makes everyone sick; the team get imprisoned; the team get released; the Doctor finds a cure. You know, when the ark's commander falls sick as part one's cliffhanger, exactly how part two is going to go.

And the second two-parter never manages to elicit much dramatic tension at all. First, it has the same barebones-plot problem that the first two-parter has, but then also, by midway through its first episode, the Doctor has made contact with the Refusians, who turn out to be an omnipotent alien race who explicitly will not allow the Monoids to continue ruling the humans as slaves. So we know that Monoid defeat will be soon and easily accomplished.

It also bothered that we saw two generations of a generation ship--and never once did we see a child from either species (and, in fact, only one person over the age of forty).

The next story is "The Celestial Toymaker", which has been lost. It's the first of that tradition of Doctor Who stories taking place in fantasyland, continuing right up to 2010 with "Amy's Choice", which typically do very well with fans and very poorly with general viewers. The next story up on our rewatch will be the one that follows it, Doctor Who's trip to the American West, "The Gunfighters".

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