August 20: Image of the Fendahl Parts One & Two

This first episode feels very unusual for Doctor Who.  The Doctor and Leela are barely in it, and the times when they are present, they're essentially divorced from the main plotline.  That plotline feels more like a Nigel Kneale piece (and the ancient, impossible skull has obvious parallels with Quatermass and the Pit), and all the characters involved feel fully formed, as opposed to foils for the Doctor to react against.  They're scientists who've discovered a homo sapiens skull buried in 12-million-year-old volcanic ash, and they're trying to work out why it was there.  Meanwhile, the body of a dead hiker has been found in the grounds nearby ("What sort of corpse?" asks the group's leader, Dr. Fendelman.  "A dead one.  What other sort is there?" replies Adam Colby¹⁰¹, the one who found the hiker), which Dr. Fendelman wants to keep hushed up for some reason -- as if they're doing something so terrible at the Priory that they don't want anyone to associate the death of a hiker with archaeology.  It's an odd position to take, is what I'm getting at.

This first episode is really all about establishing the mood.  We know there's a seemingly impossible skull, we know that Fendelman is working on a device that will let him see images of the past (due to a "sonic shadow"), and it seems that when the device is operating, the ancient skull reacts -- and seems to affect fellow researcher Thea Ransome (Wanda Ventham's second role on the show, and apparently her first since the birth of her son Benedict Cumberbatch) in strange ways.  There's an uneasy feeling about all this, and the lack of music actually heightens this feeling -- other than the titles, there's no incidental music at all in the first episode, and only a small amount in the second part.  But where that's been a hindrance in other stories (The Web Planet springs to mind), here it adds a feeling of verisimilitude that leads to that aforementioned sense of unease -- it's ever so slightly harder, given what we see, to dismiss this as simple fiction.

Weird cliffhanger, though: the skull is superimposed over Thea's face while she turns on Dr. Fendelman's machine, Leela is shot at with a shotgun, and the Doctor stands motionless in a field.  And the resolution is even stranger: the Doctor talks his legs into moving and he's able to run off.  Oh, and Leela dodges the shotgun blast.

The Doctor is forced to grip the glowing ancient skull.
(Image of the Fendahl Part Two) ©BBC

The second part sees the Doctor and Leela more integrated into the action (and, as a random aside, Leela's hairstyle in this isn't very flattering -- allegedly the stylist took too much off and they had to put Louise Jameson's hair up to cover this), although it's Leela who seems to be doing better, as she's got a whole subplot with some locals and something about a coven or some such to deal with.  The Doctor seems to know a lot more about what's going on (note the way he instantly knows not to touch Thea, that Mitchell died the same way as someone else, and that the weird slug-like creatures that appear on Thea's fallen body look like embryo Fendahleen, "a creature from my own mythology"), but it doesn't really help, as he's quickly locked up in a storeroom and isolated from the rest of the house, with no way of getting out.  Well... except, in one of the great mysteries of Doctor Who, the door is unlocked and opened, without any indication whatsoever as to who did it.  (Although now we know it must have been Clara, as she traveled through the Doctor's timeline.)

Things aren't exactly going well in the meantime: Thea seems drawn to both the skull and Fendelman's machine, and Max Stael (the final researcher in the group) appears to be a member of that coven whose members were giving Leela trouble in the episode.  Interesting cliffhanger, though: after Thea switches the machine on, Thea is knocked out by Max and the machine is left on -- which means that the Doctor, who's been examining the skull¹⁰², suddenly feels compelled to grip it: an action which causes him some pain...







¹⁰¹ The second character on the show to bear the name Adam.  Well, I care.
¹⁰² As far as I can tell, this marks the first instance of the Doctor asking, "Would you like a jelly baby?" (in this case, facetiously to the skull) while actually offering a liquorice allsort.