Today's Doctor Who villain is brought to you by bubble wrap. A new product in 1975, when The Ark In Space first aired, it was used to create the make up on the infected crew member and the body covering of the larva stage of the insect invader called the Wrrm. It's easy to recognize green painted bubble wrap now but it wasn't as well known then. The Tardis drops in on a space station quite a way into the future, several thousand years, and the human's are using it as an ark to keep some of the human race safe until the Earth recovers from a disaster.
That's the Ark's head guy, nicknamed Noah, and that's his hand reacting to the invading sludge that got rubbed on his skin by the bug larve. The Wrrm absorbs all his knowledge while taking over his body and merges it with all the other knowledge of the previous bugs. While the human's slept a Wrrm has damaged some controls and the ship did not wake up until the Doctor, Sarah Jane and Harry arrived.
Various people get woken up and the bugs start hatching. They need biological hosts to bring their eggs to term so that doesn't look good for the Tardis gang and their new pals. They fight back of course and since we know they are going to beat the bugs we can ignore how, you know, in case you want to see it. I've hidden a link in the post. Sarah Jane has to crawl through a tiny space and she complains a lot. I'm still not thinking that Elisabeth Sladen is that good of an actor at this time.
The story was ok and the sets were mostly pretty good. It's still a dinky budget show so they can only do so much. This serial was completely shot in a sound stage and the story ends with them leaving to go to the Earth to see what's up there. The following 2 part serial The Sontaran Experiment was shot completely on location. One of the few serials to have that distiction. It was also shot before The Ark In Space and during the location shooting Tom Baker broke his collarbone. He had to wear a neckbrace which they hid with his scarf. The whole season forms a longer story ark. Not sure if that's a good idea or not. We'll see how they do when I get to see the shows.
The dvd I watched was the single disc that came out in 2002. It's kind of skimpy on extras. There's a good interview with Tom Baker on location during the filming of the next serial. There's a nice interview with designer Roger Murray-Leach who talks about how they stretched their budgets. There's outtakes of the model shooting and some CGI version of the ships they put into the serial. They do look nicer than what was orginally shot. I didn't listen to the commentary yet and might before I have to return the disc to the library. I see on Amazon that there was a second edition 2 disc dvd set in 2013. It's currently got a few people ahead of me in the queue. It'll get to me eventually and I'll have a shifty at that when it arrives. Here's one last interesting tidbit. The novelization of the serial was written by Ian Marter who plays Harry in the show. There's the cover. I haven't read any of the Doctor Who novels. I suppose I could see if the library has any of them but I'm not needing more stuff to read.
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