Season 15, Episode 1 | 4 parts | First broadcast: 3–24 September 1977 | Writer: Terrance Dicks | Director: Paddy Russell
Cast
- Tom Baker as the Doctor
- Louise Jameson as Leela
- Colin Douglas as Reuben
- Ralph Watson as Ben
Summary
Arriving on a remote, storm-battered lighthouse off the English coast in the early twentieth century, the Doctor and Leela find its keepers unsettled by strange lights and a series of unexplained deaths. As a shipwrecked party of aristocrats swells the isolated group, the Doctor identifies the culprit as a shapeshifting Rutan scout, an old enemy of the Sontarans, using the lighthouse as cover to scout Earth ahead of a full invasion fleet. Trapped with a killer able to mimic any of them, the survivors must hold out through the night as the Doctor works to stop the Rutan before reinforcements arrive.
Interesting Facts
- The claustrophobic, fog-bound lighthouse setting drew deliberate inspiration from classic base-under-siege horror, echoing earlier Doctor Who stories like Fury from the Deep.
- It marks a rare full appearance by a solo Rutan, an enemy previously only referenced rather than shown on screen.
- Nearly the entire guest cast is killed off by the story’s end, an unusually bleak body count for the series at the time.
- Writer Terrance Dicks was a former series script editor and prolific novelist, and this story is often held up as an example of tightly structured, economical scripting.
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