Alongside Remembrance of the Daleks, this story marks the peak of the renaissance Doctor Who experienced in the late 1980s with the Andrew Cartmel Masterplan coming to fruition. It also serves as probably the darkest Doctor Who story of all time. Additionally it is a major story as all of The Seventh Doctor adventures which would follow on in the Virgin New Adventures and Big Finish Doctor Who Monthly Range which featured The Seventh Doctor used this story as the foundations of the new direction they would later on take the show.
This is a great story but also a clever story. Having seen this a few times now I can really appreciate the amount of work that was put into the writing of the story. It is not you bog standard good solid Doctor Who of the sixties and seventies. A lot of work has gone into this script by the writer. The story is rife with symbolism (baptism, undercurrents, chess...) all adding to the effect the writer is trying to have.
I must turn to Ace, the most important character of the whole story. Sophie Aldred gives the performance of a lifetime. The production team have created this revolutionary character, someone all the companions of the modern era would later follow. This is the story where the character grows up. She is no longer the pyromaniac teenage mess ('social misfit' one might say) but now an adult who has gone through significant change when she is forced to face up to her past in a more subtle and effective way than they had tried to achieve in Ghostlight. This change is symbolised by her baptism at the end. Initially this story was to come first in the season but I am glad that they changed the order as season twenty six works brilliantly in this way. Battlefield and Ghostlight foreshadow the great changes to come for the lives of the main characters, Curse of Fenric is the big change and Survival is when The Doctor puts Ace back in her home setting to emphasise how far she as a character has come. If the original order had been the way it was released, I do not believe the effectiveness of either this or Survival would have been as present as they are like this.
Speaking of The Doctor, this is one of Sylvester McCoy's finest outings. He is dark, Machiavellian and manipulative. He is playing the game of chess against Fenric from the beginning, moving characters into place at the right time. This is the darkest we have ever seen The Doctor, when he emotionally cripples his companion just to defeat Fenric. The Seventh Doctor is so different from his successor whose morals would prevent him from doing anything (Dark Eyes Two - The Traitor) but The Seventh Doctor is ready to do anything to get the job done.
The darkness of The Doctor is reflected in the darkness of the story. The production team could have just set this in Nazi occupied Europe or Nazi Germany itself but by having it set in Britain. Having the secondary villains of the story to be the British adds a whole new dimension to the story. They emphasise how powerful and evil Fenric is, as if Millington who would drop disastrous chemical bombs to incinerate Dresden or Moscow is just the secondary villain, how evil must the main villain (Fenric) possibly be?
Thinking about this story in context also adds another dimension to it as the story may be set in The Second World War but is more about The Cold War. The beginning and the end of the war are both shown in this story. It is important to remember that this came out in late 1989 - the end of The Cold War. Most of the people watching this story would not know why there had been so much international tension between the USA and USSR. The Curse of Fenric is an allegory for all wars but especially The Cold War. The soldiers are the pawns who fight for their political leaders. It is only when the pawns work together can such a conflict end. Gorbachev came from a rural background, he at the beginning was no longer a pawn in Stalin or Khrushchev's chess matches against Kennedy, Johnson or Nixon, but by people working together conflict can end. This happens here when Bates and Sorin stop fighting and work together.
Fenric himself is a strong villain and the haemovores were the last great monster of the classic series. The Eighties were so over reliant on returning monsters that there were very few great new monsters coming about - the haemovores sadly would not make a televised return but were absolutely great monsters.
The Curse of Fenric is an allegorical, character driven, great story. The care and attention that went into both script and production is monumental and as a result produced one of the finest stories of the 1980s rivaling The Caves of Androzani and Remembrance of the Daleks. It is a shame that the show did not continue on television into the 1990s as this dark approach worked brilliantly here. The problem with the whole story though is that it does take a couple of watches to understand as it is very complex and needs some thinking. The fuel for the end of the original run of Doctor Who had been laid ages ago but stories such as this and Ghostlight are so complex that the casual viewer just did not know what was going and thus turned off. If the show had never come back in 2005 my opinion of this story may have been tainted by that fact; but it did come back. The Curse of Fenric burned away the old order and set up the new so we can have a new series. The show at this point had to go away but this is definitely the right way to let it go...
10/10