Doctor Who: "The Romans"

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

Nero attempts to woo Barbara

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Lisa thought

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

The next story is "The Web Planet".

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

Doctor Who: "The Rescue"

Why, this is the planet Dido. I've been here before. I know them very well. They're very friendly people.--The Doctor

Koquillion menaces Vicki

"The Powerful Enemy", 2 January 1965
"Desperate Measures", 9 January 1965

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

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

Doctor Who is currently midway through its thirty-second season. One of the things that's always been true over the forty-eight years it's taken to accumulate those thirty-two seasons is that the programme has shown a capacity endlessly to reinvent itself, to grow and change and sometimes even regress, so that there's really no such thing as a "typical" episode of Doctor Who--no single episode that would represent the entire half-century of the programme's run. That's both a necessary prerequisite and a necessary consequence of lasting for fifty years, in which regard, I suppose, it's a bit of a timey-wimey quality.

Thirteen months into the programme's run, we now get to its very first period of change. We get the first cast change, with the Doctor's departing granddaughter, Susan, being replaced by a pseudo-granddaughter, space orphan Vicki. In so doing, the programme establishes a baseline characterisation for the Doctor's primary companion: an adolescent girl--in fact, a schoolgirl, if she comes from a society where that's the appropriate situation for an adolescent; and often, one who's been robbed of her parents, and so needs the Doctor to serve as a paternal stand-in. These are traits that will generally hold true until the end of the 1960s.

We also see the first changes in Doctor Who's creative authorities. Script editor David Whitaker leaves, replaced by Dennis Spooner; in so doing, he begins the tradition of a departing script editor writing the first script of his successor's tenure. And Mervyn Pinfield is about to leave, too, after the story that follows this one, leaving Verity Lambert the programme's sole producer. Lambert--who, when Sydney Newman put her in charge of his new children's science fiction programme, became not only the BBC's first female producer, but also its youngest producer--had now proved herself capable of running the programme on her own.

We start off aboard a crashed spaceship, its wreckage strewn across a valley nestled amongst craggy mountains. Two survivors are living aboard the ship: the aforementioned teenager Vicki, and Bennett, a middle-aged man who's confined to the bed in his cabin by a leg injury.

Vicki gets excited because the ship's radar has detected another spaceship, landed somewhere up in the mountains. The rescue ship must have arrived early. But Bennett scoffs at this; the rescue ship must have landed early. But Bennett scoffs at this: the radar didn't detect the spaceship landing, only after it had landed, and besides, the rescue ship should still be days away. He has Vicki radio the rescue ship to confirm, and she's stunned when they confirm that they are, indeed, still three days from reaching them. Bennett also gives Vicki a dark warning to "watch out for Koquillion."

What the radar has picked up is, in fact, the TARDIS, which has materialised in a dark cavern up one of the mountains. The Doctor has nodded off and actually managed to sleep through the materialisation. Ian and Barbara wake him, and he prepares to lead them outside. "Susan," he says, "open the doors," before he realises Susan isn't there anymore. Once outside in the cavern, he encourages Ian and Barbara to go off and explore, then declares, "And I think I'm going to have a nap!" and disappears back inside the TARDIS.

Ian and Barbara are bemused at this behaviour, but they reason the Doctor must be somewhat depressed by Susan's departure. They make their way out of the cavern and find themselves at the top of a sheer cliff face looking down into the valley, where they can see the crashed spaceship.

Before they can start looking for a way down, they're confronted by Koquillion, a native of the planet. He's a fearsome looking humanoid, with a mane of threatening spikes, a pair of curved tusks that look like giant mandibles, and long claws for hands. His words are friendly, but his manner is threatening. When the humans reveal that there's a third member of their party back at their spaceship, he sends Ian into the cavern to fetch him, leaving Koquillion alone with Barbara, who's clearly uneasy.

No sooner has Ian gone than Koquillion pushes Barbara over the edge of the cliff, then uses a bulky sonic device he's carrying (it looks like a large adjustable wrench, to be honest) to seal the Doctor and Ian inside the cavern with a rockfall.

The Doctor emerges from the TARDIS when he hears the rocks; he and Ian search fruitlessly for an exit. The Doctor has realised from a rock sample that they're on the planet Dido, which he has visited before. From Ian's description he recognises Koquillion as a member of the native species, but he's surprised at such aggressive behaviour; he remembers the Dido people, whose population is only about a hundred, as profoundly peace-loving.

Barbara has survived her fall without any real injury; Vicki finds her at the base of the cliff and brings her back to the spaceship, then hides her when Koquillion comes visiting. The fearsome alien makes some threatening remarks about how Vicki should remember that she owes him her life, then decides to visit Bennett, locking himself in the older man's cabin.

Once he's out of the way, Vicki returns to Barbara and explains how the situation came about. She was a passenger on the ship, headed to a colony world, but it crashed on Dido. The people of the planet invited the ship's crew and passengers to a feast, but Vicki couldn't go as she had a fever. During the feast, a tremendous explosion wiped out everyone from the ship--the humans, including Vicki's father, had been lured to their deaths by the natives. Bennett, badly wounded, was the only survivor, and he crawled back to the ship. Now he and Vicki are in the power of Koquillion, who claims to be protecting them from the other natives; they haven't told Koquillion about the approaching rescue ship.

Once Koquillion leaves Bennett's cabin and departs the ship, Vicki takes Barbara to Bennett. He's stunned to learn of another human being alive. Barbara suggests that together, the three of them can overpower Koquillion, but while Vicki is receptive to the plan, Bennett angrily declares it too risky and refuses to countenance it.

Vicki and Barbara return to the spaceship's main cabin, leaving Bennett to rest. There, they're elated when Ian and the Doctor arrive. The two men, having failed to find a way past the rockfall, moved deeper into the caves and found another exit from the tunnels. After hearing Vicki's story, the Doctor determines he wants to meet Bennett, but he wants to meet him alone. He makes his way to Bennett's cabin and knocks on the door, but Bennett's voice responds, "No, you can't come in!" This doesn't deter the Doctor, who breaks the door down.

Inside, he finds the cabin empty. Bennett's voice came from a tape recorder. The Doctor also discovers a hidden trapdoor in the floor, allowing Bennett to lock his cabin door and then leave the spaceship unnoticed.

Back in the main cabin, Ian and Barbara are explaining to Vicki that they're not just space travellers; they're time travellers. "What year was it when you left Earth?"

"Why, 2493, of course," Vicki responds, then boggles when Barbara tells her that she and Ian left Earth in 1963. "But ... that means you're about five hundred and fifty years old!" she exclaims.

Ian doubles over with laughter at this while Barbara tries not to feel offended; it's a truly charming moment, probably one of my favourites in all of Doctor Who (amidst an otherwise unremarkable story), because it's so genuine.

(William Russell has a real talent as an actor, I'm discovering in this rewatch, for having his character laugh at things a real person would laugh at, and do it in such a way that I honestly wonder if it's Ian who's laughing, or Russell.)

The Doctor, meanwhile, has gone through the trapdoor, and found himself in the Great Hall of the Dido natives, where he waits. Eventually, Koquillion arrives, as the Doctor knew he would. The Doctor has figured out what's going on: he recognised Ian's description of a Dido native, but he realised that when Ian described Koquillion's appearance, he was describing clothing, not physical form. Koquillion is simply wearing the ceremonial robes of the Dido people.

So Koquillion removes his mask, revealing that he is, of course, Bennett. Bennett explains to the Doctor what really happened: he murdered a man aboard the spaceship and was arrested for it. So when the ship crashed and the Dido people invited the crew to a feast, it was Bennett who set the explosion with supplies from the ship's armory, killing both the humans and the entire (tiny) population of Dido.

(Bennett says it was "easy" to set the explosion, though he doesn't give us any hint as to why it was so easy for a man under guard for murder to gain such complete access to the ship's armory.)

Vicki did not know of Bennett's crime or arrest, so after the explosion, Bennett dressed up as Koquillion to convince her of the foulness of the planet's native population; once the rescue ship arrived, she would confirm his story, and he'd be a free man.

Bennet and the Doctor grapple hand to hand, with Bennett winning the upper hand. But just as he's about to strike the killing blow, two men emerge from a hidden recess in the great hall. These are the real natives of the planet Dido--possibly the last two natives, survivors of the explosion. Bennett, terrified, runs from them, but he falls over a cliff and plunges to his death in the caverns.

Vicki, then, is left with nobody to care for her, so of course the Doctor, Ian and Barbara invite her aboard the TARDIS. As it dematerialises, we cut back to the spaceship, where the rescue ship is radioing that they're about to land, but they receive no response. The two Dido natives enter the cabin and, not wanting any contact with the species that has just wiped out their entire population, smash the radio to pieces.

What Lisa thought

"I thought it was pretty good. It was a good introduction to Vicki." A pause. "I think I like the four parters best."

All of which I'm inclined to say is just about right. "The Rescue" is clearly just there to introduce us to New SusanVicki. It's a cute enough little story--there's no world-shattering stakes in play, and it gets a nice little twist at the end. There's also a few good light moments, like the scene where Vicki calculates Barbara's age, or the scene where Barbara shoots a fearsome beast dead as it creeps up on Vicki, only to learn that it was in fact Vicki's pet, a sand crawler she'd named Sandy. She'd been training it to come to her for food. Vicki retains an endearing, slightly petulant resentment at Barbara for this throughout the story.

So it makes a nice break, but Doctor Who's at its best--as it turns out Lisa agrees with me--with the ninety minute stories.

The next story is "The Romans".

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