Who Reviews The Visitation by Tony J Fyler

Tony admires the Terileptil art.

The Visitation is an odd affair.

As a story, there’s no doubt that it stands up well – Eric Saward announced his arrival in the world of Doctor Who with a cogent script of fleeing alien prisoners, possessed of both an aesthetic sense, a craving for beauty, and also, in their prison-hardened state, a ruthlessness that would see them try to wipe the Earth clean of most of its human beings so they could make themselves a new, safe home. Complex, intriguing science fiction right there. Mix that in with a good dollop of British history – the coming of the Black Death and the Great Fire of London, and you’re on to something really rather robust.

Add in secondary characters like the endlessly fruity actor-cum-thief Richard Mace, played by Michael Robbins, and a setting that allows the BBC historical and costume departments to turn up their game and set the scene hugely well in an extended opening that’s entirely free of the Tardis crew, and all the signs are good.

Add in Death stalking about the place, and things really get interesting.

Reveal Death to be a gemstone-studded android of appalling gaudiness and you get the faintest wobble of what-the-hell. But really, it’s only when the aliens themselves, the Terileptils, are revealed, that this starts to look the budget-squeezed Doctor Who of mid-Tom Baker time. Bless ’em, they try hard in The Visitation though – chief Terileptil actor Michael Melia gives his best effort, struggling through a costume of properly Ice Warriorlike rigidity. The costume and effects department give him a face with animatronics in, so he looks less entirely fake than many other aliens in Who history, but the levels of care run slap-bang into a BBC budget on the rest of the costume, meaning he has to shuffle about the place with little flipper-arms accentuating the ‘bloke-in-a-rubber-suit’ness of his plight to the heavens.

That, if anything, is the hallmark of The Visitation – it tries awfully hard and means awfully well, and has a fair share of startling visual moments, but it’s let down by budgets and believability-crises in a way which is particularly unfair to the writing.

The writing gives us, above all else, a tougher edge to the still relatively new Fifth Doctor. We’ve seen him ponder in Castrovalva, get his Buddhism on in Kinda and defeat a deeply unfortunate inflatable snake (which entirely fails to do justice to the performance of Jeff Stewart as Dukkha, or the Mara, throughout the rest of the story), bring a totalitarian frog down to size in Four To Doomsday, but here, under the nudgings of Saward’s script, the Fifth Doctor is stretched into areas of his character that have been at best hinted at so far – uncompromising areas, where he fails to be taken in or impressed by charlatans and sets a standard of behaviour for them to aspire to if they wish to actually impress him. It’s also here, more than in Four To Doomsday, that Peter Davison gets to show his Doctor as a Citizen of the Universe, knowing the history and troubles of the Terileptils, the prisons and mines of Raaga, appreciating their art and artistic natures (for all the gaudy android that embodies that art is decidedly…well…eighties). He’s less grand than the likes of Pertwee or Tom Baker in this aspect of his character, treating his knowledge of time and space more as a fact of life and an asset, like Patrick Troughton’s Second Doctor did, and it brings this difference of tone with what’s gone recently before him into sharp relief. He’s fairly sympathetic to the plight of the escaped Terileptils, but not at the expense of the people of the Earth, even if he can also sympathise to some degree with the Terileptils’ disdain for those people in this particular, grubby, bawdy, primitive and god-fearing age.

The Terileptil plan to genetically enhance the Black Death to make it even more deadly and to wipe the planet considerably cleaner than it is makes a degree of sci-fi sense, but more than that, it shows the Terileptils as a complex enemy – creatures with lives of industry, with an aesthetic sense, with great ability, turned by long mistreatment into rigid people, people unable or unwilling to see an alternative outside that which they have mapped out for themselves, come what may and damn the consequences. In essence, the Terileptils are a tragedy of character, rather than a straightforward marauding alien evil. Nevertheless, their rigidity of vision and its deadly consequences is a line the Doctor can’t allow them to cross, and the Citizen of the Universe becomes, as he did in Four To Doomsday, the force of cosmic justice that will stand in the way of bad behaviour. That, by the time of The Visitation, is becoming a defined characteristic of the Fifth Doctor – while on some deeper, revolving levels he understands the universe’s complexities and frailties, and his own, when he stands up against you, he’s prepared to do whatever is necessary to stop you. It’s a characteristic that evolves over the rest of his time in the Tardis, with his third season in the role giving much more explicit voice to the idea, in everything from Warriors of the Deep through Resurrection of the Daleks to The Caves of Androzani. The Fifth Doctor will let the universe be its complicated self, and he’s never as certain of his moral outrage as, for instance, his successor would be, but his abhorrence of bad behaviour, as with Monarch in Four To Doomsday and with the Terileptils in The Visitation, produces an almost parental, paternalistic stiffening of the spine, and a determination to say no and stand up against it.

As the Great Fire begins to rage, the Fifth Doctor is quite happy to let it burn – there are deaths he can’t prevent and deaths he can – but it’s almost sweet that at the end of The Visitation, Richard Mace, in his determination to stay and help people fight the inferno, finally earns himself at least the respect of a favour from the Fifth Doctor, who offers to take him out of danger, to ensure he’ll be alive tomorrow. Mace’s refusal, his dedication in a moment of utter crisis to helping out his fellow humans, feels like a natural strand of his character, and the Doctor is able to finally close the Tardis door on him, knowing that the highwayman was genuinely not all bad after all.

Re-watching The Visitation more than thirty years after broadcast, a surprising amount of it stands up to scrutiny very well – the script is solid, the visuals and costumes mostly sound, and the performances from the two Michaels, Melia and Robbins, help elevate the story above some of the also-rans of Peter Davison’s first season. Really, the big issue is in the Terileptil costumes (an issue that would continue to blight otherwise reasonably interesting stories, like Arc of Infinity, Frontios and – dare we say it – The Twin Dilemma), which punch a hole of hilarity into what is otherwise good work from all concerned. Give it another watch today, and give the Terileptils a chance.