Nightmare of Eden (2)

 

Bob Baker is a lovely little plotter. And he has a knack for dreaming up out-there, borderline surreal science-fiction ideas. It was one of his scripts that injected a miniaturised clone of the Doctor into his own bloodstream to combat an evil, sentient microbe. Nightmare of Eden is a network of set-ups and pay-offs that culminate in a logically satisfying fourth episode. But is a densely plotted “Howdunnit” which depends on mind-bending sci-fi imagery necessarily what you want to watch between Basil Brush and Larry Grayson on a wet Saturday in November? 

So. There are two spaceships that have, due to a terrible hyperspace miscalculation become embedded or fused inside each other. This does weird but ill-defined things to the local structure of reality: when Tom Baker ventures into the interface between the two ships, the picture goes all wobbly, as sometimes happens on Top of the Pops. 

There is a brilliant scientist with a silly accent but no robot dog, who has invented a giant projection TV with a permeable screen. Monsters can get out of the picture and threaten people on the ship, and people on the ship can get inside the picture. He must be very brilliant indeed, because this invention is only a sideline: he’s primarily a zoologist, trying to catalogue every life form in the galaxy. Either the galaxy is very sparsely populated, or else Bob Baker is as confused as Terry Nation about the meaning of the word. 

Worse: someone is smuggling narcotics on board the big ship: the navigator is already an addict. It isn’t too hard to guess the identity of the drug-runners: the mystery is how they are getting away with it. The spaceship comes fitted with an infallible Drug Detector, according to which there are definitely no drugs on board. 

Was it TS Eliot who said that Doctor Who could communicate without being understood? There plenty of stories where the best approach is to sit back and enjoy the fact that the Doctor is having a sword fight in a remote castle, or that the Loch Ness Monster is menacing the Houses of Parliament, and not worry to much about the why’s and wherefore’s. And in fairness, plenty happens in Nightmare of Eden. The monsters galumph along corridors, killing people and getting killed. The Doctor and Romana are menaced by vicious foliage in a jungle on the other side of the Magic TV screen, and are rescued by an square jawed space agent who has been hiding inside the projection. They are arrested on suspicion of drug-running by two stupid and zealous customs men.  This is all fairly good fun. But Bob Baker seems to be labouring under the misconception that we are keeping track of how it all fits together.

In Episode One, we hear that Tryst (the zoologist) and Della (his colleague/assistant) spent time on a planet called, for no reason I can work out, Eden, and that during the expedition, a third member of the team was killed. Shortly after hearing this information, we see on the Magic TV  Screen that a human is hiding in the foliage. In Episode Two, we learn that the dead man was named Stott, and a very close friend of Della’s. In Episode Three, the Doctor and Romana jump through the screen into the Eden environment where they encounter a magnificently heroical space-agent named, you guessed it Stott. This is a perfectly good set up with a perfectly good pay-off. But the format drip feeds plot to us in twenty minute doses. There are no re-runs, synopsis, or even so much as a “Previously On…” voice over. And in those days, you couldn’t freeze frame, rewind, or switch the subtitles on, as I had to several times while writing this review. 

I am afraid in 1979, the most common response to the Episode Three reveal would have been “Who the hell is Stott?” 

In the final instalment, the Doctor catches the drug-runners. And he catches them in a genuinely clever and surprising way. They get entrapped on the wrong side of the Magic TV screen. I don’t recall having seen anything quite like this before. And it happens for a pretty good, witty, story-consistent reason. But if you’ve not been paying full attention, or if, god forbid, you had to go to the Sunday School concert rather than watch Episode Three, you may find yourself asking  “what the **** just happened.”