Review: Doctor Who: The Ultimate Evil
- 2 hours ago
- 7 min read
By Matthew Kresal.
The decision in February 1985 to put Doctor Who on hiatus had an immeasurable impact upon the series. The series, which had already begun to bleed viewers, would continue to do so until BBC executives felt they could end it in everything but name nearly five years later. The decision also arguably tarnished the image of Colin Baker as the Doctor, which was further harmed when the same executives pushed him out of the role late the following year. Its most immediate impact, as readers might already be aware, was to put a number of already written serials out of their production slots.
Among them was The Ultimate Evil which would take almost 35 years to finally be dramatized.
The Ultimate Evil had an interesting pedigree as it was written by a stalwart of BBC radio rather than television. Wally K Daly had started his career as an actor but by the 1970s had found his calling as a writer, especially for radio. Nor was he limited by genre, moving between comedies, horror, and science fiction. His writing also found a home in a more limited capacity on television such as the 1978 Play for Today episode Butterflies Don’t Count in which a young priest struggles after hearing the confession of a murderer.
Daly wasn’t a fan of Doctor Who, admitting in a 2018 interview that he hadn’t watched very much of the show at all. As an established writer with some success in science fiction, Daly sought out the series and its script editor Eric Saward to get more TV work. Looking over what the series was doing at the time and deciding that given the scripts were so often focusing on the TARDIS being out of order, he set out to write a story with the TARDIS working properly as its starting point. From there the Doctor and Peri would attempt to take a holiday, only to become involved with an attempt by an alien arms dealer named Mordant to use a “hate ray” to ferment a war between the nations of Tranquela and Ameliora with the intention of profiting off the eventual war.
Daly’s pitch met with a positive response from Saward and producer John Nathan-Turner. The scripts were duly commissioned as two 45-minute episodes which Daly delivered was and paid for by the BBC. Nathan-Turner had selected director Fiona Cumming, whose work on the series included serials such as Enlightenment and Planet of Fire, and The Ultimate Evil looked set to be the second serial of Colin Baker’s second season in the role. At least until the decision was made to put the series on hiatus. The decision to return the series to 25-minute episodes and order from BBC One Controller Michael Grade to scrap previous scripts led to the abandonment of The Ultimate Evil.
Despite being unproduced for the screen, The Ultimate Evil was soon enough accessible to fans. By the end of the 1980s, Target Books’ series of novelizations was running out of episodes to adapt. In an effort to keep the range going longer and with fan interest in the unmade season 23 apparent, editor Peter Darvill-Evans took the step of commissioning three of the scripts to be novelized. Daly was among them with The Ultimate Evil being published in paperback on the 17th of August 1989 and would become how many fans would experience it over the next thirty years.
Which might not have been for the best. As varied and successful as his career as a dramatist proved, Daly was not a skilled writer of prose. “Description is soon down to a minimum,” reviewer Mark Wyman noted in a review for TV Zone, “the word count being reached through much superfluous paraphrasing of characters' thoughts and reactions.” A harsher assessment came from Lars Pearson in the second volume of the I, Who reference books in 2001, that if fans “didn’t think that the Colin Baker era had enough violence, or that the Doctor wasn’t enough of a raving, homicidal jackass, you’ll love The Ultimate Evil.” While Alister Pearson (no relation to Lars) highlighted the characterization of the Doctor and Peri as highlights in DWB, the novelization’s reputation was poor enough that it impacted sales, with Darvill-Evans noting in 1991 that Ultimate Evil was among the worst selling Doctor Who titles published by Target. The serial’s reputation was best summed up by Lars Pearson in 2001: “Thanks Heavens this didn’t get filmed.”
Not that it hurt Daly’s career. At the time of Doctor Who’s hiatus, he was working on the series Juliet Bravo and would contribute to series such as Casualty on television. Daly continued to find his steadiest output on radio with a series of audio dramas including the dystopian thriller 2004 broadcast in 1995, which imagined a Britain that elected a leader that promised a high tech solution to its crime rates, and the 1996 Radio 4 historical drama Grigorii Efimovich Rasputin - Almost the Truth.
It was on audio that The Ultimate Evil found not one but more leases of life. In 2008, Big Finish Productions began a new range of releases known as Doctor Who – The Lost Scripts. With Colin Baker’s era featuring at least a season’s worth of unproduced scripts, it was a natural enough place for Big Finish to start. With Daly’s script having been novelized, it was among the first serials that range producer David Richardson sought out for production. Quickly, however, such a possibility was squashed as Daly already had plans to record an audiobook version for the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) available only for the registered blind. Though the two would be different works (one a straightforward reading of the novelization, the other a production of the actual script), The Ultimate Evil would not find a home at Big Finish after the RNIB recording was released in 2009 or before the initial end of the range in 2013.
Time, in a Doctor Who fashion, offered both distance and a solution. With Big Finish’s 20th anniversary of Who audio dramas approaching in 2019, the company revived The Lost Stories for two additional releases. With the RNIB audiobook now in the past, Daly was able to commit to adapting his TV scripts for audio. With a cast including Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant reprising their respective roles as the Doctor and Peri, Big Finish recorded the serial at Moat Studios across the ninth and tenth of May 2019 for release that November. Did it fare better than the novelization thirty years earlier?
Without a doubt, yes. Daly’s lack of experience with prose proved not to be an issue on audio, a medium that he had decades of experience writing for and, unlike Christopher H. Bidmead’s The Hollows of Time, the script made an easy transition to the audio format. The straightforward nature of the plot aided it in that regard. While it’s missing out on the direction of Fiona Cumming that might have further aided it, the change of medium plays more in Daly’s favour under Big Finish director Helen Goldwyn. While Lars Pearson might have been thanking the Heavens it wasn’t made, Big Finish’s 2019 production suggests it’s a shame that it wasn’t as The Ultimate Evil works far better as a performed work than it ever did in prose.
Something which is also clear from the cast. With Baker and Bryant back in their TV roles, there’s meat on the bones of Daly’s dialogue. Indeed, despite the moments of madness that overtake the Doctor in places, Baker’s performance brings out a still at times egotistical but warmer version of his Doctor that feels like a midway point between screen and audio depictions. While the writing for Bryant as Peri still isn’t great, there are times when it stands above much of what she was given to do on TV, and there’s a neat bit of double casting with her that feels likewise in keeping with the era.
Of the supporting cast, it is Robin Sebastian as Mordant that comes as a surprise, given that the novelization portrays him as a poor knock-off of the era’s most memorable villain, Sil from Vengeance on Varos and Mindwarp. Sebastian’s performance offers a different approach with an almost comic book like villain who plots and schemes but is ultimately cowardly when caught out. A villain complete with a parrot, performed in a nice bit of symmetry by Daly himself in what turned out to be his final acting performance before passing away in April 2020. With an evocatively 1980s Radiophonic styled score from Nigel Fairs, it’s a production that brings out the best in Daly’s script.
Is it The Ultimate Evil a great Doctor Who serial lost to time by the BBC meddling? No. Matt Michael’s criticism that “bad Star Trek ideas abound” from a 2003 Doctor Who Magazine article regarding this isn’t unfounded. The hate ray feels like something that 1960s Trek might have tackled with some of its B movie influences. By the 1980s, it felt either terribly out of date or a throwback, depending on how generous one feels toward it. Something which can also be said about Daly’s dialogue, which is stilted in place with moments where the characters still talk like they’ve stepped out of a 1950s B-Movie or something akin to 1936’s Things to Come.
Nor is The Ultimate Evil helped by the fact that it crosses the border in places well into idiot plot territory, propelled along only by one character after another making the worst decision in that moment. At least when “thought bubbles” that allow characters to travel to different locations at the speed of thought aren’t offered as a convenient plot device. That Daly wasn’t overly familiar with Doctor Who is abundant from his writing, producing something that might not have been out of place in the 1960s when William Hartnell or Patrick Troughton were playing the Doctor, though even then it’s easy to imagine various script editors adding complications to its straightforward plot. What’s clear is that it was perhaps out of step with what Doctor Who had become by the time it was written.
As such, it’s easy to imagine this being dismissed out of hand by viewers in a 1986 where it made it onto BBC One. Having a director like Fiona Cumming at the helm might also have helped, as could have a solid production as the Big Finish version shows. What remains, between the 1989 novelization and the 2019 audio drama, is what might have been a throwback to another era if the stars and cameras in TV Centre had aligned just right. All told, Big Finish might just have offered the best version of what Daly’s script could have become.
Matthew Kresal is, among other things, the author of the SLP book Our Man on the Hill and short stories in the anthologies AlloAmericana, The Emerald Isles, and The Scottish Anthology.