The Curse of Fenric: Part One

The Doctor and Ace arrive at a Wartime base, where Professor Judson is working on a thinking, computing machine. The area is full of talk of a Viking curse, and has a band of Soviet troopers on a mission.

The acting is wonderful, the late Nicholas Parsons is quite wonderful as The Vicar. Dinsdale Landen is superb as Doctor Judson, when he speaks, you listen, he has an incredibly delivery.

The music is glorious, moody and atmospheric, the production values simply cannot be faulted.

For anyone that dismisses the late eighties as the poorest area of the show, I would urge them to watch this one, not just the best of McCoy's efforts, but I would class this as a top ten story in general.

It's a terrific start.

Review of all 4 episodes:

Highly acclaimed quite rightly, this is up with Remembrance of the Daleks as the two undisputed greats of the McCoy era. The story is more reminiscent of the Hinchcliffe and Holmes era of high quality gothic horror than the camp adventures of McCoy's earlier seasons. It still has some slightly camp aspects but is dark, creepy and powerful. The drama is great, the dialogue is strong and the content is both absorbing and intelligent.

The plot involves a wartime village where Russian soldiers are coming ashore, a code breaking machine is being used to decipher ancient writing and zombies come out of the sea. The layers of depth in the story involving Viking ancestors, Ace's mysterious family background and themes of trust and faith in various beliefs make this a real top standard effort. Writer Ian Briggs and script editor Andrew Cartmel are to be applauded.

The backstory of Ace is a great touch and gives Sophie Aldred a chance to shine as Ace. There are fascinating dark aspects of the Doctor acting in a manipulative way and a scene where he makes Ace lose faith in him by verbally attacking her. It is very effective.

The themes of faith which run through the vicar's faith in God (beautifully played by Nicholas Parsons), the Russian commander's faith in his country and the Doctor's faith in the people and things he trusts as well as Ace's faith in him all are evocative and thoughtful.

The zombies look great and bring about some superb menacing scenes. There are further great characters bringing more great story aspects such as the complex role of Dr. Judson (Dinsdale Landen) and theultra strict busybody Miss Hardaker and the evacuee girls in her care.

This is a brilliant classic.

My ratings: All 4 episodes - 10/10.

(Note: This is a review of all four episodes of the story.)

There is a saying about going out on top. Sylvester McCoy (and indeed Doctor Who itself) found itself coming to an unexpected end in 1989 with some of the original series best stories. Of those the best of them would be The Curse Of Fenric. The result is what I consider to be the second best Doctor Who story ever.

Any good production must have a good cast and this one has one of the best of the series. The performances start with the regulars: Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor and Sophie Aldred as Ace. McCoy gives his single best Doctor Who performance in this story as he strikes just the right balance between his more comedic Doctor of season 24 and the more serious Doctor of season 25 and earlier in season 26. Just look at the final episode to see McCoy at his best. Sophie Aldred also gives one of her best performances as Ace. This was the middle story of what has become known to fans as the "Ace Trilogy" (the other two stories being Ghost Light and Survival) due to their heavy focus on Ace and giving Aldred a chance to show off her skills as an actress. Aldred doesn't disappoint with a strong disappointment with a strong performance as the companion who discovers that her past is interlinked with the events unfolding around her. Despite their excellent performances, McCoy and Aldred is just the tip of the cast.

There is also an excellent supporting cast as well. There's Dinsdale Landen as Dr. Judson, the crippled computer scientist who unleashes the title and effectively embodies it. Alfred Lynch gives an excellent performance the obsessive Commander Millington who grows more and more paranoid as the story unfolds. There are also excellent performances from Tomek Bork as Soviet Captain Sorin plus Joann Kenny and Joanne Belll as the two teenagers Jean and Phyllis. Even the smaller roles are filled with good actors and actress like Anne Reid (Nurse Crane), Steven Rimkus (Captain Bates), Janet Henfrey (Mrs. Hardaker) and Raymond Trickett (the Ancient One). The true highlight of the supporting cast is Nicholas Parsons as Reverend Wainwright. Parsons, who apparently is better known in the UK for his more comedic roles and game show hosting, gives one of the best performances of the McCoy era as the priest who lost his faith and pays for it. There is a wonderful scene in the church where he is giving a sermon to an empty church that illustrates this beautifully and gives Parsons his best moment in the story. All together they form one of the show's best casts.

The story also has some strong production values as well. From the outset we get a rather well-done recreation of a WWII era army camp complete with trappings of the era (including a well done 1940's computer). Then there's the Haemovore's: the vampire possible future evolution of humanity brought back to the past. The Haemovore's, especially the Ancient One, are amongst the best monsters ever designed for the show as they are incredibly spooky and convincing. Couple this with the underwater filming and excellent location work and the result is a story that proves that under the right conditions a low budget can be overcome.

Then there's the heart of it all: the script. This is a story with many threads and layers. It is a story about war and faith that explores the nature of evil plus the lengths one must go to fight it. On top of all that there is the obvious horror aspect in the form of the Haemovores. Ian Briggs also manages to tie together stories from the McCoy era (Silver Nemesis, Dragonfire) to explore the background and character of Ace. Above all, this story is a sort of chess game between the Doctor and is ancient enemy named here as Fenric in which all the other characters act as their pawns. This is a story where one must watch to get everything that is going on making this not only a action story but one of the show's most cerebral as well.

The Curse Of Fenric is Doctor Who at its finest or close to it. It is defiantly the best story of the McCoy era at any rate with its strong performances, good production values and a strong script. Believe what you've heard because it is true. The Curse Of Fenric is excellent.

Doctor Who was coming to the end of its original long run in 1989, and Sylvester McCoy would be the last to play the Time Lord for some time. Stories from the last series would be a little patchy, but this one - perhaps because of its supporting cast (Nicholas Parsons, Alfred Lynch, Dinsdale Landen, Anne Reid) - doesn't disappoint.

There are aliens, a war plot, a fiendish chess game, a computer encryptor, a priest who has lost faith in God, and - a common theme in the series - men in the armed forces who may not be all they seem. This story has a reputation of being one of the best, and it is certainly clever and slightly scary. McCoy himself was a good Doctor, giving the character a bit of vulnerability and charm alongside the eccentricity, while Sophie Aldred as Ace was a good sidekick.

Comparing 'The Curse of Fenric' with some more recent stories from the new era is interesting as it comes out rather well; and perhaps that bit more convincing.

During my childhood and teenage years, and even during my time at university, I was an avid fan of "Doctor Who", but my enthusiasm for the series began to wane in the late eighties, by which time I was in my twenties. Part of the reason was the decision to move the programme from Saturday to a Wednesday timeslot, as work commitments meant that I could not always get home in time to watch it. This difficulty could no doubt have been overcome by the purchase of a video recorder, but another reason was that I disliked Sylvester McCoy's interpretation of the role. I therefore gave up watching, and when the BBC cancelled the series at the end of the 26th season I greeted their decision with indifference rather than the fury which would have been my reaction a few years earlier.

"The Curse of Fenric" was one of a number of serials which I missed because of my anti-McCoy boycott of the programme, and I had never seen it until it was recently broadcast on the "Horror" channel. It was the penultimate serial in that fateful 26th season; the very last "classic" Doctor Who adventure was the ironically inappropriately named "Survival".

The Doctor and his companion Ace arrive at a British military base in Northumberland during World War II. The base, he main purpose of which is to intercept and decipher German coded messages, is loosely based upon the real-life Bletchley Park, but whereas Bletchley had a vast team of cryptanalysts, all the work at this installation seems to be done by only two men with the aid of a computer. Trying to explain the plot in any more detail would be a vain endeavour. Suffice it to say that it involves Viking inscriptions, a group of Russian soldiers who are carrying out an invasion of Britain despite the fact that they were supposed to be our allies at the time, an insane British naval officer who seems far madder than any Nazi, a wheelchair-bound professor, an unbelieving parson, poison gas, a race of aquatic vampires known as Haemovores, an Oriental vase, a baby, a game of chess and some revelations about Ace's family background. Have you got all that?

Despite the wartime setting the villains are not the Nazis, who are conspicuous by their absence. Behind the mayhem which engulfs the base and the surrounding area is a being called Fenric, who, like The Mara which featured in some earlier episodes, is a disembodied evil entity from the dawn of time. Just as The Mara was derived from Hindu/Buddhist mythology, so Fenric is loosely based upon Norse myths; the name is derived from Fenrir, the monstrous wolf which fought against the Norse gods. (The original title for the serial was "The Wolves of Fenric").

Unfortunately, there is little in "The Curse of Fenric" to alter my view that McCoy was the George Lazenby of the series. I think that the problem was that he was originally a comic actor who tried to play the Doctor as a clown. When this proved unpopular with both the producers and the viewing public, the scriptwriters tried to make his character darker- the Seventh Doctor is for this reason sometimes referred to as the "dark clown"- but McCoy never really seemed able to convey this. I was never a great admirer, either, of Sophie Aldred's Ace, a surly, bolshie young woman who seemed to have a perpetual chip on her shoulder. Aldred also struck me as a rather wooden actress.

The acting is not, however, the only reason why I regard this serial as a failure. As might be apparent from my above list of all the many plot elements, the story is unnecessarily complex, difficult to follow and does not make a lot of sense. "The Curse of Fenric" is, unfortunately, not the only below-par adventure from the late eighties and while watching it I could easily understand just why the BBC executives decided not to bring "Doctor Who" back for a twenty-seventh season.

Some Goofs. Officers in the Royal Navy (unlike the Army and RAF) are required either to be clean-shaven or to wear a full beard. A moustache like Commander Millington's would not be permitted. Whoever came up with the name "haemovore" seems to have got his Greek confused with his Latin. The Greek form of "blood-eater" would be "haematophage" and the Latin "sanguivore".