"The Gunfighters"

The Doctor: Oh, quite so. Allow me, sir, to introduce Miss Dodo Dupont, wizard of the ivory keys, and Steven Regret, tenor, and lastly, sir, your humble servant, Doctor Caligari.
Bat Masterson: Doctor who?
The Doctor: Yes, quite right.

The Doctor, Steven and Dodo meet Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp

"A Holiday for the Doctor", 30 April 1966
"Don't Shoot the Pianist", 7 May 1966
"Johnny Ringo", 14 May 1966
"The OK Corral", 21 May 1966

Written by Donald Cotton
Directed by Rex Tucker
Script editor: Gerry Davis
Produced by Innes Lloyd

William Hartnell as the Doctor
Peter Purves as Steven Taylor (latest extant appearance)
Jackie Lane as Dodo Chaplet

At the end of the previous (no longer extant) story, "The Celestial Toymaker", the Doctor had badly chipped his tooth on a piece of booby-trapped candy, and so when the TARDIS materialises at the beginning of "The Gunfighters", his only thought is to find a dentist who can extract it.

The TARDIS, it turns out, has arrived next to the entrance to the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, in 1881. The team venture out into the streets of Tombstone, where they soon start meeting the town's inhabitants: the Clanton brothers, town marshals Bat Masterson and and Wyatt Earp, and ultimately the town dentist, who is, of course, Doc Holliday.

The Clantons have arrived in town looking for Holliday; they intend to shoot him down in vengeance for the death of another brother, Reuben. The story's first two and a half episodes revolve around a case of mistaken identity, with the Clantons convinced that the Doctor is, in fact, Doc Holliday. Holliday, who's a weaselly, conniving character, helps further this misunderstanding by supplying the Doctor with his own, easily recognisable six-shooter, and even Wyatt Earp--who's a good friend of Holliday's--goes along with it. The Doctor ends up locked in Tombstone gaol for his own protection from the posse the Clantons have raised, while Steven and Dodo are forced, at gunpoint, to play piano and sing in the saloon, with Dodo turning out miraculously to be a talented pianist and Steven displaying a hitherto unhinted-at professional skill as a singer.

Two events midway through part three change the story, redirecting it into the inexorable leadup to the Gunfight at the OK Corral. The first is the arrival in town of Johnny Ringo, a cold-blooded, psychopathic outlaw who's hunting Holliday because his old girlfriend, Kate, has taken up with the Doc. The second is the murder of Earp's youngest brother, Warren, while the Clantons' are springing one of their own brothers, Phineas, from Tombstone gaol.

Ringo allies with the Clantons and hatches a plot to murder Holliday and Wyatt Earp. The Clantons, though portrayed as the villains of the piece, had at least been planning to confront Holliday and Earp in a straight-up gunfight. But Ringo instead insists that while the Clantons confront Holliday and Earp, he will sneak up behind the two men and shoot them in the back.

The story culminates, as we've of course known it will since episode one, in the famous gunfight, by which time another Earp brother, Virgil, has arrived in Tombstone to act as backup. There's a brief diversion from the main gunfight when Johnny Ringo takes Dodo hostage and Holliday, living up to the chivalry that he's always been falling short of so far in the story, throws away his gun to save her life. But he then produces a hidden pea-shooter and shoots Ringo, killing him. All three Clanton brothers also get killed, and Holliday and the Earps have their historic victory.

The events depicted in "The Gunfighters", it should be noted, bear about as much resemblance to the historical Gunfight at the OK Corral as the movie Sahara does to actual American Civil War archaeology. It wasn't Wyatt Earp who was the Tombstone sheriff, but his brother Virgil; Wyatt occasionally acted as Virgil's unpaid deputy. Warren Earp wasn't killed by the Clantons; he wasn't even in Tombstone at the time of the gunfight. In fact, he lived until 1900, when he was killed in a barfight. Johnny Ringo had absolutely nothing to do with the Gunfight, and there was no barfly Kate who formed a love triangle with Ringo and Holliday.

So anyway, with all that settled, the TARDIS team head off to parts unknown. This is the last time we'll see Steven in the rewatch. The next story after this is "The Savages", now completely lost. In it, the TARDIS arrives in the far-distant future, at an advanced city where the inhabitants have reached the culmination of human society, giving themselves completely over to creativity and advancement. But then it's discovered that these people have built their social order on a tribe of cave-dwelling, illiterate barbarians who inhabit the wilderness beyond the city; the city's inhabitants maintain their own vital energy by capturing tribesmen and sucking the energy from them. The Doctor, of course, puts a stop to all this, and Steven stays behind to be mediator of the new society that must be built, as the savages and the city people learn to live together.

What Lisa thought

When I first got into Who fandom in the nineties, conventional wisdom was that "The Gunfighters" is the single worst Doctor Who story ever made. Like "The Romans", it approaches a bloody episode of history as an opportunity for farcical comedy; it's full of British actors making poor approximations of American accents (though I always feel that standards for accents should be lower in television than they are in film). And on top of that, there's the Song.

No straight plot summary of "The Gunfighters" can convey the experience of watching the story, because it leaves out the Song--the ballad "The Last Chance Saloon". "The Last Chance Saloon" summarises and comments on all the action in "The Gunfighters", and it gets played incessantly--at the beginning and end of each episode, and between most scenes. It's also the song that Steven and Dodo perform when held at gunpoint by the Clantons.

Lisa, of course, turned out to love "The Gunfighters", as is her way. She found it very experimental, specifically citing the song as a manifestation of that.

In the time since the mid-90s, fandom has reconsidered "The Gunfighters" somewhat, apparently concluding it's not as bad as we thought.

I'm of the opinion that reconsideration is wrong. "The Gunfighters" is just as poor as we though fifteen years ago, and that's almost entirely because of "The Last Chance Saloon". It stops the story from ever achieving any sort of tension.

So it's time to move on. Since "The Savages" has been lost, the next story in the rewatch will be "The War Machines".

I

Doctor Who: "The Romans"

Vicki: Has the Doctor told you where we're going next?
Barbara: Oh, no. He never does that.
Vicki: You mean it's a surprise?
Ian: Yes. To everyone.

Nero attempts to woo Barbara

"The Slave Traders", 16 January 1965
"All Roads Lead to Rome", 23 January 1965
"Conspiracy", 30 January 1965
"Inferno", 6 February 1965

Written by Dennis Spooner
Directed by Christopher Barry
Produced by Verity Lambert
Associate producer: Mervyn Pinfield

William Hartnell as the Doctor
William Russell as Ian Chesterton
Jacqueline Hill as Barbara Wright
Maureen O'Brien as Vicki

I'll be honest. For a long time, I didn't really get the Ian and Barbara fans. They were perfectly adequate companions, but I didn't get why they generated such intense adulation in the little corner of Who fandom they can call their own. (To be fair, Ian-Barbara fandom is pretty shipping-centred, and I don't get shipping in general.)

But after seeing "The Romans" for the first time, I got it. The banter between Ian and Barbara in episodes one and four absolutely sings, and it does so because of the chemistry between Jacqueline Hill and William Russell. We're talking Josiah-and-Abigail-Bartlet levels of chemistry, here.

The TARDIS crew are having something rare: a holiday. For the past several weeks, they've been staying at a Roman villa. The owner is away, so finding the villa deserted, the team decided to stay awhile.

Ian and Barbara are loving the idleness, but the Doctor is chafing to go off and have an adventure--and so too is Vicki, who after all has only just joined the crew. The Doctor manufactures a spat with Ian and Barbara so that he can declare, in a huff, that he and Vicki are going to visit Rome. They'll be back in a few days, and Ian and Barbara are not invited.

As the Doctor and Vicki are walking along the road in the twilight,* they come upon the dead body of an old man. He's been murdered, but it wasn't robbery--he's been left holding his lyre, a very valuable musical instrument. The Doctor picks the lyre up and examines it; as he's looking at it, a centurion arrives. Seeing him with the lyre, the centurion assumes the Doctor is the famous musician Maximus Pettulian, who's known to be travelling on foot to Rome to play for the Emperor Nero.

The centurion claims to have arrived to escort Maximus Petullian along the dangerous roads, but the Doctor realises something else is going on: whoever murdered the real Maximus Petullian was hired by the centurion, who has only come out here on the roads to check for himself that the murder was carried out. The Doctor decides to masquerade as the musician (much to Vicki's consternation), and accepts the centurion's company on the way to Rome.

Meanwhile back at the villa, Ian and Barbara are contentedly lazing after enjoying a fine meal. (Barbara has taught herself Roman cooking during their stay; the menu of a Roman aristocratic supper is described in detail during an Educational Moment.) But in the nearby village, a pair of slave traders are passing through. They're leading prisoners from Gaul, who will be sold at auction in Rome. But the traders are dissatisfied with the quality of their merchandise; they won't fetch a good price. Hearing that the villa is currently occupied by four undefended strangers--two of whom are women and one of whom is an old man--they decide to see if they can't kidnap the TARDIS team in order to enrich their stock.

They break into the villa and attack Ian and Barbara. The two schoolteachers fight back. Barbara lifts a pot high in the air to smash over the head of one of their attackers--but the slave trader ducks out of the way, and Barbara brings the pot smashing down on the back of Ian's head instead. Ian's knocked unconscious, and Barbara is quickly captured. They're taken back to the slave traders' camp, where Ian is sold almost immediately, to a galley captain who needs oarsmen straight away. Barbara is shackled with the rest of the prisoners, to be auctioned off in Rome.

The Doctor, Vicki and the centurion stop at an inn for the night, where the centurion meets up with the assassin he hired to to kill Maximus Petullian. The assassin is an illiterate mute (so if he's captured, he can't give up the identity of his employer) and is understandably confused to learn that Maximus Petullian is still alive. He sneaks into the Doctor's room and attacks him, and we're treated to the sight of the aged Hartnell Doctor having a fistfight with a vicious Roman ruffian, until Vicki comes in and pushes the assassin out the window.

Barbara is taken to Rome, where she's auctioned off before a raucous crowd. She's bought by Tavius, who brings the auction to a surprised halt by raising the bid from two thousand sesterces to ten thousand sesterces. Tavius turns out to be the majordomo for the Imperial household, and he puts Barbara to work as the new chambermaid for the Emperor Nero's wife, Poppaea.

The Doctor and Vicki have also arrived at the palace, where they meet Nero. Nero demands that the Doctor immediately perform on the lyre, but the Doctor worms his way out of it by asking that Nero play instead. (Nero, as the Doctor well knows, fancied himself the greatest stage performer of his day, and expected his subjects to treat him as such.)

Ian, meanwhile, has been shackled to an oar aboard a galley, but during a storm the ship wrecks. He washes up on the beach with Delos, a fellow slave whom he'd befriended aboard the galley. Ian and Delos head to Rome to look for Barbara, but they're recaptured by the original slave traders, who decide to train them as gladiators to be killed by lions in the arena.

After his audience with Vicki and the Doctor, Nero proceeds to his wife's bedchamber, where he discovers Barbara. Instantly he's besotted with her.

From this point, part three descends into intentional farce. Barbara flees as Nero chases her around the palace. His continued attention to her provokes Poppaea's jealousy. Several times hay gets made from having Barbara and either the Doctor or Vicki narrowly miss each other, such as when Nero is chasing Barbara round Poppaea's bedroom and the Doctor knocks on the door. Nero appears in the doorway and bellows at the Doctor to leave; after Nero slams the door in his face, the Doctor is turning to leave when Poppaea arrives. The Doctor informs her that Nero has another woman in the room with him, so Poppaea bursts in and finds Nero on the bed, holding Barbara to him. Even the death by poisoning of Nero's valet is played for laughs.

The Doctor eventually falls from favour when, at a banquet in his honour, he cannot get out of performing with his lyre. He pulls an Emperor's New Clothes, telling the audience that his new composition is an exceptionally fine melody that can only be heard by a sufficiently cultured ear. He then mimes plucking at the chords of his lyre; his listeners hear only silence, but none of them are willing to admit that they can't hear his music. Nero gets jealous at the adulation receives and resolves to kill the Doctor. He'll invite him to play before a packed crowd at the arena--but as he plays, the Emperor will have the lions released to devour him.

Before he does that, though, Nero decides to take Barbara out on a date--and when you're a Roman Emperor, a date involves taking a lady to a slave barracks to watch a private gladiator duel. Of course, the gladiators who are chosen to duel are Delos and Ian. It's a fight to the death; whoever wins must kill his opponent, then will be set free. Delos wins, but instead of killing Ian, he launches himself at Nero. Nero escapes the assassination attempt, and Ian and Delos escape out into the streets.

Back at the palace, the Doctor and Vicki are exploring when they come across Nero's office, and on his desk they find his extensive plans for completely rebuilding Rome--plans that Nero hasn't been able to put into effect because the Senate won't vote him the money. The Emperor, just returned from the gladiators' palace, comes upon them. The Doctor accidentally sets fire to Nero's plans, and Nero becomes furious--until the burning plans give him an idea. He will set fire to the city of Rome itself, burning the city down so that he can build his new one in its place. He leaves Vicki and the Doctor, hurrying off to put his new brainstorm into motion.

Nero has some street thugs rounded up and brought to him, so that he can instruct them to set fire to the city. Ian manages to sneak into the palace with the thugs, and then he sneaks off and finds Barbara. The two of them escape, heading back toward the villa and the TARDIS. The Doctor and Vicki, too, have now snuck away from the palace, heading for home. They watch the Great Fire of Rome lighting up the sky from a hilltop overlooking the city.

Ian and Barbara arrive back at the villa first, and we get another great scene between the two of them (though Ian chasing Barbara round as she shrieks with mock fear would probably qualify as sexual assault nowadays). By the time the Doctor and Vicki arrive, the two schoolteachers have fallen asleep on a pair of couches. The Doctor chastises them for idling around the villa for the past few days. Ian and Barbara attempt to explain about their own adventures, but the Doctor won't let them get a word in edgeways. The four of them depart for the TARDIS and a new adventure.

What Lisa thought

The main impression the story made on Lisa was how it paired off the regular characters. Ian and Barbara got some of their best scenes together, and the pairing of the Doctor and Vicki let us know for certain that Vicki--as Lisa puts it--really is going to be Susan by another name. She's still not warming towards Barbara, but she concedes that she's enjoying that she and Ian are becoming more playful in their scenes together.

The next story is "The Web Planet".

I

*I find it irrationally annoying that for the sake of plot, we're not supposed to point out how unrealistic it is that they would start the day-long walk to Rome at sunset.

Doctor Who: "The Reign of Terror"

The Doctor masquerades as a French Revolutionary dignitary

"A Land of Fear", 8 August 1964
"Guests of Madame Guillotine", 15 August 1964
"A Change of Identity", 22 August 1964
"The Tyrant of France", 29 August 1964
"A Bargain of Necessity", 5 September 1964
"Prisoners of Conciergerie", 12 September 1964

Episodes in italics no longer exist.

Written by Dennis Spooner
Directed by Henric Hirsch
Script editor: David Whitaker
Produced by Verity Lambert
Associate producer: Mervyn Pinfield

William Hartnell as the Doctor
William Russell as Ian Chesterton
Jacqueline Hill as Barbara Wright
Carole Ann Ford as Susan Foreman

Ian makes a joke about the Doctor never being able to get the TARDIS to go where he wants it to go, and the Doctor--despite the fact he's been trying for nine months to drop Ian and Barbara off in 1963 Britain but has yet to get any closer than fifteenth-century Mexico--takes mortal offence at this and declares he's kicking Ian off the ship at their next stop.

(You can tell I've been watching a lot of Hartnell Who lately because it sounded perfectly natural to me in that sentence to refer to the TARDIS as "the ship".)

The TARDIS materialises in a wooded copse, which the Doctor declares is twentieth-century England. Ian is sceptical and asks that the Doctor come with them to confirm that before leaving them, but he refuses. Ian instead turns his request into an offer of a pint at the pub, to say good bye, and this entices the Doctor and Susan to accompany him and Barbara into the woods.

And they're not in Britain, or the twentieth century--they know that when they catch a filthy twelve-year-old boy in a tunic and breeks, who's been stalking them. The boy reveals that they're about twelve kilometres north of Paris, and it's the 1790s. They're in the middle of the French Revolution--and, in fact, in its bloodiest and most dangerous period, the Reign of Terror.

The boy runs off into the wood, and the TARDIS team happen across a farm house. The house is deserted, but it's not abandoned--people have been here recently. Because the first thing you do when you knock on a front door and get no answer is go inside, the Doctor heads upstairs to explore, while Ian, Barbara and Susan check out the ground floor. They find a stack of blank passports signed by none other than Robespierre, and also a chest full of clothes of all different sizes. Ian, Barbara and Susan therefore change into period garb, because--again--that's the sort of thing you do when prowling around a stranger's empty house, isn't? Change into their clothes? We'll let the logic go here, since the close-bodiced, square-necklined dresses that the women don are rather sexy, particularly Barbara's.

But it turns out the house isn't empty. While the Doctor is upstairs, two men sneak up behind him and knock him out with a blow to the neck. They then head downstairs and confront the other three. The two men have been condemned to death by guillotine for the crime of being aristocrats, but they've escaped. This house is (unsurprisingly) part of a prepared route, a stop on an Underground Railroad for French aristocrats fleeing to England.

The two men seem friendly, braining the Doctor notwithstanding, but they're interrupted by the arrival of a company of French infantry sent to recapture them. A gunfight ensues, and the two men are killed; the infantrymen arrest Ian, Barbara and Susan and then, unaware of the Doctor unconscious upstairs, set fire to the building and lead their new prisoners back to Paris.

After the others have been led away, the young boy from the woods rescues the Doctor from the flames and tells him that his friends will have been taken to the Conciergerie prison in Paris. The Doctor heads after them.

Upon arriving in Paris, Ian, Barbara and Susan are taken before a magistrate and summarily sentenced to the guillotine. They're put in gaol to await their fate. Barbara and Susan share a cell; Ian is given a cell with a prisoner who turns out to be a British spy. The spy, however, is near death, and with his dying breath he makes Ian promise to undertake his mission for him: Ian must find another British agent, one James Sterling. Sterling has information that will be vital to Britain in the coming war with France, and Ian must tell Sterling that it's time for him to return to England so he can relate that information.

A while later, a dignitary named Lemaitre visits Ian and his fellow prisoner. Discovering that the other prisoner has died, he demands to know if he said anything before he died; Ian insists that he did not. Lemaitre is not convinced, and after he leaves the cell, he demands from the prison warden the list of all prisoners who are due to be guillotined. He crosses Ian's name off the execution list. Ian is therefore left behind when the guards come for Barbara and Susan; the two women are loaded onto a tumbril and carted off to meet the guillotine at the centre of the city.

The Doctor, meanwhile, has arrived in the city. He trades his clothing and a magnificent jewelled ring to a tailor, who in return gives him the ostentatious uniform of a Regional Officer of the Provinces. Back at the prison, Ian manages to escape while the prison warden is in a drunken stupor. He doesn't know that his escape has been orchestrated by Lemaitre; nor does he know that Lemaitre is following him, reasoning that it's the only way to find out if the dead prisoner gave Ian a message for James Sterling.

Barbara and Susan's procession through the streets is intercepted by two men, Jules and Jean, who kill their guards and spirit the women back to their own safehouse. When Jules and Jean hear the women's story, they are shocked to hear of the burning of the farmhouse outside Paris and the death of the two escapees who were hiding there; it was Jules and Jean who had freed the two men and sent them to the farmhouse. They conclude that there must be a mole in their organisation, leaking details of their rescues and escape routes to the Revolutionary government.

The Doctor arrives at the prison, hoping to use his disguise as a Regional Officer to secure the release of the others. But of course he's too late; they've all already left. Before he himself can leave, though, Lemaitre arrives. He's on his way to a meeting with Robespierre, and he insists the Doctor come with him, so that he can report on his province. After the Doctor and Lemaitre leave, the tailor who sold the Doctor his disguise arrives at the prison. He tells the warden that he wishes to a report a traitor, and he has proof. When the warden demands to see the proof, the traitor holds out the Doctor's jewelled ring.

And then,

... And then, we run into an unfortunate truth of Doctor Who from the 1960s, namely that a good solid chunk of the decade's episodes no longer exist. It didn't become BBC policy to retain a copy of everything it aired until the late 1970s, and despite a lot of hard work by a lot of people all around the world, there are still to date over a hundred 25-minute Who episodes that have never been recovered, including episodes four and five of "The Reign of Terror". We've already had to skip "Marco Polo" because that story has vanished in its entirety (though its soundtrack, like the soundtracks of every lost episode, are still extant, and in most cases available on CD from BBC audio).

The problem's only going to become worse as we continue; seasons four and five have only one fully extant story apiece, of which one ("The War Machines") is only "fully extants" because a few segments have been reconstructed with images drawn from elsewhere in the story, and the other ("Tomb of the Cybermen") was thought lost for a generation, until a complete copy was found in Hong Kong in 1992. The second Doctor, Patrick Troughton, has only six fully extant stories from his three seasons--in other words, if we'd skipped William Hartnell and started our rewatch with Patrick Troughton, we would by now already have moved on to Jon Pertwee.

Rather than listen to the audios of the missing episodes, in this rewatch we're going to skip ahead to episode six. (We'll also only be watching those stories that have more than half their episodes extant, not orphaned episodes from stories that are mostly missing. All the orphan episodes, though, have been released on DVD, as part of the Lost in Time collection.)

By now, Barbara and Ian are at Jean and Jules's safehouse, but Susan is back in prison. The Doctor has been in prison, too--we've missed his meeting with Robespierre entirely--but Lemaitre has secured his release, and now the Doctor leads him straight back to the safehouse. Once there, Lemaitre reveals his secret--that he, in fact, is James Sterling, the British spy that Ian has been seeking. Ian relays the dead prisoner's message, that it's time for Sterling to return to England.

But Sterling refuses. He's learnt that a politician, Paul Barras, is planning a coup to overthrow Robespierre, and tonight he's meeting with a general to plot. Sterling can't leave until he finds out which general Barras will be meeting with, as that general will likely be the next ruler of France. But he can't infiltrate the meeting without help from the TARDIS team. They agree to help him, so long as he first helps them by securing Susan's release from prison. He agrees, and soon Susan is back at the safehouse too.

(It's at this point that anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the French Revolution should, of course, be screaming at the television, wondering how it is that none of the TARDIS team even attempts a guess at whom Barras is meeting with. Barbara is a high school history teacher, and one with enough interest in the French Revolution that she loans books about it to her favourite students. Susan already has enough experience of the Revolution that when she opened the book Barbara gave her about it, her first reaction was to laugh and declare that the author had got something wrong. And the French Revolution is, according to Susan, the Doctor's favourite period of Earth history. It's inconceivable that none of them don't instantly know exactly with whom Barras will be meeting to plot the Thermidorian Reaction tonight.)

But whatever. After Susan has been replaced, Ian and Barbara head to the inn where Barras has his meeting. Lemaitre has seen to it that the staff have been tied up in the back, so Ian masquerades as the innkeeper and Barbara as his barmaid. Barras arrives, and so too does his co-conspirator, who is, of course, one Napoleon Bonaparte. Barras lays out his plan to Bonaparte: with Napoleon's military support, Robespierre will be arrested and summarily executed the following day, and a triumvirate of Consuls will take power in France, with Bonaparte as First Consul. Napoleon, of course, agrees.

(The story actually leaves out couple of historical steps here. Barras overthrew Roberspierre's Committee of Public Safety in 1794, and in 1795 he and Napoleon staged a coup that established the Directory, not the Consulate--this was when Bonaparte dispersed the crowds with his famous "whiff of grapeshot". It wasn't until 1799 that Napoleon and the Abbé Sieyès overthrew Barras and the Directory, replacing them with the Consulate; at that time, Napoleon took office as First Consul.)

The coup goes off without a hitch the following day, but by that time, the TARDIS team are twelve kilometres outside Paris, in the woods where they first arrived. They head back into the TARDIS and take off, and we've finished Doctor Who's first season.

What Lisa thought: She wasn't too thrilled with this one, and that was true even in the early episodes, before we missed fifty minutes of story. Maybe it's because it's a straight historical. The Hartnell historicals, without any monsters or any science fiction elements whatsoever (beyond the presence of the main characters) are a beast unlike anything else the Doctor Who viewer can find in the programme's corpus; since the early part of season four, Doctor Who has only ever attempted one straight historical, 1982's "Black Orchid", and even that still had a clumsy attempt to create a "natural" monster.

The next story is "Planet of Giants".

I

Doctor Who: "The Aztecs"

But you can't rewrite history. Not one line!--the Doctor

Tlotoxl and Barbara intrigue against each other

"The Temple of Evil", 23 May 1964
"The Warriors of Death", 30 May 1964
"The Bride of Sacrifice", 6 June 1964
"The Day of Darkness", 13 June 1964

Written by John Lucarotti
Directed by John Crockett
Script editor: David Whitaker
Produced by Verity Lambert
Associate producer: Mervyn Pinfield

William Hartnell as the Doctor
William Russell as Ian Chesterton
Jacqueline Hill as Barbara Wright
Carole Ann Ford as Susan Foreman

And so we come, in Doctor Who's earliest surviving historical,* to the programme's first serious examination of the existential issues that time travel raises.

The TARDIS materialises inside the tomb of a great Aztec leader. Barbara is instantly able to identify the tomb as Aztec--she specialised in the Aztecs at university. She greatly admires their civilisation, and bitterly resents its destruction at the hands of the Spanish. She blames that destruction on the Aztec practice of human sacrifice, which, she feels, blinded the conquistadors to all that was good about Aztec society.

When she emerges from the tomb, Barbara finds herself mistaken for the reincarnation of Yetaxa, the deceased high priest buried within it. The Aztecs living in the city outside enthrone her in the temple's central precinct, and the Doctor, Ian and Susan find themselves treated as her divine servants. Barbara is delighted at the mixup, as she immediately determines to use the Aztecs' perception of her as a god to put an end to human sacrifice, thus setting up Aztec civilisation to survive the coming of the Spanish in a hundred years.

There's a lot of different sides to the debates that get raised by "The Aztecs", and they all get their own advocate in the story. First, there's the argument amongst the TARDIS crew, with the Doctor and Ian both horrified and outraged at Barbara's plan. Barbara takes the idealist viewpoint, seeing the possibility of making the world better. The Doctor objects on principle--he's seeing himself as the custodian of history, and changing that history is just wrong. Ian's objection is more pragmatic: he thinks Barbara is being foolishly irresponsible, placing all four of them in great jeopardy by attacking one of the Aztecs' fundamental religious beliefs.

Meanwhile, the dilemma facing the Aztecs is played out in the dialogue between the two high priests: Autloc, high priest of Wisdom, and Tlotoxl, high priest of Sacrifice. Gentle, rational Autloc already doubted the efficacy of human sacrifice even before the TARDIS arrived, and he undergoes a profound crisis of conscience as he struggles with whether or not Barbara really is the reincarnation of one of his gods. Eventually, he gives up all his possessions and walks off into the wilderness, presumably to die, seeking spiritual enlightenment. Tlotoxl, on the other hand, is bloodthirsty, crafty and conniving. He probably doesn't really believe sacrifice is a divinely necessary act--the Doctor points out that he's carefully "timing their miracle" to make sure the sacrifice is conducted just a few moments before the first rains fall--but he's determined to preserve it, since it's how he maintains power. Time and again, he manoeuvres others so that his own aims get furthered.

My favourite speech in the whole story belongs to Ian, as the situation is rapidly deteriorating in part three. He chastises Barbara because of how tenaciously she clings to the fact that Autloc agrees with her about the evilness of human sacrifice. She tells herself that there are many more like Autloc, if only she can remove Tlotoxl's misguiding influence. But Ian points out to her that she's got it the wrong way round--it's Autloc who's the exceptional, unusual one, and it's Tlotoxl whose views reflect the feelings of the Aztec population.

In the end, of course, Barbara fails, and Tlotoxl triumphantly carves the heart out of a sacrificial victim to "restore" the sun in the midst of a solar eclipse, while the time travellers escape back into the TARDIS and depart. The Doctor is grimly satisfied that history has been preserved; Barbara regrets the failure of her attempt, but defiant in believing the attempt was still worth waiting. Really, we've not had any answers--neither the Doctor and Ian, nor Barbara, has managed to convince the other side of the correctness of their viewpoint. We don't even know if Barbara's attempt to change history failed because she just didn't manage to succeed this time, or because time in Doctor Who has some mechanism to prevent history from being changed.

That's my favourite way to treat questions like this, to be honest--we've had the questions, we've had the debates, but if we want any conclusions, we'll have to reach them on our own.

What Lisa thought: I'm pretty sure Lisa's favourite part of the story was the romance between the Doctor and Cameca, which she described as "super sweet". It's a charming little love story between a pair who've both been widowed and each find a kindred spirit, and you can see the Doctor's gruff defences drop whenever he's with Cameca. The close of episode four features a beautiful moment, as the Doctor leaves the seal Cameca gave him on the real Yetaxa's sarcophagus just before he enters the TARDIS. Then, rather testily, he turns back, picks up the seal, and goes back into the TARDIS.

The next episode is "The Sensorites".

I

*"Marco Polo" has been lost in its entirety, and "An Unearthly Child" isn't a historical, since it takes place not during history, but prehistory.

Doctor Who: "An Unearthly Child"

But it is ridiculous. Time doesn't go round and round in circles. You can't get off whenever you'd like in the past or future.--Ian Chesterton

Barbara and Ian leave the TARDIS for the first time

"An Unearthly Child", 23 November 1963
"The Cave of Skulls", 30 November 1963
"The Forest of Fear", 7 December 1963
"The Firemaker", 14 December 1963

Written by Anthony Coburn
Directed by Waris Hussein
Script editor: David Whitaker
Produced by Verity Lambert
Associate producer: Mervyn Pinfield

William Hartnell as the Doctor (first appearance)
William Russell as Ian Chesterton (first appearance)
Jacqueline Hill as Barbara Wright (first appearance)
Carole Ann Ford as Susan Foreman (first appearance)

Doctor Who has had many pilot episodes. Arguably, every time a new Doctor takes over, his first story is a pilot episode, relaunching the programme. Those pilots, though, are all about the existing viewership, about convincing old viewers that the new chap is just good as his predecessor and they should stick around.

But less frequently, Doctor Who has to do the more traditional sort of pilot, the one that's about presenting a new show to new viewers. Some of those pilots have been successful, leading to long, healthy runs for the programme; others have been failures. So when someone sits down to write the next first episode of Doctor Who--and as sure as the fact that the curtain will one day fall on the programme's current run is that someone will be bringing it back five or ten or fifteen years later--they have plenty of material to show what works and what doesn't work in a Doctor Who pilot.

And it seems from experience that the best way to go about making such a pilot is to make the story not about the Doctor, but about a normal, modernday person (or in this case, two people) who finds their world suddenly turned upside down by the arrival of the Doctor in their life. It's what "Rose" did in 2005; to a much more limited extent, it's what "Spearhead From Space" did in 1970. It's what the television movie--Doctor Who's biggest failure of a pilot--should have done in 1996, but didn't. And it's what "An Unearthly Child" does for Doctor Who's very first pilot, presenting the programme to the newest viewership of all.

Our viewpoint characters in this instance are Ian and Barbara, a pair of schoolteachers--Ian teaches science; Barbara teaches history. They're concerned about one of their pupils, Susan. Susan is precocious, letting slip hints of an intelligence and a body of learning that aren't just out-of-place for a fifteen-year-old girl, but at times seem out-of-place for anyone in 1963. As Ian puts it, "She lets out her knowledge a little at a time, so as not to embarrass me."

But at the same time, Susan has odd gaps in her knowledge--for instance, she's unaware of how the pound sterling works, believing that British currency has already been decimalised. (In reality, that didn't happen until 1971.)

Ian and Barbara follow her home, and discover that the address she has listed as her own with the school is in fact a junkyard. Inside the junkyard, they meet Susan's grandfather, a cantankerous, obstructive--even malicious--old doctor. They eventually conclude that the doctor is keeping his granddaughter locked up inside a police call box they find oddly secluded at the back of the yard, and over his protests, they force their way past him and inside.

Of course, they find themselves in an impossibly large room--far larger than the police box could possibly contain--centred around a futuristic, octagonal control panel; they have entered the TARDIS, the Doctor's time machine.

The revelation of the TARDIS's interior is beautifully done. I'm sure that in a future story, we'll discuss how British television from the 60s is more closely modelled on a stage play than on a movie (as we expect television to be today). One of the key differences between movies and stage plays is that a movie will do most of its storytelling through pictures, while the stage does most of its storytelling through expository dialogue.

And that's certainly true of Hartnell-era (and, to a lesser extent, Troughton-era) Doctor Who. But not here. The jump cuts from the struggle in the junkyard to the extreme closeup on Barbara's face as she stumbles into the control room to the wide shot of the whole room are a wonderful piece of visual storytelling, complemented by perfect sound editing (most likely because it's not so much sound editing we're dealing with as ambient studio sound). Only Rose's first encounter with the TARDIS in "Rose" compares with it, in terms of dramatising the shock characters must feel on first entering the Doctor's time machine.

The Doctor is convinced that, now that they've discovered the truth, Ian and Barbara will reveal his secret to the outside world. He locks the TARDIS doors and flicks a few switches on the controls, and we have Doctor Who's first cliffhanger--the police box vanishes from the junkyard and reappears on a blasted plain. At first, the plain seems deserted, but then we see the long shadow of a human being, watching them.

All we've really had, through the entire first episode of "An Unearthly Child", is exposition and scene-setting. We've been introduced to the TARDIS, and we've been introduced to the idea of the Doctor and his granddaughter as cosmic exiles. But through casting Ian and Barbara as the main characters, writer Anthony Coburn has turned the episode into a mystery, and all that exposition essentially becomes plot--every time they make a discovery or have something new explained to them by the Doctor and Susan, it is essentially moving the story forward.

And Coburn has also turned the Doctor himself into a mystery, into a decidedly enigmatic figure. Indeed, he's not simply enigmatic here; he's downright sinister. He locks Ian and Barbara inside the TARDIS, and seems to be considering keeping them there indefinitely. He may or may not have boobytrapped the TARDIS console so that when Ian attempts to operate it, he receives an electric shock strong enough to knock him off his feet. He tells Ian and Barbara that he and Susan have been exiled from their own time, and are determined one day to return--but the nature of that exile is an open question. Is it an act of injustice, or of justice? Or maybe they're not actually exiles, but are in fact fugitives--but then, fugitives from what?

I think at times, the importance of a sense of mystery around the Doctor can get overstated. It's not necessary to Doctor Who for the Doctor's character to be swathed in mystery. Throughout Classic Who's golden age in the 1970s, the main character was pretty much devoid of mystery. But it's a great way to introduce the Doctor, to hook the viewer into the show.

The production team in 1963 certainly understood the benefit of making the Doctor as mysterious a figure as possible. The pilot of Doctor Who as transmitted in 1963 was actually the second attempt at taping the same episode; the script and the production had been retooled to fix some problems that had got the first attempt rejected by Sydney Newman, Head of Drama at BBC Television.* One of the most significant changes involved the loss of most of the Doctor's and Susan's backstory. In the original, they're explicitly alien, and from the 49th century. But in the reshoot, all that's been abandoned, replaced only by the Doctor's much more ambiguous statement that he and his granddaughter are from "another time, another world." (One of the edits of the original version is available on the Doctor Who: Beginnings DVD boxset.)

The remaining three episodes are, essentially, a separate story. The TARDIS has landed on prehistoric earth at the dawn of the Ice Age, and soon find themselves caught up in a power struggle for the leadership of a tribe of cavemen. Za, the son of the tribe's late chief, is finding his leadership challenged by Kal, an outsider who has joined the tribe after his own tribe was wiped out by cold. Whichever of the two men can discover the secret of fire will be the next chief.

Kal captures the Doctor after he sees "fire leap from his fingers" (the Doctor striking a match) and takes him to the tribe, with the intent of forcing him to show them the secret of fire; Susan, Ian and Barbara are also captured when they attempt to rescue the Doctor. The four of them escape and are pursued into the woods by Za and his mate, Hur (what a great name for a cavewoman). Just as Za has come upon the group, however, a wild beast appears and gores him.

Our heroes are about to make their getaway, but Hur's anguished screams over Za's crippled body convince Ian and Barbara to stop and attempt to give their erstwhile captor some medical aid. The Doctor is adamant that they should take this opportunity to escape while they can, trying to persuade Susan to come with him back to the TARDIS, leaving Ian and Barbara behind in the Stone Age. But Susan refuses, and reluctantly the Doctor waits while the other three treat the injured caveman.

There's a nice moment when Susan leans over Za to minister to his wounds, but Hur, almost feral with fear for her lover, snarls at her and takes a vicious swipe at her, convinced that Susan is actually trying to displace her as the alpha male's mate. The cavemen spend most of these episodes conversing in twentieth-century Queen's English (with articles and plurals omitted so that we know they're uncivilised tribespeople), but showing Hur react this way under stress is a great way to dramatise that the tribe are actually human beings who are still midway in the transition to primitive civilisation from being, essentially, wild animals.

The Doctor, meanwhile, has gone over into a corner to pout. It's in this scene that he becomes a decidedly dark, sinister figure. Having just been willing to abandon Ian and Barbara in prehistory if it allowed him and his granddaughter to escape, he now displays a willingness to murder Za in order to get the group moving again. Sneakily, he picks up a large rock, but Ian catches him and stops him before he can strike his blow.

That confrontation is part of a running struggle between Ian and the Doctor for dominance in the group--the Doctor has already objected at Ian assuming the leadership of the four of them, and Ian has outright told the Doctor that were it not for the women's presence, he'd have abandoned the Doctor in the woods and headed back to the TARDIS alone. It makes a nice parallel to see the two men in the supposedly civilised group engaging in just as much alpha-male posturing as Za and Kal.

Finally the group decide they cannot remain where they are and must get back to the TARDIS, bringing Za along on a makeshift stretcher. They emerge from the forest, the police box in sight, but find themselves ambushed by the tribe, who have now given their allegiance to Kal.

They're taken back to the tribe's cave, where they're able to engineer Kal's fall from grace and Za's establishment as leader by giving Za--thanks to Barbara, now recovered from his wounds--the secret of fire. But instead of freeing them in gratitude, Za indicates that he intends to hold them prisoner indefinitely.

Once night falls, they're able to escape, thanks to a plot hatched by Susan and Ian. They race through the dark forest, pursued by the tribe, and make it back into the TARDIS, which dematerialises just in time for the cave warriors' spears to hurtle through the empty air where it stood. And it's only now that Ian and Barbara discover that the Doctor cannot in fact steer the TARDIS--he can only pilot from one arbitrary destination to another, but has no way to return the two schoolteachers to their own time.

It's commonly accepted in fandom that the first episode of "An Unearthly Child" is a tantalising classic of science fiction, while the ensuing three episodes are a bog standard (or even bog substandard) early Who adventure. And until now, having already seen the story three or four times, I'd always been inclined to agree.

But over the course of this writeup, I've come to a different conclusion. Elements like Lisa's enjoyment of Hartnell's morally ambiguous Doctor (see below) and the jockeying for primacy between the Doctor and Ian have given me a new appreciation for "An Unearthly Child"--and that has me pretty excited about going on with this rewatch.

What Lisa thought

She really took to William Hartnell's morally ambiguous Doctor: "I like that he's not a kind, altruistic guy. I like that he's selfish." But she really disliked Barbara, finding her melodramatic and prone to hysteria. "I was kind of hoping that when the Doctor picked up that rock, it was Barbara he was going for." I find this interesting not because she dislikes the character, but because her impression is pretty much the opposite of how Barbara's fans describe her. I'll be curious to see how she feels when we get to those stories where Barbara really takes the lead, like "The Aztecs" or "The Romans" or "The Web Planet".

The next story is "The Daleks".

Doctor Who Rewatch Index

*It's the first of many parallels between Doctor Who and Star Trek that both programmes had their initial first episodes rejected by the networks, and had to make a second attempt.