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
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"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.
