Nightmare Of Eden (1979) Review

A family's typical reaction if you tell them you're watching Doctor Who from the start.

Nightmare Of Eden is a mixed bag of extreme camp and extreme drama. It attempts to be a PSA on drugs and drug dealing, with numerous interesting sci-fi twists and yet the production appears to be completely flippant, almost to the point of incompetence. 

WRITTEN BY

Bob Baker, whose former partnership with Dave Martin gave us the largest collection of "meh" stories in Doctor Who history. He's sort of like the Classic Era Chris Chibnall, always writing solid stories, but never really shocking us with quality.

PLOT

The TARDIS lands inside two spaceships that have accidentally materialised inside one another. Offering to help, the Doctor, Romana and K-9 discover a drug smuggling operation onboard, somehow connected to an eccentric scientist's CET machine - essentially an electric zoo containing landscapes and animals literally ripped from other worlds. Things take a darker turn when dangerous predators escape from the machine and all fingers start pointing at the Doctor...

ANALYSIS

I really liked the story. Focusing it simply around two spaceships makes for a nice breath of fresh air after the usual "civilisation under threat" stories and the intricate, slimy scheme is very interesting. I also like its anti-drug message, reminiscent of all those "lesson of the day" endings in the Pertwee era(The Mutants, The Green Death, Invasion Of The Dinosaurs...). Being contained in one ship, there's also a very Robots Of Death vibe to it. However, it has one serious handicap... nobody involved seems to give a crap.

Seriously, nobody in the production cast or crew had the slightest interest in this story. At least that's the feeling I got. Actors seemed to have been given no direction on what to do, resulting in a pantheon of cheesy, campy performances. The sets were not very well built. The spaceship models looked bad, like "held by a string" bad. Even the writing seemed to go off in various directions. At one point, the Doctor even says something akin to "okay, it's nice that we got this sorted out, but now let's get back to what we actually have to do..."

CHARACTERS

The master of irreverence is of course Tom Baker, who does act a little bit towards the end, very nicely showing his huge disappointment in Tryst, a fellow scientist who'd gone to immoral extremes to fund his research. But for the most part, he's just fooling around. 

Lalla Ward is unfortunately given very little to work with as Romana. In fact, she's quite out of character, being terrified by unconscious Mandrels and being generally ineffectual. She's very old-fashioned in a bad sort of way. 

My absolute favourite cast member is Lewis Fiander as the multilayered scientist Tryst. He is a great character, initially very likable and quirky, with a simple mind, but also turning out to be quite an unpleasant person in the end. He's a lot of fun and plays off of Tom Baker wonderfully in one of those iconic hero-villain pairings. He's right up there with Mavic Chen(GUARDIAN OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM) and the BOSS for me as one of the greatest Doctor Who one-off baddies. Tryst has a strange European accent(something he apparently worked out with Baker), which might be off-putting for some, but to me, only served to make the character more exotic and fun, in a campy sort of way. 

The owner of the rogue vessel that bumps into our cruise ship is called Dymond, and the only thing I can say about him is that he looks and acts exactly like Colin Baker. 

Captain Rigg(played by David Daker, who played the savage Irongron in The Time Warrior) was initially conceived as a tragic character, I think... an honorable, stubborn leader who is forced to deal with a situation he can't comprehend and then forced into addiction by the villains, who plant the drug in his drink. But too many things go wrong. First of all, I find it hard to believe that simply planting a drug in someone's drink would turn him into an addict, no matter how powerful the drug. He doesn't even know that it's vraxoin, for heaven's sake, so how would he make the connection that he needs more of something?

And secondly, with lines like "I must have something for this terrible feeling!!", how can you take his addiction seriously? Why would he think Romana has whatever he needs anyway, no matter how desperate he was?

Stephen Jenn's Secker is just... odd. We're introduced to him as he's already addicted to the vraxoin and completely indifferent, so it honestly took me a few minutes to decide whether he was a very poor actor or if something was actually wrong with him. Now that I think about it, though, I'm surprised Rigg didn't get someone to send him to sickbay sooner. I know they mentioned that he was the only navigator onboard... but why? Always have backup, people!

Stott and Della are one of those classic Doctor Who romances between two youngsters. Nothing else to see here, except that I was slightly confused by Stott's motivations(see what I meant by nobody giving a crap? I have so many questions!). He claims to be an agent for some drug investigation agency, but why would that make him decide to hide out in the CET machine, knowing it was unstable? Wouldn't it be safer to come out and continue your investigation with Tryst and Della outside? You know, just in case you GET KILLED???

And who could forget Officer Fisk and Officer Costa(Rica), who are basically campy, ineffectual versions of the Kaleds from Genesis Of The Daleks. They're completely unfair and with vague Nazi overtones, but their blindness is mostly played up for laughs. 

Our monsters for the story are the Mandrels, who are basically overgrown teddy bears filled with white powder. Incredible. 

NOTES

*Since this is Bob Baker writing, K-9 seems to revert to his original personality, which doesn't suit David Brierley's OTT tones at all. 

*Tryst's method of storing his worlds on crystals gave me Stargate SG-1 vibes. That show loved crystals to death. Every alien race ever = crystals.

*Maybe it's just me, but Tryst was so likable in the first few episodes that it seemed almost out of character for him to be the villain. I didn't really find his malevolence entirely convincing! But that's probably the point...

*For perhaps the first time, I've spotted the infamous wobbly sets! At one point, when Tom Baker is running down the stairs, the whole thing goes with him. 

*Speaking of the stairs, this story reuses The Invasion Of Time's gimmick of reusing the exact same set over and over again to show. And I thought The Curse Of The Fatal Death was just poking!

*Barry Andrews, who played Stott, also snagged a role in the James Bond movie "The Spy Who Loved Me" two years prior to this. Good choice, man.

*I wish we could've seen more of Dymond's ship. I almost never felt like the two ships had integrated the way it was shown. They should've had it be bigger and have scenes in two different types of corridors. 

*The plot of this heavily reminded me of Farscape's Self-Inflicted Wounds two-parter, in which a ship travelling through a different dimension materialises inside Moya and the two get stuck inside a wormhole. Obviously, it looked a lot better. Despite only having like three-four sets in total too(a few corridor sets, a Moya bridge set and an alien bridge set).

*The Doctor drags his dark brown Hinchcliffe-era coat out of the closet! I must say, I wasn't expecting it at all. It really fuelled the whole Robots Of Death vibe I was getting.

*The passengers look like the Oompa-loompas from the television room in Willy Wonka's factory.

BEST QUOTE

"Work for? I don't work for anyone. I'm just having fun." - the Fourth Doctor explaining his modus operandi.

CONCLUSION

Some really great ideas in this one, but it suffers from what I'm now coining 'the Adams Factor': comedy where comedy isn't needed. Also notable for poor production values.