The Ark by Paul Erickson
5 - 26 March 1966
The Ark is a thing of two halves, in more ways than one. Obviously, there is a gulf of about seven hundred years in between episodes two and three, stitched together by the frankly amazing cliffhanger of the statue honoring humanity being discovered to have a Monoid head instead. This two halves phrase also holds true in that, while the first half of the story has some good story beats and some interesting concepts to it, the second half bored me to death. The Doctor getting to practice medicine for once is cool, and the concept of the Ark itself is fairly novel for the show. The Monoids are well-realized as a costume, as seen in the opening shot of the first episode, and I liked seeing all the critters in the jungle. In fact, none of this serial is what I would call bad and I generally enjoyed myself, but it really did lose me, and lose me hard, in the last two episodes. I think this story would have benefited from being split, with another adventure in between, sort of like how The Myth Makers separated Mission to the Unknown from the rest of The Daleks' Master Plan. The delayed gratification on the statue reveal would have been magnificent. But it's hard to say whether the Monoids in control would have been any more exciting, or if the Refusians would have been any less rubbish. Either way, the production values and the direction are good, so the episodes are visually arresting all the way through.
The one big thing everyone seems to remark upon while reviewing this story is the recurring debate over whether the portrayal of the Monoids is racist or not. Many platoons of pixels have bravely given their lives over the years to this topic online, so I'll stay brief. Though this particular theme of the story is undoubtedly not executed very well, and as such the implications of the Monoids turning around and oppressing the humans after being oppressed themselves are pretty grimace-worthy, I will say that I'm almost positive that this is just a case of well-intentioned writing going a bit off the tracks. The fact that the Doctor blames the humans in part for their own predicament, and that the Refusians insist that the two species coexist in harmony at the end of the serial, suggests that there is probably a good message somewhere under here, it's just buried by bad writing decisions. The noticeable fact that the cast is entirely white despite representing the remnants of the whole human race, ostensibly, is still an ugly actuality, though might be more to do with casting issues. Any further analysis of the problem is way over my head.
I'll change tacks and point out a strange fact I discovered while researching this serial. While Lesley Scott has a writing credit on this story, the first woman to have such a credit for Doctor Who, it doesn't appear that she actually did any writing on the scripts. Evidently, per Paul Erickson who was her husband at the time, it was a personal arrangement. Just another odd quirk to tack onto this episode. I always write the headers of these posts with the actual authors and will avoid crediting pseudonyms for the duration of the marathon. Just in case anyone was wondering.
There's not much more I can find to say about The Ark. Next we'll look at The Celestial Toymaker and see how it stacks up.
(Modified from the original posted at Gallifrey Base on 30 April 2020.)
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