"Doctor Who" scriptwriters could occasionally be guilty of stealing ideas from previous serials, and could even be shameless enough to acknowledge their thefts by using a slightly adapted version of the earlier title. The similarities between the Second Doctor adventure "The Seeds of Death" and the Fourth Doctor's "The Seeds of Doom", for example, go well beyond the titles. "The Ark in Space" borrows not only the title but also some of the themes from the First Doctor story "The Ark". Perhaps the scriptwriters assumed that the master tapes of "The Ark" had been safely erased- as had been done with so many early episodes- so nobody would notice their plagiarism. In fact, "The Ark" is one of the few serials from that part of the programme's history to have survived the BBC's cultural vandalism intact.
The Doctor, Sarah and Harry find themselves on a space station which turns out to be an "Ark", a vehicle containing the last few survivors of mankind, who have been placed in suspended animation to escape a disaster which has wiped out life on Earth. ("The Ark" made use of a very similar scenario; the next serial after "The Ark in Space", "The Sontaran Experiment", shows us what has been happening on Earth during the interim). Several of the crew of the Ark are revived in the course of the story; we learn that their leader is, for obvious reasons, nicknamed "Noah". (His real name is Lazar, a reference to the raising of Lazarus from the dead). The main threat to the Doctor, his companions and the inhabitants of the Ark comes from the Wirrn, a race of predatory alien insects who see humans as a tasty source of food. (The word "Wirrn" is pronounced, approximately, "wirren"; it does not rhyme with "burn"). "The Ark" is not the only story to have served as inspiration for this one. The Third Doctor adventure "The Green Death" also featured gigantic insects and their larvae, and made use of a toxic fluorescent green slime, a plot device which also appeared in "Inferno".
"The Ark in Space" was the first "Doctor Who" serial to be produced by Philip Hinchcliffe. It is one of those serials (and there were quite a number of them) which suffered noticeably from the programme's notoriously parsimonious budget. The adult Wirrn are not too bad, but their larvae are all too obviously made out of bubble-wrap spray-painted lime green. Hinchcliffe, however, wanted to increase the show's horror content to increase its appeal to adults, and he largely achieves this, particularly in the sequences in which Noah is slowly transformed into an insect. Noah, in fact, is a well-realised character; he is not particularly sympathetic, even in his human form, yet at the end proves himself capable of great heroism.
Despite its dodgy special effects, "The Ark in Space" is not a bad serial. The storyline is well paced and generates significant amounts of tension. And for all its lack of originality, there have been claims that the serial may itself have been the victim of some creative borrowing. It certainly seems to have been an influence on the various "Alien" movies.
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