September 30: State of Decay Parts Three & Four

Camilla and Zargo hold Romana and the Doctor while Aukon listens
to the Great One. (State of Decay Part Three) ©BBC

This story really does an excellent job of evoking the mood of an old Hammer horror film while still retaining that scientific grounding that Bidmead prefers.  The Three Who Rule themselves are wonderful, looking like they've stepped out of a medieval castle, and the impending rise of their master, the Great One (not the leader of the Metebelis spiders), is treated as a cause for great concern, and it's not hard to imagine a version of this story during the Hinchcliffe years (or, indeed, as the opening story of season 15).

It's unlikely that there would have been quite such an emphasis on technology in that older version, though; the sequence with the Doctor telling Romana the legend of the Great Vampires would have probably remained the same (and can we just pause for a moment to talk about how wonderful it is when Tarak enters their cell to rescue them and smacks the Doctor in the face?  I'm still not sure how much of that was intentional and how much was accidental, but it makes me laugh every time I see it), and there would have been similarities with the stuff in the TARDIS and the Record of Rassilon, about how the king of the Great Vampires disappeared, but one wonders if the climax of the story -- the idea of using one of the Hydrax's scoutships as a giant stake -- would have been at all like what we get here.  And there's also the matter of using the old Hydrax scanner to see what the Great Vampire looks like, but probably the less said about that less-than-successful effect the better.  But those Record of Rassilon scenes are a nice touch, by making the Great Vampires into a threat that even the Time Lords took very seriously -- which means that they must be a grave threat indeed, and as viewers we put the king of them in the same category as Sutekh or the Fendahl ("If it escaped into our universe," the Doctor says at one point, "billions of lives would be lost").

Part four isn't quite as good just because it's concerned more with tying things up rather than continuing the mood.  There's also the odd subplot where Adric seems to be going over to the vampire side but not really, which just doesn't feel properly motivated in either the set-up or the execution.  And, finally, there's the way in which the Doctor builds up K-9 as "a very useful tool.  Armoured.  Immune to hypnotism. ... And a dead shot with a nose laser," only for K-9's appearance to be met with dubious looks and something of a "sad" cue from the music.  The show's not taking him very seriously anymore, is it?

However, the attack on the tower is pretty well staged, and the shots of the Great Vampire being "staked" by the Hydrax scoutship are surprisingly well done (particularly given the earlier shots of the vampire on the scanner).  And the deaths of the Three Who Rule are horrifying and effective -- it might be the best "turned to dust" effect we've ever seen on the series.

It's well-written and -directed, and the mash-up of styles (Dicks's older, Hammer horror-tinged approach, and Bidmead's more serious, scientific one) works very well, setting the vampires up as ancient powers preventing scientific knowledge and progress from blooming.  To be honest, it's hard to find much of anything really at fault with State of Decay.  So far this E-Space story arc has turned up trumps for the show.  Can they keep it up?