The Doctor: Oh, quite so. Allow me, sir, to introduce Miss Dodo Dupont, wizard of the ivory keys, and Steven Regret, tenor, and lastly, sir, your humble servant, Doctor Caligari.
Bat Masterson: Doctor who?
The Doctor: Yes, quite right.
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"A Holiday for the Doctor", 30 April 1966
"Don't Shoot the Pianist", 7 May 1966
"Johnny Ringo", 14 May 1966
"The OK Corral", 21 May 1966
Written by Donald Cotton
Directed by Rex Tucker
Script editor: Gerry Davis
Produced by Innes Lloyd
William Hartnell as the Doctor
Peter Purves as Steven Taylor (latest extant appearance)
Jackie Lane as Dodo Chaplet
At the end of the previous (no longer extant) story, "The Celestial Toymaker", the Doctor had badly chipped his tooth on a piece of booby-trapped candy, and so when the TARDIS materialises at the beginning of "The Gunfighters", his only thought is to find a dentist who can extract it.
The TARDIS, it turns out, has arrived next to the entrance to the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, in 1881. The team venture out into the streets of Tombstone, where they soon start meeting the town's inhabitants: the Clanton brothers, town marshals Bat Masterson and and Wyatt Earp, and ultimately the town dentist, who is, of course, Doc Holliday.
The Clantons have arrived in town looking for Holliday; they intend to shoot him down in vengeance for the death of another brother, Reuben. The story's first two and a half episodes revolve around a case of mistaken identity, with the Clantons convinced that the Doctor is, in fact, Doc Holliday. Holliday, who's a weaselly, conniving character, helps further this misunderstanding by supplying the Doctor with his own, easily recognisable six-shooter, and even Wyatt Earp--who's a good friend of Holliday's--goes along with it. The Doctor ends up locked in Tombstone gaol for his own protection from the posse the Clantons have raised, while Steven and Dodo are forced, at gunpoint, to play piano and sing in the saloon, with Dodo turning out miraculously to be a talented pianist and Steven displaying a hitherto unhinted-at professional skill as a singer.
Two events midway through part three change the story, redirecting it into the inexorable leadup to the Gunfight at the OK Corral. The first is the arrival in town of Johnny Ringo, a cold-blooded, psychopathic outlaw who's hunting Holliday because his old girlfriend, Kate, has taken up with the Doc. The second is the murder of Earp's youngest brother, Warren, while the Clantons' are springing one of their own brothers, Phineas, from Tombstone gaol.
Ringo allies with the Clantons and hatches a plot to murder Holliday and Wyatt Earp. The Clantons, though portrayed as the villains of the piece, had at least been planning to confront Holliday and Earp in a straight-up gunfight. But Ringo instead insists that while the Clantons confront Holliday and Earp, he will sneak up behind the two men and shoot them in the back.
The story culminates, as we've of course known it will since episode one, in the famous gunfight, by which time another Earp brother, Virgil, has arrived in Tombstone to act as backup. There's a brief diversion from the main gunfight when Johnny Ringo takes Dodo hostage and Holliday, living up to the chivalry that he's always been falling short of so far in the story, throws away his gun to save her life. But he then produces a hidden pea-shooter and shoots Ringo, killing him. All three Clanton brothers also get killed, and Holliday and the Earps have their historic victory.
The events depicted in "The Gunfighters", it should be noted, bear about as much resemblance to the historical Gunfight at the OK Corral as the movie Sahara does to actual American Civil War archaeology. It wasn't Wyatt Earp who was the Tombstone sheriff, but his brother Virgil; Wyatt occasionally acted as Virgil's unpaid deputy. Warren Earp wasn't killed by the Clantons; he wasn't even in Tombstone at the time of the gunfight. In fact, he lived until 1900, when he was killed in a barfight. Johnny Ringo had absolutely nothing to do with the Gunfight, and there was no barfly Kate who formed a love triangle with Ringo and Holliday.
So anyway, with all that settled, the TARDIS team head off to parts unknown. This is the last time we'll see Steven in the rewatch. The next story after this is "The Savages", now completely lost. In it, the TARDIS arrives in the far-distant future, at an advanced city where the inhabitants have reached the culmination of human society, giving themselves completely over to creativity and advancement. But then it's discovered that these people have built their social order on a tribe of cave-dwelling, illiterate barbarians who inhabit the wilderness beyond the city; the city's inhabitants maintain their own vital energy by capturing tribesmen and sucking the energy from them. The Doctor, of course, puts a stop to all this, and Steven stays behind to be mediator of the new society that must be built, as the savages and the city people learn to live together.
What Lisa thought
When I first got into Who fandom in the nineties, conventional wisdom was that "The Gunfighters" is the single worst Doctor Who story ever made. Like "The Romans", it approaches a bloody episode of history as an opportunity for farcical comedy; it's full of British actors making poor approximations of American accents (though I always feel that standards for accents should be lower in television than they are in film). And on top of that, there's the Song.
No straight plot summary of "The Gunfighters" can convey the experience of watching the story, because it leaves out the Song--the ballad "The Last Chance Saloon". "The Last Chance Saloon" summarises and comments on all the action in "The Gunfighters", and it gets played incessantly--at the beginning and end of each episode, and between most scenes. It's also the song that Steven and Dodo perform when held at gunpoint by the Clantons.
Lisa, of course, turned out to love "The Gunfighters", as is her way. She found it very experimental, specifically citing the song as a manifestation of that.
In the time since the mid-90s, fandom has reconsidered "The Gunfighters" somewhat, apparently concluding it's not as bad as we thought.
I'm of the opinion that reconsideration is wrong. "The Gunfighters" is just as poor as we though fifteen years ago, and that's almost entirely because of "The Last Chance Saloon". It stops the story from ever achieving any sort of tension.
So it's time to move on. Since "The Savages" has been lost, the next story in the rewatch will be "The War Machines".
I
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