Doctor Who – “State of Decay” (1980)

              This one’s just utter self-indulgence on my part.  I guess technically ‘The Night Stalker’ was a tv movie and ‘Salem’s Lot’ a tv mini-series so I don’t really have to justify writing about this but as this is episode two of the eighteenth season of a show that’s still around, it’s a horse of a slightly different color.  We’re starting to move into a time that I actually sort of remember and talk about things that I was aware of growing up, and since the chance came up to do something fun I felt like taking it.

              I’m not going to spend a whole lot of time setting up the basic premise of the long-running televisual show ‘Doctor Who,’ the internet exists.  I will briefly sketch the specific setup for this episode: The Doctor and Romana, his traveling companion and fellow Time Lord, have been shunted into E-Space for a few episodes, a sort of miniature universe separate from the main one.  The entire season is basically one slow shuffle of plot and characters setting up the exit of Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor and preparing for Peter Davison’s tenure as the Fifth Doctor.  This includes writing off Romana, which happens in the next episode, and introducing a new set of secondary characters, which started in the previous episode with Adric and continues for the rest of the season.  The bare minimum to know is that The Doctor and Romana find a lone planet in E-Space and land to try to find a way back to the normal universe, with Adric trailing along as a stowaway.

              This is a very, very standard episode for the show: the characters investigate an alien planet that seems to ape primitive human society but it turns out that something else is going on, usually involving long lost technology or interference by some outside alien force.  In this case it’s both.  The Doctor just kinds of walks around being weird at people, gathering information, until he’s eventually captured by the bad guys, escapes and find out what’s really going on, formulates a plan that gets a lot of the locals killed but works, and then he leaves.  This isn’t a criticism, this is how you keep a show on the air for forty plus seasons: you find a set of formulas that work then turn out variations on the basic themes. 

              This is still true for the new series, by the way, so if you’re a fan of those but feel like turning up your nose at the old, ropey-looking stuff I have bad news for you.  The concept of The Doctor and Co. shunted to a pocket universe where an ancient foe of the Timelords is hiding was used again for Neil Gaiman’s ‘The Doctor’s Wife,’ vampires actually being aliens was used again in ‘Vampires in Venice,’ an ancient confined evil struggling to break free was used again in ‘The Satan Pit,’ and the idea of The Doctor arriving in the middle of an ancient civilization built upon a lie and tearing the whole thing down is just the base state of the series.

              This episode was written by Terrence Dicks sometime around 1976 so clearly the script wasn’t inspired by the absolute bumper crop of 1979’s vampire movies (including ‘Love at First Bite,’ which made more money than any of the ones I looked at) but they might have contributed to it finally being produced in 1980.  Terrence Dicks is one of the big names of the original run of ‘Doctor Who.’  He was script editor from 1970 to 1974, during which time most of the mythological spine of the show was established.  If you like all the Time Lords and Gallifrey stuff in ‘Doctor Who’ that comes from his tenure. 

Although it really hasn’t ever come up again in the main show proper the ideas introduced in the episode have gone on to have a flourishing existence in the Doctor Who Expanded Universe.  Just like any sufficiently beloved genre property there exists an entire universe of official, quasi-official, and fan works that complement, contradict, and otherwise exist alongside the episodes of the show produced by the BBC.  The rights issues for almost everything in the show are a complex nightmare of legal knots as anyone who’s ever even brushed up against the issue of who really owns the rights to the Daleks is well aware.  Unlike Star Wars or Star Trek, where there is a central authority willing and able to make judgements as to what is and is not canon, the BBC, being at the end of the day a publicly-funded broadcaster, doesn’t care at all about what is and isn’t ‘real’ in the Doctor Who universe, and by and large the writers take the same approach that Grant Morrison does to Batman: it all counts, even and especially the things that contradict each other.

Here’s the very basic premise of the episode: that long ago the Time Lords fought an enemy know as The Great Vampires almost to extinction except for their leader, who vanished.  These space vampires could suck entire worlds dry of all life and could only be killed by obliterating their hearts with bowships, giant spaceships that flung giant steel bolts into their chests.  Having fled to E-Space, the last vampire lured a human spaceship after him.  He turned the three officers into his immortal vampire servants and placed them over a peasant workforce designed to live and breed in order to supply him with blood over the course of a thousand years until he could heal from his wounds and rise again to return to the normal universe and wreak havoc.

So far pretty metal.  The Expanded Universe stretches this every which way.  To quote the ‘Doctor Who’ wiki: “Great Vampires were actually emanation and avatars of a demonic force of destruction, which could be understood as a singular conscious entity, know as the Yssgaroth.”  Sometimes they were speculated to be alternate universe Time Lords, sometimes servants of the great evil, sometimes smaller versions of the great evil split into smaller pieces and inserted into our universe.  Vampire legends were declared to exist all over the universe and they were but dim memories of the real Great Vampires.  They took it in all sorts of directions and there’s no single entity around to say what is and isn’t true, so if a writer decides tomorrow they want to use some of the mythology but not other parts they’re completely free to do so.

I suppose at some point I should talk about the actual vampires we get on screen.  There are only three of them and all they really do is stand around and make threats until around the third episode, when they finally meet The Doctor and Romana.  While they do eventually show some fangs and talk about how much they crave blood the fact that they’re specifically vampires is never particularly important to the plot.  One of them has control over bats, which gives the director the opportunity to insert stock shots of vampire swarms and the prop department the excuse to throw a bunch of rubber bats on strings at the actors.  All of them have the vampire mind whammy, but no one is ever turned into a vampire or even has their blood sucked on screen.  We are shown corpses in a big blood-extraction chamber and a big ol’ tube of blood leading down to the Great Vampire, but basically the vampire stuff is mostly aesthetic.  The point is to establish that the buried demonic being is bad, he could kill billions, he has some servants with mind control powers, and he must be stopped by destroying his heart.

The episode itself is perfectly fine.  Tom Baker has finished whatever transformation he’s been going through and his Doctor has reached its final form: he’s never particularly impressed by the bad guys, he wanders around seemingly only paying half-attention, asks questions mostly to hear himself talk, he’s obviously making it up as he goes along and gets irritated if anyone notices.  Again, for anyone who only watches the modern stuff, the new shows were written and directed by people who grew up on this stuff, this is where they got it all from.

There are all the usual complaints, of course, most of them in some way involving the budget.  The special effects are what you get when you have a BBC budget in 1980: lots of miniatures, lots of puppets, and lots of bad key effects and obvious green screening.  Also the plot heavily depends upon a thousand years of human victims to feed the immortal giant vampire and from what we see there are maybe twenty whole villagers in their entire society.  Despite being vampires the bad guys don’t display any actual powers other than staring at you real hard until you do what they say and at one point someone tosses a stuntman at a table.  If they’d had the money they’d have spent it, but they’d long since learned to make do with what they had and make up for it with plot and characterization.

It’s interesting that all of the POV characters at this point in the show weren’t human, or at least not from Earth. The Doctor and Romana are Time Lords and Adric is from another planet in another universe.  This is one way to avoid characters chiming in with lines like “but I thought vampires hated crosses” or “where can we find garlic on this alien planet?”  In 1980 I’m assuming the BBC wasn’t amazingly keen on having the main character of one of it’s flagship shows toss away a crucifix as being completely pointless, which is absolutely what The Doctor would have done.  They mention the mythology of vampires in Earth culture in a throwaway line but it’s absolutely not the point of the story.  The meta element that I saw starting to creep in with ‘Salem’s Lot’ is kind of in there but it’s not focused on.

This has been a nice break from what’s threatening to be a run of movies that I’m going to have to pay more attention to than I’m used to.  It’s also reminded me that I haven’t dug into the old seasons of ‘Doctor Who’ in far too long and I really need to fix that.  I didn’t really get the full sci-fi riff on vampires that I was kind of hoping for, though I guess if that’s what I really wanted to I could go watch ‘Life Force,’ and that’s not happening any time soon.