Fenric is revealed to be an old enemy of the Doctor's who has not been in the TV series before, like Lady Peinforte, the gods of Ragnarok, or Morgaine. There's been a lot of these turning up recently, I presume because the writers couldn't be bothered doing origin stories. Fenric says
"You left me in the shadow dimensions, trapped for 17 centuries. But now I've found a body again, and the preparations are complete."then he disappears himself.
Millington orders his henchmanny to shoot the Doctor, Ace and Captain Sorin, but they get rescued by the Russian soldiers and the British and Russian soldiers start fighting each other again.
Millington goes back to his Nazi office where he still has his chess set despite the orders he gave - in this very room - back in part two to have them burnt. He is raving, which Cthulhu says is because he has lost all of his sanity points from summoning Fenric.
Fenric teams up with the vampires and the monsters and gets them to summon their leader to be his chief henchmonster, then he tells Millington a little more of his backstory with the Doctor:
"For 17 centuries I was trapped in the shadow dimensions because of him. He pulled bones from the desert sands and carved them into chess pieces. He challenged me to solve his puzzle. I failed."
The Doctor and Ace try to steal Millington's chess set but he has left it booby-trapped and it blows up the office. Fenric tells his new henchmonster to kill all the mannys by blowing up the entire world with Millington's poison bombs. This causes Millington's henchmanny to team up with Captain Sorin against Fenric and the monsters.
More mannys get turned into vampires, expect for Mrs Dudman and the tiny manny, because they are named characters and therefore immune. The Doctor takes Mrs Dudman's chess set, which was also saved from being burnt. It's lucky the manny in charge of burning all the chess sets wasn't as good at his job as Perkins was at smashing all the radios.
Fenric has a smiley face, he is happy because his plan is working and all the spare mannys that the plot doesn't need any more are being killed off.
The Doctor sets up his chess puzzle as Ace helps Mrs Dudman and Audrey to escape in a car. Fenric orders his henchmonster to kill off the rest of the vampires and monsters, which is lucky because they were about to catch Ace. Then he goes to play chess with the Doctor.
"Where is the game, Time Lord?"
"You couldn't resist it, could you? The game of traps. The contest as before: one move. Find the winning move, spring the trap on me, if you can."
Millington gets shot by Vershinin (the last of the Russians left except for Captain Sorin). Ace sees that the surviving British and Russian soldiers have teamed up (even though she was also there when they teamed up with Captain Sorin earlier) and this gives her the idea of how to solve the Doctor's chess puzzle.
Captain Sorin tries to shoot Fenric, but Fenric reveals that he can't because he is also one of the "wolves of Fenric," like all the mannys in this story are. Ace goes in and tells Fenric the solution to the puzzle, making exactly the same mistaik she made when she told Dr Judson about the computer program in part two. The Doctor comes in and says "ACE!" in the style of a Big NO! (not to be confused with a Big Bad I Said No!) because he just knows she's been unbelievably stupid again.
Do you think that when Ace said "am I so stupid?" and the Doctor replied "no, that's not it," he was just being polite?
Fenric, who is now possessing Captain Sorin so that his accent makes it much harder to understand the exposition, explains that Audrey the tiny manny will grow up to become Ace's mother, making Ace a wolf of Fenric too.
I think Fenric has made a foolish mistaik in having wolves, he should have had cats instead since cats are best. Also, if his henchmonster is about to poison the world then won't Audrey, who lives on the world, also get poisoned before becoming Ace's mother?
Ace tries to use her faith in the Doctor to defeat the henchmonster when Fenric orders it to kill them, so the Doctor does his best Blake impression to manipulate her:
"I knew she carried the evil inside her. Do you think I'd have chosen a social misfit if I hadn't known? She couldn't even pass her chemistry exams at school, and yet she manages to create a time storm in her bedroom? I saw your hand in it from the very beginning. She's an emotional cripple."Like the best bluffs, there's a lot of truth in that. Also we get a very fast explanation that Fenric was the one moving the chess pieces in between scenes back in Silver Nemesis (which did not make sense at the time, so I suspect this was retconned in to this story after somebody pointed this out), and was also responsible for the "time storm" that teleported Ace to Iceworld to be in Dragonfire (this is less likely to be a retcon, but it still sounds like something they made up to fit after the fact, rather than having been planned all along).
With Ace's "psychic force" broken, the henchmonster kills Fenric and itself, just like the Doctor and we knew it would. Ace wants to have a sulk for being the only one who didn't see what the Doctor's plan was, but the Doctor knows things always blow up at this point in the story so he has to rescue her. Ace still has a sulk.
"Couldn't even pass a chemistry exam?"It is true really, lol.
"I'd have done anything not to hurt you, but I had to save you from Fenric's evil curse. Your faith in me was holding the haemovore back."
"You said I was an emotional cripple! A social misfit!"
"I had to make you lose your belief in me."
"Full marks for teenage psychology."
"It's not true, believe me."
They go to the beach and talk some more about Audrey being Ace's mother, but a lot of this is too hard to hear over the incidental music, which has obviously lost too many sanity points over the course of the story because it just goes mad at the end here.
Ace jumps in the water. Wolf of Fenric or not, she's definitely no cat.
The Curse of Fenric has its flaws, yes, mainly in the shape of some plot holes that we can only overlook because the rest of it is so good, with some of the best special effects, monster design and guest character actors of the Sylvester McCoy era of Doctor Who - Dinsdale Landen (purr) and Nicholas Parsons especially, the latter evidently only got killed off before the final episode to give the others a chance. Plus it contains one of the best cliffhangers of all time.
But before I declare The Curse of Fenric to be the best story of the McCoy era overall, I have one story still to watch - the very final one of the original series, and it is one I have never seen before, so I have no idea what it is like.
Stay tuned!
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