I’m not sure that there’s much consequence to most classic Who stories. Ghost Light is maybe a little odd in that its events have less to do with plot than with theme. There is really no more or less carry-over than you get from Planet of Evil — except that maybe the themes will stick with the viewer more than the mechanics of who escaped from which prison in which order.

Ghost Light is about evolution in all of the ways that the concept could be applied to life, both literal and abstract.

It’s basically the same idea as Adaptation. That’s a really abstract movie about, well, adaptation. It uses the diversity of orchids and the desperation of species to propagate as a metaphor for the creative struggles of a screenwriter (indeed the very person writing the movie at hand), the tragedies and coping mechanisms of a weirdo plant poacher in the Florida Everglades, and the unfulfilled life of a posh magazine writer from Manhattan. And as with Ghost Light, the film doesn’t have much of a plot — at least, not until its shambling events reach the notion of tacking on a hackneyed Hollywood style conclusion of the sort that one of the story’s characters would have written. Instead, every element of the story exists in order to explore some aspect of its basic theme.

Ghost Light plays kind of loose with the literal mechanics of evolution, because it’s more concerned with the implications of change versus stasis. Change is embodied in Control and Ace. Anyone who fails to adapt to circumstances, like the policeman who refuses to wrap his head around what is happening, tends to perish. Nimrod is simple enough to roll with and accept whatever he is handed, so he turns out okay. Josiah’s whole interpretation of change is warped (in a very typical way, insofar as classical understanding of Darwinism), such that he views it as a narrow one-way journey to a static supremacy rather than a simple response to the needs of the environment. His reading doesn’t hold up in the end, so he also dies.

The way that I spell all of this out, I’m making it sound more complex than it is. Basically, it’s just 75 minutes of fantasy TV that dramatizes the notion of evolution in all its permutations.