I really feel for the people who have to write the descriptions on the DVD sleeves for bad stories. For good stories? Easy as piss. "This story is a total classic that everyone loves," couldn't be easier. And for mediocre ones as well. "Well, it's not great, but the good outweighs the bad," again, takes all of five minutes. And even for the bad stories released as part of box sets - take Warriors of the Deep for example, where it basically is "Look, we know you bought this for the two Pertwee stories, but we had to release it at some point, so just roll with it." But for bad stories they've released on their own? They can't just come out and say "This is dogshit and you've wasted your money," can they? They have to try and justify it as much as they can, usually taking about "ambition" or "good on paper, not in execution" or something like that.
It amuses me therefore that the bit of text for Nightmare of Eden is probably the most egregious example of this. It's a fun, light-hearted story with some special effect failures that slightly mar it, said nobody ever apart from the poor sod assigned to write the sleeve notes for this DVD. Anyway, just a funny observation I think. Have a rifle through your DVD collection, have a read for the bad stories and have a chuckle.
Anyway, Nightmare of Eden is a bad story, although I'll damn it with very faint praise and say that it's not quite the worst thing ever. It might not say very much that I'd rather watch this than Black Orchid, but it does at least say we're not entirely without merit here. Just not very much.
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| Romana was dismayed to find she had accidentally worn a dressing gown to the Han Solo costume competition |
Anyway, Nightmare of Eden is notorious for three things. Firstly, is the political message of the story, and let me tell you, Literal Communist Malcolm Hulke this aint. It's written by Bob Baker, half of a frequent writing duo with Dave Martin - most notably, they together created K9 and Omega. Nightmare of Eden is just Baker however - now, I must admit I'm not quite as well versed in Baker and Martin's work as I am with say Robert Holmes or Terrance Dicks or Comrade Hulke or a few other more notable writers I could mention, so I'm not really able to say what they each add to the duo. Safe to say, however, that any political messaging in those stories was probably Martin.
But was there any really? Looking at the list of stories they authored I see mostly straight sci-fi tales, which is of course fair enough, but doesn't really add credence to the idea that you can take one of those writers on his own and give him the drugs episode.
Oh, yeah, it's an anti-drugs message, in case you were one of the six or seven people who weren't aware. Now, I would rather talk about the life cycle of a fruit fly than delve into the moral issues surrounding drug use and trafficking but it is extremely important to note that it is a very complex issue with a lot of sides and angles to consider - it's no more black and white than any other issue, and we'd all do well to remember that. Bob Baker included.
While I'm not some Nancy Reaganite who thinks that one joint is the gateway to a ruined life, I'm also not necessarily opposed to the message he's trying to get across here - drug use is bad, can put other people at risk, it can destroy communities and trafficking can lead to nasty consequences usually involving death. That's not a bad message in itself, but it's ruined by the utterly ridiculous strawman he creates to explore it. Vraxoin, the story's big bad drug, just doesn't fit the message here. It's effects are ludicrously vanilla, it just makes the user a bit high and apathetic - the fact that in the very story one of the people who took it was confused for being drunk shows that it's possible even the script is fully aware of this. You could manage that effect down the pub on a Friday night after a few pints of insert choice lager here, not needing a (presumably) hideously expensive and dangerous drug. Oh, the moment the user doesn't get more of the drug? DEATH. So an extremely high chance of death for a kind of effect you'd have no real issue getting with alcohol, which presumably remains perfectly legal in this future and has a significantly lower fatality rate. Definitely sounds like something that would catch on.
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| Good job there's a big red button saying 'alarm'. otherwise who knows what would happen |
You seeing the problem? It's hardly a strong message showing the perils of drug-taking and more a parable on how stupid someone would be to actually take it. Apparently this was not originally supposed to be the case, and a drug with an effect more clearly resembling modern recreational drugs was supposed to be used, but there were objections this would glorify drug use to the younguns watching.
Well, to be perfectly blunt, is showing kids such a ridiculous drug the kind of thing you want to do, when in a few years time they might be shown a drug with a much more pleasant effect that doesn't lead to instant death? Yeah, have a think about that one. And also, if that's the concern, why are you making this in the first place? If you don't want to do a story properly showing the dangers of drugs, THEN DON'T DO IT AT ALL. Doctor Who is a show that is watched by children and anyone writing it needs to take this into account, which is why the better political analogies are more subtle and don't have obvious things like fucking murder drugs in them.
Slightly more effective is Baker's look at the other side of drug use, drug trafficking. Tryst and Dymond (oh yeah, spoilers) represent, at least in the way I read it, the two sides of drug trafficking - Dymond is in for the money, does it without any qualms and couldn't give two fucks either way who gets hurt, while Tryst has been forced into it by necessity. He doesn't like doing it, but he's managed to convince himself it's for a greater good and goes along with it in just the same way. It's difficult not to see this as a commentary on the big drug lords and the poor schmucks they bring in to do the dirty work. I also may be looking into this a bit too deeply, but the drug police who turn up at the end of episode two may be a commentary on certain extremely tough on drugs countries, where the authorities are pretty blatantly corrupt - the two of them are overhead at one point talking about how they'll get their promotions because they've got the Doctor and Romana, on the sole evidence of the Doctor having traces of the drug on his person... despite the fact he was the one who reported the presence of the drugs to them and therefore it being fairly logical that he may have found some. Again, I may be looking into this too deeply, but I think it's quite interesting if I'm not.
This only goes so far however - Dymond is a painfully flat character and Tryst is a pretty generic science guy who talks about 'the greatness of my work!' and all that crap, and rather famously is played with an utterly ridiculous accent that makes every scene he's in difficult to take seriously - even Tom Baker is frequently visually trying (and usually failing) to not laugh at it. It's also pretty obvious he's the one behind the drug smuggling from early on - as soon as Mystery Guy Who Turns Out To Be A Secret Agent (an annoyingly common trope) is ruled out, it becomes very simply a process of elimination, which does rob from the mystery. The drug police guys are pretty ridiculous as well, in costumes you'd expect to see in Season 24, not the Tom Baker era, with their manner of speaking and extremely questionable actions throughout the story not helping their case.
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| Only the most badass drug enforcement agencies have sparkly bits stuck to their uniforms |
The second thing Nightmare of Eden is notorious for is the Mandrels. In particular, the horrific special effects and how this manages to make them genuinely the least threatening Doctor Who monster ever created.
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| Watch out Doctor, he'll give you a hug! |
They look and sound pretty ridiculous, and are based on a particularly flawed premise - how exactly are they supposed to be creatures composed of the drug? I'm no biologist but I think the composition of life tends to be a bit more complex than 'made of an addictive substance'. And also, how is electrocution supposed to return these creates to their base elements? I mean, if we go through every unanswered question in this story we'll be here for weeks, true, but if a monster is unthreatening, looks ridiculous and makes no sense in the confines of the story, then what at all does it add, apart from a very weak menace and the occasional interruption to a scene for K9 to fight them.
The Mandrels are pretty inexcusable. As usual, I'll say that if you're watching Classic Who for the production values then you're wasting your time, but it does also come back to that same idea - if something cannot be convincingly achieved with the time and budget, then don't do it. It really is not rocket science.
Speaking of production values, they are not great here. The model shots are pretty bad, the interface between the two fused ships just looks like a budget version of a viewscreen from Star Trek, and the set design itself is just very bland 'seventies Who'. Say what you like about John Nathan-Turner, and boy will I one day, but the change when he took over for the next season were very notable. This is really, in terms of production values, look, feel, etc. a story that could have been made at any point during the 1970s, and JNT was correct in realising that had to change if the show was to survive into the 80s. It's just a shame so many of his changes were mind-bogglingly awful, but that's a different story for a different day.
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| Nightmare of Eden predicts what year some sad prick will write a blog post about it |
Anyway, I suppose we'll briefly touch on what I do like about this story, and there are a few things. Chiefly, I think the first episode-and-a-half or so aren't actually that bad at all - there's some good pacing, it moves well, has some interesting mystery and some pretty good humour from Baker. It's not City of Death by any means, but it's fairly inoffensive stuff up until the Mandrels start appearing, the bit of Eden inside the machine starts becoming more prominent and the space drug police turn up, which is when it all starts to fall apart. Tom Baker and Lalla Ward are as reliable as ever - I particularly like the moment when Tryst is being arrested at the end of the story and tries to justify his actions to the Doctor as for a greater scientific good, who dismisses him with a simple "Go away," brilliantly delivered by Baker and putting across the Doctor's feelings about hurting and using people for a greater good - he won't abide by it. Until he suspects the moon might be an egg of course, then he'll do whatever the hell he likes.
I also like some of the ideas behind the story - two spaceships being fused in a warp-speed collision is an interesting one, as is the idea of storing small parts of worlds inside a machine. But the ideas are all I really like - for the former, I don't think the concept is used anything like enough, as the two ships seem to be perfectly fine both during and after the fusing, which misses out on some great storytelling potential. For the latter... well, the idea was already used in Carnival of Monsters, an absolutely fantastic story that uses the potential of the idea to its full, and it is a comparison that does not flatter this story, which only really uses it as an excuse to bring in the Mandrels and to have some filler moments in a crap BBC jungle.
You may be wondering what the third thing this story is notorious for is, and that's the absolute hell it was to produce. Graham Williams hired aging director Alan Bromly for this story, and depending on who you ask, he either butted heads with Tom Baker over the latter's frequency to improvise and control things, or he was a dinosaur totally set on his outdated ways who pissed off far more people than just Baker. Either way, he quit halfway through and Williams had to finish the job. I couldn't really tell what was done by Bromly and what was done by Williams so take that for what it's worth.
Now the effect this has on the actual story is debatable - Baker's improvised humour can sometimes be genuinely funny, like it is in Part One, and sometimes it can be painful, like the infamous 'oh, my everything' scene, but let's face it, even if this production had gone totally smoothly, the script and the Mandrels would make sure this was not going to rise very far.
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| The evil eyes, wooooo.... |
Anyway, to sum, Nightmare of Eden is not terribly impressive. It starts well enough, does have some solid intrigue and mystery and is interesting to think about... it's just not interesting to watch. There are holes in the plot so large you'd be forgiven for it was a Steven Moffat script, the political message is pretty bad and the Mandrels are totally impossible to take seriously.
So is it a Nightmare of Eden. Maybe not, I'd call it a Pretty Dull and Insipid Bad Dream of Eden, which is probably not much of a recommendation, but hey, it is what it is. And as for the DVD sleeve writer? 'Comedic and fun?' Yeah, not really. It's actually interesting that this is probably the least Douglas Adams-y story of Season 17, which is weird as it maybe could have used his touch to liven it up a bit. But comedy is in the eye of the beholder, so if you find stupid strawman drugs and monsters that look like evil teddy bears hilarious, then this is the story for you.
Final Score: 3/10. It is not without its moments, such as a strong start and some interesting mystery, and overall it's not hugely unpleasant to watch, but it is dull, stupid, awkward and uses a stunningly weak political message as its main theme, which leads to a bad, but not totally disastrous outing.
Next Episode: Paradise Towe-
Oh no.
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