As Fenric continues, more themes emerge that are dealt with with a certain intelligence and adult viewpoint that wouldn't really have been possible previously in Doctor Who.
Take, for instance, the two young evacuee teenagers, Jean and Phyllis. They're young, rebellious, and similar to Ace, and in any other story, one might expect that they would end up as Ace's close allies throughout the entire piece. But instead, they are consumed with a desire for lust. They spend their days breaking rules and going down to Maiden's Point, the nearby beach, which is clearly meant to be a metaphor for having sex. As they cavort in these waters, they are dragged down and turned into vampires, representing creatures of evil, a natural progression from the darkness and lust already present within their hearts. And their first act as vampires is to lure a Soviet soldier to his death, coaxing him into the water with promises that it will be nice and lovely, only for it to backfire horribly on him, with deadly results.
So one could read this as just simply being that lust and sex are bad things. But that's not the full story here. There's a scene with Miss Hardaker, the woman who looks after Jean and Phyllis, where she has her house broken into by the two young women, now vampires. Her primary character motivation so far in the serial has been to be a Mary Whitehouse figure, shouting that they shouldn't go down to Maiden's Point, and that they'll be damned forever. She sees herself as some kind of moral guardian, saying to the local vicar that the war is clearly being fought for all the right reasons and they must win it as God is on their side, to the protests of the vicar who says that God is not on anyone's side during a war. This forthright attitude all ends up getting her killed as Jean and Phyllis seek revenge in their vampire form. But my theory is that she wasn't just killed because of that, but because there was a belief in evil in her heart. She saw only the worst in people, and never felt that there was good in humanity, which, as shall be discussed tomorrow, is one of the vampire's weaknesses, where hopefully this argument will make a lot more sense.
No comments:
Post a Comment