“Ghost Light” (season 26, episodes 5-7. Originally aired Oct. 4-18, 1989)
“Ghost Light” has a fitting title: It was the last Doctor Who serial to be filmed before the show was cancelled. (The last story broadcast was “Survival,” but it went before the cameras before “Ghost Light” did.) After this, except for one brief, tragic misfire, Doctor Who really did become a ghost, doomed to wander the earth as a forgotten-cult-TV spectre in the form of quasi-canonical novels and radiodramas until the day it would finally, like its hero, regenerate into a new form.
That title is also pretty ironic, considering that “Ghost Light” has a well-earned reputation as the murkiest, most difficult Doctor Who story ever televised. What begins as a mysterious Victorian ghost story shot through with surreal images and an array of insane characters to rival Alice In Wonderland swings wildly into a sci-fi tale about ancient aliens and evolution, refusing to make it easy to figure out how everything connects. Even the BBC’s official website for the story suggests that “in order to appreciate fully what's going on it is probably necessary to watch ‘Ghost Light’ two or three times.” Naturally that’s made “Ghost Light” awfully divisive; its proponents suggest that there’s a brilliant story to be cherished here if you’re only willing to work to solve the puzzle that writer Marc Platt lays out. The other school grumbles that if it’s a puzzle, it’s still missing too many pieces to be properly solved, and it’s only a puzzle because the script does such a poor job of explaining anything. That’s compounded by post-production problems that reduce comprehensibility even further, including a bad sound mix that renders some dialogue totally inaudible, and drastic editing to make it fit the three-episode running time. I lean toward the second school.
Before I go too much farther, if any story needs a plot summary, it’s this one, so here goes. The Seventh Doctor and Ace (previously covered in TV Club in “Remembrance Of The Daleks” and “The Curse Of Fenric”) arrive in the TARDIS in a Victorian mansion called Gabriel Chase; the year is 1883. As we’ve seen, their relationship is unusual for the series because there’s something of a hidden agenda in it for the Doctor—this version of the character, as imagined by script editor Andrew Cartmel, is a manipulative schemer who knows more than he lets on, and unlike previous incarnations his travels are often not the random journeys they seem to be but destinations with a goal he doesn’t reveal until late in the story. And especially in season 26, many of the journeys are secretly about helping Ace grow and mature, in this case to force her to confront an old childhood trauma. She doesn’t realize it at first, but the mansion is the same one that she burned down when she was a kid (100 years later, in 1983) because she was convinced it was haunted. And since this is Doctor Who, it kind of was haunted, but not exactly by ghosts. The Doctor has brought her to the building’s past to show her how it got that way. It means terrorizing her, but the Doctor must figure she’ll be stronger for it in the end.
So what haunts Gabriel Chase if not ghosts? Well, here’s where “Ghost Light” gets weird. And this is not easy to boil down to a few simple sentences, so bear with me.
Gabriel Chase’s owner—or so we think as the story begins—is a sinister gentleman named Josiah Smith. He’s filled the house with thousands of butterflies in jars and other biological specimens, and has scandalized his neighbors with public support for Charles Darwin’s new and deeply controversial theory of evolution. He’s also so sensitive to light that he wears dark glasses constantly and demands that his entire household be only active at night. In fact, he’s terrified even by the mention of the word “light.” He does employ a full staff of daytime maids, but they’re so terrified of him that they flee the house every day before sunset arrives—which is when the rest of the house wakes up, as if they were robots being switched on or the dead returning to life. He seems to have them all under his mental control, including his young ward Gwendoline, who has developed a bizarrely bloodthirsty side under his influence. This might lead you to suspect that Josiah is really a vampire, but things aren’t nearly that simple. We’ll come back to that. Oh, and one of the servants, the butler Nimrod, is clearly a Neanderthal, even if he wears a fine suit and speaks with the cadence of Jeeves.
We also meet a couple other minor players worth mentioning. First, the magnificently muttonchopped Reverend Matthews, a stuffy and judgmental preacher who’s come to see the master of the house to harangue him for his support of Darwin, and winds up getting devolved into a chimpanzee by a cackling Josiah instead. There’s also a Victorian big-game hunter and adventurer in the Allan Quatermain mode, who has been made crazy, amnesiac, and slightly radioactive by a mysterious light somewhere in the house, where he has come to save Redvers Fenn-Cooper, the famous Victorian big-game hunter and adventurer, from some dastardly fate at the hands of Josiah Smith. No sooner does he see his reflection and realize that he is Redvers Fenn-Cooper, when suddenly the household staff appears and whisks him away to be locked up in the attic with a straitjacket. And there’s also a policeman, Inspector Mackenzie, who the Doctor finds comatose in a collection drawer like one of Josiah’s butterflies, and who came to the house to investigate the disappearance of its real owner, Gwendoline’s father—two years earlier.
Josiah also has something nasty walled up in his cellar, something that utters crazy-sounding threats and ravings in a raspy voice, calling itself “Control” in the third person. He clearly hates and fears it, especially after escapes and calls to threaten him on the in-house telephone (just the thing for a forward-thinking member of the Victorian upper class). It’s not the only weird thing in the cellar. For one thing, the cellar itself is actually a spaceship, which the mansion was apparently built on top of. (Or maybe, given the ending, the ship materialized underneath the building somehow. It’s never made clear.) Also, Ace is attacked by a pair of monsters with grotesque heads, one insectoid and another reptilian. It turns out that these are earlier forms of Josiah himself, who has the ability to mutate himself and “evolve” into more complex forms. His final mutation is a sly satirical dig at human vanity: Josiah loses his light-sensitivity and becomes the pinnacle of evolution on Earth: an Englishman.
In the second cliffhanger, the final presence emerges from the cellar: It’s Josiah’s boss, an angelic-seeming being called Light, who scares Josiah even more than Control does. And at last, the Doctor finally tells Ace (and us) what’s he’s apparently known the whole time: Light, Josiah and Control are all ancient beings—or perhaps very sophisticated machines that are able to mimic life, or something like that. Light came to Earth millions of years ago to catalog all life on the planet—”every organism from the smallest bacteria to the largest ichthyosaur.” But he hadn’t counted on evolution creating new forms of life faster than he could catalog them, and so he was never able to finish the job despite centuries of work. Josiah and Control were originally servants, or perhaps subroutines, of Light’s mission. If I’m understanding the murky explanation correctly, Josiah was the program that actually went out into the world and counted up the animals, and Control stayed behind on the ship and watched Josiah in case of malfunction or other problems. But Light, frustrated by his task, went to sleep in the ship, where he’s been perhaps for millennia, leaving Josiah to start dreaming about not just cataloging Earth, but conquering it. In the end, the Doctor and his allies must stop two insane plans: Josiah has hatched a harebrained scheme to assassinate Queen Victoria and take over the British Empire, apparently entirely hinged on the fact that Redvers has a written invitation to meet her highness. And Light has decided to bring the number of species on Earth to a manageable number: Zero.