Having already written about a Tom Baker-led serial, we’re taking a big leap out of seventies Doctor Who and into the early-to-mid eighties, where the lead role was taken over by Peter Davison. The eighties ended up being a fairly tumultuous period for the series, following up on the tonal shifts that occurred after complaints of the show’s violent content led to pressure from producers, and where it seemed to gradually slide increasingly into irrelevance, with production problems, creative indecision, and hostility from the top brass at the BBC eventually leading to the show’s fifteen-year hiatus at the end of the decade. The biggest problems of the original run’s final years was still in the future while Davison was there, but you can definitely sense in these early eighties seasons that the show was a little more uneasy, experimenting with different ideas and tones to see what actually worked.
“The Awakening” hails from Davison’s final year, which in turn was following the series’ twentieth anniversary (an anniversary special where Davison teamed up with many, but not all, the previous Doctor actors aired two months before.) After spending an entire year spotlighting the series and its history, a story like this feels like a return to the “classic” mode—it is another plot about an alien presence invading modern England (in this case, specifically said to be 1984), and a plot with more than a hint of Quatermass and the Pit in it, in which our history turns out to be the product of said alien presence. That’s not a surprising direction to go, considering that Doctor Who had been pulling from Quatermass and the Pit (and the other Quatermass serials) pretty much from the beginning, and this one actually puts that story in a new and interesting context, which scales down the scope of its implications while keeping them equally grave.
Of the serials I’ve written about, this one is the shortest, airing its two episodes from January 19th to January 20th 1984 (this was from a period where the show aired two episodes weekly rather than the traditional Saturday spot, one of the many bizarre decisions that hurt the show’s ability to retain its audience), and given the loose pacing of the average Doctor Who serial, this comes off as fairly compact and propulsive (this is the only script credited to writer Eric Pringle, and it was also heavily rewritten by script editor Eric Saward, much to Pringle’s irritation.) Like Quatermass and the Pit, the story revolves around someone digging up the monstrous past and having it return to life and assert control, although that explanation doesn’t come in until halfway through the storyline, probably wisely—it’s telling rather than showing, but that has the benefit of getting us into the action pretty much immediately. In this specific incarnation of the plot, we’re talking about something in the past of a small English village, a quaint place whose main claim to fame was being a particularly gruesome battlefield during the English Civil War, and its citizenry hold a yearly re-enactment of that skirmish in 1643. This type of historical pageantry is common enough across the English-speaking world, and the rather questionable ideology of turning wartime brutality into a festival is integrated into the story: right as we’re introduced to many of the serial’s supporting cast, we see a clash between average villagers like teacher Jane Hampden (Polly James) and the local magistrate, Sir George Hutchinson (Dennis Lill), when the latter seems to be taking the re-enactment thing a bit too seriously.
Intruding on this municipal dust-up are the Doctor and his two sidekicks Tegan (Janet Fielding) and Turlough (Mark Strickson), who warp to the village to visit Tegan’s historian grandfather (Frederick Hall), and are initially confused when they see a bunch of seventeenth-century English soldiers riding around on horseback. Hutchinson seems a bit too happy to integrate visitors into his method-style re-enactment—this comes after him boasting that no one can get in or out of the village while the celebration is going on, a rather ominous thing to imply when talking to the people who live there. This hooks the Doctor’s curiosity, leading him to investigate an abandoned church outside the village—it is apparently off-limits, but not so off-limits that random people are not able to come and go from it as they please. In and the around the church, the Doctor and Co. see apparitions of seventeenth-century randos appear and disappear, except for a single young peasant named Will Chandler (Keith Jayne), who sticks around in 1984 and ends up helping the Doctor uncover the dark secret of the village, which is connected to a demonic visage drawn on the masonry of the church.
Hutchinson, always dressed in his imitation Roundhead gear, has basically taken the whole village and turned it into his pretend-war playground, and when someone like Hampden complains, he and his followers threaten to lock her up so she doesn’t spoil the “fun.” Initially, this seems to be some over-the-top methods of keeping the village’s traditions intact—that would explain why more reasonable re-enactors like Ben Wolsey (Glyn Houston) are reluctant to challenge Hutchinson’s rather feudal assertions of authority—and it’s not a leap to believe that some people would take the adherence to tradition and obsession with their home’s historical significance to extremes. The present becomes anchored to its history in that way, and you get the sense that an upper class lout like Hutchinson carries an unspoken nostalgia for the way things used to be (and specifically, the power a person like him used to have.) But since this is a Science Fiction show, it also becomes increasingly clear that Hutchinson is being directed by an external force that has its own interests, which turns out to be a giant extraterrestrial face called Mallus that is hidden behind the walls of the church, a being that connects the events in 1984 with those of 1643.
From what we learn, Mallus is an engineered alien weapon of sorts, a thing sent to earth to aid a planned invasion by using its psychic powers to both absorb and amplify the violent tendencies of the humans in its vicinity. If you’re wondering why that particular invasion never happened (as opposed to all the numerous other alien invasions that did happen on the Doctor Who version of Earth), well, the Doctor basically says “I guess I’ll look into that later.” In any case, the carnage in the village in 1643 was a big influx of power to it, and while it doesn’t seem to have caused the battle, it evidently made it even worse—it is simultaneously a cause and a symptom of our warlike tendencies, which is a very Quatermass concept for an alien invader. After being dug up accidentally by Tegan’s grandfather, Mallus began secretly pushing Hutchinson to not just re-enact the battle, but to fully recreate it, with all the bloodshed that entailed (including taking Tegan and burning her as the “Queen of May”, a very Wicker Man plot point), so it can get another power surge. In that sense, it is a literalization of the moral dubiousness of blindly celebrating a history of war, and that idea is further pushed by the character of Will Chandler, who witnessed the battle (and Mallus’ first appearance) firsthand and has been understandably traumatized by it—to him, the war is not some thing we can look at from a distance as a fun bit of trivia and tradition, a complete contrast to Hutchinson and his underlings.
As a demonic face with glowing green eyes and smoke billowing out of its mouth, Mallus can cut an intimidating figure, but he’s also clearly a prop whose limitations are fairly obvious. Even so, like many classic Doctor Who effects, there’s a theatrical quality to it—as in, something from a stage play—that gives it a uniqueness that makes up for its lack of realism. Although the scariness of Mallus comes and goes across the two episodes—sometimes it’s inactive, and characters can just stand around and talk about it while it sits quietly in its wall—they do try to give it some weird additional qualities, such as having distinct “projections” that show up in different places, giving it a wide-reaching presence across the village. It even ends up having a presence inside the TARDIS itself, where it takes the form of a lizard on the wall with the same demonic face, and that ends up vomiting up green slime as it “dies.” Much is made of its similarities to a traditional supernatural presence: characters compare its various powers to a poltergeist, and it has the ability to conjure up “ghosts” of the past that at first paint it as a classic haunting (and one where the past very literally attacks the present.) Making the alien so demonic-looking, to the point where the images in the church identify it as the Devil himself, is also very reminiscent of Quatermass and the Pit’s devil-horned martians, positioning a Sci-Fi creature as the origin of our traditional ideas of unearthly evil. Of course, as in all versions of this plot, there comes the moment where the scientific-minded person finds evidence that the thing is extraterrestrial (in this case, a metal the Doctor recognizes from another planet), and then provides “rational” explanations for the goings-on—the Sci-Fi not just supplanting the fantastical, but exposing it as a fraud.
The historical connection is the main way this serial differentiates itself from the other stories of “monsters in our backyard” like “The Web of Fear”—it’s less direct than just having aliens show up in London and look in your windows, but I’m sure there were more than a few viewers who knew places like the village in this story, and maybe even some who knew a few George Hutchinson types. Like its inspiration, though, it raises questions about how we view our own civilization and its actions, proposing that things we think we understand about ourselves may have been the product of something unknown, something outside of our own control—and this can extend to our vaunted traditions, which could hold hidden meanings that became obscured memories, faded by the passage of time and the propensity of people to forget, sometimes intentionally. The implications of “The Awakening” are not as all-encompassing as Quatermass and the Pit and its revelations about the origins of homo sapiens, but it nonetheless demonstrates how our past can be full of monsters that change everything we know about where we came from.
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