The Ark in Space

A massive space station hovers over Earth in the far far future. Harry's attempts to get out of the TARDIS, having taken it for a parlour trick, has resulted in the Doctor and his companions being flung into the 40th century and landing on Space Beacon Nerva, the last resting place of a select group of humans in cryogenic suspension waiting for the day when they can return to a fire-ravaged Earth. During their long sleep, though, the humans of Nerva have been visited by the Wirrn, a race of space wasps intent on using the sleeping humans for food and making Earth their new breeding ground, and when the Doctor, Sarah, and Harry arrive, the Wirrn are almost ready to move...

Everyone love a good doomsday story. And I love The Ark in Space. LOVE IT. For the entire first episode, the Doctor and his companions wander the seemingly abandoned station in creepy near-silence until they discover the cyrogenically preserved humans; Sarah is actually caught up in the process herself and becomes one of the sleepers for a time until the reviving crewmembers bring her back from the edge of her suspension. The people of the Ark are naturally suspicious of the presence of outsiders and react almost snobbishly; one gets the feeling that the people of Nerva were a select group of the best humanity had to offer before the solar flares devastated the planet and made evacuation necessary. Add to this the feeling of isolation in the adventure: it's true that in space no-one can hear you scream, and this was before Alien came along. And the Ark does not just have one Wirrn on board; Harry finds the dead queen at the end of episode one, but the infrastructure is festooned with chrysalid forms of Wirrn preparing to hatch and devour. I think when I first saw this episode I was very young and the Wirrn gave me bad dreams. This time, I had Jay with me. And together we braved the episode.

The DVD release of The Ark in Space has entirely new CGI effects for the space station exterior shots, and it's a good thing considering how much the original wobbled against the video background of stars. What we are presented with looks close to Babylon 5 quality but still somehow looks like it was done for a video game. A few liberties are taken with the design of the station, adding to it an inner obeservation transom where the impressive corridor shots are supposed to take place, adding a bit more size to the whole thing. Normally Jay and I revel in the shortcomings of the special effects but I insisted on adopting a revisionist attitude for the day and the enhanced version was what we ended up watching. And we really didn't have too much to say about production values; the adventure is very well directed and the set design while being still on the "affordable" side of things is still something quite impressive. That said, we did notice one of the extras in a cryogenic capsule actually blinking; "You'd think she could have held it together for just that one shot," Jay said. We also found the lack of legs or visible signs of locomtion on the Wirrn a bit of a problem, but we did agree that as giant killer bugs go they are pretty creepy, even if they speak to each other like dolphins.

We had no beefs with the supporting cast outside of the blinker we mentioned. Noah's battle with his bubble-wrap hand made us question his abilities as a serious thespian, and Libri's death by laser fire was... um... rigid. But Vira (although a bit cold) was excellent, and Lycett and Rogin made for more human elements of a crew that may as well have been robots for all the compassion they initially showed.

So fresh from this tale of claustrophobic horror we went on to the Gerard Square McDonalds to enjoy some of the plight that the solar flares will eventually wipe away. What a dump. I'd take my chances with the Wirrn any day over the regulars at that place.

NEXT EPISODE : THE SONTARAN EXPERIMENT