An Hour of Who a Day: July 13: The Ark in Space Parts One & Two

July 13: The Ark in Space Parts One & Two

Standard and special edition DVDs

Five episodes into the revised title sequence (oh, right, forgot to mention that for Robot -- and hooray! It no longer looks off-center!) and they decide to give everything a salmon tint; guess they were trying something different. It only lasts for this episode, though.

So, confession time: I've never really cared much for The Ark in Space. I always found it rather slow. But that was in an isolated context. Viewing it in place, its virtues become much more apparent.

It starts unlike any Doctor Who story of the 70s -- other than a brief alien viewpoint at the beginning, the whole first episode consists of the Doctor and Harry slowly exploring the environment they find themselves in, learning about things at the same time as the audience. It's a style that evokes the feel of a Hartnell at times, and it's a welcome change from the standard set-up of the Pertwee years. It's also nice how they choose to make the relationship between the Doctor and Harry rather spiky, yet with a sense of affection deep underneath. The Doctor is annoyed with Harry, but he's not sending him off to sulk in a corner and he seems to enjoy exploring the space station with him. There are also some nice set pieces (such as the bit with the auto-guard), and, coming after the (occasionally stuttering) freneticness of the previous stories, this feels less slow and more like we're being given a chance to breathe.

And where's Sarah during all this? She's been accidentally pulled into the machinery, as it were, and is cryogenically frozen along with the people on board the station, essentially writing her out of the rest of the episode. So this is like a Hartnell in more ways than one.

Oh, plus we get a great cliffhanger, with Harry opening cupboards to look for a resuscitation unit and finding a giant dead insect instead...

Part two is a little less wonderful, simply because they've decided to introduce new characters into the mix. There's an effort to make the revived members of the station crew seem as alien as any random race by making them unfamiliar with Harry's colloquialisms and such. It's partially successful, but it breaks down a bit with Noah, who's required to be unreasoningly hostile towards the Doctor and his friends. You'd think a people as compartmentalized and as coldly logical as Vira and Noah seem to be would be willing to at least hear the Doctor out, but Noah assumes the Doctor is there to cause trouble and won't even listen to his warnings about something in the solar stacks -- presumably brought out of hibernation when the Doctor restored the power in part one.

In terms of plot though, the primary things happening in part two concern Sarah's resuscitation and Noah's infection by something in the solar stacks, as a green pseudopod slimes his hand. It starts to make Noah's behavior more erratic, ultimately resulting in this episode with him killing Libri before, in what's another excellent cliffhanger, he pulls out his left hand and looks on in horror at what he's becoming. Yes, it's clearly painted bubble wrap, but Kenton Moore's performance is so good that you don't mind one bit.