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.
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"The Slave Traders", 16 January 1965
"All Roads Lead to Rome", 23 January 1965
"Conspiracy", 30 January 1965
"Inferno", 6 February 1965
Written by Dennis Spooner
Directed by Christopher Barry
Produced by Verity Lambert
Associate producer: Mervyn Pinfield
William Hartnell as the Doctor
William Russell as Ian Chesterton
Jacqueline Hill as Barbara Wright
Maureen O'Brien as Vicki
I'll be honest. For a long time, I didn't really get the Ian and Barbara fans. They were perfectly adequate companions, but I didn't get why they generated such intense adulation in the little corner of Who fandom they can call their own. (To be fair, Ian-Barbara fandom is pretty shipping-centred, and I don't get shipping in general.)
But after seeing "The Romans" for the first time, I got it. The banter between Ian and Barbara in episodes one and four absolutely sings, and it does so because of the chemistry between Jacqueline Hill and William Russell. We're talking Josiah-and-Abigail-Bartlet levels of chemistry, here.
The TARDIS crew are having something rare: a holiday. For the past several weeks, they've been staying at a Roman villa. The owner is away, so finding the villa deserted, the team decided to stay awhile.
Ian and Barbara are loving the idleness, but the Doctor is chafing to go off and have an adventure--and so too is Vicki, who after all has only just joined the crew. The Doctor manufactures a spat with Ian and Barbara so that he can declare, in a huff, that he and Vicki are going to visit Rome. They'll be back in a few days, and Ian and Barbara are not invited.
As the Doctor and Vicki are walking along the road in the twilight,* they come upon the dead body of an old man. He's been murdered, but it wasn't robbery--he's been left holding his lyre, a very valuable musical instrument. The Doctor picks the lyre up and examines it; as he's looking at it, a centurion arrives. Seeing him with the lyre, the centurion assumes the Doctor is the famous musician Maximus Pettulian, who's known to be travelling on foot to Rome to play for the Emperor Nero.
The centurion claims to have arrived to escort Maximus Petullian along the dangerous roads, but the Doctor realises something else is going on: whoever murdered the real Maximus Petullian was hired by the centurion, who has only come out here on the roads to check for himself that the murder was carried out. The Doctor decides to masquerade as the musician (much to Vicki's consternation), and accepts the centurion's company on the way to Rome.
Meanwhile back at the villa, Ian and Barbara are contentedly lazing after enjoying a fine meal. (Barbara has taught herself Roman cooking during their stay; the menu of a Roman aristocratic supper is described in detail during an Educational Moment.) But in the nearby village, a pair of slave traders are passing through. They're leading prisoners from Gaul, who will be sold at auction in Rome. But the traders are dissatisfied with the quality of their merchandise; they won't fetch a good price. Hearing that the villa is currently occupied by four undefended strangers--two of whom are women and one of whom is an old man--they decide to see if they can't kidnap the TARDIS team in order to enrich their stock.
They break into the villa and attack Ian and Barbara. The two schoolteachers fight back. Barbara lifts a pot high in the air to smash over the head of one of their attackers--but the slave trader ducks out of the way, and Barbara brings the pot smashing down on the back of Ian's head instead. Ian's knocked unconscious, and Barbara is quickly captured. They're taken back to the slave traders' camp, where Ian is sold almost immediately, to a galley captain who needs oarsmen straight away. Barbara is shackled with the rest of the prisoners, to be auctioned off in Rome.
The Doctor, Vicki and the centurion stop at an inn for the night, where the centurion meets up with the assassin he hired to to kill Maximus Petullian. The assassin is an illiterate mute (so if he's captured, he can't give up the identity of his employer) and is understandably confused to learn that Maximus Petullian is still alive. He sneaks into the Doctor's room and attacks him, and we're treated to the sight of the aged Hartnell Doctor having a fistfight with a vicious Roman ruffian, until Vicki comes in and pushes the assassin out the window.
Barbara is taken to Rome, where she's auctioned off before a raucous crowd. She's bought by Tavius, who brings the auction to a surprised halt by raising the bid from two thousand sesterces to ten thousand sesterces. Tavius turns out to be the majordomo for the Imperial household, and he puts Barbara to work as the new chambermaid for the Emperor Nero's wife, Poppaea.
The Doctor and Vicki have also arrived at the palace, where they meet Nero. Nero demands that the Doctor immediately perform on the lyre, but the Doctor worms his way out of it by asking that Nero play instead. (Nero, as the Doctor well knows, fancied himself the greatest stage performer of his day, and expected his subjects to treat him as such.)
Ian, meanwhile, has been shackled to an oar aboard a galley, but during a storm the ship wrecks. He washes up on the beach with Delos, a fellow slave whom he'd befriended aboard the galley. Ian and Delos head to Rome to look for Barbara, but they're recaptured by the original slave traders, who decide to train them as gladiators to be killed by lions in the arena.
After his audience with Vicki and the Doctor, Nero proceeds to his wife's bedchamber, where he discovers Barbara. Instantly he's besotted with her.
From this point, part three descends into intentional farce. Barbara flees as Nero chases her around the palace. His continued attention to her provokes Poppaea's jealousy. Several times hay gets made from having Barbara and either the Doctor or Vicki narrowly miss each other, such as when Nero is chasing Barbara round Poppaea's bedroom and the Doctor knocks on the door. Nero appears in the doorway and bellows at the Doctor to leave; after Nero slams the door in his face, the Doctor is turning to leave when Poppaea arrives. The Doctor informs her that Nero has another woman in the room with him, so Poppaea bursts in and finds Nero on the bed, holding Barbara to him. Even the death by poisoning of Nero's valet is played for laughs.
The Doctor eventually falls from favour when, at a banquet in his honour, he cannot get out of performing with his lyre. He pulls an Emperor's New Clothes, telling the audience that his new composition is an exceptionally fine melody that can only be heard by a sufficiently cultured ear. He then mimes plucking at the chords of his lyre; his listeners hear only silence, but none of them are willing to admit that they can't hear his music. Nero gets jealous at the adulation receives and resolves to kill the Doctor. He'll invite him to play before a packed crowd at the arena--but as he plays, the Emperor will have the lions released to devour him.
Before he does that, though, Nero decides to take Barbara out on a date--and when you're a Roman Emperor, a date involves taking a lady to a slave barracks to watch a private gladiator duel. Of course, the gladiators who are chosen to duel are Delos and Ian. It's a fight to the death; whoever wins must kill his opponent, then will be set free. Delos wins, but instead of killing Ian, he launches himself at Nero. Nero escapes the assassination attempt, and Ian and Delos escape out into the streets.
Back at the palace, the Doctor and Vicki are exploring when they come across Nero's office, and on his desk they find his extensive plans for completely rebuilding Rome--plans that Nero hasn't been able to put into effect because the Senate won't vote him the money. The Emperor, just returned from the gladiators' palace, comes upon them. The Doctor accidentally sets fire to Nero's plans, and Nero becomes furious--until the burning plans give him an idea. He will set fire to the city of Rome itself, burning the city down so that he can build his new one in its place. He leaves Vicki and the Doctor, hurrying off to put his new brainstorm into motion.
Nero has some street thugs rounded up and brought to him, so that he can instruct them to set fire to the city. Ian manages to sneak into the palace with the thugs, and then he sneaks off and finds Barbara. The two of them escape, heading back toward the villa and the TARDIS. The Doctor and Vicki, too, have now snuck away from the palace, heading for home. They watch the Great Fire of Rome lighting up the sky from a hilltop overlooking the city.
Ian and Barbara arrive back at the villa first, and we get another great scene between the two of them (though Ian chasing Barbara round as she shrieks with mock fear would probably qualify as sexual assault nowadays). By the time the Doctor and Vicki arrive, the two schoolteachers have fallen asleep on a pair of couches. The Doctor chastises them for idling around the villa for the past few days. Ian and Barbara attempt to explain about their own adventures, but the Doctor won't let them get a word in edgeways. The four of them depart for the TARDIS and a new adventure.
What Lisa thought
The main impression the story made on Lisa was how it paired off the regular characters. Ian and Barbara got some of their best scenes together, and the pairing of the Doctor and Vicki let us know for certain that Vicki--as Lisa puts it--really is going to be Susan by another name. She's still not warming towards Barbara, but she concedes that she's enjoying that she and Ian are becoming more playful in their scenes together.
The next story is "The Web Planet".
I
*I find it irrationally annoying that for the sake of plot, we're not supposed to point out how unrealistic it is that they would start the day-long walk to Rome at sunset.
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