The Ark

They were treated like slaves. Is it no wonder that when they got the chance they repaid you in kind?

The Ark is a story that I don't know much about other than that the principle aliens are the Monoids and that it is divided into two halves with the cliffhanger of Episode Two being the statue with a Monoid head. I've never heard anyone speak highly of it so I'm expecting a story that rather mundane. Usually if a story is openly bad, it gets a little extra attention just for that. Forgettable stories just fade into the ether.

Plot Summary

The TARDIS lands in the midst of a jungle filled with Earth creatures. Dodo, who is suffering from a cold, assumes they've landed in a zoo and goes wandering off. Steven follows her, chastising her for being so cavalier. The Doctor also believes they are in a zoo of some kind but notes a metallic sky and mechanical vibration in the floor.

They have actually landed on a ship and in the crew area, a trial is being held regarding a crewman who endangered the lives of others both human and the alien Monoids, who escaped to Earth from their own dying world and are now travelling with these humans who are escaping the dying Earth. The defendant is found guilty and placed into a machine that shrinks him to a microscopic level where he is then frozen and placed into storage. One Monoid enters and informs the court that strangers have arrived and a group of Monoids go to investigate.

The Doctor and his party become aware of the search party and duck into a cave to avoid them. Once past, they walk out and into the inhabited part of the ship, with the Doctor realizing they are on a ship. The Monoid search party finds them and they are taken to the Commander.

The Commander welcomes them and explains their history and their goal of traveling to a world seven hundred years travel away. Most of the human colonists have been shrunk and frozen, leaving a small group to breed and man the ship along with the Monoids. The group is also shown a statue being built as a symbol of unity among the crew.

As they talk, the Commander begins to feel a bit ill. As his fever grows, a flatbed cart is driven in by a Monoid with another Monoid on it. Both the Monoid and the Commander have contracted Dodo's cold and their lack of immunity is making it worse than for Dodo. The Monoid dies and the Commander becomes incoherent. The deputy commander, Zentos, accuses the Doctor's party of being agents of the planet they intend to colonize and orders them arrested.

As the cold spreads, Zentos orders the Doctor, Dodo and Steven to be put on trial as saboteurs. Steven elects to be the representative at the court with a man named Rhos and the Commander's daughter Millium acting as defense. During the trial, word comes that a human has died from the illness and the crowd declares the defendants guilty and to be executed by being ejected into space. Also during the trial, Steven falls ill from the cold and is taken back to the cell.

Millium goes to her father and rouses him enough to order that the Doctor be given a chance to find a cure for the illness and that Steven is to be the test subject. If he fails, they will be executed. The Doctor readily accepts and has Dodo and the Monoids bring him ingredients from the TARDIS and the animals in the jungle. Working with both the human scientists and a Monoid technician, the Doctor synthesizes a cure and injects Steven with it. His fever spikes briefly and then breaks. Dodo heads out to inform the others and the cure is passed out to all the others.

Apologetic, Zentos releases them and wishes them well on their travels. The three leave in the TARDIS only to have it reappear in the same place. Confused, they walk out to look for the people they just met and find the space nearly empty. They do find the statue has been completed, only instead of being a man like the plans, it has the face of a Monoid.

The Doctor investigates the empty control room to find it fully automated. He also discovers that the Monoids have taken over and are now using the humans as slaves. The Doctor, Dodo and Steven are discovered by the Monoid second-in-command who takes them to the Monoid leader. The leader recognizes them as the same travelers from the past. He also relates that Dodo's cold mutated after they left, weakening the humans and Monoids in it's wake. The Monoids, encouraged by the humans to improve themselves, learned to make weapons and rose up in a violent revolution.

The three are sent to the security kitchen to assist in the preparation of food. The Doctor and Steven rally the humans to try and rise up against the Monoids but they are beaten back and one is killed by reinforcements. The Doctor and Dodo are taken out of the kitchen with Steven left as a promise of good behavior.

Approaching the planet Refusis II, the Monoids launch a landing craft with the Monoid second-in-command, his human slave, the Doctor and Dodo. They explore the planet but see no one. They do find a castle and enter it. The Monoid begins to destroy things to get the inhabitants attention but he is stopped by an invisible power. The Doctor calmly talks with the Refusian and learns they were altered into beings of energy by a solar flare impacting their planet. They welcome new inhabitants, so long as they are peaceful, and have taken steps to build shelters for them, including the castle.

Back on the ship, the Monoids plan to land on the planet and colonize it once they have a report. They also plan to blow up the Ark and all it's inhabitants with a bomb in the statue, ridding themselves of the remaining humans. One of the slaves overhears this and runs to the kitchen to warn the others.

This plan is also let slip by the second-in-command to his slave and Dodo. The slave tries to fight him but is shot down. The Monoid continues back to the landing craft, unaware that he is being followed by a Refusian. He signals the Ark but before he can relate the information about the Refusians, the Refusian blows up the landing craft, killing the second-in-command and leaving the Doctor and Dodo stranded on the planet.

Concerned over the failure of communications with Two, the lead Monoid orders that all Monoids, including the preserved ones, head down to the planet. However, Monoid Four believes that they should stay on the Ark and begins to foment dissent among some of the Monoids.

Knowing that they need to find the bomb, Steven and the others watch the Monoids prepare to depart. One man, Maharis, sneaks out after finishing loading the pods with the Monoid colonist trays and releases the others from the kitchen. After the Monoids depart the ship, they begin to scour the ship for the bomb.

On the planet, the Doctor and Dodo hide while the Monoids look for Two and the inhabitants of the planet. The Doctor and Dodo sneak aboard one landing craft and signal the Ark. The Doctor and Steven devise a plan where they will keep looking for the bomb while the Doctor tries to get it's location from the Monoids. As an added distraction, the Doctor has the Refusian he has been in contact with, take the landing craft back to the Ark.

The Doctor and Dodo surrender to the Monoids and the Monoids are equally dumbfounded by the landing craft departing when they cannot see anyone flying it. Interrogated by Monoid One, the Doctor insists that he and Dodo have not seen anyone. Unnerved, Monoid Four openly defies the leader and leads some of the Monoids back to the pods with the intention of taking the Ark elsewhere. Monoid One gloats that as the bomb is in the statue, he will find it difficult to move, allowing the Doctor to learn of it's location. Monoid One then gathers his followers to deal with Monoid Four's insubordination.

On the Ark, Maharis decides to take the landing craft back to Refusis to help the Doctor. Another collaborator, Dassuk, insists on going along and they head down. They land to see the Monoids in a firefight with each other. Dassuk tries to give himself to them but he is shot down. Maharis and those that accompanied him run to the castle where they tell the lone Monoid guard that Monoid One has sent for him to help in the fight.

Unguarded, the humans and the Doctor make their way back to the landing craft where the Doctor signals Steven that the bomb is in the statue. On board, the Refusian uses he powers to levitate the statue to the landing bay and Steven and another human named Venussa launch it into space where it explodes harmlessly.

The humans come down to the planet where they disarm the few surviving Monoids, Monoids One and Four having been killed in the fight. The Refusians allow them to colonize the planet so long as the two species live in peace. The Doctor chastises the humans noting that their ancestors enslaved the Monoids, embittering them towards the humans. If they treat each other as equals, they will live well together.

The Doctor, Steven and Dodo depart in the TARDIS. While in flight, the Doctor has a slight cough and as he does so, he begins to become invisible. Steven asks if this is similar to the Refusians but the Doctor informs him that he believes they are under attack from a more powerful source.

Analysis

I think The Ark can best be described as something that is there as it is not overly engaging. I do think that the second half of the story is better than the first, but neither is particularly engaging.

I think unquestionably the best thing about this story is the Doctor. The Doctor is calm, collected and inquisitive. He aims to help and doesn't get flustered, even when things go against him. He is also quite proactive, which is somewhat unusual for the First Doctor. Steven still takes the lead on much of the action but the Doctor goes out of his way to do things on his own. He actively petitions to help cure the plague in the first half, he instigates the feelings of rebellion in the second and actively works to thwart the Monoids and lend as much aid as possible to Steven in finding the bomb. He does all this with a chipper sense of adventure that is sometimes lacking with the First Doctor and it is enjoyable.

I'm not much for linguistics and it's been a while since I watched The Massacre so Dodo's switch from a more working class accent to the posh version was entirely lost on me. She was okay in this story though a bit dim. I got the feeling that she was intended to be more of a comic relief type of character, especially when dealing with the cold in the first half. In the second, she took a more subservient role to the Doctor and behaved more or less as the average 60's female companion: look nice and don't get in the Doctor's way. I didn't have a problem with it but there was nothing particularly catching about it either.

Steven was typical Steven. He took on a slightly exasperated parent tone when dealing with Dodo in Episode One, which did amuse me as Vicki had a similar tone when dealing with Steven in The Time Meddler. But once things got real, he settled down into his usual role. Episode Two didn't give him much other than the trial at the beginning but in the second half of the story, he went into typical action-man mode, going so far as to metaphorically slapping around the human slaves. He did well, but again, there wasn't much outside of what I would have expected. It was Steven being Steven and he did it well but nothing outside of that.

If there was a point where this story really fell down it was in the acting of the guest cast. This is more so in the first half. I actually didn't have a problem with the Monoids as I thought they were reasonably well designed and did about as well as you would expect a man in a suit to do. As such, when they were the focus in the second half, shortfalls in the acting did not register as much.

The real problems came with the human crew. The worst offender I thought was the Commander who falls ill at the end of Episode One. He has one good moment where a criminal is put into storage. After that, his delivery is terrible and he doesn't seem to know which direction he should take himself. Mellium is okay but she is every bland 60's female guest actor. She has her moments of stilted delivery and just standing about looking pretty which makes her quite uninteresting. Similarly Zentos is every zealous over-reactionary we've seen before. He chews the scenery while proclaiming the Doctor and his companions to be evil with no proof. He stands in a position of self-righteousness only to be humbled later as we have seen so many times before. If the acting doesn't get you, the genericness of the characters will.

There is a bit of an improvement in the second half as all the human characters seem to be portrayed by better actors, but there is so little time devoted to them, that it is impossible to care about them. I actually lost track of who was who at one point because all the men just seemed to look like each other. I guess that should be expected when you start with a relatively small genetic pool and then look forward seven hundred years, but it made the story just that much more difficult to follow. The standout was Venussa, not only because she was a woman but also because she seemed to be a slightly better actress and seemed to be the most enthusiastic about the revolution.

It's actually a bit of a shame that more time could not have been devoted to them because there was an interesting angle could have been explored about the collaborators and their relationship with the Monoids and then back to the humans. It's glossed over in a bit of a hasty way in this story with only the one die-hard collaborator who is gunned down by his masters when he surprises them.

Another thing that bugged me about this story is the nature of the plague that developed. Dodo has a generic cold, a bout of the sniffles essentially when they land. I can understand it felling the inhabitants of the Ark and being nastier there as they are lacking the level of immunity that Dodo and Steven have. However, even without that immunity, death from a cold seems like an extreme reaction. What's more, Steven catches the disease but instead of having symptoms like Dodo, the virus has apparently mutated in the span of a few hours to fell him during the trial. This makes no sense as the base level germ should have been the same to what he was exposed to in the TARDIS. At one point when hiding, Steven had his hand over Dodo's mouth to keep her quiet so he has been more than exposed to the germ. Yet, rather than having an immunity to it, he is felled just as bad as the others. Even if he had not yet fully gotten Dodo's cold, he should have displayed symptoms similar to hers, given his own build up of immunities over the years. A slight fever maybe but it should have essentially been a runny nose, watery eyes and sneezing.

I would argue that the disease is not Dodo's cold but in fact some other germ that they've been exposed to and brought with them. The Doctor is immune because of his different physiology and Dodo does not get it because her cold has her immune system working harder and it repels the bulk of the infection without any significant effects. The passengers are felled first because of their lack of prior immunities but then Steven goes down with similar symptoms, demonstrating that it is a different bug. At least, that's how I like to think of it.

Jumping back to the Monoids, I rather liked the design even if the Beatles haircuts are a bit much. I would also note that despite what the Doctor says in Episode Four, there isn't a lot of evidence showing the Monoids as slaves in the first two episodes. Monoid One even goes so far as to mock the humans for encouraging their learning which allowed them to rise up. I thought it rather a weak sauce to make the idea of peace a little easier at the end by implying the humans were just as guilty as the Monoids, despite there being no evidence in the story of that guilt. It is actually a Monoid death that prompts Zentos to have the Doctor and his companions arrested, which doesn't seem like the actions of a slave master. I think it would have worked a bit better if the Monoids felt like they were being oppressed and the Doctor telling both sides they needed to talk to each other rather than just have the Doctor pronounce guilt on the humans, mitigating the Monoid's actions.

One positive point was the model work. Both the model statue and the ships were quite well done and I thought that was good work for the time. All the sets really were well done, although the idea of a "security kitchen" is a little dumb. I'm also not sure a real elephant was necessary to convey the feeling of the Ark, but it did add a nice little bit of extra flair.

I'm a bit indifferent about the Refusians. They were a literal Deus Ex Machina with the added benefit of being invisible so you save money on design. The story worked well enough with them, though the addition of god-like beings did make the Monoids seem like much more adept villains that normal. Or the humans as just that much more pathetic. Take you choice there.

If you can get past the faults of the first two episodes, this story isn't terrible. I wouldn't recommend it as a first run on the First Doctor era as there are much better stories out there. But it has some good points and at least a bit of fun adventure in the second half. The concept is definitely sound and one that should be played with more often (such as is implied in The Face of Evil) but this is more of a first draft effort.

Overall personal score: 2 out of 5