Doctor Who: "The Time Meddler"

But that means that the exact minute, the exact second that he does it, every history book, the whole future of every year and every time on Earth will change, and nobody will know that it has?--Steven Taylor

The Viking scouting party land in England

"The Watcher", 3 July 1965
"The Meddling Monk", 10 July 1965
"A Battle of Wits", 17 July 1965
"Checkmate", 24 July 1965

Written by Dennis Spooner
Directed by Douglas Camfield
Script editor: Donald Tosh
Produced by Verity Lambert

William Hartnell as the Doctor
Maureen O'Brien as Vicki (latest extant appearance)
Peter Purves as Steven Taylor

The Doctor and Vicki are in the TARDIS control room, commiserating about how much they miss Ian and Barbara, when they hear a noise from the interior rooms--someone's back there! They take up position on either side of the door, prepared to attack whoever it is when they come out, but it's Steven Taylor who emerges, and as soon as he does, he collapses from exhaustion.

Once he's come to, Steven explains that after escaping from the Mechanoid city, he searched through the forest for our heroes, eventually coming upon the TARDIS and stumbling inside. He's grateful for finally being rescued from his captivity on Mechanus, but he's openly scornful of the Doctor and Vicki's assertions that he's now on board a time machine.

Vicki gets him new clothes and apparently gives him a thorough shave, and by the time that's finished, the TARDIS has landed. The crew head outside and find themselves on the shore of an angry sea, at the foot of imposing English cliffs. The Doctor finds a horned Viking helmet on the beach and shows it to Steven as proof that they've travelled not only through space, but also through time.

"Well, maybe," Steven concedes doubtfully.

"Maybe?" the Doctor says. "What else do you think it could be? A space helmet for a cow?"

Unbeknownst to the team, the TARDIS's arrival has been witnessed: a monk was watching from the clifftop. He hides until our heroes walk off, then inspects the TARDIS. But he can't get in, because it's locked.

The Doctor finds an easy, gentle path up to the top of the cliffs, and in a fit of pique he declares that he will take this route, while Steven and Vicki can take the harder, steeper path and meet him at the top.

But once he gets to the top, it's not his companions that he meets. He finds himself at a mediaeval peasant's cottage. The man of the house is away, but his wife, a friendly woman named Edith (played by Alethea Charlton, who previously played Hur in "An Unearthly Child"), gives him some dinner and a flagon of mead.

In conversation with Edith, the Doctor is able to ascertain just when they've landed. Harold Godwinson is the new King, having succeeded Edward the Confessor at the beginning of the year. This news instantly alerts the Doctor that he's landed in 1066, one of the two most famous years in the history of the English-speaking world.

I'm sure it's alerted you of that, too, but nevertheless, I'm going to insult your education and give a brief recap. Harold Godwinson was the last of the Saxon Kings of England. Shortly after his accession, England was invaded by two different armies. The first of these was led by Harald Hardrada, King of Norway and the last great Viking. (He's only ever referred to as Hardrada in this story, presumably to avoid confusion with Harold Godwinson.)

Godwinson defeated and killed Hardrada at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire, then immediately had to march south to meet a second invasion, from William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy. His exhausted army was defeated by the Normans at the Battle of Hastings in October, heralding the Norman Conquest and ensuring that William the Bastard would be known to history as William the Conqueror.

The Doctor calculates that it's currently midsummer, and Edith informs him that they're in Northumbria. This means that Hardrada's army will be landing soon, not too far south of here, at the Humber.

All the time they're talking, the Doctor and Edith have a soundtrack playing behind them: monks from the nearby monastery, chanting. But as they're listening to them, the Doctor hears an abrupt glitch in the singing, like it's not actually live singing, but rather a recording.

But of course, here in the eleventh century, that's ridiculous.

The Doctor leaves Edith and heads up to the monastery to investigate. He finds it apparently abandoned. He enters, and in a small chamber off the main hall, he finds a twentieth-century phonograph, playing a record of Gregorian chants. But then wooden bars slide down, trapping him inside the chamber. He's been captured by the Monk we saw earlier, who now steps out from hiding, laughing.

We cut to the next morning, when the Monk is preparing breakfast--using an electric toaster and an electric griddle. After serving the Doctor breakfast in his cell, the Monk heads back to the cliffs, where he surveys the sea with a pair of modern binoculars. And soon, he sees what he's evidently looking for: an approaching Viking longship. It's not yet the whole army--just a single scout ship.

Out in the forest, meanwhile, Vicki and Steven have spent the night asleep beneath the trees after failing to meet up with the Doctor. Steven is still sceptical that they've travelled through time--especially when he finds a golden wristwatch that someone has lost in the bushes.

The two of them soon run into some Saxon peasants, who capture them and take them to the village. They think that they must be a pair of Viking scouts and want to execute them, but the village headman--Wulnoth, Edith's husband--chooses to believe their story that they're just travellers and releases them. When they tell they're looking for the Doctor, Edith recognises his description and directs them toward the monastery.

They arrive at the monastery and knock on the door, which is answered by the Monk. He tells them, of course, that the Doctor hasn't visited him. But Steven and Vicki are suspicious, and they decide to come back after dark and have a look around.

Meanwhile, the crew of the Viking scout ship have come ashore. They need provisions, so they raid a cottage they come across in the wood--Wulnoth and Edith's cottage, though only Edith is home. After the Vikings have gone, Wulnoth returns home, to find his house sacked and Edith brutalised (but still alive). He collects the men of the village together, and they go hunting the Vikings.

A battle ensues between the villagers and the Viking party. The villagers win, but two of the Vikings escape. They need a place to hide until the main body of Hardrada's army arrives, so they decide to head to the monastery, planning to take the monks hostage.

Once night falls, Vicki and Steven sneak into the monastery. They come across the Monk's phonograph and toaster, and then find the cell where he's holding the Doctor. But they discover the Doctor is no longer inside--he's left his cloak on top of a mound of blankets on the sleeping pallet, to make it look like he's asleep, and has escaped down a secret passage he must have discovered in a corner of the cell.

Vicki and Steven follow the passage; it disgorges them in the woods, near the clifftop. They return to the TARDIS to see if the Doctor has returned, but he hasn't. In the bushes on the clifftop, though, they discover what looks like a modern grenade launcher mounted on a tripod. Someone (the Monk, obviously) has left it there, pointed out to see.

The Monk, unaware that the Doctor has escaped, has headed to the village, where he asks a favour of Wulnoth and the other villagers--because they believe him a man of God, they're always more than willing to do whatever he asks. He asks them now if they would light beacon fires for him on the clifftop, so that approaching ships will know where to land.

The Monk tells Wulnoth that he needs the beacon fires because he is expecting some building materials to arrive by ship. But what he doesn't know is that, after escaping from his cell, the Doctor returned to Wulnoth and Edith's cottage, where Edith gave him dinner. The Doctor told her that soon a Viking invasion fleet would land at the Humber, but that King Harold would defeat it.

Though he doesn't let on to the Monk, Wulnoth now concludes that the Monk wants beacon fires to lure Hardrada's fleet towards the beach. He's right, of course, but unlike us, he hasn't seen the cannon the Monk has hidden there, so he doesn't know that the Monk is only trying to attract the fleet in order to blow it out of the water. He instead concludes that the Monk is a Viking spy.

Failing to find the Doctor at the cliffs, Vicki and Steven have returned back up the secret tunnel to the monastery, which is now deserted. Looking around more, they find an electrical cable which appears to run directly into a heavy stone sarcophagus. Steven presses the side of the sarcophagus, and finds that it opens just like a door. He and Vicki enter--

--and find themselves in the control room of a TARDIS. The Monk has a TARDIS. He isn't just a time traveller: he's a member of the Doctor's own people.

They explore the interior of the Monk's TARDIS. They discover a whole trove of treasures from all periods of Earth's history, as well as what look like projectile grenades, but Steven is able to identify them as neutron bombs. They're ammunition for the cannon on the clifftop.

"What's he trying to do?" Steven asks. "Sink a ship?"

"He could sink a whole navy with one of these," Vicki responds.

They also find a big sheet of paper labelled PROGRESS CHART, on which the Monk has conveniently detailed his entire eight-step plan, including "Sight atomic cannon", "Light beacon fires", "Destroy Viking fleet", and "Battle of Hastings". The final step is "Meet King Harold", which is our indication that he's definitely planning on changing the course of history, since Harold, of course, was killed at Hastings.

The Monk, still under the impression that Wulnoth will help him, is just returning to the monastery when he's apprehended by the Doctor, who presses a stick into his back to make him think he's carrying a gun. But before the Doctor can get an explanation out of him, there's a knock at the door.

The Doctor can't afford to ignore the knocking, as that would alert whoever was there that something was wrong, so he answers the door--to find the two survivors from the Viking scout party. They storm inside and take the time travellers captive, but they're so certain that a pair of old men pose no threat to them that they let their guard down, allowing the Doctor and the Monk to take them captive.

After the Vikings are tied up, the Doctor gets the Monk to tell him his whole plan. He's going to destroy Hardrada's invasion before it can land; that way, Harold Godwinson won't have to march north. His army will therefore be well-rested at Hastings and will defeat the Normans. With England thus spared a line of Norman kings, she will be able to avoid centuries of entanglement in French conflicts like the Angevin Empire and the Hundred Years War. With the country thus stable, the Monk will be able to accelerate technological progress: "Jet airliners by 1320! Shakespeare will be able to produce Hamlet for television!"

The Doctor is horrified by this, but since it's William Hartnell, that horror doesn't take the form of the moral outrage that later Doctors would give us; instead, it's the exasperated berating of a schoolteacher toward the foolish children under his authority. He demands the Monk show him to his TARDIS, where the two of them encounter Vicki and Steven.

As the four of them are emerging from the Monk's TARDIS, however, they encounter the two Vikings, who have managed to escape. The Monk manages to convince them that he's on their side, and they tie up the Doctor, Vicki and Steven. The Monk tells the Vikings that his neutron bomb missiles are "magical charms" that will help Hardrada's army, and gets them to carry them with him up to the cannon at the clifftop.

As they're leaving the monastery, though, they're attacked by the men of the village, led by Wulnoth. They're chased into the woods. The Vikings are surrounded and killed, though the Monk escapes. Edith frees the Doctor and his companions.

The Doctor goes back into the Monk's TARDIS and ties a long piece of string around a piece of equipment inside the control console. It's evidently a very delicate operation: after it's completed, the Doctor exits the TARDIS, then very carefully pulls the string until he also pulls out the piece of equipment. Pleased with himself, he slips the equipment into his pocket.

With the Monk being hunted by the villagers, the Doctor is confident now that he won't be able to destroy Hardrada's fleet, and that the Battle of Stamford Bridge--and the Battle of Hastings--will go off as history says they should. He, Steven and Vicki return to the TARDIS and depart.

The Monk, meanwhile, eventually eludes his pursuers and returns to the monastery. But a nasty surprise awaits him: when he attempts to enter his TARDIS, he discovers it's no longer bigger on the inside. The Doctor has removed his dimensional control, thereby shrinking the TARDIS's interior so that it now fits into its exterior; the Monk cannot get inside. He's stranded in 1066 England, with the country about to undergo successive invasions and the Harrowing of the North.

The Doctor and the Meddling Monk

What Lisa thought

Lisa's word to describe this one was "okay". She did like that she didn't see coming the revelation that the Monk had a TARDIS and was one of the Doctor's own people.

(The part three cliffhanger, with Steven and Vicki entering the sarcophagus and finding themselves in a TARDIS control room, is probably my favourite 60s cliffhanger.)

"The Time Meddler", put in context, is arguably a very important Doctor Who story. It's the first time we've met one of the Doctor's people besides the Doctor himself and his granddaughter; indeed, at this point, there still hasn't been any comment on whether the Doctor's people are, in fact, human.

But even beyond that, it's the first time a historical has had a science fiction component, besides the presence of the main characters. Such a development is approached with real freshness--even though there's science fiction, there's still no traditional "Doctor Who monster", for instance. And it's done in such a way that the audience learns a whole lot about the time period in which it's set, without ever once feeling like they're having a history lesson. Maybe all those reasons are why I love it so much.

(Well, okay. I also love the "space helmet for a cow" line.)

"The Time Meddler" marks the end of season two, but it also marks the beginning of something else: that period of Doctor Who that has been almost eradicated by the BBC's wiping policy. In the first two seasons, we've missed only two stories ("Marco Polo" and "The Crusades"). But we're about to cover seasons three, four and five in only six stories, two of which will have missing episodes.

The next story after "The Time Meddler" is "Galaxy 4", in which the TARDIS team fight a race of militant, cloned interstellar conquerors who all look like attractive twenty-year-old blonde women. I'm particularly upset that it's missing.

Then is "Mission to the Unknown", a one-part prologue to "The Daleks' Master Plan" that contains none of the regular cast. "Mission to the Unknown" was Verity Lambert's last involvement in the programme, after which she was replaced with producer John Wiles.

Then "The Myth Makers", in which the TARDIS lands in the middle of the Trojan War. Vicki falls in love with Troilus during the story, and at the end she leaves TARDIS to marry him and become the mythological Cressida.

Then there's "The Daleks' Master Plan", a twelve-part epic. The late Nicholas Courtney makes his first appearance in Doctor Who, though he's not yet Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart; instead, he's evil Earth Security Agent Bret Vyon. (A two-minute clip of his performance has been preserved, because during Peter Purves's long period hosting Blue Peter in the 1970s and 80s, it's the clip that would be played of Steven whenever Blue Peter did a Doctor Who segment.) The Meddling Monk also appears in "The Daleks' Master Plan", having allied himself with the Daleks.

And then we come to "The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve", in which, unsurprisingly, the Doctor and Steven get caught up in the events leading to the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre. New companion Dodo Chaplet is introduced at the very end of the story, and we'll pick up our rewatch with her first adventure, "The Ark".

I

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: "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.