DOCTOR WHO:  IMAGE OF THE FENDAHL

commentary by Judy Harris

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#20:  IMAGE OF THE FENDAHL (4 parts)	
ORIGINALLY AIRED:  10/29/77 to 11/19/77
WRITTEN BY:  Chris Boucher
DIRECTED BY:  George Spenton-Foster
PRODUCER:  Graham Williams
SCRIPT EDITOR:  Robert Holmes
		

This story's chief interest is its brief references to the Doctor's early life on Gallifrey and what a Time Lord is not supposed to do. It also manages to come up with a scientific explanation for ghosts and the superstition of throwing salt over your shoulder.

At Fetch Priory--played in exterior scenes by Stargroves House in Berkshire, previously seen in PYRAMIDS OF MARS and THE SEEDS OF DOOM--Adam Colby, a paleontologist, addresses a skull, whom he calls "Eustace." The skull was found in Kenya in volcanic sediment 12 million years old, according to the potassium argon tests of Thea Ransome, whose field is chronology. It's a scientific puzzle because this is 8 million years before man existed.

In their secret lab in the priory, Dr. Fendleman and Max Stael, two archaeologists, turn on some elaborate electronic equipment, which causes the skull to vibrate with pulsating light. Outside, a passing hiker finds he can't move his legs. Something attacks him. Inside, next to the skull, Thea faints.

In the TARDIS, the Doctor has K9's inner workings scattered around in order to clean up a little corrosion in his circuits. In reality, the decision to add K9 as a companion wasn't made when the script for IMAGE OF THE FENDAHL was commissioned, and as the radio controlled prop dog was still acting up, the only attempt to integrate K9 into the show was a brief wraparound TARDIS scene at the beginning of part 1 and the end of part 4 in which K9 has no dialogue.

Leela and the Doctor argue over calling K9 "him;" the Doctor insisting as a machine K9 is just an "it." Leela points out the TARDIS is just a machine, which the Doctor calls "her;" Leela believes the Doctor can't control the TARDIS. "I am in complete and constant control of her," the Doctor states, as the TARDIS pitches, throwing them to the floor.

The Doctor's instruments indicate someone is using a sonic time scan. The TARDIS is being dragged toward a Relative Continuum Displacement Zone--a hole in time. The Doctor suggests Leela watch her tongue around the TARDIS, adding "she just generates a low intensity telepathic field and, obviously, primitive thought patterns like yours appeal to her."

The Doctor isn't able to calculate the coordinates, so he traces the scan back to its source to stop it from being used. "Otherwise," he says, "it will cause a direct continuum implosion and destroy the planet it's operating from." When he discovers the planet is Earth, he tells Leela, "Your ancestors have a talent for self destruction that borders on genius." In passing, he notices Leela's new outfit, which is a similar, although lighter colored, set of skins. "I like your new dress," he says.

Colby is out walking his dog, Leakey, who discovers the body of the hiker. Fendleman persuades everyone not to report the body to avoid interruptions and unwanted publicity while their work is at its critical stage. He orders an armed security team and asks Stael to autopsy the body.

The Doctor and Leela exit the TARDIS in a field. "Good morning, ladies," the Doctor says, tipping his hat to some cows grazing nearby, "Now which one of you has the time scanner?" Receiving no replies, he says to Leela, "You know, I don't think these cows know anything about the time scanner."

In his lab, Fendleman gloats over his machinery, which he hopes will display the living owner of the skull. Stael has completed the post mortem and can't find the exact cause of the hiker's death. There's a small blister at the base of his skull, and the body is decomposing as if all the energy has been removed--all the binding force is gone and all that remains is a husk.

The Doctor takes a nap under a tree until Leela wakes him, her knife at the throat of Ted Moss. The Doctor offers him a jelly baby. "You've both escaped from somewhere, haven't you?" Moss asks. "Frequently," the Doctor admits. Moss tells him the nearest village is Fetchborough. "Tell me about the ghosts," the Doctor requests, but Moss nervously denies there are any. He tells the Doctor and Leela about Fendleman and the others at the priory.

At the priory, Martha Tyler, the cook, has a row with David Mitchell, the new security team leader. When Colby and Thea find out they need permission to leave, Colby, in search of Fendleman, goes to the secret lab and discovers the array of electronics. Fendlemen enters and explains his research to see into the past.

Outside, Leela is all for killing the security guard patrolling the grounds with a watch dog, but the Doctor prevents her because "you'll upset the dog."

Colby tells Thea of Fendleman's experiments. He thinks Fendleman is mad, especially since he hears the equipment works only after dark. Thea goes to Fendleman's lab and turns on the equipment. The skull begins to pulse with light, while Thea goes into a trance.

To the Doctor's chagrin, Leela goes off on her own. She tries the door of Martha Tyler's cottage and narrowly misses being shot by Ted Moss. The Doctor finds he can't move his legs; with the force of his will he is able finally to throw off his paralysis, barely missing being attacked by something slinking around the grounds.

Leela wrests the rifle from Moss. Mrs. Tyler's grandson, Jack, disarms her by pointing a cane at her back and pretending it's a gun.

Colby finds Thea in a trance in Fendleman's lab. Mitchell hears the creature stalking the Doctor and goes to investigate. Colby turns off the scanner, as Mitchell screams. He slaps Thea out of her trance and they go off to find Mitchell dead, a blister on the back of his neck, the same as the hiker. Thea passes out.

The Doctor enters and tells Colby not to touch her. He asks Colby how many deaths there have been. There is a glow around Thea's body and small creatures appear on her. They resemble a cross between a snake and a plant, with feathery tendrils coming out of their "mouths."

As Thea wakes up, the Doctor tells Colby, "They look like embryo Fendahleen to me." A Fendahleen is "a creature from my own mythology. Supposed to have perished when the fifth planet broke up, at least so they said;" but "if it survived 12 million years, it's energy reserves must be enormous."

In three scripts, this is the third time Chris Boucher has invented a planet and not given it a name. It isn't even clear if it's the fifth planet in Earth's solar system or the fifth in Gallifrey's part of the sky.

Twelve million rings a bell with Colby--that's the age of the skull he found. The Doctor says it's when the fifth planet broke up. "There are 4000 million people here on your planet and, if I'm right, within a year there'll be just one left alive." (If this sound familiar, he said something like this about the Krynoid in THE SEEDS OF DOOM).

Fendleman arrives, and the Doctor asks him to dismantle the scanner. Instead, Fendleman pulls a gun and tells his guards to lock the Doctor up. He's taken to a closet-like box room.

At Mrs. Tyler's cottage, Jack kicks Ted Moss out. Leela tells him about the sonic time scan, which Jack doesn't understand, but he knows something strange is going on and worries his Gran is involved. Leela tells him the Doctor can help; "He has great knowledge and gentleness."

Back in the box room, the Doctor isn't displaying much gentleness; he kicks some boxes in frustration because the sonic screwdriver failed to open the lock. This clever use of editing, juxtaposing the dialogue in one scene with an action or line of dialogue in an unrelated scene, crops up occasionally in DOCTOR WHO, especially in Leela's last story, THE INVASION OF TIME.

The Doctor was frustrated prematurely; the lock opens. The Doctor picks up the sonic screwdriver, kisses it and leaves.

Colby tries to phone the police but the line is dead. Fendleman denies disconnecting the phone. He tells Colby and Thea he believes the skull is extraterrestrial in origin. His theory is man did not evolve on Earth. With his scanner, Fendleman has traced the moment of death of the alien owner of the skull, at which time there was an enormous surge of power. Fendleman's research has been into where the power is stored. To find out he X-rayed the skull.

Thea makes her excuses to leave and goes looking for the Doctor, but can't find him.

In another room of the priory, Ted Moss warns Stael about the Doctor and Leela. Stael is the leader of the village coven.

Mrs. Tyler shows up at her cottage in a terrified state. She's seen something huge and dark, which called to her in her mind, and is hungry for her soul.

Fendleman shows Colby an X-ray of the skull. It shows an image of a pentagram, which is part of the bone structure itself. Fendleman believes it's a form of neural relay, where the energy is stored. He thinks the skull is a beacon; the release of energy would act as a signal that there's intelligent life on Earth.

This plot smacks of the Stanley Kubrick film 2001, in which the featureless monoliths affected the development of primitive cave men and, when man reached the technological milestone of the moon and uncovered a second monolith there, this sent a signal out beyond Jupiter to alert superior aliens of our level of development.

Leela goes searching for the Doctor, knocking out a guard outside the priory. Thea goes to Fendleman's lab and sees the X-ray. Stael comes in and calls her "the chosen one." He knocks her out with chloroform.

The Doctor goes into Colby's lab, eating jelly babies. He recognizes a piece of equipment as a parastatic magnetometer. He finds a 12th century bone and absentmindedly puts it in his pocket. He uncovers the skull and offers it a jelly baby, paraphrasing Hamlet: "Alas, poor skull." Just then it starts to pulsate and glow. The Doctor drops his bag of jelly babies and puts his hand on the skull, shouting with pain.

Leela comes in; he warns her not to touch him. She kicks the chair out from under him, breaking his connection to the skull. He falls on her. "You are very heavy," she tells him.

The Doctor addresses the skull: "You're becoming a mutation generator, aren't you?" He tells Leela it's alive and "using appropriate genetic material to recreate itself. The Doctor thinks the skull is the indestructible Fendahl which "grows and exists by death," adding, "The Fendahl absorbs the full spectrum of energy--what some people call the life force or the soul. It eats life itself."

Although he came to stop the time scan, he tells Leela Fendleman can operate it for 100 hours before the cataclysmic implosion. Leela points out it may be near the 100 hour point already, but the Doctor feels it's more important to reach Mrs. Tyler, who has seen the Fendahl and lived. As a matter of fact, Fendleman has used the scanner for 98 hours 56 minutes 43.7 seconds. He's kept a log because some of the components have a limited life.

Stael takes Thea to the cellar and ties her up. He tells her she's the medium through which the ancient power of Fetch Priory is focused. The scanner awoke the power, and now he plans to use it to become a god. He injects her with something to make her sleep.

The Doctor and Leela go to the Tylers' cottage. Mrs. Tyler is in psychic shock and is slipping away. To bring her around, the Doctor tries to impose an air of normalcy. He tells her grandson Jack to make tea and serve it in the best china with fruitcake. "Off you go," he tells Jack, confiding to Leela, "I love fruitcake."

Stael goes to the lab and finds Colby and Fendleman using the scanner. He pulls a gun and demands they turn it off.

At the cottage, the Doctor recites an eccentric recipe: "Then you mix the peanuts with the treacle and throw in the apple cores very hard, put the lot in a shallow tin and bake in a high oven for two weeks..." Mrs. Tyler wakes up and tells him that's not how to make a fruitcake.

She confides to the Doctor she has second sight. "Telepathy and precognition are normal in anyone whose childhood was spent near a time fissure like the one in the wood," he assures her. The Doctor explains a time fissure is "a weakness in the fabric of space and time; every haunted place has one, doesn't it? That's why they're haunted; it's a time distortion. This one must be very large. Large enough to have affected the place names around here, like Fetchborough--Fetch--an apparition."

The Doctor asks Jack to keep an eye on the priory to see who comes and goes, and promises to be back the next day at sundown. Mrs. Tyler gives Leela a charm to protect her.

Stael ties up Fendleman and Colby in the cellar. He says he's been planning this ceremony since Mrs. Tyler's visions began to come true.

In the TARDIS, the Doctor searches for the coordinates of the fifth planet, telling Leela, it's "107 million miles out and 12 million years back, so we've no time to lose." He thinks the Fendahl "probably used that enormous stockpile of energy to project itself across space" to Earth; "humans speak of astral projection, traveling psychically to different planets--that could be a race memory."

The next day the coven arrives at the priory.

Leela wakes on the floor of the TARDIS from a nightmare of being chased by something and not being able to move. She draws her knife as the door opens, but it's only the Doctor. "It's a good thing your tribe never developed guns," he remarks, "They'd have woken with a start one morning and wiped themselves out."

The Doctor has checked his data banks, but can find no record of the fifth planet. "We Time Lords are a very meticulous people. You have to be when you live as long as we do. All information's recorded."

They arrive at the fifth planet, but there's nothing to see, because of a time loop. "All memory of the planet has been erased by a circle of time, making it and its records invisible. Only a Time Lord could do that!," the Doctor says, dismayed at this criminal use of Time Lord power and upset to have been on a wild goose chase.

This is the first real mention of a time loop, which became rather a crutch for the writers in later stories. Something similar, a "temporal trap," was mentioned in PYRAMIDS OF MARS, but that does not seem to have been quite the same as a time loop.

It's Lamas Eve (July 31; Lamas is an old harvest festival held on August 1). Mrs. Tyler gives Jack a charm and fills two of his rifle cartridges with salt.

At the priory, Stael hooks the skull to a remote control unit in the cellar that links up to the scanner. Fendleman pieces together what's happening, and even though he's tied up and can do nothing, Stael shoots him in the head, killing him.

In the TARDIS, the Doctor tries to figure out what's happening with the skull, saying, "The question is, where is it getting the power from? Inducted biological transmutation takes a lot of power. There isn't that sort of power available in the priory..." But then the Doctor realizes, "The skull's absorbing the energy released from the scanner beam damaging the time fissure."

He is chagrined he didn't think of this sooner, confiding to Leela, "I was frightened in childhood by a mythological horror. Too frightened to think clearly."

The Doctor and Leela meet up with the Tylers in the priory. A giant Fendahleen approaches them and, as in Leela's dream, they can't move their legs. "It's psychotelekinetic," the Doctor says, "It controls your muscles telepathically." The Doctor shoots it with the rock salt in Jack's gun, killing it and freeing them from their paralysis.

In the cellar, Thea spontaneously transforms into the Fendahl core: she has a long flowing gown, pinned up braids and eyes painted on her eyelids. If this were shown in brief glimpses, it might have worked, but unfortunately, the camera dwells repeatedly on her, and as she doesn't do much more than pose with her arms over her head, she looks rather like a classic statue come to life and is not very threatening.

Thea looks at Ted Moss and he's transformed into a Fendahleen. She begins to change the rest of the coven, despite Stael's protests. The Doctor realizes the Fendahleen he shot "can only have been created out of pure energy while the skull was restructuring Thea's brain."

Leela and the Doctor head for the cellar. Leela releases Colby. The Doctor warns them not to look in Thea's eyes. It's too late for Stael; he's seen her eyes and is paralyzed. He asks the Doctor to leave him the gun, and he uses it to kill himself.

The Doctor examines the Fendahleen he shot, noting "Sodium chloride obviously affects the conductivity, destroys the overall electrical balance, and prevents control of localized disruption of the osmotic pressures." "Salt kills it," Leela translates. "I just said that," the Doctor observes, "probably the origin of throwing it over your shoulder."

The Doctor turns off the time scanner, telling Leela, "I've saved the planet, but we're too late for the Fendahl."

The Fendahleen he killed was an isolated, relatively weak creature. What's in the cellar is the Fendahl, a gestalt. Colby explains this is a group creature made up of separate parts. When they're joined together, they make a new, more powerful creature.

"According to legends of Gallifrey and superstitions of this planet, it's fairly certain that the Fendahl is made up of 12 Fendahleen and a core," the Doctor says. He has killed one and Stael shot himself, so there are only 10 left. There's still time to act because the Fendahl is not complete.

The Doctor needs rock salt. Mrs. Tyler takes back from Leela and Jack the charms she made them, which contain rock salt. Jack loads these into his cartridges, while Mrs. Tyler goes looking for more salt. "Off you go," the Doctor tells her.

Then he sends Jack and Leela to keep watch: "Off you go."

The Doctor dismantles the time scanner and reprograms it. He tells Colby about the Fendahl's origin: "The Time Lords decided to destroy the entire planet and hid the fact from posterity. They're not supposed to do that sort of thing, you know." Colby can't quite grasp what's going on. "The Fendahl is death; how do you kill death," the Doctor says, "The energy amassed by the Fendahl was stored in the skull and dissipated slowly as a biological transmutation field. Now any appropriate life form that came within the field was altered so that it ultimately evolved into something suitable for the Fendahl to use." The skull may have affected man's evolution. "That would explain the dark side of man's nature," the Doctor notes.

Thea and another giant Fendahleen appear to Leela and Jack. Jack freezes up, so Leela knocks him out, grabs the gun and shoots it herself.

"If you want an alternative explanation," the Doctor offers Colby, "The Fendahl fed into the RNA of certain individuals the instincts and compulsions necessary to recreate. These were fed through the generations until they reached Fendleman and people like him," Or, the Doctor supposes, it could all be just a coincidence. The Doctor hears Leela's gunshot and says, "Time's running out."

He fetches Leela and Jack and sends the Tylers back to their cottage. He tells Colby to give Leela and him time to get to the cellar and then turn on the scanner for 2 minutes to confuse the Fendahl. Then Colby is to leave immediately, because the scanner's been rigged to set off a controlled implosion 3 minutes after it's been switched off.

The Doctor and Leela leave, but the Doctor pops back. "Remember," he says to Colby, holding up 4 fingers, "three minutes."

Armed with salt, the Doctor and Leela head for the cellars. Wearing a rubber glove, the Doctor gingerly puts the glowing skull in a lead lined case. They all get clear of the priory in time, and the building implodes.

The Doctor and Leela take off in the TARDIS. The Doctor plans to find a star about to go supernova and dump the skull in the vicinity. He finds one in the constellation of Cantharis.

Leela has changed back into her old costume. This is because the stories were filmed out of order, and THE SUN MAKERS, in which Leela wore her old costume, was made before IMAGE OF THE FENDAHL. "I like your new dress," the Doctor tells her. He's just remembered he better finish repairing K9. Leela triumphantly pounces when the Doctor calls K9 him. "I can call K9 him if I want to," the Doctor says, "He's my dog; aren't you K9?" In another limp humor ending, K9 nods creakily.

Denis Lill, who plays Dr. Fendleman, plays Sir George Hutchinson in the Davison story THE AWAKENING.

Wanda Ventham, who plays Thea Ransome, played Jean Rock in the Troughton story THE FACELESS ONES; and Faroon in the McCoy story TIME AND THE RANI.

Scott Fredericks, who plays Stael, played Boaz in the Pertwee story DAY OF THE DALEKS.

Geoffrey Hinsliff, who plays Jack Tyler, plays Fisk in a future Tom Baker story NIGHTMARE OF EDEN.