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The Nucleus |
Reviews
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The Nucleus |
"I am the fly" by Thomas Cookson 4/7/23
Captain Scarlet & The Mysterons saw the security forces of future Earth having to combat the pernicious alien threat, the Mysterons. If you started the show late, you'd probably miss how this conflict really started from human folly. The first episode presented humanity's first contact with the Mysterons on Mars. Showing the Mysterons weren't necessarily hostile originally, until the humans mistook a large camera tracking them for a gun and rashly shot first. A mistake which provoked the Mysterons' fury and 32 episodes of retaliation.
Now why was this important to establish? Partly to highlight humanity's flaws. But mostly, I think it was to explain why the Mysterons of Mars were waging this war on us now, rather than anytime before. It was perhaps to make the Mysteron threat more than just a self-generated story engine, and more one given credible motives by story events. Giving them an anger and vendetta helps brings them fully to life as a threat.
As I mull this over, I think maybe this is what's missing from The Invisible Enemy. Much like the Mysterons, the story's super-virus has the power to possess and zombify humans and use them as agents. There's even explicit allusions to cloning and our hero himself falling under their influence at first. However, the big missing piece is, well, anything that makes them feel more than just a self-generated story engine. It's blatantly a Doctor Who monster that exists just to make the whole story happen.
This isn't necessarily about motivation. The Master, Daleks and Sutekh never needed much motivation beyond pure sadism. Likewise, the viral nucleus is presented to us as a creature simply obeying its biological imperative to breed and spread. But the way a villain is established or seeded in a story can make the difference between us believing it as a concept or rolling our eyes. The Invisible Enemy can't help but feel a bit 'this'll do'.
To be clear, The Invisible Enemy just about pulls it off. The main reason we can suspend disbelief without thinking too hard about the plausibility of the threat is that the plot and action keeps moving fast enough to not give us pause to think about it. But in the aftermath, it all can't help feel throwaway in a way the show hasn't been since The Krotons.
My review on the story was an attempt to reckon with the question of why, despite being an entertaining watch with some shrewd bits of script doctoring, it all felt inconsequential. I thought punitive nit-picking might nail it. I tried the angle that the story started strong, but minor diminishing faults accumulated. Perhaps I missed the big fundamental flaw with the central antagonist. That maybe, if anything, the script did the best it could with a shaky premise.
The Hinchcliffe era saw many non-recurring monsters that fans nonetheless wanted to return. The Zygons. Sutekh. Wirrin. All felt as though they had much more longevity to them. Sadly the Nucleus is not one of them. Even the Kraals felt they had more thought to them.
Now I should probably qualify the complaint of the threat feeling auto-generated. After all, the story draws from real biology and virology. From existing real-world threats, whilst taking dramatic liberties with the concept. We are, unfortunately all-too aware nowadays of how deadly viruses operate and how difficult or near impossible containing and combatting them can be. We've known COVID-19 obviously. The safeguarding procedures that had to be followed. Desperate experimental research into vaccines. Even beforehand, more presciently to this story, we had the horror of superbugs. The terrifying idea that hospitals could become breeding grounds for more intelligent, near-invincible viruses that every medication had been tried on, in vain. By 'intelligent', I mean in the sense of absorbing signal information from perished comrades and developing immunity from that knowledge, almost as if learning. Likewise, the COVID virus can't be said to have an intellect, but it operates on its inbuilt instructions and acts as though it knows exactly where to strike.
The Invisible Enemy tries a child-friendly spin on the idea. What if the Doctor could go into an infected person's body and see a virus infection at work? I did suggest the story missed a trick in not showing a full-scale nightmarish, nasty war going on inside the body between infected areas and the remnants. Between virus and immune system.
However, the story largely dodges the procedural rules of how pandemics operate, which is why it doesn't resonate quite like it should. Viruses typically pass on by breath or touch. They're usually at their scariest at a time when we're in the dark about how exactly they become so virulent. Space stations of course are meant to provide the perfect immunity of airtight seals to make quarantine swift and ruthless.
But the virus we're presented with here is a little too far-fetched in its ability to transmit via mere eye-contact and thrive in the vacuum of space. In fact, showing the physical radio transmission effect itself kind of diminishes the horror, tipping us off too easily. What's scary about viruses is they spread invisibly, but not here.
Here, I think it moreso needs a reason to exist. The opening episode presents us with some spatial anomaly that seems to be either home to the virus or a dimensional gateway, but it's never clear which. The idea seems to be that this is a virus so massive and evolved that it's actually able to transmit neurological signals like a lightning storm and also affect human brains.
So what exactly was the anomaly? Everyone seems to largely forget by the end, which defies sense. Surely it'd be the Doctor's priority to ensure it gets closed off. But no one seems bothered. Perhaps that's another reason the story doesn't feel so grave or lacks staying power. There should be a sense this could easily happen all over again if nothing's learned. But no one seems to care.
Various explanations could've been offered. Maybe a dimensional gateway to a parallel universe where viruses became the dominant life. Maybe it's from a human waste dump that no one's ever thought to sanitize, hence why the virus managed to breed so ferociously. Maybe solar radiation caused it to mutate even. Something to establish the reasons for it to exist in the fiction.
If you established the idea of a dimensional gateway, it would even provide potential interest in the first passing shuttlecrew to discover it. They could marvel at and study the phenomenon for a time before it begins to affect them. This is what the story could've done with: spending more time with the infected crew. Maybe seeing their condition worsen over time, despite them trying to carry on as normal. Having to fight off these strange alien homicidal thoughts and compulsions to obey.
There's a brief scene we see the Doctor mentally fighting the influence, refusing to shoot Leela, and it's probably the story's best scene. The story should've seen more moments like that. This is after all meant to be about zombie horror. The fear of losing your own human will. But we're largely presented with ciphers we don't get to know before their possession.
Now in Pyramids of Mars we saw Marcus Scarman possessed by Sutekh in only his first scene. However, we then spent time around those character witnesses who knew him as a friend or brother, and this really conveys the loss. The problem is The Invisible Enemy wants to start the action immediately and involve the Doctor quickly by way of someone pressing the distress beacon. But it wastes a lot of potential immediately.
If we had more character background, we'd have more of a stake in this. The virus would feel more insidious. The Doctor casually rising up in his sick bed for long enough to explain how the virus works presents its own problems (it would've been better were he near-paralytic and had to weakly type the information with his only moving hand). However if we'd seen the crew slowly succumb to mind control, then the Doctor's explanations would feel like they resonated with what we'd seen.
Alternatively, to give it more of a sense of personal stakes, what if the virus entering this universe was somehow the Doctor's fault? That this was a super-intelligent bug from another dimension that had somehow leeched onto his TARDIS. That the impossible had happened partly because of the Doctor's arrival. This would give more of a personal impetus for the Doctor to put right what he'd caused to go wrong, making for a more cathartic conclusion.
As with any Martin & Baker story, there's the sense of the writers clearly loving and enjoying doing this kind of child-like creativity. Writing for the sheer joy of it. But it feels like maybe someone needed to channel their energies better and impose a structure for them to work around. Give them hard-line suggestions of what the story needed. There is the feeling that the makers had just gotten complacent with their formula by this point and just rattled this one out to get it out the way.
There is a theory in writing called 'the iceberg effect'. That, like an iceberg, the bulk of a story and characters should remain below the surface. That a certain depth and mystery should remain hinted at, but hidden for the story to intrigue and feel real. For some fans, this is why Kinda is the better story than Snakedance, as the latter perhaps gives too many answers.
In Pyramids of Mars, we're not immediately introduced to Sutekh. We're first introduced to one of his fanatical doomsayer followers, prophesying his legend. We're given the pieces of a puzzle, glimpses at a legendary force, before Sutekh finally appears fully formed. As the full picture comes together, the greater it feels Sutekh's stature, power and reach is. Enough to rival the Doctor.
With the nucleus, on paper it should be a terrifying match for the Doctor, given its ridiculous super-powers of possession. The problem is it seemingly comes out of nowhere, super-powered, with no process to finding out its powers gradually. This all makes it feel more a contrived ready-made threat than an enemy we're still learning about the strengths and weaknesses of. There's not the same terrifying, believable engagement.
Basically, it reveals enough about the nucleus to kind of expose it as a half-baked idea given to immediate, premature displays of God-mode powers. Basically, much of this story feels like a stab in the dark rather than crafted to perfection. Moreover, when the Nucleus is seen in full form, the Doctor is openly unimpressed. Leela's earlier premonition of its evil feels far from paid off. When the Doctor ultimately blows it up, it just feels the writers wrote themselves into a corner with their super-powered threat. It's hard to disagree with Kim Newman's sentiment that this story was where Doctor Who turned from a show that felt it mattered, to one that felt it didn't.
The Captain Scarlet comparison is perhaps an apt one. It established an alien threat strong enough to keep the story going for 32 weeks, and could've gone on longer were Lew Grade not so short-sighted. The Invisible Enemy's antagonist felt like it was almost stretching its own sustainability at four episodes.