"Man has been the same, sir, since he stood in the garden of Eden, and he was never ever a chattering gibbering ape."
TECHNICAL SPECS: First aired Oct.11 1989.
IN THIS ONE... Reverend Matthews is turned into a monkey. The Doctor awakens the policeman in the cupboard. Control escapes the cellar. Josiah sheds his husk.
REVIEW: Here's how Ghost Light is opposing evolution and creationism. The personified Light is undoubtedly God/creationism, and is often off-handedly equated to Divinity. The light at the end of the tunnel. Redvers seeing its face and going mad. Nimrod's god, the Burning One. A literal reading of Genesis would make Earth an unchanging ecosystem, where all the plants and animals were made whole and have not since changed. The Reverend Matthews is its unknowing advocate, but even he is transformed by other forces in the house, regressed to an ape-like state as Josiah's joke. Josiah and Control, the two main denizens of the house, represent the forces of evolution, though they serve Light each in their own way. That isn't a contradiction. Light has been made prisoner, after all, and both Josiah and Control fear Light, perhaps out of guilt for their evolutionary sins. Though now that Josiah has taken on a new body, one that doesn't fear daylight and doesn't need dark glasses, that he as evolved into a Victorian gentleman, one who might better embrace Darwinism and reject dogma, it'll be worth seeing if Light has less influence over him.
Whether Light/God/Orthodoxy wants to admit it or not, they're living in a changing world. In the house, this manifests as dead bugs coming to life in drawers (and a "bluebottle" policeman too, his prodigious eating as much a symbol of all-consuming humanity pushing us "forward" as a joke about his having slept for two years). But the outside world, too, is changing. The Doctor's eco-message throw-away joke about the Amazon desert is just such a reminder. But it's not just a physical change, it's a social one as well. There's a very good reason to cast the male Josiah against a female Control. The role of women is changing. Ace and Gwendoline in boys' attire was the first shot across the bow, but female Control climbing out of the cellar demanding her "freeness" is outright war against the house's status quo, and so, against society. Ghost Light then becomes a condemnation of the innate fascism of any system that would seek to restrain social evolution in favor of a status quo, one which in this case, has favored one gender over another (and more, the inspector's various racist remarks speak to another flaw of the Empire). While Josiah's plan hasn't been made known yet, we do see him using a picture of Queen Victoria as target practice, the anomalous woman-on-top in this Man's World. And of course, at the center of things, Ace, a thoroughly modern woman who doesn't believe in gender roles.
All of which is theory and doesn't get at the story as a literal Doctor Who story. If I neglect that aspect of it, it's that Ghost Light is so thought-provoking, I can't help but turn the review into a bit of a literary essay. As a story, I like what it's doing too. I feel for Gwendoline's loss of identity, crying over her absent parents in her mother's presence it turns out (so don't tell me this isn't about gender politics, the women here aren't allowed to follow their true selves). McCoy is stellar as the Doctor, restrained, funny, and active. I love the small touches like Ace sleeping away the day, bringing her back to the spooky evening. Mad Redvers keeping himself prisoner though his bonds have already been loosed by the Doctor. And being sent to Java is an amazingly colorful metaphor for getting boxed. Great images.
VERSIONS: Deleted and extended scenes featured on the DVD include a distraught Gwendoline visiting Redvers, and the Doctor leaving that dress for Ace, making his comment about it play differently.
REWATCHABILITY: High - A weird, moody and frequently funny episode that is redolent with meaning. Fascinating.
IN THIS ONE... Reverend Matthews is turned into a monkey. The Doctor awakens the policeman in the cupboard. Control escapes the cellar. Josiah sheds his husk.
REVIEW: Here's how Ghost Light is opposing evolution and creationism. The personified Light is undoubtedly God/creationism, and is often off-handedly equated to Divinity. The light at the end of the tunnel. Redvers seeing its face and going mad. Nimrod's god, the Burning One. A literal reading of Genesis would make Earth an unchanging ecosystem, where all the plants and animals were made whole and have not since changed. The Reverend Matthews is its unknowing advocate, but even he is transformed by other forces in the house, regressed to an ape-like state as Josiah's joke. Josiah and Control, the two main denizens of the house, represent the forces of evolution, though they serve Light each in their own way. That isn't a contradiction. Light has been made prisoner, after all, and both Josiah and Control fear Light, perhaps out of guilt for their evolutionary sins. Though now that Josiah has taken on a new body, one that doesn't fear daylight and doesn't need dark glasses, that he as evolved into a Victorian gentleman, one who might better embrace Darwinism and reject dogma, it'll be worth seeing if Light has less influence over him.
Whether Light/God/Orthodoxy wants to admit it or not, they're living in a changing world. In the house, this manifests as dead bugs coming to life in drawers (and a "bluebottle" policeman too, his prodigious eating as much a symbol of all-consuming humanity pushing us "forward" as a joke about his having slept for two years). But the outside world, too, is changing. The Doctor's eco-message throw-away joke about the Amazon desert is just such a reminder. But it's not just a physical change, it's a social one as well. There's a very good reason to cast the male Josiah against a female Control. The role of women is changing. Ace and Gwendoline in boys' attire was the first shot across the bow, but female Control climbing out of the cellar demanding her "freeness" is outright war against the house's status quo, and so, against society. Ghost Light then becomes a condemnation of the innate fascism of any system that would seek to restrain social evolution in favor of a status quo, one which in this case, has favored one gender over another (and more, the inspector's various racist remarks speak to another flaw of the Empire). While Josiah's plan hasn't been made known yet, we do see him using a picture of Queen Victoria as target practice, the anomalous woman-on-top in this Man's World. And of course, at the center of things, Ace, a thoroughly modern woman who doesn't believe in gender roles.
All of which is theory and doesn't get at the story as a literal Doctor Who story. If I neglect that aspect of it, it's that Ghost Light is so thought-provoking, I can't help but turn the review into a bit of a literary essay. As a story, I like what it's doing too. I feel for Gwendoline's loss of identity, crying over her absent parents in her mother's presence it turns out (so don't tell me this isn't about gender politics, the women here aren't allowed to follow their true selves). McCoy is stellar as the Doctor, restrained, funny, and active. I love the small touches like Ace sleeping away the day, bringing her back to the spooky evening. Mad Redvers keeping himself prisoner though his bonds have already been loosed by the Doctor. And being sent to Java is an amazingly colorful metaphor for getting boxed. Great images.
VERSIONS: Deleted and extended scenes featured on the DVD include a distraught Gwendoline visiting Redvers, and the Doctor leaving that dress for Ace, making his comment about it play differently.
REWATCHABILITY: High - A weird, moody and frequently funny episode that is redolent with meaning. Fascinating.
Comments
The whole premise has been an English gentlemen going around the universe, knowing better than all the natives he meets and fixing everything because he alone knows what is right. It's an incredibly arrogant, imperial streak to the show. Cartmel's 2000AD-esque satirical perspective had already taken some pot-shots at Thatcher-era politics, but Ghost Light takes it a step further by attacking some of the more conservative values that lie at the core of the show itself. Interesting too that this occurs with the first Doctor not explicitly played as an upper-class Englishman.
The story does have a reputation for being hard to understand, and the reputation is at least a little deserved. I don't think it's incomprehensible, but it does require a bit of concentration and more than one viewing. I don't think this is a bad thing, myself.
I rewatched it last weekend, and apart from a couple of points I think I do understand the story now. The only thing I'm unclear on, really, is when and why Light went into hibernation, why did Josiah emerge at this particular point in time, and where was he and what was he doing when he was in his insectile forms?
Doctor Who has tried to critique Imperial values before, notably in The Mutants, but you're right, I hadn't considered how this becomes an attack on Doctor Who's own Imperialism (though I did see it as an attack on how companions were mostly portrayed in the past) even after I'd responded to another comment of yours by saying the Doctor worked well in Victorian settings because he's essentially a Victorian gentleman adventure (like Redvers). At the antipodes of that Empire (both in time and space), I guess Imperialism is a little less on our minds than if we were living on the British Isles, despite my people having suffered a type of genocide in the 18th century at the hands of the Empire.
The Fourth Doctor was more "bohemian wanderer" than "upper class Englishman". For another example.
Thing is, going right back to the First Doctor, the character has been anti-establishment. (except perhaps for his third incarnation) Maybe a product of it (as confirmed in the Deadly Assassin- the Prydonian chapter is basically "Eton for Timelords"), but never part of it. I also disagree with the idea that the seventh doctor is the first time he's not been played as an upper class gentlemen- for classic Who the costume was always "eccentric" rather "fashionable for upper classes now", and the accents were a product of the BBC's habit of not letting people who didn't speak Recieved Pronunciation (AKA "BBC English") on tv. Hence Dodo Chaplets ever shifting accent.
Certainly critique of imperialism is not something I picked up on this story, and this is with me being from the British Isles.
As for understanding the story- Light didn't go into hibernation, and Josiah didn't "emerge" at this particular point in time. But I probably shouldn't say anything more on this until part 3 has been covered, as to say more would be to either "half explain" it, or to spoil exactly whats going on (at least as far as Cartmel and Platt are concerned)
Whether or not Ghost Light comments on Doctor Who itself, there IS an attack on Imperialism here, in so far as there's an attack on the forces maintaining the status quo (Empire, the Church, etc.).
Everyone at Gabriel Chase is so busy being an archetype (along with their mostly arch acting), they never become real characters. There's precious little actual real interaction between the Doctor & Ace and the other characters--it's as if they've been dropped into a play that just continues on around them, barley acknowledging them.
This also makes it hard to connect, because there's no one to root for besides our heroes, no sympathetic guest characters. Structurally, that's the only real reason to introduce the Inspector--so the Doctor has someone besides Ace to talk to.
For my tastes, then, it's a case of the dense themes being sabotaged by the weaknesses on the literal level. To paraphrase Ebert, it's not what Ghost Light is about it's how it's about it. And for me, the unsubtle panto wasn't the right way to go.
To my mind, the cosmic hobo and Bohemian archetypes ARE upper class characters. In my experience, you're only allowed to be a jobless wandering, interfering Great British Eccentric if you're Old Money. Everyone else is just an unemployed layabout and a target to be monstered by the tabloids. Only the upper classes are rich enough to dress that slovenly.
In a similar vein, I absolutely agree that to an extent the Doctor has always been anti-establishment, but coded in the mould of radicals like Tony Benn and Michael Foot; again, an eccentric from a privileged background. The upper classes are allowed to be a bit bolshie, it's all very charming. But if you dare to be a working class radical, then you're a troublemaking thug.
This is one of the things that makes the Ninth Doctor super-interesting to me. Accent, clothing, the actor who plays him, all solidly- stereotypically- Northern working class. And his creator from Swansea, a city that isn't, not to put too fine a point on it, the most affluent place in the world. Even the Ninth's console room was bashed up, broken down, barely stable. The TARDIS as owned by Doctors 1 through 8 may have been beaten up on the outside, but on the inside was either bright white and modern or wood-panelled and refined. There's an interesting discussion to be had, I think, as to why Matt Smith's Doctor is again an English Eccentric with a shiny console room.
On further reflection re. the Seventh, I still think he's played by McCoy as upper-class, just an upper-class Scot rather than an upper-class Englishman, only a little way down the ladder compared to the rest of us.
All of this just my opinion, of course, your mileage may vary, etc. etc.
What this whole discussion made me think of is the concept of "slumming it", historically a distasteful practice that involved the rich visiting poor areas as if it were a human zoo or safari park. And the Pulp song (bettered by William Shatner) "Common People".
Not sure how much we can and/or should read into that scene, but it's the only time we've seen other Gallifreyans who aren't either ruling class, mad scientists, or Ostrogoths.
As for Pertwee being a little too chummy with authority figures, I see him as a temporarily embarrassed aristocrat having to lodge below his station. As soon as he got his knowledge of materialization codes back he was off on space adventures again. (While he did return to UNIT pretty often, I can't fault him for having developed genuine affection for the Brig and the rest.)
Since then the UK has had to come to terms with the fact that it is no longer the dominant super power in the world, and is, in fact, largely irrelevant on the worlds stage. Bit's of Britain have been fine with that going right back to 1945, other bits are going to struggle with this for generations to come. Indeed, even in the 60's for some sections of British society the Empire was something they'd quite like to brush under the carpet and pretend never happened due to being ashamed of being a country that would be involved in that.
The majority of Britons, I think, had already gone through this "sea-change" before Doctor Who started, and that's one of the reasons why the Doctor has always been a critic of imperialist values.
Really, the only way in which the Ninth Doctor would not have been "possible" before 1989 would be due to their not having been an Eighth yet. In the 60's it wouldn't have been possible due to the "Character doesn't speak with a BBC English accent", but thats the only reason why.
So we have a Doctor who's FOR the common man and greater good, but also a Doctor who can be insufferably smug and superior (even working class Eccleston).
Siskoid- Yeah, the default setting of every Doctor is "smug git".
Never mind a certain sci fi program they did that in the early 1970's did a couple of stories about miners rights where working class people who didn't "know their place" were front, centre and sympathetic.
CiB- I'm continuing to reply not because I'm trying to get the last word or anything, but because I think this is genuinely an interesting conversation, and I hope you don't think I'm being one of those argumentative internet pedants.
I mentioned sitcoms as being one of the places that working class people were "allowed" in my earlier comment, because regardless of the satirical and sympathetic approach the characters were still there to be laughed at. Only Fools and Horses in particular is a show about how laughable people are when they get ideas above their station.
The Doctor picking the dress, making Ace look the part so she'd seem conforming and "safe" to the pseudo-Victorians in the house?