Tony’s feeling wrecked.
The Early Adventures are intended
to be stories that deepen our understanding of the First two Doctors and their
friends, telling stories that feel right for the black and white period of the
show’s history, but often taking the character development forward in a 21st
century style to bridge the gap between worlds. That makes them an inherently
risky project. Go too far towards the sixties and you end up with stories that
add in the results of TV budget restrictions of that era when they’re not
needed. Stray too far into the 21st century style of storytelling
and you risk telling stories which don’t feel like they’re enough ‘of the
period’ to sit alongside the actual sixties stories we know and for the most
part love. Getting the balance right has resulted in some amazing additions to
our library of early Doctor Who stories. Getting the balance wrong has
occasionally led to stories we’d rather forget.
We mention all this
because The Wreck of the World is a story that feels a little too sixties for
its own good.
Writer Timothy X Atack
sets his story after the Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe have escaped the Land of
Fiction. There’s repair work to do to the Tardis, and the three of them…erm…do
it. For what probably isn’t, but which certainly feels like a solid fifteen
minutes.
Then they get separated
and face a whole new sequence of annoying engineering problems on ‘The World,’ a
giant colony ship that seems (at least at first) remarkably lacking in
colonists.
Zoe meets a solidly
comical robot that goes by the enigmatic name of Gnostic and appears to have a
loud, irritating nervous breakdown when asked particular questions, while the
Doctor and Jamie join forces with a motley crew of treasure-hunters who’ve come
to The World with a mission to loot the historical artefacts of many Earth ages
and stock their museums to the gills.
There’s always something
to do in The Wreck of the World, but
there’s also the sense that the story is little more than ‘one damned thing after another’ in terms of the problems
the crew face, which can test even an ardent fan’s patience – Zoe has to
rebuild a whole roomful of technological equipment just to turn the lights on.
Jamie has to run on a treadmill to deliver motive power to the ship. The Doctor
spends quite some time in a tunnel with tools, doing some properly complicated
jiggery-pokery. The crew spend more time wandering through an archive of Earth
historical artefacts looking for a thing they’re fairly sure they won’t
recognise when they see it…
These set pieces seem to
exist to allow the crew to be Doing Something to burn minutes of run time, but
for all that, The Wreck of The World has
more going on underneath its skin – and if you can tear yourself away from what
amounts to Doctor Who Does Scrapheap Challenge, that’s an interesting
dimension, which breaks it out of slavish adherence to the sixties vibe and
puts it squarely in Fifth Doctor Series Three territory, with a dark secret
behind the ‘wreck,’ a touch of arch social commentary, quite a bit of comedy
(if you’ve ever wanted to hear Jamie punched clean across a corridor, you’re in
luck here), a conceptually interesting alien threat, a very large number of
zombies, and a body-count that would never have been allowed in 1968, when this
story is theoretically supposed to have ‘aired.’
In other words, The Wreck
of The World is a good story, overly consumed with annoying physical problems.
There’s an entirely decent alien story in here, explaining the wreck and delivering
quite a solid and troubling lesson for our society. But it’s all rather buried
beneath the mechanical and engineering challenges that Atack throws in the way
so we don’t guess the solution ahead of time, leaving The Wreck of The World
much harder work to listen to than it should have been. By the end of it, you’ll
feel like a member of the Tardis crew, having had to mine for the nuggets of
gold that are certainly there, through miles and miles of steel, encountering
mechanical problems every inch of the way.
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