Something tells me that Robert Holmes might just have been a bit of a workaholic. On top of his new responsibilities as script editor, he also mostly reworked Revenge of the Cybermen, was heavily involved in the scripting of The Sontaran Experiment, and performed a page-one rewrite of this story here. It's a wonder he still had it in him to do more seasons after this! Still, this script certainly doesn't suffer for the workload Holmes was surely laboring under. As far as a statement of intent for the new Hinchcliffe-Holmes vision of the show goes, you can't ask for a better story than this.
It's striking from the start of Part One just how spooky and cold the atmosphere of the titular Ark is. The white, empty chambers of the Ark are revealed to us in some fairly sweeping shots which sell the scope in a way that conceals the actual size of the sets. The room with the dormant humans is especially effective, an impression helped by the awe that Baker's Doctor feels when he stands there for his monolog.
"Homo sapiens. What an inventive, invincible species. It's only a few million years since they've crawled up out of the mud and learned to walk. Puny, defenceless bipeds. They've survived flood, famine and plague. They've survived cosmic wars and holocausts, and now here they are amongst the stars, waiting to begin a new life, ready to outsit eternity. They're indomitable. Indomitable!"
This moment is remarkable not just because of the oratory power held by Tom Baker, whose big, booming voice is absolutely perfect for moments like this, but for the outright annunciation of what makes humankind so special. It's de rigeur in today's show to extol the virtues of humanity, but this is the first time that the Doctor has told us what he finds so interesting about our species in such expansive and glowing words. The Pertwee Doctor, as human as he was, mostly seemed fed up with us during his time on Earth, so this is definitely an interesting change in tone.
As with the previous story, the idea of what it actually means to be human is a central theme of The Ark in Space. We discover that the human population stored in stasis aboard the Ark is a remnant selected to survive the solar flares that scourged the Earth. We also learn, interestingly, that there are colonies, the inhabitants of which Vira and Noah refer to with clear derision. Thus it's implied that the colonists might have survived too, but that these particular survivors don't consider them "real" humans. For all that the Doctor tells us that all colors and creeds are represented in this collection, the idea that there are some people who aren't worth saving still seems to persist.
Cleverly, then, after Noah is transformed into one of the parasitic Wirrn, becoming a grotesque insect, we see that his own human instincts still win. The Wirrn represent the ultimate violation of our humanity. We like to think of ourselves as being higher than the other members of the animal kingdom. We know that parasitic wasps exist in our world, but they don't bother us; they prey on spiders and other animals we consider "beneath" ourselves. The Wirrn clearly don't see that distinction and prey on us all the same, both by feeding us to their young and even turning us into them. There couldn't be something more disgusting to our sense of self.
So of course at the end, Noah's love for his humanity, and for Vira, allows him to sacrifice himself and destroy the Wirrn which he's joined. His last words, an apology and a farewell, while a rocket silently shoots off into space and then explodes. It vindicates what we the viewers already know, that the disdain the Ark crew hold for the colonists was wrong; human beings are human beings. No matter how monstrous he looked, Noah was the most human of them all, at the moment when it really counted.
The better side of humanity prevailed. It always does. Always will.
So yes, of course I thought it was an amazing story. No contrarianism here. The Sontaran Experiment is next.
(Modified from the original posted at Gallifrey Base on 15 April 2021.)
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