Doctor Who: Image of the Fendahl (Story 94)

Elaborately balanced between horrific and comedic, "Image of the Fendahl" comes in near the midpoint of Tom Baker's tenure as the Doctor, a justifiably classic phase of the series when those responsible for its making seem confident but not complacent that their efforts will entertain a wide segment of the BBC audience. That is, while a bit murkier and edgier than prior years, this is still "Doctor Who" as the quintessential family show--somehow working on several levels at once. On the simplest and most tangible level we have big slug-like monsters (and, this being the olden days before CGI, I think we should stop a moment and appreciate the inventive craftsmanship that endowed them with a mouthful of squirming writhing tentacles). On an equally thrilling if less visceral level, we have a finely-scripted tale of suspense and mystery. On yet more sophisticated levels yet, all of this is framed and informed by a complex and intriguingly speculative science fiction premise of astronomical scale spanning eons--which might feel overly remote if it didn't all come to a crisis within the familiar context of rural England in the 1970's. And yet all these levels cohere in harmony rather than jarring and grating with each other, which takes astounding storytelling skill if you think about it.It seems natural to characterize this story as the last gasp of the so-called "gothic" tendency seen in the show in the mid-70's. Certainly this is apt in that for all intents and purposes "Image of the Fendahl" follows the plot logic of a good horror story (in some ways it rather reminds me of John Carpenter's 1987 film "Prince of Darkness", in fact). It also works the old reliable "Doctor Who" alchemy of reinterpreting standard horror motifs in a science fiction idiom: the pentagram is a "neural relay", the inability to move as something wicked approaches (a prototypical nightmare) is due to some sort of psychic force, a pinch of salt to ward of evil works because sodium chloride "prevents control of localized disruption of osmotic pressures" and so on. For all that, though, this story is somewhat atypical. In such beloved classics as "Pyramids of Mars" and "the Brain of Morbius" and such, the scientific technical interpretation straightforwardly replaces the supernatural one, utterly displacing and invalidating it--a well-intended nod anyway to the show's original mandate to encourage an interest in science (and history) among its younger viewers. Here things are not so simple, however. The premodern, pre-scientific, indeed pre-Christian manner of explaining these phenomena, especially as they are articulated by the local wise woman/"witch" Martha Tyler, are portrayed not as backwards, ignorant, and wrong but merely as different, as an alternate frame of reference every bit as functional when the Fendahleen are slithering towards you down the hall. You know things are getting weird when the Doctor reels off three mutually-conflicting explanations for what's happening as if all three are equally valid and equally invalid. That's surely eccentric even by the Fourth Doctor's standards. But for those of us who suspect that a little epistemological doubt is healthy, it's also rather refreshing.Multiple levels of significance and sophistication would mean little if not for the wonderfully varied cast of characters we have here though, all of them saved from the brink of stereotype and brought to life by impeccable acting of the first order as well as a superb script sensitive to the finer points of characterization. One actually cares what happens to them, and that's the ultimate sorcery that makes or breaks a tale.

"Image of the Fendahl" was the last of "Doctor Who"'s 1970s Gothic horror fests. Producer Phillip Hinchcliffe, who oversaw such classics as  Doctor Who: Pyramids of Mars (Episode 82)  and  Doctor Who: The Talons of Weng-Chiang (Episode 91) , had recently left the series; script-editor Robert Holmes (who authored the two above-mentioned stories) was on his way out. New producer Graham Williams was about to lighten the tone dramatically, and the show's violence content was about to fall off.As a swan song for a well-regarded chapter in "Doctor Who"'s long history, "Image of the Fendahl" is a notable but somewhat frustrating story. The plot is complex, involving three conflicting menaces in the English woods: A high-technology "Time Scanner" that threatens to destroy the galaxy; an ancient time rift that's turned the local village into a haven for black magic (or "the Old Religion")... and a 12 million year-old skull that's going to exploit both the Time Scanner and the time rift in order to resurrect Death personified, which will in turn destroy the Earth's population (as opposed to, say, the galaxy). Of course it's never a great idea when the story's named villain poses less of a menace than the secondary plot device.Story writer Chris Boucher (who previously wrote the futuristic Christie-esque  Doctor Who: The Robots of Death (Episode 90) ) was effective at writing for small but distinctive casts. One mark of a good writer is when the characters have different levels of intelligence. One example of this, as well as of the story's dry wit, is when archaeologist Adam Colby tries to define the term "gestalt" for local villager Jack Tyler. None the wiser, all Tyler can do is gesture at the Doctor and say: "He reads a lot".There's a lot going on story-wise, so the rest of the cast turn out to be sophisticated plot devices as well as individuals. Dr. Fendelman, the inventor of the Time Scanner, turns out to have a mystical connection to the Fendahl skull, which awkwardly manifests in the character's final 30 seconds. Thea Ransome is (for no apparent reason) turned by the skull into a golden-skinned evil goddess. Local "white witch" Granny Tyler turns out to possess just the right amount of homespun wisdom that allows her to defeat the 12 million year-old menace with a few shakers of salt.The text commentary for this disc is a rare failure for the DVD restoration team. A story of "Fendahl"'s complexity suggests the need for a text commentary that both explains a lot of the story's more rapid-fire expository dialogue and attempts to resolve some of the story's plot holes. Instead, the commentary here is full of distracting minutiae, such as "this scene was filmed on this date" and "this tertiary character appeared in minor roles in the following 11 TV shows 30 to 40 years ago". The commentary track features four cast members but no-one from the production booth; there are lots of reminscences about the BBC's Television Centre circa 1977. The DVD release itself is one of the "light" releases, so the only noteworthy extras are a standard making-of feature, and some black-and-white film outtakes.The best part of the extras is the highlighting of Tom Baker's own, often ad-libbed, contributions to the Doctor's on-screen presentation. Baker was compulsively watchable even in a bad story, and his Doctor's eccentricities add just the right amount of whimsy to this otherwise scary story.

Image of the Fendahl is one of the best episodes from the Fourth Doctor's era. The atmosphere is on point, the performances are great, and the BBC's notoriously cheap production budget is put to amazing use. I watch this one at Halloween every year.

Image of The Fendahl has something of a special meaning for me, as the last episode was set on the day I was born. That aside, it is an enjoyable serial with a nice plot. The Fendahleen may look a bit silly, but I like it that way. It's part of the classic Doctor Who charm. They're actually not that bad a design idea, the crew just didn't have the time and budget to fully realize them. Wanda Ventham does an excellent job as both Thea Ransome and The Fendahl Core, and I felt sympathy for both characters. I'm not really a fan of Leela, but I actually like the way she is portrayed as opposed to some of her other stories. The glowing skull is a great effect, and Tom Baker is wonderful. Edward Arthur is great as the sarcastic, skeptical scientist Adam Colby. All of the actors give high-quality performances, though Dr. Fendelman's on/off fake German accent is a bit distracting. There are a few plot holes, such as where Colby's dog Leaky went after his minute or so of screen-time and a few other things I wont mention.A warning, it is a fairly dark episode, and Stael's fate might trouble more sensitive people, but for those who enjoy a bit of old-fashioned, non-graphic horror it is a fine show.

I loved the gothic look. But it's IMHO didn't wake up until part three. I didn't like the first two parts. The last two parts were much better. All in all it was fine. But not my most fav, but by no means was it the worse episode by a long shot.

With the show changing hands and Graham Williams taking over as producer for Season 15, we were given a run of stories that marked a noticeable period of transition. The show started to change gears and head towards a generally lighter tone. However, Horror Of Fang Rock and Image Of The Fendahl did feel like something that could've easily slotted into the previous season, with both heavily relying on horror tropes and imagery.Image Of The Fendahl plays host to almost everything associated with the occult: skulls, pentagrams, religious cults donning robes, charms, wise women etc. It also boasts one of the strongest supporting casts of the season, with there being little to no weak links among them. Dennis Lill, Scott Fredericks and Wanda Ventham are all great here, but perhaps the real standouts are Daphne Heard hamming it up and having great fun, and Edward Arthur getting to play a character who's oddly arrogant yet likeable. Although we picked up K-9 at the end of the last story, here he's out of action for the duration leaving us with the Doctor and Leela. Both of them get a lot of great moments throughout the story, and share a great chemistry with one another. The big lumbering Fendhaleen creatures come in for some flak, but I really don't think they look too bad. There are certainly worse lumbering monsters from Doctor Who, and their design here is quite striking. The red fronds spilling from their green slug/snake-like body has an almost abject quality to it, and I like the attention to detail as they leave a trail of slime behind them.I've gotten to the point in my relationship with Classic Who that now any stories I watch are basically plugging the gaps. Apart from missing stories, the only ones I have left to watch are those that never really took my interest or that I've been putting off in favour of other stories. I wasn't really expecting a great deal from Image Of The Fendahl, but this turned out to be a welcome surprise. I really had fun with this one, and was happy to find at least one more entry to Doctor Who's Gothic horror catalogue.

After a sonic time scan draws the Tardis to Fetch Priory back on Earth, the doctor and Leela have to investigate when they come across a human skull that is incredibly old and what the connection is and why this nightmare is locked into the doctors past.The scientists that are working on the skull soon run into trouble themselves when security guards are murdered by a mysterious creature stalking the priory grounds.This is great story and deserves to have much more praise heaped on it, we have some fine actors working on it including one woman who is Benedict Cumberbatch's mother.We have commentary from Tom Baker (The Doctor) Louise Jameson (Leela) Wanda Ventham (Thea Ransome or now known as Benedict Cumberbatch's Mother and Edward Arthur (Adam Colby)After Image documentary the cast and crew talk about making this classic.Deleted and Extended Scenes cut out from original transmission but quality is low because it's a monochrome video recording.All the usual extras included as well, this is one to have in your collection.

`Image of the Fendahl' was the last story in the legendary Gothic era of `Doctor Who'. It has all the elements of a classic of this period but I'm not at all sure that it is. 4* with reservations.In ancient and creepy Fetch Priory, deep in the modern-day English countryside, four scientists are delving into the mysteries of the origins of humanity. They have discovered a skull which is 12 million years old, many times older than the first of our species - so who (or what) is it?Two of the scientists are English and very posh, the other two are German and at least one of them is very mad, although this isn't obvious at first (the mad part). Dr. Fendelman (Denis Lill) has made a vast fortune from electronics and is spending it on his pet research project. He built and used a `sonic time scanner' to locate the skull in Africa and brought it back to his base where he is studying it with apparently loyal assistant Max (Scott Fredericks). But Max secretly dreams that "I shall be a god!" In fact, the real villain is elsewhere, manipulating those around it ...The `sonic time scanner' sets off major time ripples that hit the TARDIS, bringing the Doctor and Leela (new short hair, very short new costume) down to Earth in a field of cows to investigate. If the scanner isn't stopped before (a suspiciously round) 100 hours of operation it will cause "a direct continuum implosion" and suck the Earth into nothingness. Top-quality performances from Tom Baker and Louise Jameson once again, Leela is right at home in the dangerous, haunted atmosphere of Fetch Priory, knife in hand and ready for anything. Unfortunately they are kept slightly out of the story for long periods, including a tension-sapping side trip to the asteroid belt halfway through. And the tension is also sucked out of the time-scanner implosion sub-plot when the Doctor (quite reasonably) just flicks the off-switch with lots of spare time left!They have landed in present-day rural England (circa 1980) so (to put it mildly) it's a surprise to find all the villagers are quite so `oo-arrr'. If the story was set a century earlier, then all the Mummerset-voiced locals and talk of "the old ways", covens, rock salt and "Mother" Tyler the kindly Wise Woman might have seemed slightly less patronising. Really, rural England wasn't at all like that in the 1980s (or even the 1880s I suppose!) Being positive, let's assume the `time fissure' running through eerie Fetch Wood has not only given Mrs. Tyler her second sight but somehow `held back' the locals from the modern world. I want to be positive because Mrs. Tyler is brilliantly played by Daphne Heard and her cheery grandson Jack (Geoffrey Hinsliff) and their bonding with Leela (who's also from a world of `old religion') are the best part of the story. They are well written and superbly acted although as characters incongruously out of their time, but with nice tea and fruitcake for their guests. They also carry magic charms and a shotgun, but then so might anyone living in a cottage in Fetch Wood!Back at the Priory, pleasant English scientists Adam (Edward Arthur) and Thea (Wanda Ventham) are rather out of the loop and out of their depth. Adam seems to be in the story mostly to give the Doctor an extra companion to talk to when Leela is off in action with the Tylers. Adam appears to have an understandable attraction to eye-catching Thea, but any romance is doomed from the start. Thea as a person barely exists in the story, she is sinking deep into alien possession from the very beginning and there is worse to come ...Enter the Fendahl, slowly at first, stalking hikers through the darkness of the wood at night before bursting onto the scene in the final episode. It's a complex idea of a gestalt or group monster, made up of 12 `Fendahleen' and the golden Core. Thea's transformation into the Core is a superb and quite chilling variant on an ancient myth, a golden Medusa, beautiful but evil and fatal to look upon. The `Fendahleen' are unfortunately less successful. Costs meant that only one full-size monster was built and although Mrs. Tyler memorably describes her vision of it as "hungry for my soul!" it looks more hungry for her cabbages. The DVD features and commentary describe 15 minutes of laughter when the cast first encountered it. It's not that bad, but would have been more effective if made less visible...The model `baby' Fendahleen work far better, like particularly sinister little cobras. There is a bizarre moment when Thea collapses in a golden glow and two baby Fendahleen monsters appear sitting on her body. Bizarre, because it's effectively done and a dramatic moment, which everyone then seems to forget about within five minutes, including Thea's assumed boyfriend Adam, whose next scenes with Thea are mostly spent worrying about a disconnected telephone!If the Fendahleen aren't scary to look at, the wonderfully dark Priory sets and the extensive night filming in misty Fetch Wood create an ambience of lurking, ghostly shadows matched by few other `Doctor Who' stories. Excellent lighting, and direction by George Spenton-Foster lay on the Gothic gloom to full effect. The effects in the last episode (apart from the Fendahleen) are excellent, the ghostly golden Core showing the way this story should have gone with its monsters - less substantial and as a result more frightening.So parts of the story are patchy and parts of the monster are disappointing, but the acting, sets and filming are excellent and `Image of the Fendahl' still generates Gothic atmosphere in plenty. I saw the original broadcast, read the novelisation, bought the VHS and now the DVD - so I keep coming back to Fetch Priory, which is very curious because I'm always vaguely underwhelmed by this tale and enjoy it less than I think I should. Perhaps I too am being manipulated by the Fendahl? Let's hope not... 4*The DVD Special Features are few in number but very good and add to the release.An enjoyable commentary, some nice anecdotes from Tom Baker, Louise Jameson, Edward Arthur and Wanda Ventham.`After Image' is an excellent `making of' feature with a great set of contributors - Louise Jameson and Colin Mapson (Visual Effects) are especially interesting.`Deleted and Extended Scenes' - from a low-quality copy of the location filming, but interesting to fans.A fun little Easter Egg.

Phillip Hinchcliffe was out, Graham Williams was in, and Robert Holmes retained, for a while, and with stories like this - edited by Holmes and penned by his padawan learner, Chris Boucher, you'd hardly notice the difference.There are four scientists in this house, and by the end of the story, only one will be left alive, just one - and it's the immensely likable Adam Colby, beautifully played by Edward Arthur - I wonder what happened to him.The acting really carries this; the neat little ensemble cast really do shoulder the tale and run with it. It's hard to see what could have gone wrong - Dennis Lill, Scott Fredericks, Wanda Ventham as the other three scientists, and Geof Hinsliff as a little man with a hat and a shotgun. The scene where he makes friends with Leela is a delight to watch - in the midst of all this sinister madness about a prehistoric skull and a hole in time, two humans born worlds and centuries apart, just click. It's lovely.And as if it couldn't get any better, Daphne Heard (just check her out as the senile nanny in Upstairs Downstairs - I know... but do it anyway) rises head and shoulders over the rest. As Louise Jameson says in The Making Of, 'An actress who really knew how to serve a text'. No mean praise from someone of Miss Jameson's standing.It's as if (and I hope Mr Boucher will pardon the suggestion) the writer had watched Dr Who do Dennis Wheatley in The Daemons, and decided now to do HP Lovecraft, and instead of Damaris Hayman's brilliant and birdlike Miss Hawthorne, we get Daphne Heard as the dumpy, grumpy Granny Tyler.Give the script its due; it's hard not to look at an old woman after someone's just threatened to set a dog on her, but by gum Granny hits back with 'Ain't a dog born that'd go for me, boy. They've got more sense than most people'. It's worth buying the DVD just to see this pitch-perfect performance. 'One day John, I'm going to be getting too old for all this'.The plot is hokum, but so well constructed and delivered that it's quite palatable, with disbelief quite happily suspended - these are normal people, they argue about dinner, ride bicycles, own (vanishing) dogs named 'Leakey', so of course the skull must be real.The VFX aren't great; the implosion fits where it touches, and the two baby Fendahleen are quite dodgy, though the full size version looks very good, and it doesn't seem to matter that there really is only one of them, because the fourth episode runs at such a clip that it's easy to believe that there's getting on for a dozen, and in any case it's the transformed Thea that's the really scary thing by then.The Fifth Planet thing in Episode 3 is fairly flagrant padding, but that's forgivable as the rest of the story works so well, and the omission of K-9 (because they didn't know if they were keeping him or not) is a bit obvious, but the story is a triumph.'The corpse; it's decomposing almost as you look at it'.Brilliant.

After three hugely popular years as the doctor in stories that were full of gothic horror, tom baker's era changed. budget cuts and pressure to reduce the onscreen horror and violence left a new producer having to change things somewhat.But Tom Baker's fourth season in the role did contain this story, a script originally commissioned during those earlier years, and as a result it's pretty much the last attempt at gothic horror they mounted.On present day earth [as of the year of transmission] the tardis arrives in the british countryside near a country priory where scientists are conducting expermients on an ancient skull.With dark forces lurking and horrible things happening to a hitch hiker, the fate of the world is at stake...But whilst this is in the style of those three successful years it's not quite as strong as the best stories from them. The doctor takes a while to get involved in things and the plot doesn't really click till the end of part three. and then it stands or falls on the realisation of some monsters that you will have to suspend your disbelief for.But the cast all play it totally seriously, it never slips into camp humour, and the production values whilst cheap are perfectly decent. This is a long way from being the best that the show has to offer but it's a little above average and not a bad watch at all.There's not much on the dvd extras wise:a commentary from tom baker and louise jameson, who played his companion leela, plus wanda ventham and edward arthur who play characters in the story.after image: a twenty five minute long documentary about the making of the story. There's not quite as much detail of the shoot as I would have liked - apart from an interesting piece about a letter they had to send to mick jagger as a result of it - but it's a very good documentary and there are some good anecdotes and interviews in it.deleted and extended scenes contains eleven minutes worth of these. although they come from an old and poor quality tape and a result the picture quality isn't great. most arte just long versions of scenes involving characters getting from one point to another and thus the deleted bits are people walking around or in and out of buildings so you can see why they were cut. There is one good moment for supporting character ted moss, though.trailer: is the original bbc trailer for the story from 1977, which was broadcast right after the end of the preceding story. It's short but interesting.viewable as PDF files, which you can look at if you view the disc on a computer, are the radio times listings for the story.there's a photo gallery of shots from the story and it's productionproduction information subtitles which can be displayed while watching the story and give information about it.a trailer for the next dvd release in the range: the deadly assassin. this story is as good as the trailer makes it look, but be aware that if you've not seen it and don't know anything about the plot it will give one key fact away.for an easter egg, watch this on a computer and move the pointer over the left side of the screen till a doctor who logo lights up. click on this to see a short segment presumably cut from the documentary, with louise jameson talking about one of the worst bits of doctor who merchandise ever. it's well worth watching.the disc has audio navigation and english is the only language tracka dn subtitles.so just like the story, this release as a whole isn't the best in the range, but it's not bad and it's worth getting