State of Decay

There's nothing worse than a peasant with indigestion.

State of Decay is the second part of the E-space trilogy and also a holdover story. Terrance Dicks originally wrote this story back for the Philip Hinchcliff era but it got put on the shelf because it would have gone on around the same time as a BBC production of Count Dracula and that would have been too much vampire at one time. The one thing I don't know is if Terrance Dicks was brought back to rework the script or if Christopher Bidmead just took the script as submitted and reworked it with his own twists. Bidmead certainly would have added all the references to E-space so he may have just done the whole thing himself.

Plot Summary

The Doctor and Romana land on an Earth-like planet, hoping to find help in getting out of E-space and back into N-space. The planet they land on has only one village surrounding a large tower in which are "the Three Who Rule": the king, Zargo, the queen, Camilla and the councilor Aukon. The Doctor and Romana explore the town which appears to be medieval in style. However after they leave, the headman of the village, Ivo, alerts others using a radio communicator.

K-9 is left on the TARDIS to do some calculations and discovers that Adric has stowed away. While he cautions him, Adric convinces K-9 to let him out of the TARDIS to explore on his own. He also comes to the village and is taken in by Ivo and his wife, Marta, as their son was recently taken by the Three Who Rule to serve in the tower.

The Doctor and Romana walk out of town, hoping to find other settlements but are taken by a group of rebels, who oppose the Three. They are taken to their lair where they have been trying to figure out how to work some antiquated technology they found. The Doctor and Romana look it over and manage to get it working. The computer is a primitive one and came from a cargo ship that left Earth but was pulled into E-space through a CVE. The computer lists three crew members and pulls up their pictures. One of the rebels was once a guard of the tower and recognizes their faces as the Three.

Concerned, the Doctor and Romana leave the rebels and head back towards the village. They are unaware that one of the guards in town reported their presence to the Three. Aukon dispatches a cloud of bats to find the Doctor and Romana. The cloud discovers the two walking towards the village and one bites the Doctor. The cloud engulfs them as they hunker down but lifts and flies back to the tower. As they do, a squad of guards finds the Doctor and Romana and takes them to the tower.

In the tower, the Doctor and Romana are greeted by the king and queen. They are welcoming but become increasingly nervous by the Doctor and Romana's intelligence and their knowledge of the old spacecraft. The Queen becomes somewhat entranced when Romana cuts her finger on a broken glass, but manages to break her gaze.

Outside the tower Aukon enters the meeting house, having detected a third alien intelligence when scanning for the Doctor and Romana. He orders the patrons to line up, including Adric. He quickly zeros on Adric, who also gives himself away with a questioning and slightly defiant attitude. Aukon takes the boy back to the tower.

The king and queen are summoned by Aukon, leaving the Doctor and Romana alone in the throne room. Aukon has hypnotized Adric and informs the others that the time of the great awakening is at hand. The king and queen are pleased but still hesitant about the Doctor and Romana.

The Doctor theorizes that the tower is actually the old space ship and he searches around and finds an access passage below the thrones. They enter it and find old control mechanisms. Descending further, they find hibernation chambers with the other crew but all have been drained of fluid. The tanks, normally full of fuel, are instead filled with blood.

The Doctor and Romana enter the base of the tower to find a large cave with Aukon waiting for them, having been alerted by the king and queen of the Doctor and Romana's escape. He tells them of a great awakening and how they will be part of the Great One's plans. Aukon attempts to hypnotize the Doctor but he resists and closes his eyes. Though he resists, the king and queen return and the two are taken captive. They are also informed of Adric being taken, though they were unaware that Adric had snuck aboard the TARDIS.

Back at the rebel lair, one of the rebels, Tarak, decides to go and help the Doctor, having been a tower guard. He goes alone as no one will aid him. He sneaks in and knocks out one of the guards, stealing his uniform. He watches as Romana and the Doctor are led into a chamber to await being offered to the Great One while the Three sleep.

In the cell, the Doctor recalls a Gallifreian legend of a great war between the Time Lords and a race of great vampires. The Time Lords prevailed but one escaped and remains in hiding. The story triggers Romana's memory that she ran across an old order of Rassilon's in the archives to install a book of records in all Type 40 TARDISes. As they talk, Tarak breaks in, knocking out the guards and freeing them. They prepare to head back to the TARDIS but Romana remembers Adric. Tarak suggests the boy might be held in the keep. They decide that Tarak and Romana will rescue Adric while the Doctor heads back to the TARDIS to find Rassilon's record book.

Ivo meets the remaining rebels in their lair. He informs them that the Three are planning a great ceremony and this is the time that he will lead the village against them. He urges the rebels to aid them, but Kalmar defers, still believing that the time is not right. Ivo tells him that he will attack anyway.

In the TARDIS, the Doctor and K-9 search the TARDIS mainframe but find nothing. The Doctor then remembers there are old data tapes and discovers the records among them. The records validate the story he heard and that one vampire did escape the Time Lords. He also learns that the only way to kill the vampire is to totally destroy it's heart, which the Time Lords did by crafting ships that fired steel bolts into their hearts.

Romana and Tarak head down to the keep where Zargo and Camilla are sleeping. They find Adric but in trying to wake him, they wake the other two. They attack Romana and Tarak. Tarak tries to fight them off but Zargo kills him in the fight. Camilla, angry at the loss of live blood, turns and attacks Romana and Adric. Romana tries to run but Zargo grabs her. Aukon however stops them, insisting that Adric will become one of them and Romana is to be sacrificed to the Great One. The two are taken to the throne room and bound.

The Doctor decides that he needs help and rematerializes the TARDIS in the rebel's lair. Using the scanner that he and Kalmar fixes, the Doctor shows them the Great Vampire sleeping beneath the tower. Ivo is summoned and the Doctor makes a plan where the people will storm the tower with K-9. They will take out the guards while the Three are busy with the ceremony. That will give the Doctor time to put his own plan into action.

In the tower, Romana appeals to Adric to help her. He defers, stating that as they have lost, he doesn't see what good it does to be on the losing side. He appeals to Aukon that as he will be joining them, he shouldn't be bound. Aukon agrees and allows him out of his bonds. The Three then take Romana and Adric down to the crypt.

As the ceremony begins, the townspeople storm the tower with K-9 stunning guards as well. They take the throne room and the Doctor heads into the service areas again, ordering the townsfolk to take care of the remaining guards and then evacuating the tower when K-9 gives the signal. The Doctor finds three different control rooms but two of the three are completely out of power. The third however does have a little battery power left and the Doctor initiates a launch. K-9 orders evacuation while the Doctor heads down to the crypt.

The ceremony is interrupted by the launch of the spaceship. Adric tries to attack the Three and free Romana, but he is slapped aside. The Great Vampire begins to emerge from it's tomb as the ship takes off. The ship climbs into the atmosphere and then U-turns back to it's launching point. The spire of the ship buries itself into the tomb of the Great Vampire, piercing it's heart and killing it.

The Doctor enters to rescue Romana and Adric and the Three try to attack him. However, without the Great Vampire, they lose their power and decay into dust. The villagers enter prepared to fight but find the battle over. They thank the Doctor and Kalmar asks the Doctor for help with the technology. He conducts some minor repairs but tells them to work it out on their own, which would allow them to flourish as their own technological civilization. He, Romana, Adric and K-9 then leave in the TARDIS.

Analysis

I really enjoyed this one. You can trust Terrance Dicks to craft a good, straight-forward story and the return to gothic horror is a nice interlude from the heavy hand of science that Christopher Bidmead can sometimes use. Yet, science is still used and the vampires explained away without invoking the normal religious tropes that would have gone against the show's format.

Both the Doctor and Romana are quite good in this. The Doctor is serious and does not take the threat lightly but he also cracks quips here and there, putting the vampires off their game slightly with his seeming whimsy. Romana is very active in this one and there is a seriousness to her as well that is occasionally absent in some of the lighter fare. Given when this was originally planned to run, I would assume that Terrance Dicks originally wrote the companion as Leela and I think a degree of that direct action was retained in Romana's character, which suits her.

Adric was pretty good in this as well, but I think that is also because he was largely absent from the story. Again, going back to when this was originally written, Adric probably took the role that was originally written for Ivo's son. There are a few references to him after the opening scene where he was taken but he seems mostly to have been dropped other than as a motivator for Ivo to finally rebel. But if he was supposed to be in the position that Adric was, the scenes that remained make a lot more sense. Still, the limited use of Adric allows him to focus better which improves his acting. It also helps that as the Doctor and Romana are still getting to know him, his apparent betrayal of them is much more believable, even if his efforts to help were effectively useless in the end.

The Three were pretty good, although they could get a touch over the top at times, especially Aukon. He had a quite creepy vibe to him but his near-religious frenzy regarding the Great Vampire was a bit much at times. I think Camilla got into the vampire spirit best as I got a lot of classic vampire movie vibe from her performances, especially when she was giving into the blood frenzy. I think that if the music had been a bit different, this would have been really scary for kids and it still might have for all I know.

I was also amused that the Three have positions that are actually inverse of their own standing. They were styled as Zargo the king, Camilla the queen and Aukon the chamberlain. However, it is Aukon that is in communion with the Great Vampire and seems to have the most actual power. Camilla likewise is clearly stronger and more given over to her vampiric powers than either of them. Zargo is more like a weak king who is led by the nose by the other two, though he too does display a measure of ferocity when given over to the vampiric lusts.

The Great Vampire is an interesting idea, though not great in execution. There is a model shot of him on the scanner that looks pretty bad and then you only see his hand emerging from the ground before the spire of the ship pierces him. That was probably a good thing as I doubt they could have made him look that good and they probably wanted to avoid a situation like The Dæmons where the antagonist just looked bad. Still, it did make for a bit of an anticlimax in how easily he was dispatched, which in turn destroyed the Three so easily.

The sets and costumes looked quite good. It is very difficult to fault the BBC on anything that looks period and this one is no exception. About the only bad moment was the climax as the model of the spaceship flying to its apex did look very much like a model and superimposing of the Great Vampire in the crypt through green screen also looked rather fake. But those are small nits to pick in an otherwise well done story. As good as it looked, I wish the whole thing could have been done on film instead of just the outside scenes as that would have added a whole new level to the gothic horror element.

One thing I will appreciate is how much Christopher Bidmead restrained his hand in reworking this story. Obviously he had to add the stuff about E-space and the scenes with Adric, presumably dropping other scenes as well to make room. But in all of this, he did not give over to his natural desires to impose science everywhere. He did toss the beginnings of a small argument about the nature of science between Kalmar and one of the other rebels just as the Doctor arrives in the TARDIS early in Episode Four, but aside from that, he left the gothic horror as it was. Granted, he was probably mollified enough by the use of technology but given the potential mystical origins for the Vampire race and their war with the Time Lords, I'm still impressed that he didn't muck with that. I think with too much change, the essence of this story would have been lost and I appreciate leaving it with the air of unknown and mystery.

I can always tell when I genuinely enjoyed a story as I usually have trouble doing a full write up of it. It's always much easier to write about things that don't work and how they could have been fixed rather than just stating that a story works well for these reasons. This was not a perfect story as I did have some small problems with it, but the overall structure, the acting and the production made it a highly enjoyable story. I could easily watch this one again without complaint.

Overall personal score: 4.5 out of 5