Doctor Who

That Was the Future That Was: The Curse of Fenric

Jim Leach That Was the Future That Was: The Curse of Fenric After the unceremonious dismissal of Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy took over as the seventh Doctor, who, like the second, was a trickster figure, but without any of the sixth Doctor’s assertiveness. The spirit of aggression was transferred to his streetwise companion Ace whom he meets in Dragonfire (1987) waiting tables in an intergalactic theme park called Iceworld, having been mysteriously abducted from her home in the London suburb of Perivale. Ace’s pleasure in blowing things up with the “nitro” she always carries with her contrasts and complements the persona of the Doctor whom McCoy saw as “a combination of unarmed vulnerability and eccentric imagination” (Howe and Walker 1998, 31–32). Andrew Cartmel, who took over as script editor at this time, tried to reinject a sense of mystery, which he felt had been lost by the Doctor’s recent incarnations, and gradually introduced hints that the Doctor might have a dreadful secret in his past. In what turned out to be the final three seasons , the stories increasingly turned on what seemed to be magical rather than scientific explanations and fully exploited the unpredictable entanglements of past, present, and future that had become the hallmark of the series. The Curse of Fenric takes the Doctor and Ace to a remote naval base in Britain during World War II, which becomes the site of a struggle between monsters from the distant past and the far future. After twenty-six years, the fragmented and complex timelines in such stories matched the experience of many viewers. For those who started watching Doctor Who during its later seasons, earlier stories that were originally set in the present or the near future are now set in their past, and they encounter earlier Doctors after their exposure to later ones. These viewers also read back later information about the Doctor into earlier stories made when these develop76 Doctor Who ments had not yet been imagined. The gradual revelations about the Doctor’s past in the course of the series make it difficult to establish a coherent time scheme to account for all his adventures, but fans constantly tried to make things fit together , resulting in some highly convoluted hypotheses. It was now the overabundance of information about the Doctor ’s past that created uncertainty and left openings to generate new mysteries. In Remembrance of the Daleks, the seventh Doctor returns to London in 1963 and battles his old enemies in the school and the junkyard where, as far as television viewers are concerned , his adventures began. Ace stays at a boarding house where the landlady has a “No coloureds” sign in the window, confronting us with one of the realities about the 1960s glossed over in An Unearthly Child. When she notices the 77 The Doctor and Ace run into trouble in a military base during World War II. Jim Leach sign, she goes out for a breath of fresh air just as the BBC logo appears on a television in the sitting room and an announcer starts to introduce a new Saturday evening science fiction series . The shot ends before he mentions the title, but most viewers—even if they have not seen the first story—will know of Doctor Who’s legendary beginnings. Since the new story purports to explain the purpose of the Doctor’s presence in London to begin with, his story now continues in two dimensions : inside the television in 1963 and outside it is 1988, a quarter of a century and six Doctors later but set only a few months after his original visit. As Jonathan Bignell and Andrew O’Day suggest, the relativity of time is built into the basic formula so that “in many cases there is extreme dissociation of plot time and viewer time, where the episode shows plot time running out for the protagonists, yet ‘real’ time slows down for the audience who must wait for the next instalment” (2004, 90). Typically, the series often draws attention to the discrepancy between the linear unfolding of the series/serial and the time periods of the events it depicts. In The Invasion, for example, the second Doctor and Jamie discover a Cybermen plan to invade Earth, and they are reunited with Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, with whom they had worked in The Web of Fear, broadcast earlier that same year. Since that time...