Impressively ambitious and complex (for many, read: confusing and hard to follow) Ghost Light showed that Doctor Who had plenty of ideas even in the dying days of the original show. It must be said, though, that stories like this weren't exactly winning over the casual viewers that the series needed at this point. The last episode of the original run to be produced, although not the last aired, the story has 7th Doctor Sylvester McCoy making companion Ace confront her fears and her pyromaniac past by returning her to the "haunted" Victorian manner that she once burnt down. From there on the story involves a Neanderthal butler, a mad explorer out to hunt Queen Victoria, and a creepy presence in the cellar (which turns out to be not so much a cellar as a massive stone spaceship). The Theory of Evolution is the big Victorian theme on show here (along with the concept of the Victorian haunted house) with the story's alien threat attempting to evolve into the era's dominant lifeform, the Victorian British man. Much of this can be hard to keep up with, though, as writer Marc Platt's long script was cut down to a three part serial to the point where even the cast didn't know what was going on half the time. This does at least contribute to a sense of unease in an unusually dark storyline that saw McCoy showcasing a more hard edged, calculating Doctor, although he does say "wicked" at the end.
