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Summary: Classic sci-fi TV survives because of excellent scripting...
Review: A great segment from TV's longest running sci-fi series. Due to lack of budget these episodes of Tom Baker's second story have the typical cheesy effects and limited set designs, however the tight script and fascinating premise will keep any true sci-fi fan riveted. Note how this 1974 TV show had similar aspects to 1979's ALIEN movie by Ridley Scott (Insects in space that germinate in the human form aboard a craft of cryogenic sleepers resulting in the aliens being destroyed aboard an escape craft). Coincidence? Anyway you slice it, the gorey deaths, cool rubbery aliens, cliff hangers, snazzy dialogue and glimpses of future cultures keep the eyes watching and the mind whirling. This is a must for any Doctor Who fan's collection.
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Summary: Doctor Who's "Alien"
Review: Tom Baker was introduced to BBC viewers as the fourth Doctor Who on New Year's Eve 1974 with a story made under the auspices of the production team responsible for all of his predecessor's stories. The Ark in Space, broadcast in January and February 1975 was the second of his stories broadcast, the first under the production of Philip Hinchcliffe and script editor Robert Holmes, and the change in direction is apparent from the word go! A precursor to Alien by almost four years, this story deals with the Doctor and his two companions, Sarah-Jane Smith and Harry Sullivan, and their fight against an insect like parasite, the wirrn, in a battle to save humanity. Set many centuries in the future, the Earth has been damaged by solar flares and has been abandoned, with humanity cast into space in vast arks where they are in suspended animation, waiting to return to Earth. Unfortunately, the wirrn have invaded the ark, and are consuming the humans, including their leader Noah, as they take over the ship. The theme of the story, the design of the sets and the direction, make a very stark contrast to earlier Who, and vastly increased ratings followed hand in hand. Already available for many years on VHS, the story has now been remastered and some bonus features added. New model shots have been filmed using the latest technology, and added to the adventure, although the original footage is available too. The soundtrack features both Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen, the first time they've worked together on the show since 1976, and reunites them with producer Hinchcliffe. Hinchcliffe seems to do most of the talking, with Baker seemingly unable to recall a great deal about the story itself, but the warmth and friendship between the three of them is very evident, and even when they are "rambling" about the show in general, it is very entertaining. The on screen production captions are much more useful in highlighting the story's history. Also added are some test shots from unused opening credits and schematic pictures of the ark's design. This really is Doctor Who at its very best. A great story, very well acted, brilliantly designed and tensely directed. As a result it's easy to forgive the "bubble wrap" monsters! I hope Baker and Sladen reunite for future releases. Their commentary is truly entertaining, although presumably at some point they will run out of anecdotes. A great DVD release, certainly one of the best so far.
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Summary: ASSIMULATED BY THE WIRRN!!!
Review: 1974's Season 12 saw the introduction of a new Doctor in the form of Tom Baker and while the first story "Robot" had the public wondering what had happened to Jon Pertwee, the second story "The Ark in Space" made them quickly forget him.The Doctor decides to take UNIT's chief surgeon, Lt Harry Sullivan (Ian Marter), on a quick trip in the TARDIS to prove to him that really was a space/time machine. When Harry and Sarah (Elizabeth Sladen) emerge with the Doctor they discover themselves on space station in the far future. The Doctor finds a damaged console and attempts to repair it to activate the station's life support system but accidentally engages the intruder defense system. While the Doctor and Harry dodge energy blasts in the control room, a dazed Sarah is teleported to another part of the ship where she is placed into cryogenic suspension. With the defense system deactivated, Harry and the Doctor set off to look for Sarah. They eventually come across a stasis chamber full of preserved humans awaiting revival. They locate Sarah's capsule and attempt to revive her. Meanwhile the Doctor finds the mummified body of a giant wasp-like insect which appears to have damaged the space station's clock preventing the human from awakening. With his repairs complete, the humans start to revive and the first one to emerge is Vira, the first Medtech, who is disgusted to find what she regards as primitive savages onboard her ship, is confused by the presence of the dead insect and then horrified to find that one of the capsules is missing its occupant and that the remains of an alien membrane are attached to the inside of the shell. The Doctor deduces that the dead alien had laid eggs in the missing crewman which had hatched, devoured him and was now infesting the station's solar stacks. In order to slow their development the Doctor heads off to shut down the stacks while more human are revived. Sarah is reanimated along with two technicians and their leader, Noah. Noah doesn't trust the strangers and follows the Doctor, preventing him from shutting off the power, but becoming infected by the Wirrn larvae. The alien cells start to mutate Noah into an adult Wirrn and cause him to kill one of the revived Techs. Other Wirrn start to emerge from their cocoons in the power room and the alien Noah demands the remaining human bodies in stasis be left as hosts for more Wirrn eggs... Once again the BBC has done a wonderful job of remastering the prints onto DVD. The story line is excellent and is somehow similar to Alien and you can't help but wonder if this might have made a good adult horror movie on the big screen if it had a bigger budget. There is also the option to replace the laughable original model shots of the space station and the shuttle with new CGI effects in order to "upgrade" the show for a more modern audience that are not used to cardboard spaceships suspended from fishing lines. A classic story with some excellent acting that will give you 90 minutes of pure viewing pleasure. The commentary with Tom Baker, Elizabeth Sladen and Phillip Hinchcliffe provide a funny and interesting guide to the making of this fan-favourite romp!
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Summary: Science Fiction's Best!
Review: How can one not love Doctor Who? The classic British TV show set impressive standards for imagination and creativity, as exemplified by The Ark In Space, a perennial fan favorite. Tom Baker is in top form here, playing up the Doctor's mystery and aloofness, all the while demonstrating that he's a force for good and right. Elisabeth Sladen is charming as always in the role of sarah Jane Smith, and Ian Marter's Harry Sullivan is an hilarious deadpan to all the sci-fi madness going on. Excellent dialogue and plotting make a for a gripping story throughout. What else can I say? This disc should be in your collection - go buy it now!
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Summary: An undisputed classic.
Review: "The Ark in Space" is an excellent, spellbinding tale from Doctor Who's gothic Hinchcliffe era, set on a spaceship many thousands of years in our future. It's also the first really great story to feature the wonderful Tom Baker in the title role, and is, for me at least, a better introduction to his time on Doctor Who than his own debut story, "Robot". Thousands of years have passed since the present day, and ecological disasters have forced humanity to go into hibernation. While civilization crumbled and decayed on the surface of our world, out in orbit around it was constructed a safe haven for the slumbering human race. With the selected few meant to carry on the species in suspended animation, they were helpless to do anything when something else decided to make its own nest there too ... The Doctor arrives just as that something is beginning to reawaken, and is about to become a threat to the sleeping humans. "The Ark in Space" would have been dubbed an "Alien" clone had it come out a few years later: while it was safely produced in 1974, its story has a lot of things in common with the Ridley Scott film. Luckily for this story, "Alien" didn't have the Doctor, but that's not the only reason to watch it now. Sure, this doesn't look as good ... the low budget is obviously apparant in most every scene you'll see here, but rather than make this a bad production it actually has the opposite effect. The production crew have done a splendid job here, constructing a sterile and utterly believeable environment for the story to take place in, from the white, empty corridors of the space station to the sleeping chambers where the humans reside. Apparantly they hadn't had a lot of material to work with, but with what they had they produced some real miracles. It's wonderful to look at. The aliens in this story, the Wirrn, are a wonderful as well... when I first caught a glance at them, I thought they looked terribly cheap, but that feeling went away after I'd really studied them. They're excellently insectoid ... even the transformation of one of the humans into a Wirrn, accomplished with green spray-painted bubble wrap, doesn't look terrible because of the fact that bubble wrap is used: insects seem to be able to create remarkable geometric structures (honeycombs, wasps nests, etc)... the use of bubble wrap, with its tiny, identical circles, is absolutely perfect and is therefore convincing. I can't believe I've made such a big deal about the production values here, as I didn't really mean to, but they are obviously worth congratulating. But everything else is great here too: the premise of the story (pre-"Alien", I will say again), the excellent new Doctor and his companions, the setting, and the story that follows the Doctor's arrival, told over the course of four mesmerizing episodes ... You can't go wrong with this one. Of all the Tom Baker stories to be selected for a release on DVD, I am glad that this was among the first. The DVD contains a wonderful vintage interview with Tom Baker, by the way, filmed while he was still just settling into the part. Very interesting indeed. Carry on Carry on, MN
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Summary: Warm Romanticism vs. cold and logical Positivism
Review: "Homo sapiens. What an inventive, invincible species. It's only a few million years since they crawled up out of the mud and learned to walk. Puny, defenseless bipeds. They've survived flood, famine, and plague. They've survived cosmic wars and holocausts. And now, here they are, out among the stars, waiting to begin a new life. Ready to outsit eternity. They're indomitable." So says the Doctor when he notices the rows of humans in suspended animation aboard the title vehicle, an example of the normal Positivist stance sci-fi takes. The Doctor, Sarah, and Harry land on Space Station Nerva, which houses hundreds of humans in suspended animation. Apparently, solar flares caused millions of Earth people to hide underground while a percentage of them was sent to Nerva, wake up after a few thousand years after the Earth cooled off, and resettle it. Trouble is, the humans overslept by a couple thousand years, and during that time, they had a visitor, which Harry discovers--a green giant locust-like alien. The crucial members of the crew, Vira, first medtech, and Noah, the ark's Prime Unit, are awoken, and prepare to resucitate the others. Noah is then attacked by an alien, and before long, his body begins to metamorphose into that of a Wirrn. His transformation is mental as well as physical, yet he constantly struggles to maintain his humanity as he's gradually absorbed into the Wirrn hivemind. The concept of aliens using men for endoparasitism predates Alien by a good five years. And look at the title of the story and at Noah's name. The biblical connotations are obvious, as the mission is to repopulate an Earth destroyed by a catastrophe. The difference is, Biblical Noah will live in a world where man and beast live in harmony, but in this story, humans are in danger of "symbiotic atavism", of an Earth ruled by aliens. But the Wirrn and the humans on the Ark have a commonality. The Wirrn are a collective hivemind, while the Ark survivors have a humorless, strictly hierarchical, coldly scientific, compared to the more warmer and less technical Doctor, Harry, and Sarah. Indeed, when Vira coldly asks the Doctor and Harry if Sarah's of value, Harry incredulously says, "Of value? She's a human being like ourselves! What kind of question is that?" Vira then tells the Doctor that Harry's a Romantic, to which the Doctor says, "Perhaps we both are." This denotes the crossing out of the cerebral Positivism with a more warm-hearted Romanticism. As a cost-cutting measure, the sets for Nerva were reused in Revenge Of The Cybermen, which was the next story shot after this, but aired as the last story of the season. Trivia: the music played to Sarah in Episode 1 is taken from Georg Handel's Largo. And why Episode 2 was the highest charting story, #5 and netting 13.6 million viewers on first airing, is anybody's guess, as I've seen better episodes. As for the effects, the Ark model and interior are realized great, especially the cathedral-like cryogenics chamber, but the Wirrn larvae are wrapped in both sizes of bubble wrap sprayed green. This story clearly puts human beings in a good light, and sees great potential for them. As the message by the long-dead Earth Minister says, "You are the chosen survivors. You have been entrusted with a sacred duty, to see that human knowledge, human culture, human love and faith shall never perish from the universe. Guard what we have given you with all your strength."
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Summary: An almost perfect episode - the Who version of Alien
Review: As I've said before, it's easy to overrate Doctor Who episodes, especially the Tom Baker ones, which, to me, tend to work the best. The costumes hold up better than with most of the other Whos, the companions were a bit smarter, there was K-9, and I, like a lot of other Amercians, quite like Tom Baker's sense of humor. Still, not all series work as well as others, and this one has quite a bit of science and is quite creepy as well. This episode is the first in which Henry is a companion of the Dcctor along with Sarah, when they land on what appears to be a malfunctioning "lifeboat" in space. The crew are in cryogenic suspension, the space station apparently the victim of some sort of infestation. Initially, the doctor and crew merely have to restore power to the station in order to survive long enough to leave, but end up staying to help the crew, which is slowly coming out of 10,000 years of cryogenic suspension only to face a menace that threatens to end the human race. This is an episode that seems to have solid science at its foundation, a thrilling and realistic sense of danger, and no shortage of brave humans. As usual, the aliens are rather cheesy looking but, also as usual, when the story is this good, you learn to overlook it rather quickly and this series is quite reminiscent of Alien, which didn't come out until about 10 years later. The show makes good use of its single setting and the acting is superb. I hardly noticed the time going by with this one. Highly recommended.
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Summary: One of the best from "the monster season"
Review: Being a "Doctor Who" fan for over two decades running, I rejoiced to see the series finally making its appearance on DVD. "Ark in Space" is one of the reasons why; it's one of the best episodes of the "monster season" that inaugurated Tom Baker's great run as the Doctor, one which saw a "who's who" (no pun intended) of some of his greatest nemeses. Yet "Ark in Space" stands out for its careful pacing, which brilliantly mounts the tension as the Doctor and his companions face a menace which threatens to wipe out one of the last remnants of humanity. Many people often complain about the special effects of the series, which is understandable given their low-budget nature and the expectation created by "Star Wars" and other sci-fi extravaganza to dazzle viewers with computer-generated pseudo-realism (something the BBC acknowledges with the new CGI footage on the DVD of the space shots). But such complaints miss the point; the show succeeded because of great writing and quality acting, not glitzy visuals. Few episodes better demonstrate this than "Ark in Space", which creates suspense for the viewer even though you know that the "aliens" at one point are little more than actors in green bubble-wrap. This is why "Doctor Who" continued on long after more visually spectacular (but creatively flat) shows like "Star Trek", "Space 1999", and "Battlestar Galactica" had disappeared from the airwaves. Hopefully, the BBC will remember this as they revive the series once more; until then, fans have to settle for the glacially slow release of the classic episodes on DVD.
Rating:
Summary: Don't touch anything!
Review: Here we have possibly the best remembered story from the Tom Baker era, and only his second aired adventure as The Doctor. The simple yet affective sets and the cast both contribute enormously to a solid script and turn this story into a well-paced sci-fi action adventure. The sense of isolation thousands of years into the future, overshadowed by the looming threat of the Wirrn as they slowly awaken and breed to slaughter the sleeping humans on board the Ark is very well excecuted. The tension slowly builds accross four episodes and blends well into the next story (The Sontaran Experiment) making the last four stories from Tom's first season into a single coherent plotline. If I could pick just one Tom Baker era DVD to own, this would be it.
Rating:
Summary: The highest ever rating for a Dr. Who story
Review: This story is one of the most interesting 'morality plays' of Dr. Who's series, which shows character portraits of trickery, faith, and insanity at its best. Tom Baker's soliloquy to the sleeping humans in the cryogenic chamber 'Homosapiens, what an indomitable species! It was only a millions ago since they crawled out of the mud and learned to walk!' is one of his best, next to the infamous one as Macbeth when one night he got a peanut stuck in the back of his throat (as he later told to Peter Haining). The story, set at a time when the Earth is ravaged by solar flares, is a tense and terrifying one in which the future of humanity is threatened by the Wirrrn, speechless locust-like creatures whose former colonies were destroyed by humans on Andromeda. Having taken over the body and mind of Noah, they seek their revenge by devouring the humans left but allowing the Doctor, his companions and the few revived Terra Nova humans to escape. Kenton Moore's Noah and Richardson Morgan's Rogin show two determined men who despite the enormous trial end up sacrificing themselves for the sake of their people. The story is memorable for one of the most incredible cliff-hangers - whereupon Noah disposes of the young Libri only to take his hand out of his pocket to find it turned into a green scaly mess of alien flesh where his gloating suddenly turns to an expression of horror. Other scenes such as the Doctor taunting Sarah when she gets stuck in the air duct, the Doctor joining his mind to the Wirrrns and Noah begging his wife Vira to destroy him whilst his mind is being taken over show Dr. Who at its most ingenius to earn it the No. 5 rating in the UK TV charts in 1975 - the highest position the programme ever scored. Dario Western
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