Their experiments with the scanner plays havoc with the TARDIS, which is drawn to the grounds near Fetch Priory, where the team is based. The Doctor and Leela not only become involved with the happenings there, including a mysterious death, but with Jack Tyler and his elderly grandmother, who has precognitive powers. She and many of the villagers of Fetchborough believe in the old ways of superstition and magic. Logic has no place in her life but more human nature. "When most people believe what's said, that make it true." Jack says "Most people believed the earth was flat when it were round." She counters with, "Ah, but they behaved as if it were flat," emphasizing the word "behaved".
What Dr. Fendelman is unwittingly tampering with involves a creature from the Doctor's own mythology that began when a planet between Mars and Jupiter exploded. Unless the Doctor can stop them from messing with dangerous things, the population of Earth will go down from 4 billion people to 1 person.
There's a great deal of horror/suspense in this story, from the hiker walking in the forest at night, the eerie churning sound when the skull begins to glow, and the air of crisis described by Colby at one point. "The phone is cut off, the place is surrounded by guards, we are beset by a wandering lunatic, we have a pair of corpses on our hands, and on top of all that, the telephone seems to be very dead. We are trapped."
Tom Baker is at his usual goofiness. He asks a bunch of cows upon landing, "Which one of you has the time scanner?" Another time, they are hiding outside the Priory and espy a guard and a dog.
Leela: I shall kill him.Doctor: No.Leela: Why not?Doctor: You'll upset the dog.
He also offers a jellybaby to the skull and even goes "Alas, poor skull" a la Hamlet. Here, Leela sports a lighter tan outfit that shows more cleavage and has her hair, of a more reddish tint, in a bun. "Don't worry, Doctor. I shall protect you." she says and does.
What really struck me about Wanda Ventham (Thea) was that rigid, stone-faced look of someone being possessed. It's very reminiscent of Elizabeth Sladen's reaction on feeling her soul leaving her body in the Who story Planet Of Evil. She has a stab at doing Dr. McCoy: "I'm a technician, not a human paleontologist." And this is one of Denis Lill's greatest TV moments as the misguided but persistent Fendelman, someone who is a passionate adventurer in unlocking mysteries of human evolution. Daphne Heard is quite a character as the superstitious, headstrong, but also kind Ma Tyler. The dialogue between her and her grandson show an argumentative but loving relationship.
Goofs: The Doctor mentions two victims, naming one of them, even though he hasn't been told the name. Another is a scene in Episode 2, when he is locked in a cupboard. The sonic screwdriver doesn't work, yet later, the lock outside is heard unlocking and the door swings open. Who let him out?
A mixture of science and the occult, this is the closest Dr. Who got to the horror genre.
It's made abundantly clear that Thea is the focal point for the entire unfolding drama, but the other characters fail to notice that fact. It's clearly not due to ignorance, it's likely due to stupidity (or bad writing.) The Doctor bumbles about after breaking free and makes no attempt to track down Thea. Fendleman and Adam rabbit on about mutation and pentagrams - in front of our hapless heroine - and not ONCE does Adam say to Fendleman: "Y'know I saw this shimmering halo around Thea and some freaky Lovecraftian beasties crawling around her! Maybe we should stop the experiments!" Rather, he blurts out the Doctor's recommendation about X-Rays without mentioning the extraordinary reason WHY. Thea, perhaps tiring of her colleague's roundabout blather and lack of concern for her peculiar condition, ups and leaves. It never occurs to Adam to keep an eye on his tormented friend.Searching for the Hero of the Series in an attempt to save her comely ass, she instead falls into the clutches of the villain, Maxmillian Stael. Drugged and bound, she is dragged into the basement of the manor by Max. Soon after her two doofus colleagues are bound and dragged there as well. Fendelman suddenly blurts out nonsense about him being used, Max being used and Adam being used. No mention of the ultimate sacrifice lying supine before them.An arcane ritual is conducted which transforms Thea into what looks like a radiant Hellenic Goddess (appropriate that her name means "Goddess" in Greek!) Sadly, this devil in disguise has totally erased or submerged the hostess' personality. She starts turning the participants in the ritual into the wormlike creatures that writhed over Thea's body... the Doctor manages to save idiot Adam and destroy the Fendahl Hostess and her worm flunkies by imploding them into Lovecraftsville. The only eulogy for Thea is the look of distraught loneliness on her/the Hostess' face before she's slurped out of existence. Adam mourns her loss by "sticking on the kettle" for a bunch rustic bumpkins who were peripheral to the story (and had WAY too much screen time.) The Doctor and his sidekick Leela share some dumb bell wisecracks that would be appropriate for ANY other "Doctor Who" episode except this one."Image of the Fendahl," in more creative hands, would have been a cool occult episode complete with Thea as the Heroine-in-distress. (Leela's no heroine, she's a comic relief.) Sadly, the script writer ignored the strengths of the story and as a result, the episode imploded.Before anyone drones out the catch-all excuse for a muddled teleplay, "C'mon man, it's just a shooooo-oooooooow," do me a favor: Stow it. George Lucas uses that excuse for his bad prequels, the Trek franchise uses it for everything done after "The Wrath of Khan," and it's getting old.
The story has the Doctor investigating a "rift" in time which is eminating from that same rural English country mansion that seems to appear in about half the show's episodes. Turns out a team of scientists led by an obsessed millionaire genius are responsible; for reasons never adequately explained, they are scanning time following the discovery of a human skull which predates the appearance of humans on earth by about 11 1/2 million years. Of course, they are messing with something better left alone, and it turns out that the skull is actually the power source of a thought-to-be-extinct race of monsters called the Fendahl. The Fendahl are snake-like creatures who feed off death itself: the Time Lords destroyed them millions of years before because they represented a perversion of evolution. It turns out that one of the scientists is actually a member of a witch coven who believe the skull is their way to power, and between the (more or less) well-intentioned efforts of the scientists and the meddling of the witches, the Fendahl emerge from the endangered list to endanger our heroes and everybody else on the planet.
If the plot sounds a bit overdrawn, it is. The logical gaps are annoying, and the Fendahl don't work very well as villains, because in addition to looking like spray-painted foam flowers or badly rendered Chinatown dragons, there there isn't really a human villain in this episode for the Doctor to spar with, or even talk to. The female scientist turned into the Image of Fendahl doesn't have any dialogue, and spends most of the last episode striking somewhat silly poses and turning people into snakes. That skull is indeed creepy, but a glowing skull can't carry a whole episode. We are told it is indestructable ("The Fendahl is death. How do you kill death?") and then at the end, the Doc breezily tosses it into a supernova to kill it. Why not spare yourself the contradiction and toss it into a black hole instead?
Okay, that last criticism is nerdly in the extreme. A cheap shot. On the plus side, "Fendahl" does do a good job of combining horror with humor, it gives the enjoyable guest stars a lot of screen time, and is one of the episodes which plays up the combative-yet-affectionate relationship between the Doc and Leela with good effect. His largely unsuccessful attempts to civilize her are some of the finest moments in the series.
"Fendahl" has problems which are hardly unique to this episode. It's just in this case, those problems slightly outweigh the things that work. Not an episode I would recommend except to harder-core fans, but still worthy of a place in the collection.
