Day 730: The Lazarus Experiment

The Lazarus Experiment is a beloved Doctor Who story. To be more specific, it's beloved by my mother, who ranks it as one of the greatest episodes of Doctor Who that has ever been made. I regularly struggle to see where she's coming from, because, to my mind, this story is resolutely average.

I mean, the story does try to do good things. The action scenes are reasonably exciting, with some interesting camera moves from Richard Clark and an intriguing monster design for the Lazarus creature, even if the jaw opening is a little bit ridiculous. But the action scenes occasionally stretch credulity, such as the fact that Martha apparently does not have the ability to run and talk at the same time, stopping in her paces ever time she needs to say some line of dialogue, allowing the Lazarus creature to catch up. It makes the action scenes feel slightly unreal, and reduces the overall intensity of the situation.

There are reasonably good things in the episode, however, such as the fact that it desperately wants the story to be about a man wishing to extend his life, paralleled with the Doctor, who already lives with a vastly extended life. There are a few problems with this, however. For a start, this theme is, in general, restricted to a handful of conversations, with the real meat being a brief scene towards the end of the story, which then turns into another action set-piece. It gives the impression that the writer, Stephen Greenhorn, was writing this story with the full intention of it being about action, and only inserting drama out of a sense of obligation rather than out of him wanting to tell a good story.

Also, the character of Lazarus is, to be perfectly honest, a bit of a creep. He hits on women who are around 50 years younger than him, and rejects his lover's intention to be rejuvenated for no real reason than he wants to be cruel to her. This wouldn't necessarily be a problem because Lazarus is the villain of the piece, and you don't necessarily have to sympathise with him to create a good story. But the ending seems to want us to see him as a tragic character, a man who only wanted to lengthen his life-span, but ended up becoming a scorpion monster in the process. And as we've seen him as just a purely evil man throughout the story, it kind of lessens the impact of those final scenes in the cathedral.

So we're left with a story that just feels average. It tries to do good things, and some of them succeed, but some of them don't work at all. I think that my entire attitude to this story can be summed up by a quote that I remember reading from Greenhorn, where he said that his ambition for this story was to have the Doctor and Martha land somewhere, have an adventure, and then depart, essentially in the same state as when they landed. This shows, at least to my mind, that Greenhorn only had intention of writing just a science-fiction action story with the Doctor in it, and not something deeper. Unfortunately, Russell T Davies took him up on this and made him write a story that would mean something for the Doctor. But that's another story, for another day...