Doctor Who, season 3 continues …

The Ark, which is fully available as a live-action story, is fairly familiar to Doctor Who viewers by now, I’d imagine.

The most intriguing thing is that now, having had Dodo’s proper introduction, we move straight to her first story – with her brash naivete having her leaving the TARDIS at the first opportunity to explore her surroundings and then being almost Steven Taylor in her disbelief of having left Earth.

Dodo suddenly has a cold (didn’t have one at the end of the last episode), a cold that disappears quite rapidly having done the plot-damage, and her accent has adopted a more understandable lilt.

The Ark tells the story of the last of mankind travelling far away to a new world on the advent of Earth being destroyed by the sun (I’ll forgive the 60s not realising that they should have left sometime sooner if they didn’t want the whole of mankind to be destroyed in the prelude to the destruction, because it’s quite fun to see the end of the Earth).

The future-humans have no protection against Dodo’s cold virus, leading to some of them (and their mute friends, the Monoids) catching it and dying from it.  The Doctor, Steven, and Dodo are put on trial for actively planning to kill the last of mankind.  When Steven catches the virus, the ailing leader of the “Guardians” (the humans) insists that the Doctor be allowed to find a cure.  This he finds in next to no time, and they leave with a quick wave before the end of episode 2.

They return immediately, albeit 700 years later when the Ark reaches its destination, only to find a mutated version of Dodo’s cold sapped the will of the humans and left them open to being conquered by the previously peaceful Monoids.  Now the humans are slaves to the Monoids who can now speak through a voice gadget.

The first shuttle reaches the planet, with the Doctor, Dodo, one of the Guardians and an armed Monoid, who wants to conquer the planet’s inhabitants before knowing anything about them.  The invisible Refusians are not as easily defeated as the humans, and the humans learn that the Monoids plan to leave the Ark and destroy it behind them – and the entire remnants of the human race at the same time.

The Ark has some great sets (the jungle, and Refusis, for example) and has some great ideas – including an invisible alien, and mankind defeated by a cold virus.  Given that each part of the story is limited to the brevity of just two episodes each, none of the ideas are explored all that well.  The first half centres a lot on the TARDIS crew on trial (seen that before) with the Doctor finding the cure rather quickly, whilst the second features much posturing by the Monoids with no clear explanation of why they felt the need to conquer the humans in the first place (they weren’t treated like slaves before or anything like that).

Nevertheless, plenty going on to keep the attention.

Next time … The Celestrial Toyroom