Survival

The Doctor takes Ace back to Perivale after she idly wonders what her old friends are up to. Far from status quo for the sleepy suburb of London, it appears that Ace's friends are all missing, and the town is being overrun by stray cats. The Doctor realizes that the disappearances are actually abductions, and young people are being transported to the planet of the Cheetah People to be hunted and eaten. This, though, is the least of the Doctor's worries; the Master has turned up on the Cheetah Planet and contrary to his claims of being able to control the animals there, he himself is falling under the planet's thrall...

And that is the finaly story of a 26 year run on television. It's not the most original or complicated plot, but the real strength of Survival stems from first time writer Rona Munro's fantastic script and some really solid direction. It's shot entirely on location, with just the right amount of special effects to make the Planet of the Cheetah People appear a tad more exotic than the quarry it was shot in. The Cheetah People costumes are pretty much what one would expect; actors in fur suits but the faces and heads are worthy of Cats. (Remember Invasion of the Cat People? Those feline anatagonists were linked to these ones in that novel as being a different branch of evolution, and it would come up again in 2006 and 2007 in New Earth and Gridlock respectively).

Being set in Perivale, Survival gets another kick at the mythology that is Ace's backstory, this time bringing her back together with her old chums Ange, Shreela and Midge. The boorish self-defence instructor Sgt. Patterson recognizes Ace and refer to the police having ler her off with a warning for some bit of mischief or another; it's hard to believe that a warning is all she would have gotten for burning down Gabriel Chase as was revealed in Ghost Light, so she's obviously been in trouble outside of that incident. Her friends are surprised to see her, but she is not immediately keen to tell them where she's been. Survival is actually the first story to really devle into the effects travelling with the Doctor can have on the companions' lives; Patterson admonishes Ace for leaving and having her worried mother list her as a missing person. This would start the ball rolling for the return of the series in 2005 and how companions Rose Tyler, Martha Jones and Donna Noble would deal with worried families when they themselves went missing.

Anthony Ainley makes his final appearance as the Master. Trapped on the Cheetah planet he is in danger of becoming an animal himself, with his eyes mutating to cat-like irises and his teeth beginning to grow into fangs; all brought about by his midn link with the animals there. Being a Time Lord, though, he resists the change and fights it, maintaining his dignity and even a sense of style as always. But the desire for revenge against the Doctor does not help keep the powers at bay, and the process begins to speed up and make him more feral as the story progresses. Not having met this incarnation of the Doctor before, he is wary of him, perhaps sensing there is more to this incarnation than there has been in the others.

As for the Doctor, he manages to figure out what is going on relatively quick, as is the norm with him this season. He grasps the danger posed to Ace by her growing bond with one of the Cheetah People, Karra (played by Lisa Bowerman who would soon return as the voice of companion Bernice Summerfield in the Big Finish audio range). And as he walks off into the sunset with Ace at the end, he has a fantastic soliloqy that was dropped in to wrap up the series and leave it open for its return... one day.

Had the series carried on for another season plans had been made to write Ace out halfway through and send her off to Gallifrey to inject new life into the Time Lord society. The Doctor would have continued to walk on the darker side of his nature, with the production team aiming to re-establish some mystery around the character and make him less a victim of his own circumstances. Elements of this "master plan" eventually did begin to surface in the stories that followed; Virgin Publishing, under contract from the BBC, began to publish all-new Doctor Who fiction under the banner of "The New Adventures" in 1991, taking the Doctor and Ace to places they had never been before, and places we could only dream of seeing them go. Virgin's new steps would eventually give rise to Big Finish and their success, and eventually the show would return in 2005, but not until after a lot of changes...

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