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(More customer reviews)"Horror of Fang Rock" is one of "Doctor Who"'s creepier entries. It proves that a story made on styrofoam sets, with a monster so poorly made that the props kept melting under the studio lights, can still be edge-of-your-seat viewing. The TARDIS lands on a rocky outcrop under a lighthouse on the same night that an alien invasion fleet's advance scout crash-lands into the sea. A team of doomed lighthouse keepers, derived from a sub-Coleridge turn-of-the-century ballad, falls easy prey to the shape-shifting, electricity-wielding creature, as does a yacht full of bickering aristocrats also stranded on the isle.
The story opens the 4th (and exact middle) of Tom Baker's seven seasons as the Doctor. As a midway point to the Baker years, "Fang Rock" is intriguing in that it not only hearkens back to the gothic horror of his earlier years, but also serves as a window on the series' future mayhem, when Baker the actor would start acting against the scripts and run amok of the producers' control. The DVD release pays detailed attention to Baker's on-set flareups, while demonstrating how he could still produce great on-screen moments when working with the right people -- actress Louise Jameson and director Paddy Russell.
The commentary track sizzles with tales on on-set strife generated by Baker, if you're into learning that stor of thing. Jameson (companion Leela) provides excellent audio, balancing detailed production anecdotes with an intelligent critique of the story, almost 30 years later. She gives a far more satisfactory origin of the name "Leela" than did Leela's creator, writer Chris Boucher, on the "Robots of Death" DVD some years back. Terrance Dicks, always a hoot on DVD, lavishes praise over elements of his own script, while laughing off other elements of the story. If he likes a cliffhanger (the end of Part Three, a funereal Baker oratory), he takes full credit; if he thinks the cliffhanger landed on the wrong beat (the end of Part Two, when two characters awkwardly embrace against an off-camera scream), he'll cheerfully blame the director. Third wheel John Abbott, who played the youngest of the lighthouse keepers, has neither lot to do in the story nor to say on the commentary track, but he does give an interesting account of what it was like for a rookie actor to intrude on Baker's turf.
The best of the extra features is the 35-minute documentary on Terrance Dicks' "Who" career, featuring interviews with producer Barry Letts, old series writer Louis Marks, and current series writer Paul Cornell. Cornell gives a great breakdown of what made the "Fang Rock" script work so aggressively well ("The story has three McGuffins... and two of them are used to defeat the third"). DW book editor Peter Darvill-Evans, who looked nothing at all like I imagined (more like Ric Ocasek than Charles Dickens), describes Dicks' contribution to several decades' worth of DW novels. The closing credits feature a fabulous montage of every iteration of the Dicks-coined phrase "reverse the polarity of the neutron flow", against Jon Pertwee's observation that you could sing the line to the tune of "The Sailor's Hornpipe".
Now that "Doctor Who" has graduated into the 21st century and is working on its second season of new episodes, with modern production values and British TV's most celebrated writers, an episode like "Fang Rock" can easily sink into irrelevance alongside last season's gothic horror fests "The Unquiet Dead" and "The Empty Child". However, aided by the usual wonderful set of extra features, this DVD reminds those of us who've been in the "Who" fandom game for a while just how we got here in the first place.
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The Doctor and Leela become top suspects in the mysterious deaths that occur when an eerie fog engulfs the Fang Rock lighthouse in this turn-of-the-century adventure.
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