Production code 7Q

First Transmitted:
1-04/10/1989 19:35
2-11/10/1989 19:35
3-18/10/1989 19:35

Cast
Sophie Aldred : Ace
Michael Cochrane : Redvers Fenn-Cooper
Sharon Duce : Control
Carl Forgione : Nimrod
John Hallam : Light
Ian Hogg : Josiah
Brenda Kempner : Mrs Grose
Sylvester McCoy : The Doctor
John Nettleton : Reverend Ernest Matthews
Katharine Schlesinger : Gwendoline
Sylvia Syms : Mrs Pritchard
Frank Windsor : Inspector Mackenzie

Crew
Mark Ayres : Incidental Music
Henry Barber : Studio Lighting
Keith Bowden : Studio Sound
Andrew Cartmel : Script Editor
June Collins : Production Associate
Stephen Garwood : Assistant Floor Manager
Ron Grainer : Title Music
and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, arranged by Keff McCulloch
Paul Heasman : Stunt Arranger
Malcolm James : Visual Effects
Dick Mills : Special Sounds
John Nathan-Turner : Producer
Marc Platt : Writer
Nick Somerville : Designer
Joan Stribling : Make-Up
Scott Talbott : Studio Sound
Ken Trew : Costumes
Alan Wareing : Director
Valerie Whiston : Production Assistant

Plot Outline from Wikipedia

In 1883 the mansion house of Gabriel Chase in Perivale near London is under the control of the mysterious Josiah Samuel Smith, having subjugated the occupants via some form of brainwashing. It is a most mysterious place, where the serving women brandish guns and the butler is a Neanderthal named Nimrod. Other occupants include Gwendoline, the daughter of the original owners of the house who have now disappeared; the calculating night housekeeper Mrs Pritchard; the crazed explorer Redvers Fenn-Cooper; and the Reverend Ernest Matthews, opponent of the theory of evolution which Smith has done much to spread. For his pains Matthews is transformed by Smith into an ape and placed in a display case.

The TARDIS arrives at Gabriel Chase. It turns out that Ace had visited the house in 1983 and had felt an evil presence, and the Seventh Doctor‘s curiosity drives him to seek the answers. Something is also alive and evolving in the cellar beneath the house and when Ace investigates she finds two animated and dangerous husks. The cellar is in fact a vast stone spaceship with something trapped inside. The Doctor, meanwhile, works his way through the stuffed animals in Gabriel Chase and eventually finds a human in suspended animation, an Inspector Mackenzie, who came to the house two years earlier in search of the owners. The Doctor revives him and together they seek to unlock the mysteries of Gabriel Chase. He also encounters the evolving creature from the cellar, known as Control, which has now taken on human form. The Doctor helps it release the trapped creature from the cellar, a being known as Light who takes the form of an angel.

Thousands of years in the past, an alien spaceship came to Earth to catalogue all life on the planet. After completing its task and collecting some samples, which included the Neanderthal, the leader Light went into slumber. By 1881 the ship had returned to Earth. While Control remained imprisoned on the ship to serve as the "control" subject of the scientific investigation, events transpired such that Smith, the "survey agent", mutinied against Light, keeping him in hibernation on the ship. Smith began evolving into the era's dominant life-form -- a Victorian gentleman -- and also took over the house. By 1883, Smith, having "evolved" into forms approximating a human and casting off his old husks as an insect would, managed to lure and capture the explorer Fenn-Cooper within his den. Utilizing Fenn-Cooper's association with Queen Victoria, he plans to get close to her so that he can assassinate her and subsequently take control of the British Empire.

Light is displeased by all the change that has occurred on the planet while he was asleep. While Light tries to make sense of all the change, Smith tries to keep his plan intact, but events are moving beyond his control. Light turns Gwendoline and her missing mother, revealed to be Mrs Pritchard, to stone in a bid to stop the speed of evolution; while Inspector Mackenzie meets a sticky end and is turned into a primordial soup to serve at dinner. As Control tries to "evolve" into a Lady, and Ace tries to come to grips with her feelings about the house, the Doctor himself tries to keep the upper hand in all the events that have been set in motion. The Doctor finally convinces Light of the futility of opposing evolution, which causes him to overload and dissipate into the surrounding house. It was this presence that Ace sensed and which caused her to burn the house in 1983. Also, Control's complete evolution into a Lady derails Smith's plan as Fenn-Cooper, having freed himself from Smith's brainwashing, chooses to side with her instead of him. In the end, with Smith now the new Control creature imprisoned on the ship, Control, Fenn-Cooper and Nimrod set off in the alien ship to explore the universe.

Analysis by Cuisle

Burnt toast, bus stations - full of lost luggage and lost souls - unrequited love, tyranny and cruelty.

These are the things The Doctor hates according to this episode. For myself, I hate Doctor Who episodes that ought to work and don't.

'The Independent called this the best Doctor Who story in a decade. However, in order to appreciate fully what's going on it is probably necessary to watch Ghost Light two or three times. Ghost Light is a superb example of Andrew Cartmel's vision for Doctor Who. The design is flawless, the direction is beautiful, and the script is a heady mix of the humorous and the macabre (especially when Inspector Mackenzie, the 'cream of Scotland Yard', is turned into primordial soup).'

This was the review given for this episode in Paul Cornel's Discontinuity guide. And I would agree with almost everything said there. Yes, it definitely needs to be watched two or three times to appreciate. Yes, it is flawlessly designed, beautifully directed etc.

But the problem is summed up in this comment from another critic.

'Ghost Light started off as an intellectual jigsaw puzzle that allowed the viewer to piece together the clues, one that would lead to a climax which would have been the final assembly, as the picture became clear.

Somewhere, some of the vital information went missing. The result was a jigsaw puzzle without a picture on the box, and with some pieces absent. Without this, the climax vanished, to be replaced by a less than fulfilling denouement that clarified nothing.'

I strongly suspect that the missing pieces ended up on the cutting room floor in an effort to make a very complex plot fit into three 25 minute episodes where it would have been better stretched over four or even five episodes. And this is an unusual complaint for a 'classic series' episode. Usually the problem is the other way about. There is too much padding stretching out a thin story. This was a rich and complex story saying something rather fascinating and wonderful about the nature of life itself. Light's confusion about the nature of evolution and his frustration that life on Earth does not stay in any definitive form is an interesting counterpoint to the Reverend Matthews's earlier declaration against evolutionary theory that 'Man is the same now as when he stood in the Garden of Eden.' Both reject the possibility of change. And both are proved wrong by the events that unfold in this story. But while Reverend Matthews only seeks to hold up the march of scientific knowledge, Light wants to hold up Earth itself. He wants to destroy this ever changing and mutable thing called Life and replace it with unchanging sterility.

And of course The Doctor is not having that. He loves life in all of its diverse forms. He would never countenance the halting of evolution for anyone or anything ? at least as long as that evolution is a natural process. His most deadly enemies, of course, are the Daleks and the Cybermen, two species whose evolution was interfered with by science. His own race, the Time Lords, perhaps fall into the same category of having been changed by science, but they also are an example of evolutionary stagnation. From the little we ever gleaned about them over the years, they clearly did evolve once. The Time Lords were 'Created' from ordinary Gallifeyan stock by Rassilon's scientific experiments that gave them the power over time and space and also the ability to regenerate themselves. At least so one of the theories goes. But since then they had become not only at an evolutionary dead end but socially, too. It was those things that The Doctor first rebelled against when he left Gallifrey to become a Renegade and an exile. And small wonder that he found Earth such a refreshing change. A place where nothing ever stayed the same, even if the changes took millennia to become apparent. He, after all, had plenty of time to observe it.

Ghostlight, one way or another put plenty of food for thought. But the fact still remains that it was, literally, a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing. And that meant that it was not as satisfying as it ought to have been. Whatever the Independent thought at the time, in hindsight it comes off as the least satisfactory story of Season 26, which was otherwise a magnificent series that went to prove that the show should NEVER have been axed. This story suffers more than the rest from the machinations of the BBC Executives. It SHOULD have been allowed to be a four part story with ALL of it's pieces in the box. The fact that it was not allowed to do so goes to show that the BBC were not playing fair. They axed the show because of falling ratings, ostensibly, but they sabotaged it in every underhand way in order to force the ratings to fall.