Doctor Who: "The Dalek Invasion of Earth"

The Doctor: Conquer the Earth, you poor pathetic creature? Don't you realise that to conquer the Earth, you would have to destroy every living thing?
Dalek: We are the masters of Earth. We are the masters of Earth. We are the masters of Earth!

A Dalek patrols occupied London

"World's End", 21 November 1964
"The Daleks", 28 November 1964
"Day of Reckoning", 5 December 1964
"The End of Tomorrow", 12 December 1964
"The Waking Ally", 19 December 1964
"Flashpoint", 26 December 1964

Written by Terry Nation
Directed by Richard Martin
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 (last regular appearance)

Ian and Barbara are initially elated when the TARDIS arrives in London, under a bridge on the south bank of the Thames. Susan is so excited that she scales a pile of debris to get a better look at the city. But the debris isn't as stable as it looks, and being disturbed causes a small avalanche. This results in two problems: first, Susan has twisted her ankle badly, and worse, the TARDIS is now blocked behind a large iron spar, far too heavy for the TARDIS team to move on their own.

And the Doctor has noticed something is wrong: London seems deserted. Not just deserted--entirely devoid of life. They can't even hear birdsong. And under the bridge, a large sign is posted: IT IS FORBIDDEN TO DUMP BODIES IN THE RIVER.

Ian and the Doctor head into an abandoned warehouse to see if they can find an acetylene torch to cut the iron spar, while Barbara remains behind to tend to Susan. Inside the warehouse, they find an old desk calendar, printed for the year 2164, and they find a dead human body, hidden in a crate. The dead man is wearing some sort of elaborate, futuristic headgear with a radio built into.

("But Doctor," Ian gasps, "you mean these people have invented some form of--personal communication?")

From a factory window, the Doctor and Ian see a massive flying saucer make its way over London, then set down somewhere in the vicinity of the Chelsea heliport. They decide it's time to leave, and head back to the TARDIS. But Susan and Barbara aren't there anymore.

They've gone because a man arrived, David, who expressed dismay that the two women were out in the open and demanded they come with him. He leads them across the ruins of London in a brilliantly atmospheric film sequence, which I've already lauded in my earlier review of this story.

But meanwhile, back at the TARDIS, the Doctor and Ian find their companions missing, and they've been replaced by four men in the same headgear as the corpse at the warehouse was wearing. And it's more than just a personal radio--the weird metal helmets are also brain control devices, turning the men who wear them into human robots ("Robomen"). The Doctor and Ian make a break for it, attempting to escape from the Robomen, but they're headed off by the creature that's controlling them: a Dalek.

The Earth has been occupied by a Dalek invasion force, and now Ian and the Doctor are Dalek prisoners. A full year after the programme's debut, and in a time when it was exceedingly rare for TV episodes ever to be seen again after their first viewing, this is the first time that Doctor Who has returned a villain, and for a few minutes some hay is made from the novelty of the experience, with Ian being horrified to hear the Daleks' voices again, and the Doctor explaining that, while their previous meeting occurred in the species's twilight days in the far future, the twenty-second century is the Daleks' Golden Age, when they have an interstellar empire.

David has now led Susan and Barbara to their destination: an underground hideout, used as the base for a cell of the human resistance movement against the Dalek occupation. We meet other resistance fighters: Tyler, the morose, fatalistic leader of the cell; Dortmun, the resistance's scientific genius, bound to a wheelchair; and Jenny, the brusque young woman who's in charge of the cell's organisation and administration.

The Doctor and Ian are imprisoned aboard the Dalek saucer that they saw landing from the warehouse window. There, they're told the history of the Dalek invasion by their cellmate, at the same time as Barbara and Susan learn it from the resistance members: first, about ten years ago, came a wave of asteroid impacts, followed by a horrible plague. These two combined to wipe out much of the Earth's population, particularly in Asia, Africa and South America. The few communities that remained were too small and isolated to resist the Daleks when they arrived. The Daleks enforce their rule by enslaving the Robomen, who only last for a limited time before the Daleks' mental control drives them insane and they kill themselves.

Tyler's resistance cell mounts an attack on the Dalek saucer, using a new hand grenade that Dortmun promises will penetrate the Daleks' casing, made of an extraterrestrial named dalekenium. But Dortmun is wrong; the bomb has no effect, and the resistance cell is mostly wiped out. Before that happens, though, they manage to get aboard the saucer and free a number of the prisoners held there, including the Doctor. As soon as the attack is repulsed, the saucer takes off. Ian is still aboard, but he's not a prisoner--he's hidden, Star Wars-style, in a secret compartment under the deck, with a fellow escaped prisoner, Larry.

After the failure of the attack, our heroes have been sorted into three groups, in which they'll remain for the duration of the story. There's Ian and Larry aboard the saucer. There's Barbara, Jenny and Dortmun, who have remained at the resistance headquarters and decide, when they hear of the attack's failure, to attempt to travel to another resistance rendezvous point in the North. And there's Susan and the Doctor, reunited when the Doctor was rescued from the saucer, who are accompanied by David and Tyler, the resistance fighters. Holed up in a makeshift hiding place, they listen to the sounds of the Daleks exterminating what resistance remains in the streets of London.

From David and Susan, the Doctor learns that the Daleks have turned the whole of Bedfordshire into a gigantic mining area, and he surmises that this facility must be the focus of their activities on Earth. He therefore decides that the four of them will strike out toward Bedford to investigate it. He can also see that some sort of connection is forming between Susan and David. The Doctor himself takes a liking to David when the young man, rather than attempting to take charge of the group, instead defers to the Doctor as the "senior member of the party".

Barbara, Jenny and Dortmun make their way across London, avoiding Dalek patrols. It's to this sequence that the famous images of the Daleks trundling across Westminster Bridge and standing guard in Trafalgar Square belong. When the three of them stop to rest and resupply at the Civic Transport Museum, Dortmun gives his life to save the two women. He rolls to a stop in front of a pair of Daleks and clambers awkwardly up out of his wheelchair, so that he can die on his feet.

With the distraction Dortmun has provided, Barbara and Jenny take a lorry from the Transport Museum's collection and are able to escape the Daleks into the countryside. They stop for the night, seeking shelter with a pair of haggard women in a creepy country cottage near the Bedfordshire mine. But the women turn out to be informants for the Daleks, enjoying their freedom in exchange for turning in runaways from the mining camp. Soon a Dalek arrives and arrests Barbara and Jenny, and they find themselves pressed into the mine's slave labour force.

The saucer carrying Ian and Larry also heads to the mine. Ian and Larry sneak off, and are saved from being captured by the camp foreman, who takes them with him to a meeting with a black marketeer who sneaks into the camp periodically to sell the foreman food for the workers. The black marketeer is a cynical, calculating individual (his line, "You're not one of these 'brotherhood of man' types, are you?" with his lip curled in disgust at Ian, takes on a whole knew meaning once one is familiar with Brotherhood of Man), but he nevertheless agrees to take Ian out of the camp and back to London.

Before he can do so, though, he's eaten by the Slither, a hissing, shambling monster that roams the camp at night, a pet of the Black Dalek, the camp commandant (and apparently the senior Dalek of the occupation force). To escape the Slither, Ian and Larry head into the mine's tunnels, where they're confronted by a Roboman, whom Larry recognises as his brother, Phil. When his attempts to make Phil remember who he is fail, he strangles him, and the two of them die together, with Phil shooting Larry.

Barbara and Jenny have gained access to the Daleks' control room by claiming to have knowledge of an imminent revolt. There, they learn the purpose of the mine: the Daleks are drilling to the centre of the Earth. They then plan to drop a bomb into the Earth's magnetic core, hollowing it out so that they can replace it with a propulsion device.

Now the Daleks are ready to drop their bomb down the completed mineshaft and detonate it. They start the countdown and depart, leaving Barbara and Jenny to die in the blast. Unbeknownst to them, however, Ian has come upon the bomb shaft in the mine tunnels, and he's blocked it. The bomb will still go off, but it will do so up here at the mine, having no effect on the Earth's core.

Barbara and Jenny are rescued by the Doctor, Susan, David and Tyler, who have arrived at the mine and mounted an assault. In the Dalek control room, Barbara identifies the microphone from which the Daleks give the Robomen their orders, and she and the Doctor give them one final command: "Turn on the Daleks. Destroy them. This order cannot be countermanded."

The Robomen and the people of Earth turn on the Daleks, and the occupation ends. (Presumably, all the Robomen still suffer horrible deaths of painful, insanity-driven suicide.) The Doctor leads the people at the camp to safety--apparently, a bomb that's big enough to hollow out the Earth's magnetic core can be safely evaded by moving a few hundred yards away to a cliff.

Everyone heads back to London, where the TARDIS is soon unearthed, and the team prepare to make their goodbyes. Susan's shoe has completely worn through at the sole, and despite her protestations that she has dozens of other pairs in the TARDIS, the Doctor insists on taking it into the TARDIS to mend it.

When Barbara and Ian have also entered the TARDIS, David approaches Susan before she can join them. He asks her to stay and marry him, offering her that which she herself admits she's never known: one place, one time. She's reduced to tears. She admits she loves him, but refuses to stay--her grandfather needs her.

Just then, the TARDIS door slams shut, locking her out. Inside, the Doctor has been listening to all of it, and he has realised that she will never leave him of her own volition. So, seeing what's best for her, he has humanely chosen to maroon her on a planet desolated by war, without even an entire pair of shoes on her feet, and announces over the TARDIS's public address tannoy how much he loves her and admires the woman she's become, and promises one day to return.

(Seriously, it's a really moving scene, as we see the Doctor what's undoubtedly his hardest good bye, emotionally, in the programme's history; the impact on the Doctor of a companion's departure gets dwelt upon more here than it will for anyone else up until the death of Adric in 1982. But when you really break it down like this into describing what actually happens, there are ... implications.)

The TARDIS dematerialises, and Susan and David walk away, hand in hand. Susan leaves behind her TARDIS key, its chain draped across the rubble where the blue box stood.

What Lisa thought: She cried. Susan's good bye scene made her cry. She tried to brush this off by claiming she was crying because it wasn't Barbara who was leaving.

I'm on record that I think this is the First Doctor's best story, and one of the three best Dalek stories the programme has ever managed. Both those mentions sum up the ways that I think the story beautifully captures the atmosphere of a Britain under authoritarian alien occupation.

The next story is "The Rescue".

I

Doctor Who: "Planet of Giants"

"Planet of Giants" directed by Mervyn Pinfield, 31 October 1964
"Dangerous Journey" directed by Mervyn Pinfield, 7 November 1964
"Crisis" directed by Douglas Camfield, 14 November 1964

Barbara is menaced by a normal-sized housefly

Written by Louis Marks
Script editor: David Whitaker
Produced by Verity Lambert

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

As the TARDIS is landing, its doors suddenly open before materialisation has finished. They close again, and whatever the fault was appears to have fixed itself, but the Doctor is nonetheless flustered. Something serious must have gone wrong for the doors to open in mid-flight, and he's worried what sort of further repercussion it might have that hasn't manifested itself yet.

At any rate, the TARDIS has now materialised fully, so the crew head outside. They're at the base of a massive, vertical rock face, but weirdly, the rock sits on a bed of cement as tall as a man. Who could have been so worried about such a massive rock formation being moved that they've wedged it in place with six solid feet of cement?

They split up to explore. The Doctor and Barbara come upon what appears to be a massive earthworm, half a man's height and so long that it stretches out of camera view, but it's dead. Susan and Ian, meanwhile, happen upon a giant ant standing guard over a mound of giant eggs, but the ant, too, is dead. Then they come across a fifteen-foot-high bottle of night scented stock and a mammoth matchbox, lying partially open. Susan has concluded that they've been shrunk to about one inch in height, but Ian scoffs at this, insisting that they must have just materialised in a museum exhibition or something like that.

Evidence seems to fall pretty firmly on Susan's side, though, when the ground quakes at the approaching footsteps of an impossibly huge giant of a man. Susan and Ian both scramble into hiding places, but Ian's chosen hiding place is inside the matchbox. The giant has arrived to collect the matchbox; he closes it, with Ian inside, and carries it away.

The TARDIS has in fact materialised at the bottom of a garden path--in fact, it's a garden path in contemporary England, so the Doctor has in fact succeeded in getting Ian and Barbara back to their own time and place, though not in a form that's useful to them. The giant, whose name is Farrow, heads up to the top of the path, where he sits outside his house, enjoying the warm summer day. Before long, a second man arrives, a businessman named Forester. Forester is developing a new pesticide, named DN6, and Farrow is a government inspector who's been testing DN6 for viability.

Farrow reluctantly informs his visitor that's he going to have to put a stop to development of DN6, as it's too lethal--not only does it kill pests, but it kills everything it comes in contact with, including insects that are necessary to the continued functioning of our ecosystems. And it accumulates, never washing out of the soil, so eventually, people who eat foods that have been treated with DN6 will accumulate enough of it in their bloodstreams that they'll start dying too.

Forester is visibly upset to learn that a project into which he's sunk his entire fortune is about to be killed, but he seems to accept it, and asks Farrow what happens next. The government inspector's answer reveals that he has what is probably the most profound case of genre blindness ever found on British television.

Nothing's going to happen straight away, Farrow says, because his two-week holiday began yesterday. He's already written his report, but he won't be turning it in until after he gets back from a fortnight spent aboard his boat, exploring the coastal waterways of France.

(In other words, he's about to embark on a holiday where he won't be missed for two weeks, and where it's totally reasonable for him to be killed in some sort of accident that will leave no body, just an overturned boat bobbing somewhere in the Bay of Biscay.)

(And considering how upset Forester is at the failure of DN6, why is Farrow boring him with such details of his holiday? I mean, he presumably isn't intentionally pointing out how easy he'd be to murder right now, so why doesn't he just say, "Well, I'm on my holidays for the next fortnight," rather than dangling it in the other man's face how carefree he's going to be for the next two weeks while Forester deals with the fact that his career is over?)

(And, especially considering he's already written his report, isn't "turning in the hugely important report on what could be a revolutionary new tool in feeding the world" the sort of thing one takes care of the day before leaving for two weeks' holiday, rather than the day after returning?)

So, yeah. Forester takes out a gun and shoots Farrow dead.

The Doctor, Susan and Barbara hear the gunshot as a tremendous explosion coming from the top of the path, so they head that way. There they find Ian, unharmed, but along the way they've noted that every piece of wildlife they've come across in the garden is dead.

Forester calls an associate, Smithers, to help him cleaning up Farrow's body. Smithers is the chief scientist behind the development of DN6. Forester tells him that Farrow planned to steal the formula for DN6 and take credit for it himself, that the gun was Farrow's, and that it went off as the two men struggled with each other. Smithers instantly sees through the story about Farrow being killed accidentally, but he's willing to accept the broader theme--that Farrow was planning on stealing DN6--because he's so excited about the possibilities of DN6 ending world hunger. He agrees to help Forester clean up evidence of the murder and hide the body.

As part of their cleanup, one of them picks up Farrow's briefcase and carries it inside, setting it on a countertop in Farrow's lab. This once again separates the TARDIS team, since Ian and Barbara have for some reason disappeared inside the briefcase. (Get your minds out the gutter.)

When Ian and Barbara emerge from the briefcase, they find themselves next to a small (five feet high, to them) pile of corn, coated in some thick, sticky substance. When Barbara, unbeknownst to Ian, touches this filmy covering, she finds she can't get it off her hands. A few moments later, a giant housefly lands on the corn and dies instantly because the sticky substance is, of course, DN6.

Barbara's reaction to this is just as great a display of unjustified stupidity as Farrow's was in episode one--in fact, it's probably a greater display, since Barbara sustains her stupidity for almost two full episodes: she absolutely refuses to tell anyone that she's come into contact with DN6. Even when it's become certain that she's been contaminated with pesticide. Even when during the repeated instances when the team will be discussing how dangerous the pesticide is, and then someone will say, "Yes, but the immediate problem is how to get ourselves back to the TARDIS and returned to normal size," and Barbara will respond with shrill hysteria at the change of subject. Even as Barbara grows sicker and weaker and nearer to death. She refuses to give her friends the most important piece of information they need to help her, and she apparently does so for no other reason than to build dramatic suspense.

Anyway.

The Doctor and Susan gain entry to the lab by climbing up a drainpipe into the sink, and there our four heroes are reunited. As they explore the lab, the Doctor finds Farrow's notes, on which are written the formula for DN6, and he deduces that they've stumbled into the testing stages of an extremely lethal pesticide.

They decide they need to do something about the danger the pesticide poses, so they lift a phone off its receiver by wedging a pair of corks underneath it. This connects them to the village switchboard operator, but they're unable to make themselves understood to her because their shrunken vocal cords mean their voices are pitched too high for normal-sized humans to understand. So instead they turn on a Bunsen burner and position an aerosol can in front of it, hoping that it will explode and set the lab on fire.

Meanwhile, Smithers has come across Farrow's notes in the lab, and he realises the real reason Forester murdered Farrow. Seeing his plan unravel, Forester draws his gun on Smithers, but before he can take action, the aerosol can explodes, blinding him. It's at that moment that the village constable arrives--the village switchboard is also the village constabulary, and when strange calls from Farrow's house arranged the switchboard operator's suspicions, she sent the village constable (her husband) round to check up on Mr. Farrow. The constable arrests both men.

(If the idea of the village switchboard and the village constabulary being in the same room seems too trite and cliche, bear in mind that in the village where my dad grew up, the village post office was my grandparents' living room.)

By now, the team have escaped back down the garden to the TARDIS, though Barbara is near death and finally explains what her problem is. But as soon as they're back inside and dematerialised, the Doctor is able to restore everyone to their normal size. This reduces the contamination in Barbara's bloodstream to a minimal amount, and she recovers instantly.

What Lisa thought: We both really liked this one. The Farrow-Forester-Smithers plot had a very period feel to it--it was more distinctively 1960s than any other black and white Who I can think of; the fact that the guest characters had no interaction with the regular cast gave it a feel like a 60s anthology show--The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits. The fact that the guest plot had absolutely no science fiction elements was also a good choice; the whole thing was a very atmospheric change of pace.

The next story is "The Dalek Invasion of Earth"

I

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 Sensorites"

"Strangers in Space" directed by Mervyn Pinfield, 20 June 1964
"The Unwilling Warriors" directed by Mervyn Pinfield, 27 June 1964
"Hidden Danger" directed by Mervyn Pinfield, 11 July 1964
"A Race Against Death" directed by Mervyn Pinfield, 18 July 1964
"Kidnap" directed by Frank Cox, 25 July 1964
"A Desperate Venture" directed by Frank Cox, 1 August 1964

Written by Peter R. Newman
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

The TARDIS materialises aboard a spaceship that at first appears lifeless. In its control room, they find two crew members--a man and a woman--who at first appear dead.

But they're not dead, and after a few moments they wake up. They're terrified at the arrival of more humans, insisting that the TARDIS crew must leave right away. It's not themselves they're terrified for--it's our heroes. With some effort, the TARDIS team manage to drag the story out of them: their spaceship is in the vicinity of the Sense Sphere, home planet of a race of telepaths called the Sensorites.

The Sensorites have used their mental abilities to trap the ship there, playing games with them: making them hallucinate, preventing them from ever setting a course for home, that sort of thing. They've never actually seen the Sensorites; whenever the aliens decide to make a trip to the spaceship, they first send the crew into a deep trance--they were just recovering from such a trance when the TARDIS crew happened upon them.

It's then that the Doctor makes a discovery: the Sensorites have removed the TARDIS's lock, making it impossible to open the door. Our heroes are now just as trapped as the spaceship crew.

(Out of curiosity, what happens if a TARDIS has a working chameleon circuit and adopts a form that doesn't have a lock on it?)

Barbara and Susan need a glass of water, so Carol, the female crew member, directs them over to a far corner of the control room. They follow her directions and somehow walk right past a sign marked WATER in large letters, instead heading through a doorway into a darkened corridor. The door closes behind them and, unnoticed by them, a human hand reaches into frame and locks it.

This has escaped the attention of the Doctor, Ian and the two crew members still on the bridge, because all of a sudden, the spaceship is hurtling toward a crash on the Sense Sphere's surface. All it would take to avoid it would be for Maitland, the male crew member, to pull back on his controls, but he's been so conditioned by the Sensorites' psychological warfare that he just sits there, terrified. At last it's Ian who reaches across and pulls them out of their dive. The Doctor theorises that the Sensorites wouldn't have let them crash, anyway; their goal seemed to be more to terrify the humans than to destroy them.

As he's talking, though, Carol and Maitland fall into another deep trance, and he and Ian realise that the Sensorites are approaching and are about to board.

Two Sensorites land in the ship's shuttle bay. They have blank, wizened faces, covered in wisps of white hair. Their eyes are narrow, dark slits, and they have no visible mouths or noses. (The no-mouth thing, I think, is an accident of their being covered up by the white facial hair, because their mouths can clearly be seen moving through the wispy hair whenever a Sensorite is shown in closeup while talking. Whatever. It's a neat effect. I'm keeping it.) Face to face, they communicate by speech, but they also carry silver disc medallions that they can hold to their forehead and communicate with each other telepathically over interplanetary distances.

Up on the bridge, Susan and Barbara's absence has finally been noticed. Carol and Maitland become frantic when they realise the two women have entered the bowels of the ship: that means they're trapped with John, the third member of the crew. John, they tell the Doctor and Ian, has suffered more from the Sensorites' conditioning than they themselves have. He's become totally the Sensorites' tool, and that experience has driven him insane.

Cut to Barbara and Susan, who by now have realised that they're locked inside the darkened chambers that they've stumbled into. They turn and find John approaching them menacingly. But rather than attack them, he collapses at their feet and sobs. Barbara and Susan comfort him. He seems to be in constant communication with the Sensorites, who are telling him to harm the newcomers, but he defiantly refuses.

The others finally manage to get the door open. John gets put to bed, and Barbara and Ian go to find the Sensorites. They find them, and Ian waves a hammer menacingly at them. Neither Ian nor the Sensorites attack, but the aliens advance on him menacingly, and slowly he backs up. In this manner they force him all the way back to the bridge, where the crew take refuge, slamming the door on the Sensorites and locking them in the corridor outside.

The Doctor, meanwhile, has found why the crew are being held against their will in orbit of the Sense Sphere. John, the ship's mineralogist, had discovered that the Sense Sphere is tremendously rich in molybdenum. The Sensorites must have sensed his discovery and that and wished to prevent the spread of that knowledge.

While the Doctor and Ian are discussing this, Susan suddenly starts holding a conversation with thin air. She's communicating telepathically with the Sensorites--proximity to the Sense Sphere has unlocked some sort of latent telepathic capability for her. Without consulting the Doctor, she agrees to accompany the Sensorites back to their planet, in exchange for which the others won't be harmed.

The Doctor, of course, refuses to abide by such an agreement. If Susan is to go to the planet, then he insists that he and Ian accompany her. Carol and John also go, with the Sensorites promising to reverse the damage they've done to John's mind. Maitland and Barbara remain on the ship so that Jacqueline Hill can get two weeks' holiday.

Once they make it down to the planet, the whole tone of the serial changes. The Sensorites are an open, peace-loving society. But they're dying, from a disease that they can't identify. Their working theory is that it's some sort of poisoning from a second Earth ship. That ship had been the first to visit their planet. When its crew discovered the molybdenum, they took off so hurriedly that their ship exploded, but not before the Sensorites saw the images in the crew's minds--of a fleet of spaceships returning to plunder their world. So they knew that when the second ship came within the vicinity of their planet, they could not allow it to leave again.

When Ian falls ill too, the Doctor is able pretty quickly to identify it as atropine poisoning, delivered through the city's water supply. The Sensorites are sceptical; they've already tested the water and found nothing wrong with it. But the Doctor realises that whoever is poisoning the water is making sure to shift the poison between each of the ten different pipelines that take water into the city, so that if you only sample from one pipeline, you've got a ninety per cent chance of taking a clean sample. He therefore has all ten pipes tested simultaneously, and one of them tests positive for atropine.

(Why didn't the Sensorites think of this themselves? Well, Ian falls sick within two minutes of drinking a glass of water, so it's probably the same reason it never occurred to the Sensorites to test the water people were drinking every time they fell sick.)

The Doctor's efforts to combat the poison and develop an antidote are complicated by a conspiracy amongst the Sensorites. A junior official, the City Administrator, is convinced that the Doctor and his friends are in on the plot to poison the population and are in fact planning to wipe the Sensorites out, so he diverts the Doctor's antidote from ever reaching Ian.

(How it is that the Sensorites can tell exactly what possibilities the discovery of molybdenum awakes in one crew of humans, but can't read in another that their efforts to cure the poison are genuine, is never explained.)

As part of their plot, the City Administrator and his minion kidnap the Second Elder, one of the Sensorites' two supreme leaders, and then the City Administrator masquerades as the Second Elder to Susan. He can pull this off because, as Carol observes, all the Sensorites look identical to the humans; they can only tell them about by the different patterns of black stripes they wear on their clothes to indicate their ranks. This is either a profoundly unaware view of native peoples from a writer who must still, in 1964, have yet to have had the "post" added to "post-colonial", or an amusing parody of such a view, or a delightfully post-modern comment on the limitations of television makeup. Let's be charitable and assume it's the latter two, even though I doubt that's the case.

The City Administrator is, of course, eventually found out, and Ian and the rest of the Sensorites are cured. The TARDIS team travel into the caverns beneath the city, where the water pipelines are located, and find the source of the poisoning: three survivors from that first human ship that visited the Sense Sphere and crashed, ten years ago. They've gone insane, and they believe they're waging a war against the Sensorites. The Doctor is able to lure them up into the light, and the Sensorites apprehend them. The Doctor, Ian and Susan are reunited with Barbara, and the crew depart in the TARDIS.

What Lisa thought: There's a lot of interesting sciency stuff in "The Sensorites", starting with the molybdenum and the atropine poisoning. You can see the programme still being fully in touch with its roots as an educational vehicle for pre-teen children. One touch I really like is the Sensorites' sensitivity to light. The Doctor notices that their pupils dilate in light and contract in darkness, so in the early episodes, he's able to use that as a weapon against them: he lowers the lighting aboard the spaceship, and the Sensorites are rendered effectively blind in what is for the humans only an uncomfortable dimness.

But really "The Sensorites" revolves around that transition in the opening minutes of episode three, when the Doctor, Ian and Susan head down to the Sense Sphere and everything about the Sensorites and the story's tone changes. Lisa had found the opening two episodes fairly tiresome, but she really liked the four planet-side episodes, which dabbled in medical mysteries and global politics.

I, on the other hand, thought the last four episodes were fairly passé, by the numbers stuff. The opening two episodes, though, I had thought were brilliant--genuinely creepy, disquieting science fiction, as we were locked inside this claustrophobic ship and psychologically tortured by unseen aliens for their own amusement. Watching it was for me an experience very like the first time one reads Harlan Ellison's 1967 short story "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream".

The next story is "The Reign of Terror".

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: "The Keys of Marinus"

And all our knowledge culminated in the manufacture of this. At the time, it was called the Conscience of Marinus--Marinus, that is the name of our planet. At first this machine was simply a judge and jury that was never wrong and unfair, and then we added to it and improved on it, made it more and more sophisticated, so that finally it became possible to radiate its power and influence the minds of men throughout the planet. They no longer had to decide what was wrong or right. The machine decided for them.--Arbitan

The Voord leader, Yartek, interrogates Sabetha

"The Sea of Death", 11 April 1964
"The Velvet Web", 18 April 1964
"The Screaming Jungle", 25 April 1964
"The Snows of Terror", 2 May 1964
"Sentence of Death", 9 May 1964
"The Keys of Marinus", 16 May 1964

Written by Terry Nation
Directed by John Gorrie
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

The TARDIS lands on an island in the midst of a sea that's totally calm--not even a ripple disturbs its surface--bordered by a beach where the sand is actually glass. But just before Susan is about to go splashing into its waters, Ian makes a discovery: it's not a sea of water, but of vicious acid.

(Ian realises it's acid because, when Susan removes her shoes to go for a dip, she drops them in a tidal pool, and it instantly eats their leather away. Susan then has to return to the TARDIS so she can get a new pair of shoes. A moment later, the Doctor happens upon Ian, who explains about the acid. Seeing Ian's bare feet, the Doctor berates him, telling him that if he'd remembered to wear shoes, he could have given them to Susan when she went back to the TARDIS. Ian's face splits into a wide grin at this, but it's genuinely difficult to tell if it's Ian Chesterton who's smiling, or if it's William Russell unable to stop himself at breaking character.)

On the beach, the TARDIS team find four glass submarines, each large enough to carry a single occupant. Three have been abandoned after arrival, but one remains sealed. Opening it, they find a full-body black wetsuit with some sinister looking headgear. They realise that as the submarine passed through the sea, a tiny crack in its hull allowed it to fill with acid, dissolving its poor occupant, the wearer of the wetsuit.

The landscape is dominated by a massive pyramid with no discernible entrance; the group inadvisably split up to explore its base. One by one, they find themselves trapped inside the pyramid through hidden, boobytrapped entrances. Once inside, they wander through a warren of indistinguishable passages with no discernible exit. Also wandering around are the occupants of the other three glass submarines, in their black masks and wetsuits, and they're pretty sinister--one of them sneaks up behind Susan and attempts to abduct her, but he's stopped by the intervention of a mysterious, hooded figure. After disposing of the bad guy, the figure wanders off. A few minutes later, he himself is attacked by one of the masked intruders, but he's saved by Ian--at this point, the figure decides to trust the TARDIS team. He assembles them together and brings them to pyramid's central control room.

His name is Arbitan, and he is the last of the guardians of his island. From this pyramid, a vast computer called the Conscience of Marinus had for centuries guided the minds of the planet's inhabitants, swaying them away from any evil thoughts or impulses. But then a man named Yartek figured out a way to evade its control. Leading a people called the Voord--the black-suited figures invading the corrdiors are Voords--he set out to gain control of the Conscience of Marinus, so that he could use it to control the whole planet. Arbitan has taken the Conscience offline and upgraded it, so that it will now be able to control Yartek once again, but before he restarts it, he must gather the Conscience's five keys--the Keys of Marinus, distributed in secret hiding spaces all around the planet. One by one, he has sent his acolytes off to retrieve the keys--even, eventually, sending his own daughter--but none have returned, which is why he is now alone in the control tower.

(There are six episodes in "The Keys of Marinus", and there are five keys. If you can't figure out, just from that, how the whole rest of the story is going to go, I don't know if I can be of any help to you.)

Arbitan therefore enlists the aid of the TARDIS team to set out across the planet and retrieve the keys for him. They're enlisted unwillingly; after at first refusing, they discover Arbitan has placed a forcefield around the TARDIS to prevent them leaving. The forcefield is invisible, and provides William Russell and Carole Ann Ford in particular an opportunity to show off the mime acting skills they learnt at drama school as they make their way all around the TARDIS, establishing the force field's shape. Unable to leave without Arbitan's cooperation, they of course agree to gather the remaining four keys (Arbitan has one with him already at the pyramid) and depart.

And so for the episode's middle four episodes, we get one new locale and new plot per week. They're all fairly straightforward, SFish scenarios. There's a city of great opulence, where everyone's every wish is granted, only for Barbara to realise that they're actually under hypnosis--their surroundings are in fact grubby and disgusting, and the city's population are being used as slave workers by the strange creatures who control them. Of course, she can't defeat the creatures without first having to fight Ian, Barbara and the Doctor, who are still hypnotised. In the next episode, the team enter a region where it is plant life, rather than animal, that holds the dominant evolutionary position--the vines grow and writhe, wrapping themselves around people's limbs and tearing them apart. Another key is held in a solid block of ice deep in a cave, but melting the block of ice also means thawing the four clockwork warriors who stand guard over it, with the mission of killing anyone who tries to steal the key. And in the final location, Ian finds himself on trial for murder, and the Doctor, as his advocate, must navigate an alien legal system based on the supposition of guilty until proven innocent, while trying to figure out who it is that has stolen the final key and framed Ian for murder.

In their first stop, two of the people that Barbara frees from hypnosis turn out to be followers of Arbitan--a young man named Altos, Arbitan's acolyte, and Arbitan's daughter Sabetha. Katherine Schofield, who plays Sabetha, has a breathtaking aristocratic beauty, though her IMDB page informs me she didn't really have anything more than bit parts and occasional guest roles in the 1960s and 1970s. (I do note that she appears in Nicholas and Alexandra, the movie for which Tom Baker was most famous prior to his casting as the fourth Doctor.) Altos and Sabetha join the Tardis team and accompany them through the story's remaining four episodes.

Eventually, all the keys in hand, the crew return to Arbitan's island. But Arbitan has been murdered, and Yartek of the Voords is now in command; he has imprisoned Altos and Sabetha and taken from them all but one key--Ian is carrying the last key. There's a lovely touch, in that Yartek has clothed himself in Aribitan's monkly robes. (That the production team no doubt dressed him like this purely to enable him to impersonate Arbitan when Ian and Susan approach him doesn't lesson that it's still a wonderful character-revealing moment.) Masquerading as Arbitan, Yartek is able to trick Ian into giving him the last key, but when Ian is then taken to the same prison cell as the rest of the TARDIS team, he reveals the truth--the key he gave Yartek was a fake, which they had picked up at one of the stops on their travels. When Yartek attempts to insert it into the Conscience of Marinus, it will cause the machine--and the whole pyramid--to explode.

And so it does, destroying the Conscience and killing Yartek and all his Voords. The TARDIS team and Altos and Sabetha are the only survivors. Altos and Sabetha have by now fallen in love, so they depart to start a new life together. And the Doctor, satisfied that from now on, the inhabitants of Marinus will have to make their own determinations of right and wrong, leads Ian, Barbara and Susan back into the TARDIS.

What Lisa thought: "The Keys of Marinus" isn't really an exceptional story, but I think we both felt it kept us entertained through its six episodes. Lisa did get annoyed that the Conscience of Marinus was destroyed in part six, since that essentially meant that the five episodes spent gathering the keys beforehand were, in fact, wasted time.

The next story is "The Aztecs".

I

Index of Doctor Who rewatch posts

Doctor Who: "The Edge of Destruction"

Barbara: Do you think something could have got into the ship? The doors were open.
Ian (laughing): What do you mean? An animal or a man or something?
Barbara: Yes. Or ... another intelligence.

"The Edge of Destruction" directed by Richard Martin, 8 February 1964
"The Brink of Disaster" directed by Frank Cox, 15 February 1964

Susan confronts Ian with the scissors

Written by David Whitaker
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

I don't really remember "The Edge of Destruction" as anything special. I think experience shows us that it's much more difficult to put a strong Doctor Who story in 45 minutes than in ninety--particularly during the classic series. But watching again, it's wonderfully, effectively creepy.

As the TARDIS is departing Skaro, a sudden disturbance knocks everyone aboard unconscious. Slowly, they start to recover--Barbara first, then Susan, then Ian. But they're confused; at first, they don't recognise each other. The Doctor has cut his head as he fell and remains unconscious. Susan goes into a back room to cut him a bandage that looks disconcertingly like a ribbon of condom wrappers.

There's something odd going on in the TARDIS. Ian sees that the doors have opened, but whenever he walks toward them, they close; when he steps back, they open again. The impossibility of the doors opening in flight drives Susan to a fit of hysterics. Finally the Doctor comes to, but not before Susan, adjusting controls on the control console, cries out in pain and faints.

While Barbara tends to the Doctor, Ian carries Susan to bed. She wakes, and she's changed--guarded, paranoid. She threatens Ian with a pair of scissors. He attempts to talk her down, but she cannot stop herself from stabbing at him--at the last instant, she manages to shift her aim, instead slicing into the mattress.

Barbara is now convinced that something entered the TARDIS when the doors opened--if not a man or animal, then "an intelligence"; Ian and the Doctor laugh at her concerns. While the two men try to locate a technical fault in the TARDIS's workings, Barbara visits Susan, who has taken to her bed after Ian disarmed her of the scissors. But she's snuck back out and retrieved them, keeping them clutched in her hands as she and Barbara talk. Susan suggests that the intelligence Barbara is scared of might have taken up residence in one of the TARDIS crew. And indeed, Susan herself is very much coming across as if she's under alien possession--a hawkish, predatory stare; a quiet menace in her voice.

Susan's paranoia seems to have spread to the Doctor. He accuses Ian and Barbara of engineering the crisis, of knocking he and Susan out from behind and tampering with the TARDIS console. But his accusations come suddenly to a halt when Barbara makes a terrifying discovery: the TARDIS's clock has physically melted, like The Persistence of Memory. The crew's wristwatches have also melted.

In an effort to restore calm, the Doctor passes out a cup of tea to each of his companions; no one drinks. Some time later, after everyone else has fallen asleep, the Doctor is working at the TARDIS's controls when Ian attempts to strangle him. The Doctor knocks him to the ground, stunning him.

When Ian comes out of his daze, he claims he was only trying to protect the Doctor by knocking him away from the control console, as both the Doctor and Susan had previously found that trying to operate the controls had caused them to pass out. The Doctor, though, is having none of it, and, despite Susan's entreaties for mercy, determines to put Ian and Barbara off the ship permanently--even if the TARDIS doors open to reveal uninhabitable surroundings.

Everyone is thoroughly unhinged by now. Ian, after protesting his innocence, actually sneaks up behind Barbara and attempts to strangle her. But before a final climax can be reached, the fault locator--which up until had stubbornly refused to respond--suddenly goes off, and now it's indicating that everything in the TARDIS is faulty. The fault locator's alarm keeps going off steadily every fifteen seconds.

The Doctor acts like this is a major brainstorm, giving him the information he needs to fix the problem, and excitedly he tells Susan and Barbara to wait at the door; if it opens, they are to tell him exactly what they see outside. But as soon as they're out of earshot, he confesses the truth to Ian: he is merely giving the women false hope, so that when the end comes, they won't know about it. The TARDIS is doomed--it will disintegrate within five minutes. (He mashes up the titles of this story's two episodes when he describes the TARDIS as being on "the brink of destruction".) The control column attempts to veritably leap out of the console, which the Doctor says is the TARDIS's power source, contained beneath the console, attempting to escape.

But it's Barbara who realises the truth--all these strange things that have been happening are in fact the TARDIS defence mechanisms, trying to convey to the human crew that something they are doing is causing harm to the ship. (This is why the fault locator wasn't showing any faults earlier--the TARDIS isn't at fault; the crew are.)

This is a fairly important moment in Doctor Who continuity. Barbara is making the first suggestion here that the TARDIS is alive and sentient--though the Doctor dismisses the idea derisively. But despite his objection, Barbara's theories lead him to a revelation, and he realises that the TARDIS is rushing toward the birth of the solar system: outside right now, atoms are rushing together, and the Sun is being born in a burst of nuclear fusion. The stresses of it are about to pull the TARDIS apart. And it's all happening because when the Doctor pressed the switch that sent the ship spinning back in time from Skaro, the spring inside the switch failed to work, and the switch failed to release. In effect, the TARDIS console thinks that someone has been pressing that switch continuously, sending the ship further and further back in time.

Ian and the Doctor take the switch apart and fix the problem, and the TARDIS crew have been saved. The greatest damage done is probably to the Doctor's relationship with Barbara--she's deeply resentful of his earlier insistence that he was going to strand Ian and her wherever the TARDIS next landed, regardless of where that was. But she's mollified somewhat when the Doctor provides her with a heavy coat from the TARDIS's wardrobe for her to wear outside, as they've landed in an icy, snowy landscape.

What Lisa thought: I said to her, "What did you think?", and without missing a beat she said, "Still don't like Barbara. She's so pissy." On the story itself, she largely agreed with me--the first episode was exceptionally creepy and atmospheric, though the second episode was a letdown. (I think it very much comes across that this story was filler, a bottle show with two different directors.)

The next story was "Marco Polo", but that one's unfortunately lost. We'll therefore pick up with "The Keys of Marinus" in our next post.

I

Doctor Who: "The Daleks"

Oh, there's a reason. Or "explanation" might be better. It's stupid and ridiculous, but it's the only one that fits. A dislike for the unlike. They're afraid of you because you're different from them, and whatever you do, it doesn't matter.--Ian Chesterton

"The Dead Planet" directed by Christopher Barry, 21 December 1963
"The Survivors" directed by Christopher Barry, 28 December 1963
"The Escape" directed by Richard Martin, 4 January 1964
"The Ambush" directed by Christopher Barry, 11 January 1964
"The Expedition" directed by Christopher Barry, 18 January 1964
"The Ordeal" directed by Richard Martin, 25 January 1964
"The Rescue" directed by Richard Martin, 1 February 1964

Viewers get their first look at the Daleks

Written by Terry Nation
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

The TARDIS has landed in a petrified forest. Everything--trees, shrubs, even blossoming flowers--has been suddenly turned to a powdery stone that crumbles at a gentle touch. Something happened here that destroyed all life in the blink of an eye. Barbara and Ian nevertheless hold out hope that they're somewhere on Earth, until Barbara discovers the carcass of a wild animal whose skin is actually made of metal--clearly, no such animal could exist on Earth. (The Doctor theorises that the animal was held together by an internal magnetic field, and that it might have actually been able to draw its prey toward it through magnetism. I think that's pretty cool.)

Beyond the lifeless forest is a lifeless, abandoned city. We can tell it's the product of an advanced civilisation because every building looks like the Stratosphere in Las Vegas. The Doctor wants to explore the city, but Ian and Barbara object; they want to get back to the TARDIS so the Doctor can try to return them to Earth. Plus, it's getting spooky. Susan is convinced a stranger came up and tapped her on the back in the forest, though she ran away screaming rather than turn and see them. No one believes her until they're all back at the TARDIS and hear some activity going on outside. They don't see whoever's there, but when they head back outside, they find that someone has left them a case of glass vials containing clear liquid--several doses of some sort of drug.

Ian, Barbara and Susan are now all desperate to leave, so the Doctor agrees. When he starts the TARDIS going, however, the engine starts, and then grinds to a halt. A component called the fluid link has lost its fluid and needs to be refilled. But the fluid it needs is mercury, and the Doctor doesn't have any mercury. There's nothing for it but to head over to the city. (It's pretty obvious even at this point that the Doctor has deliberately sabotaged the TARDIS so that he can explore the city.)

There's a vignette inside the TARDIS at this point, where Susan and the Doctor introduce Ian and Barbara to the TARDIS's food machine. You input what you want, and the machine gives you a biscuit that, when you eat it, tastes just like what you ordered. It's one of those twentieth-century sci fi cliches that ignores that texture and consistency are key to taste.

In their explorations of the silent city, they come across a lab filled with scientific apparatus. The lab contains a Geiger counter, which is indicating that the radiation level is fatally high. The Doctor theorises that the whole area must have been subjected to a neutron bomb--destroying all life instantly, but leaving the city's physical infrastructure intact. At any rate, it doesn't really matter right now; the important thing is to get back to the TARDIS as quickly as possible. It's now that the Doctor tells Ian that he made up the deficiency in the fluid link, and the TARDIS will actually function perfectly fine.

During their explorations, the Doctor, Ian and Susan have become separated from Barbara, and the Doctor has another of those "morally ambiguous" moments here (a term we use when wishing to obscure that the early Hartnell Doctor is actually immoral), being perfectly willing to leave the two schoolteachers behind in the city while he and Susan head back to the TARDIS and leave the dead planet. But Ian grabs the fluid link off him, forcing him to stay and search for Barbara.

Not that it matters, as the city's inhabitants now make their appearance, emerging from the tunnels deep underground where they live--the Daleks, dome-shaped mechanical creatures that glide about along the floor, peering at things with their long, disquieting cyclopean eyestalk. Their first reveal, screencapped above, is really well done, starting with a tight shot on the Doctor, Ian and Susan as we see them jump with fright and horror, then pulling rapidly out to show the forest of Daleks they suddenly find themselves amongst.

The Daleks imprison the Doctor, Susan, Ian and Barbara and keep them in a cell in their underground tunnels. It's here that I feel really glad I'm doing this rewatch, seeing the programme in order from the beginning. Because that way, I can appreciate that the Daleks aren't the monster of the week--because Doctor Who has never before had a monster of the week. The TARDIS crew--including the Doctor--don't simply take the Daleks in their stride; they're all terrified of what might happen. That terror increases when Barbara realises that they might not be robots as they appear; perhaps there is some alien creature inside them.

We learn a little about the history of this planet, Skaro, when the Daleks bring the Doctor to their control room to interrogate him. The Daleks are the survivors of the "Neutronic War", which they fought against a race called the Thals. After the war, the Daleks withdrew into the tunnels beneath their city, and also withdrew into their domed travel machines, while the Thals disappeared to somewhere else on the planet and haven't been seen since. Fallout from the neutron bombs that ended the war have caused the Daleks (and presumably the Thals) to mutate significantly, into the present small creatures that live inside the Dalek shells. The Doctor realises it must have been Thals who spooked Susan and left behind the vials of clear liquid in the petrified forest--and that the clear liquid must have been anti-radiation drugs.

Meanwhile, radiation sickness is taking a serious toll on the TARDIS crew. The Doctor and Barbara in particular are soon hard hit. They manage to persuade the Daleks to allow Susan to leave, returning to the TARDIS so she can retrieve the Thals' anti-radiation drugs. What they don't know is that the Daleks have no intention of actually allowing them to take the drugs; when Susan returns, they will confiscate the drugs from her so that they can perform research on them.

Susan has a harrowing run back through the forest, and when she gets back to the TARDIS, she's confronted by a Thal. But he's not a hideous mutant--at least, not by human standards. The descendants of the Thal survivors of the Neutronic War are physically perfect human beings, tall, strapping, fond of not wearing all that much clothing.

(When Susan enters the TARDIS, the viewer can see the dead forest through the TARDIS doors, an effect the show would only attempt to achieve once or twice more over the entire run of the classic programme. Oddly, though, when the view comes from inside the TARDIS, even the outside of the TARDIS doors are covered in roundels, rather than looking like the doors of a police call box.)

The Thal, Alydon, tells Susan that after the war, his people retired to a distant plateau, where they have transformed themselves from a warrior race to a society of pacifist farmers. But now the rains have failed, and after being subjected to a long drought, the Thals have migrated back to the vicinity of the Dalek city. They're hoping to make contact with the Daleks and establish a lasting peace with them.

Alydon realises that the Daleks might mean to confiscate the drugs Susan is carrying, so he gives her a second supply. When she returns to the Dalek city, she's allowed to keep the second set and uses it to treat the TARDIS crew, who are all soon feeling much better. Susan tells the Daleks of the Thals' hopes for peace, and they dictate to her a message for the Thals, offering them an exchange--the Daleks will provide the Thals with synthetic food from their labs, if the Thals will work to bring the soils around the Dalek city back to life. But it's a trap; when the Thals arrive to collect the Dalek food, the Daleks intend to the final remainder of the whole Thal race.

Meanwhile, the prisoners from the TARDIS have realised the Daleks are monitoring their conversation by means of closed-circuit cameras on the walls. There's an unintentionally hilarious moment when the prisoners concoct an elaborate sham, in which Ian and the Doctor get in an argument that leads to Susan physically attacking Ian, in an attempt to make it look as if the cameras got accidentally destroyed in the struggle. The camera then cuts to a pair of Daleks, watching the whole thing from their control room.

"Do you think the destruction of the camera was an accident?" one of them asks.

"No," the other replies.

Shortly after this, the TARDIS team mount an escape from Dalek captivity. They've realised that the Daleks draw their power from static electricity in the city's metal floors--this is why they can't leave the city, to pursue the Thals into the forest. They're able to cut power to one of their captors by dragging him onto a large cloak (given to Susan by Alydon to keep her warm), thus separating him from the floor.

(They first capture the Dalek by smearing mud over its eyepiece, blinding it. The Dalek repeatedly screams, "Keep away from me!" rather than, "My vision is impaired!")

Ian and the Doctor remove the mutant creature from within the Dalek--their reactions make it clear that the thing looks hideous, through all we see is a single grasping claw--and Ian climbs inside, masquerading as a Dalek who's taking the Doctor, Barbara and Susan for questioning.

The other Daleks see through the subterfuge, but the four of them are nevertheless able to make their escape to the top of one of the city's tall spires. At one point, Ian has to be left behind while the rest of the team head upwards in an elevator, because he can't get himself free from the Dalek shell he's been pilot; Susan and Barbara alternate hysterical fits at the prospect of leaving him behind.

He's able to get free, though, and joins the others at the top of the tower, from where they're able to make their way down to ground level and escape into the forest. But from the top of the spire, they spot the Thals arriving for the massacre the Daleks have planned. While the others head back to the TARDIS, Ian stays behind, trying to contact the Thals and warn them. His warning comes too late to save Temmosus, the Thal leader, but it does allow the rest of the Thals to escape.

Once the Thals and the TARDIS crew have gathered together back in the woods, Ian and Barbara expect the Thals to mount an attack on the Daleks, since their people face extinction if they can't get access to Daleks' synthetic food. But Alydon, who has succeeded Temmosus as leader of the Thals, declines. The Neutronic War has turned the Thals into an utterly pacifist people, unwilling to bring another Armageddon upon their planet. If the Daleks will not make peace with them, then the Thals will simply return to their plateau and wait to die.

The Doctor is utterly uninterested in what's to become of the Thals; now that the four of them have escaped, he wants only to depart in the TARDIS. But that plan gets disrupted when Ian realises that the Daleks still have the fluid link, taken from him when they were first imprisoned. Without it, the TARDIS cannot leave Skaro.

There's no way the main characters can take on the Daleks unless the Thals will fight alongside them. A debate follows amongst the TARDIS crew over the morality of persuading the Thals to join their cause--and inevitably persuading some of them to die--just to get back a small piece of electronic equipment. Barbara and the Doctor are all for it, because not doing so would mean spending the rest of their lives on Skaro; Ian and Susan insist that, regardless of the consequences, enlisting the Thals would be wrong.

It's a fascinating moment, and one where we can't help but be aware that we're not looking at "the Doctor and his companion(s)", as we will be once Susan, Ian and Barbara have all left the programme. Instead what we're looking at is an ensemble cast. The Doctor isn't presented as the most experienced, most natural leader of the group; his opinion carries no more weight than anyone else's.

At last Ian agrees to the idea of enlisting Thal aid, but only if the Thals will agree of their own accord to attack the Daleks. He goes back to the Thals to put the TARDIS crew's case before them, but just as before, his call to action falls on deaf ears. So Ian decides to put the Thals' insistence that they would rather die than fight to the test. He takes hold of Dyoni, the daughter of the dead Temmosus and betrothed to the new leader Alydon, and declares that he will offer her to the Daleks in trade for the fluid link. As he's leading her out of the Thal camp, though, Alydon comes after him and punches him across the face, knocking him to the ground.

"So there is something you'll fight for," Ian points out.

Back at the city, the Daleks have been experiment with the Thals' anti-radiation drugs by giving them to some of their own number. The Daleks who have taken the drugs soon start dying, and the Dalek command come to a realisation--the Dalek race have mutated in such a way that they now need the radiation to survive. They begin considering ways to preserve Skaro's irradiated state, and soon decide to detonate another neutron bomb. This would, of course, have the effect of destroying the Thals, but Daleks aren't really the sort who'd be concerned about that.

Meanwhile, Ian's demonstration has persuaded Alydon to face the Daleks, and through a stirring speech he's able to convince the rest of the Thals to follow him. They realise, though, that to attack the Dalek city from the front would be pointless; it's too well defended. To the rear, though, the city is nestled against an imposing mountain range, and the mountains are themselves guarded by a swamp full of fearsome, mutated predators that have already claimed the lives of a Thal scouting party sent to investigate. The Thals realise that the mountains are their best shot at entering the Dalek city--the Daleks will have left that approach unguarded, as they will have assumed that the dangers of the swamp will be enough to keep any attacker from approaching from that direction.

An expedition enters the swamp, led jointly by Ian and a Thal named Ganatus, who spends most of his time flirting with Barbara. The monsters who inhabit the swamp are really well done, I think--much of black and white Who seems to have more convincing special effects than the first decade of colour Who that followed. On the far side of the swamp, the expedition discovers pipes from the Dalek city, drawing water. The pipes are cut through the mountains, and Ian and Ganatus realise that they can reach the Dalek city by following the pipes through the caves, rather than having to scale the mountains.

The Thals who have remained back in the petrified forest have the task of trying to knock out the Daleks' radio surveillance tower before the expedition arrive from the mountains. Alydon, the Doctor and Susan sneak into the city, but as they reach the tower's controls, they're ambushed by Daleks. Alydon escapes, but the Doctor and Susan are captured.

During the passage through the caves, Ganatus's brother dies when he falls down a chasm. He sacrifices himself, cutting his safety rope so that he doesn't drag Ian down the chasm with him when he falls. The remainder of the expedition reach the Dalek city and start sneaking their way to the Dalek control room, but what they don't know is that they're racing against time: the Daleks have started the countdown for the detonation of another neutron bomb.

A battle ensues between the Thals, the TARDIS crew and the Daleks in the control room. The Thals manage to smash the Daleks' power centre. This stops the bomb countdown, and also cuts the static electricity to the metal floor, through which the Daleks power their travel machines. The machines all power down, and the mutants inside them die--five hundred years after the Neutronic War, the Thals have finally achieved the extinction of the Dalek race.

It's a lovely touch that they're not happy at this; instead, the Thals are wistful that they weren't able to find a solution other than fighting. But with the death of the Daleks, the Thals now have access to the Dalek methods of synthesising food, and their survival is assured.

What Lisa thought: She definitely felt more engaged with the narrative than she had with "An Unearthly Child". Lisa is no fan of the Daleks, but she liked them here--she liked them because they weren't The Daleks, the greatest menace to all life in the universe; they were simply a new menace the TARDIS team were facing. Though she did laugh at the idea of the Dalek raise facing extinction at the story's end.

The next story is "The Edge of Destruction".

Doctor Who Rewatch Index

I

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.