A version of this article was originally published in
Celestial Toyroom Issue 311
A powerful and clever horror story, with pertinent things to say about
faith and perception,
Chris
Boucher’s
“Image of the Fendahl” was the last serial to be
commissioned by outgoing script editor Robert Holmes, and considered
“easily the best script of the season” by
Doctor
Who’s new producer Graham Williams.
The narrative is inspired by the palaeontology craze of the mid-1970s,
when the Leakey family and Donald Johanson, all shameless publicity
hacks, were competing over whose finds were the most significant. They
thought it amusing to give the hominid skeletons they excavated the
nicknames “Zinj” and “Lucy”
— something
mirrored when Colby dubs the skull “Eustace”. The
scientists’ dog “Leakey”, is so-called,
ostensibly
because he is an “old bone hunter”, but with an
extra
connotation of poor housetraining.
There is a suggestion of a Lovecraft connection as well, with the
Fendahl as a counterpart of the dead god Cthulhu, who will awake and
devour humanity once “the stars are right”, while
the
sinister religious overtones of the cult are reminiscent of the way
Cthulhu is worshipped by humans.
Boucher
has acknowledged the film version of
Quatermass and the Pit
(1967) and novelist Dennis Wheatley as inspiration. He also cites a
short story “about a society which after growing up and
achieving
scientific and technical expertise, built this spaceship. Whereupon an
alien, who had set the whole thing in motion, popped up out of
hibernation, climbed in the ship, and flew away. The population then
collapsed into barbarism and eventually returned to primitive life
forms, went back to being rats as I recall.”
The focus of the adventure is the impact the revival of the Fendahl has
on a team of scientists and locals, in and around the Priory, an
isolated country house.
Three of the team, Adam Colby, Thea Ransome, and Dr. Fendelman all have
fairly clear job descriptions (Colby is a palaeontologist, Ransome his
dating specialist, and Fendelman an electronics expert and the team's
financial backer). Maximillian Stael’s position is less
clear,
beyond that of Fendelman's trusted right-hand man. He wears a lab coat
and has an air of casual authority but he is not addressed as a doctor.
He operates a computer for Fendelman early on, but later (with apparent
skill) performs an autopsy. Judging from all this, he could be a
pathologist, but this begs the question of why Fendelman would want one
on his team as they were not expecting to find any dead bodies.
Stael's name and looks are Germanic (
Scott
Fredericks
being of recent German descent) but he does not have an accent, unlike
Fendelman, who Moss describes as “foreign”.
Assumedly, this
was worked out between the actors themselves to forestall any implied
xenophobia.
It is Thea who ultimately becomes the medium for the rebirth of the
Fendahl, and the Core of the gestalt creature. There appears to be no
explicit reason for this except it’s in line with the Dennis
Wheatley tradition of women being party to demonic forces and may also
allude to the fate of Julie Christie's character during
A for Andromeda and
of Barbara Judd in
Quatermass
and the Pit. Besides, the Ancient Greek representation of
Nemesis is female.
‘Thea’
is one letter off
“Theia” the Titan
goddess of sight and vision, who, like the Fendhal is associated with a
hypothetical ancient planet from our Solar system, lending her name to
it; and ‘Ransome’, as the author has confirmed, is
a play
on the word “ransom” — defined as either
“A
consideration paid or demanded for the release of someone/something
from captivity.”
Within the story, Thea was selected because she was alone in the
laboratory with the skull when it first activated. Leela and Mrs. Tyler
experience the creature in dreams; however, both are said to have a
sixth sense. The death of the hiker in Part One, incidentally, occurs
only because he is near the fissure (as the Doctor defines it,
“a
weakness in the fabric of space and time. Every haunted place has
one”) and the Fendahl, while absorbing energy from the
scanner's
action on the rift, takes the opportunity to feed off him as well.
Later, the Fendahl tries to switch to the Doctor, presumably regarding
him as a better medium than Thea. The Time Lord subsequently refers to
the skull as a “mutation generator” aiming to
recreate
itself using similar genetic material (he also says it is
psychotelekinetic, meaning it can control your muscles telepathically).
This would imply there are issues of suitability and compatibility at
work. If, as happens in
Quatermass
and the Pit,
some people are less genetically predisposed to its mental dominance
than others, it might explain why Colby is unaffected. Equally, perhaps
it’s Colby’s sceptical personality which saves him
from
being taken over.
The
latter reflects a major theme within the narrative.
Boucher,
a self-confessed atheist, here portrays belief as the key to unleashing
evil and gives resolutely secular explanations for its occurrence. The
Fendahl may possess divine facets — performing miracles and
having mysterious motives — but it is also presented as an
alien
being. Even Mrs. Tyler’s psychic powers are said to stem from
the
fissure. The Fendahl, moreover, does not speak: earlier, Boucher had
been similarly resistant to writing lines for the messianic computer
Xoanon in “The Face of Evil”, the grounds
it was
impossible to write dialogue for a being designated as God.
Despite this secular bias, Boucher seems to have a sneaking fondness
for Martha Tyler, who is probably the most appealing one-off character
(Colby is broadly sympathetic but ultimately he’s an
ambitious
young man whose desire for advancement means he goes along with
Fendelman’s decision to withhold his discovery of the
hiker’s corpse from the police).
Although Mrs. Tyler’s beliefs concerning the Fendahl are
couched
in spiritualism and superstition, it still provides her with useful
insights. She also correctly interprets Ted Moss’ nature and
how
he will meet his fate. Just before he arrives, we see in her cottage a
partial Tarot sequence involving the Moon card crossed by the Sun,
Death below, with the inverted Hanged Man beside it, and the Devil and
the Tower on the upper right-hand side. The moon card indicates a
person who is characterised by deceit (Moss is later said not to know
truth from falsehood) ruled by order (the Sun), transformation (Death),
and sacrifice (the Hanged Man), who will perform a sequence of actions
ending in the Devil and chaos.
In the scene where she and her son debate the nature of belief, Mrs.
Tyler says if most people give credence to something, it makes it true.
When he argues, “Most people used to believe that the Earth
was
flat, but it was still round”, she retorts, “but
they
behaved as if ‘twere flat!” Holding any
unchallenged
conviction will, it suggests, play into the hands of the Fendahl
— including Fendelman's secular opinions about it. Only
sceptics
are safe. Nonetheless, this isn’t presented as black and
white.
Alongside is an acknowledgment: religions can sometimes, inadvertently,
come up with the right answer. Stael’s villainy
notwithstanding,
the man’s suicide, as the Fendahl begins to manifest, is
redemptive — his sacrifice stopping the creature from
achieving
its full potential. Boucher's portrayal of theology is not a simple
condemnation, but a recognition of both the good and bad aspects of
faith.
Mrs. Tyler and Jack's conversation also highlights another element of
the tale: facts are coloured by human supposition. Fendelman's
conviction the pentagram in the ancient skull is “a neural
relay” is unlikely, as nerves, being soft tissue, rarely show
up
on fossilised bone. Further, Colby thinks it is due to the way the
skull was put together, and, being a trained palaeontologist who is not
acting under the aegis of the Fendahl, as well as the man who actually
performed the reconstruction, he is in a better position to know. The
most obvious conclusion, therefore, is the whole skull is the relay,
not just the symbol. The Doctor states Thea’s skull should be
X-rayed, and she reacts to the sight of a pentagram by touching her
head, but this again, could be down to seeing patterns which do not
exist. Similarly, the Fendahl Core’s resemblance to a Greek
goddess/Medusa may well be Thea’s subconscious vision of what
a
divine female being associated with snakes should resemble, rather than
an accurate depiction of the creature as it manifested in Kenya during
the Miocene epoch. Furthermore, the ritual scenes involve a pentagram
because that is how the Satanist coven conceives the nature of an evil
being and the way one raises it.
Markedly, the pentagram is seen both inverted and right-side up,
connoting good and evil respectively according to various cult groups,
visually demonstrating how symbols are affected by human prejudice.
Even the manner the Fendahl uses to obtain its power is misinterpreted
by Stael and Fendelman. Stael may wire the skull up to a power cable
running from the scanner, but the energy comes from the damage caused
by the beam’s exploitation of the already-extant space/time
breach, not the scanner itself. The import of facts presented
throughout are all subject to the preconceptions of the characters or
the viewers at home. As Boucher said himself, “Once something
is
out there it will be interpreted by others as they see fit. Remember
the mantra: our world is what you think it is; by definition, it cannot
be anything else. And that is easily the most horrifying thought I have
yet come up with.”
At many junctures in the serial, it can be difficult to tell the
actions individually motivated, from those of the Fendahl working
through a character. Thea, for instance, could have gone into the time
scanner room at the end of Part One out of simple curiosity: yet a link
with the skull was established earlier, so it may be using her to try
to kill the Doctor, Mrs. Tyler and, possibly, Leela as well (employing
Ted Moss as its agent). Later, she starts to confuse herself with the
Fendahl, which the Doctor implies is due to it restructuring
Thea’s brain (something the creature has undertaken from the
moment it first activated).
There are personal reasons why Stael would cut the telephone lines, and
perhaps also secretly release the Doctor from the store room contrary
to Fendelman's orders (explaining how Stael knows, later on, the Doctor
has escaped) but both these actions serve the Fendahl. In particular,
if the Doctor is not locked up, he cannot give Thea the advice she
seeks, and he is also in a weak position, hiding from the security men
and unable to oppose the Fendahl openly.
We assume the guard who excludes Mrs. Tyler from the Priory is a
Jobsworth security man. However, as she has a subliminal awareness of
the Fendahl’s presence and how to fight it, his action may
also
be directed. Likewise, Colby shows immunity to its direct control
(indeed, he unknowingly acts against it, for example, by switching off
the scanner and thus preventing the Fendahl from killing Mrs. Tyler),
but he can still be manipulated indirectly by the others at the Priory.
The motivations of the humans and the Fendahl blend into each other
throughout.
Although the Time Lords imprisoned its planet of origin in a time loop,
the alien, nonetheless, managed to escape, possibly before the
Gallifreyan intervention: but then, since all records relating to the
Fifth Planet have become invisible, surely anything connected with it
should vanish too? It is worth remembering, when it comes to the
Fendahl, the Doctor is an unreliable witness: he is terrified of it,
and relies entirely on myth and legend about its nature and
characteristics. He casts the skull into a supernova, despite having
asserted the Fendahl is indestructible, hinting, once more, he is
susceptible to its agency.
It seems reasonable to conclude the Fendahl is so powerful it could
escape the time-loop and come to Earth through a time fissure, either
creating its own or exploiting an extant one. The Doctor speculates the
Fendahl took in Mars on the way to Earth, in a nod to
Quatermass and the Pit
(the consequences of this for the evolutionary development of the Ice
Warriors is open to debate). It is possible he’s mistaken. If
it
commands a sufficient degree of control over space/time, it could turn
up anywhere it wants.
Ultimately, the Fendahl arrived on Earth twelve million years ago, went
into hibernation, and then exerted its thrall over human evolution,
either because its journey had exhausted its energy reserves, it was
hiding from the Time Lords, or its natural life cycle is focused around
periods of feeding and dormancy. It may be all three, but
significantly, what the time scanner picked up was not the creature's
death, as Fendelman believed, but the beginning of its period of
torpidity. There was, of course, no point in turning up in 1977, as it
needed to start from scratch to create its host animals.
This inclusion of host animals suggests something interesting about the
relationship between humans and Time Lords.
Humans, having been shaped by the dormant Fendahl, resemble the Core,
as do the Time Lords and, if the Doctor is anything to go by, they both
share a similar race memory and mythological horror tradition as
humans. Intriguingly, there are also thirteen parts to the Fendahl
gestalt, paralleling the Time Lord regeneration cycle. As Boucher
tended to operate on the notion of all things looking human having a
common origin, by implication Time Lords must be related to homo
sapiens, even if neither party make the connection on their own.
The serial also takes place in a season featuring either the Time Lords
(“The Invasion of Time”); or else
Time-Lord-influenced
figures (“Underworld”). Boucher has said
“The first
thing I noticed when Graham took over was this extremely weird
framework he had come up with for the series, which involved time
paradoxes and various esoteric formulae”, so whether the
writers
are using a prevailing source or the affinities are rooted in
coincidence, is unknown, but they are definitely present.
Ironically, then, had the Fendahl not escaped, the Time Lords might
well have retroactively aborted themselves.
In the end, the Fendahl remains a creature of mystery and this is the
key to the story’s success. By presenting the Fendhal to a
varied
cast of characters and exploring the way they react to it, Boucher can
lay before us his take on evil, belief, and interpretation whilst
creating a complex and compelling masterpiece in the process.
