TARDIS Eruditorum:
An Unauthorized Critical History of Doctor Who
Volume 1: William Hartnell
Philip Sandifer
Copyright 2011 Philip Sandifer
Smashwords Edition
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This one has to be to my mother and father, for many, many things, but most of all for some scratchy VHS tapes of a ropey old British sci-fi series from the 70s.
Acknowledgements
Thanks first and foremost to my readers, and especially those who were around in the beginning and who read these entries as they went up. In particular, I’d like to single out Anna and Richard for their frequent comments, suggestions, and corrections.
Thanks also to my dedicated staff of copy-editors, also known as “mom.” Further thanks to Charlotte Snyder for her fantastic cover design.
And, of course, thanks to everyone who made Doctor Who, in the Hartnell era and beyond.
A Mad Man With a Blog (Introduction)
Why hello there! It looks like you bought a copy of the first volume of TARDIS Eruditorum, which I, as the writer, thank you for, because that probably means you have given me money. (If you haven’t given me money and downloaded this off the Internet, on the other hand, I’m kind of upset with you. Seriously, 80% of this book is already up for free on the web and you’re stealing it? I’m an underemployed PhD in English. That was my Ramen money you pirated! On the other hand, I’m kind of pleased to be important enough to pirate. So that’s cool. Oh, all right. I forgive you. Just buy the next volume, OK?)
In the unlikely event that you have no idea what book you’re holding, let me explain to you, generally speaking, how this book works. First of all, here’s what it isn’t: a standard issue guidebook to Doctor Who. Those looking for the nitty gritty facts of Doctor Who can probably get a decent sense of them by inference, but that’s not what this book is for. There are no episode descriptions, cast lists, or lengthy discussions of the behind the scenes workings of the show. There are dozens of books that already do that, and a fair number of online sites. Nor is this a book of reviews. For those who want those things, I personally recommend the Doctor Who Reference Guide, Doctor Who Ratings Guide, and A Brief History of Time (Travel) – three superlative websites that were consulted for basically every one of these essays.
What this book is is an attempt to tell the story of Doctor Who. Not the story of how it was made, or the overall narrative of the Doctor’s life, or anything like that, but the story of the idea that is Doctor Who, from its beginnings in late 1963 to… well, 1966 in the case of this book, but there’s more to come. Doctor Who is a rarity in the world – an extremely long-running serialized narrative. Even rarer, it’s an extremely long-running serialized narrative that is not in a niche like soap operas or superhero comics – both provinces almost exclusively of die-hard fans. Doctor Who certainly has its die-hard fans (or, as I like to think of you, my target audience), but notably, it’s also been, for much of its existence, absolutely mainstream family entertainment for an entire country.
What this means is that the story of Doctor Who is, in one sense, the story of the world from 1963 on. Politics, music, technological and social development, and all manner of other things have crossed paths with Doctor Who over the nearly fifty years of its existence, and by using Doctor Who as a focus, one can tell a story with far wider implications.
The approach I use to do this is one that I’ve, rather pompously I suppose, dubbed psychochronography. It draws its name from the concept of psychogeography – an artistic movement created by Guy Debord in 1955 and described as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” More contemporarily, the term is associated with writers like Iain Sinclair, who writes books describing lengthy walking tours of London that fuse his experience with the history of the places he walks, weaving them into a narrative that tries to tell the entire story of a place, and Alan Moore, who does the same thing while worshiping a snake.
Psychochronography, then, attempts the same feat by walking through time. Where walking through space involves little more than picking a direction and moving your feet rhythmically, walking through time without the aid of a TARDIS is a dodgier proposition. The easiest way is to take a specific object and trace its development through time, looking, as the psychogeographers do, at history, lived experience, and the odd connections that spring up.
And so this book is the first part of a walk through Doctor Who. The essays within it wear a lot of hats, and switch them rapidly. All involve a measure of critical reading (in the literary theory sense, not in the complaining sense) of Doctor Who stories to figure out what they are about. This generally means trying to peel back the onion skins of fan history that cloud a story with things “everybody knows.” But it also involves looking at the legacy of stories, which often means looking at that onion skin and trying to explain how it got there. No effort is made to disguise the fact that the first appearance of the Daleks is massive for instance, but on the other hand, the book still looks carefully at what their initial impact might have been.
This approach also means looking at how a story would (and could) have been understood by a savvy viewer of the time, and at how the story can be read as responding to the concerns of its time. That means that the essays tend to be long on cultural context. And, in the end, it also means looking at how I personally interact with these stories. This book has no pretense of objectivity. It is about my walking tour of Doctor Who. I try to be accurate, but I also try to be me.
To fully grab the scope of the topic, in addition to the meat of the book – entries covering all of the Doctor Who stories produced with William Hartnell as the lead actor – there are four other types of entries. The first are the “Time Can Be Rewritten” entries. One peculiar feature of Doctor Who is that its past is continually revisited. The bulk of these came in the form of novels written in the 90s and early 00s, but there are other examples. At the time of writing, for instance, Big Finish puts out new stories every year featuring the first eight Doctors. These entries cover occasional highlights from these revisitations, using them as clues to how these earlier eras are widely understood.
The second are the “Pop Between Realtiies, Home in Time for Tea” entries, which look at popular media and culture to build context for understanding Doctor Who. These entries usually crop up prior to the bits of Doctor Who they’re most relevant for, and provide background and points of comparison for the show as it wrestles with the issues of its many times.
Third, there are the “You Were Expecting Someone Else” entries, which deal with spinoff material produced concurrently with Doctor Who but that, inevitably, has some significant differences from the approach of the televised material. These exist to give a broader sense of Doctor Who as a cultural object and, perhaps more importantly, because they’re kind of fun.
Finally, there are some essays just thrown into the book version as bonuses. These mostly consist of me slogging my way through some established fan debate about Doctor Who and trying, no doubt fruitlessly, to provide the last word on the matter.
It’s probably clear by this point that all of these entries began as blog entries on my blog, also called TARDIS Eruditorum. This book version, however, revises and expands every entry, as well as adding several new ones – mostly Time Can Be Rewritten entries, but a few others.
To this end, I should thank the many readers of the blog for their gratifying and edifying comments, which have kept the project going through more than one frustrating stretch. I should also thank the giants upon whose shoulders I stand when analyzing Doctor Who – most obviously Paul Cornell, Martin Day, and Keith Topping for The Discontinuity Guide, David J. Howe, Mark Stammers, and Steven James Walker for the Doctor handbooks, Toby Hadoke and Rob Shearman for Running Through Corridors, and Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood for the sublimely brilliant About Time series, to which this book is a proud footnote.
A final note – although I have expanded and revised the essays in this book from their original online versions, I have not attempted to smooth out the developing style of the entries. Much like the show it follows, this project has evolved and grown since its beginning, and I did not wish to alter that.
But most of all and most importantly, thank you, all of you. But most of all, thank you, dear reader. I hope you enjoy.
Time Can Be Rewritten Extra: Time and Relative (Kim Newman, Telos Books, 2001)
It’s November of 2001. At least, that’s how the entry should begin. It’s how all the later ones begin. (Well, not with November of 2001, but with the date.) But, of course, this is one of those special bonus essays you book-readers get. Sure, it’s the first essay in the book, but it’s written long after the fact, and it’s not the real beginning. That’s next essay, with An Unearthly Child. And it seems wrong, somehow, to set the scene in November of 2001 – by any measure a more or less irrelevant time for Doctor Who history – when the real action begins on November 23rd, 1963.
Of course, that’s the essential problem of stories set pre-Unearthly Child. As we’ll see over the next few essays, it is in a meaningful sense important to Doctor Who that the story begins where it does. There is a narrative, in the early stories, about the Doctor becoming a hero. And setting much before that undermines those stories.
But these adventures exist. The Doctor Who Reference Guide counts a full 17 of them, and that’s ignoring the 1966 Annual stories, which are mostly placed there because they’re a continuity nightmare. These seventeen include short stories from the various Short Trips anthologies published by Big Finish (which, to be fair, have always been the places to put more experimental or oddball stories), short stories and comics from Doctor Who Magazine, an audio play, and then two novellas from Telos Publishing (this novella having been the debut title for that line). And it’s not like they’re all from the novel-and-comics writers – TV writers like Mark Gatiss and Marc Platt have penned them. So I suppose I shouldn’t ignore them. Honestly, I only did because I didn’t want to start the blog with anything other than An Unearthly Child.
The appeal of this primordial era is, of course, clear. The question of who the Doctor was on Gallifrey, how and why he stole the TARDIS, and, at least until The War Games, where he’s from and why he’s running are huge ones, and Doctor Who fandom hangs on every clue towards their answers. (This is, of course, why answering them is mostly a terrible idea.) And, of course, it also gives an opportunity to rehabilitate the character of Susan, whose problems as a character will form the bulk of several essays to come.
All of which brings us to Time and Relative, Kim Newman’s opening salvo in the Telos Novella line – a short-lived series of premium Doctor Who fiction that alternated between established Doctor Who writers and established SF writers new to Doctor Who. Time and Relative kicks the line off with a pre-Unearthly Child story featuring the adventures of Susan Foreman.
The thing that’s most striking about Newman’s book is that it is manifestly a prequel to An Unearthly Child. Taking place in the early days of 1963, in the midst of a brutally harsh winter (which really happened in England in 1963 – the snow was on the ground until April. It also happens to describe Connecticut in early 2011 while most of these essays were being written). We’re going to talk several times in this volume, including in practically all of the bonus essays, about stories that are written as though they are part of an earlier era in the show. This is an important concept for the show, in no small part because the idea of revisiting the past to tell new stories about it is kind of the entire point of the show. And more to the point, it tells us useful things about how the past of the show is understood at various times in its future. What a William Hartnell story is taken to be in 1995 is different from one in 2005 and different again from what we’ll get when we get neo-Hartnell stuff in 2015.
I say all of this because, somewhat astonishingly, the central concept of Newman’s book is to write Doctor Who as it was in March of 1963. Which may seem like a challenge, given that the most obvious answer to the question of what Doctor Who was like in March of 1963 was “it wasn’t.”
Which is basically the point of the book. Right on the second page, it stakes out its position, as the Doctor proclaims that continuity “doesn’t exist, child. Except in the minds of the cretinously literal… without contradictions, we’d be entirely too easy to track down.” Instead we get a far stranger story – one that winds its way through the various antecedents and dead ends that Doctor Who could have taken and did take. References to Dan Dare and the Mekon, or to John and Gillian (companions of the Doctor in the TV Comic strips of the 1960s) are sprinkled throughout. As are vague allusions to the program’s future – Ian and Barbara make cameos, there’s a vague reference to the Daleks (and a skeptical one – the Doctor mocks someone mentioning a flying saucer by saying “You’ll be seeing flying teacups and creeping pepperpots next”) and Susan repeatedly returns to her fear of a man who is obviously the Master.
But this is mere window dressing. Let’s be honest. Just like the lurking terror of the ice monsters throughout the book is window-dressing – an excuse to have a plot. The real story here is about Susan Foreman, an alien in London in March of 1963. By far the book’s most interesting segments are those that deal with her personality. A lengthy section, for instance, in which she speculates on what boys might like her, and what celebrities she likes. (“I don’t like Albert Finney, except I don’t like him in a special way that might mean I like him more than any others I mention.”)
One of the things you’ll notice over the rest of the book is a recurring fascination with Susan as a character. Most of this centers around something I call the Problem of Susan – namely that as a character, she destabilizes the narrative in some significant ways. When she’s present, she prevents the Doctor from quite acting Doctorly because he has to treat her as his primary concern. Once she leaves, her absence and the Doctor’s failure to ever go back for her becomes a gaping hole that is at the root of the Doctor’s steadfast refusal to go back for companions. (A problem that, admittedly, stems mostly from a later point in the series where the Doctor can at least occasionally make the TARDIS go where he wants.) And, though I don’t really talk about it at all in this book, the problem is exacerbated further when the question of the Time War comes in.
The nature of the Problem of Susan is that there is no such thing as “the” solution to it. But Newman offers one solution that is compelling. As Newman has Susan write, “I think this is why Grandfather took me with him. There are things I can do that he can’t.” And the reason for this is simple – while the Doctor still obeys some of the rules, specifically the so-called primary rule, that his people do not meddle, Susan says “I don’t think I believe in rules at all… I think meddling is an obligation.”
(The use of the word meddling, and it’s being stressed, echoes with The Time Meddler interestingly, it should be noted.)
As with Simon Guerrier’s The Time Travellers, Newman’s book is interesting in that it is the rare retcon that seems wholly consistent with the spirit of what we see on television. Newman’s account – that Susan was somehow necessary for the Doctor’s flight – is impressive because it’s so obvious in hindsight. Of course that’s why a sixteen year old girl ran off with her grandfather. Because more accurately, he ran off with her. Not that he wasn’t the sort to do that – he’s clearly a rebel as well.
One of my favorite plays ever written is Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, which offers various hypothetical accounts of the final meeting between Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr. At one point, the play has Bohr’s wife, Margrethe, speculate on the nature of their final meeting, saying “that was the last and greatest demand that Heisenberg made on his friendship with you. To be understood when he couldn’t understand himself. And that was the last and greatest act of friendship for Heisenberg that you performed in return. To leave him misunderstood.”
Newman, it seems to me, offers a very similar solution to the Problem of Susan – one that finally makes sense of the troubling end of The Dalek Invasion of Earth. (Even more sense than Guerrier’s, in many ways.) That in the end, Susan and the Doctor were equal partners in their rebellion, running off together. And that the Doctor’s last, great act of love for Susan was to force her to rebel one final time, and to run away even from him.
But that, in the end, is just one of the many future echoes left by Time and Relative. More interesting, in many ways, is what happens when the Doctor finally confronts the Cold Knights. The book is structured to defer this scene for as long as possible – much of its length is spent with Susan and her friends trying to get across London to the Doctor. This deferral relies on the reader’s knowledge that this book is ultimately a Doctor Who story in order to work. Because it is a Doctor Who story, we know that the Doctor is the one to save the day from alien threats. So Susan’s struggle to get to the Doctor is naturally assumed by the audience to double as the struggle to get to the part of the story where the villains are defeated.
Except that when they reach the Doctor, he is not the Doctor we know from the series. This is unsurprising – as we’ll see over the next few entries, it’s very clear that the story being told over the first thirteen or so episodes of the series is the story of how this cranky old man called the Doctor becomes a hero by virtue of meeting Ian and Barbara. Great lines like “fear makes companions of us all” or scenes like the Doctor giving in to despair in the Cave of Skulls, or even the Doctor and Barbara’s reconciliation at the end of The Edge of Destruction have power precisely because the Doctor is, with those lines, becoming the Doctor.
This is, in many ways, the fundamental problem with pre-Unearthly Child adventures. If you put the Doctor in an adventure prior to the start of the series, you do violence to the actual episodes at the start of the series, replacing them with a fannish reconstruction. This is a problem we’ll see throughout Doctor Who, in which fanlore about what past eras were like overwrites the actual episodes in a deeply unsatisfying way.
And so when Susan and company finally get to the Doctor, he calmly refuses to help. He stands by the fundamental rule of his people – not to meddle. And when Susan implores him to help, he points out that her stated consequences – that they would be “a part of things, not apart from them” is a “dreadful state of affairs.” It is only when he is presented with a child’s toy – “a feat of the imagination” – that the Doctor agrees to become a part of things, and in the process to lose the freedom from fixed reference or involvement in continuity that he praises at the start of the novel.
In other words, Time and Relative functions as a pre-Unearthly Child story by positing a Doctor who is even less of a hero than the one we see in An Unearthly Child, and then giving the Doctor one of the missing traits over the course of the novel. It fits into the non-existent slot before the first story, curiously, by making it clear why stories cannot fit into this slot and remain Doctor Who stories.
The result is a rarity among neo-Hartnell stories – one that actually seems to pay tribute to the episodes that aired on television instead of fictionalized memories of them, and one that is an admirable and oddly satisfying start to the era, albeit thirty-eight years late.
I Was a Dad Once (An Unearthly Child)
It is 5:16 PM, November the 23rd, 1963. Gerry and the Pacemakers' "You'll Never Walk Alone" is the number one single. It will go on to become the anthem of Liverpool FC, one of the most successful English football clubs of all time. Elsewhere in the charts are The Beatles, Roy Orbison, and Chuck Berry. These are classic, innocent days of rock and roll.
Whereas in the news, life has just gotten a lot less innocent. Since 6:30 PM the previous day, the BBC has been running news coverage of the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy. There are other news stories, but in terms of the times, this is the only one anyone cares about right now.
At twenty seconds past the minute, exactly eighty seconds off from its scheduled airtime, normal programming resumes with the first episode of a new children's science fiction serial, Doctor Who. The opening credits are a futuristic psychedelic blur that seems at once miles ahead of its time and oddly quaint as the symbol of youthful revolution has just been gunned down in Texas. The theme music, ostensibly written by Ron Grainer was, for all practical purposes, realized by Delia Derbyshire, who arranged Grainer's score by splicing tape together and speeding/slowing a sample of a single note being plucked on a string, white noise, and some testing oscillators. Derbyshire would, in her later life, be recognized as an unsung hero - a pioneer of electronic music - but received no on-screen credit because the BBC's policy was that members of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop would remain anonymous. The credits themselves were done by distorting footage of a pen light being moved around using a process called howlaround.
The effect is mysterious and chilling – like nothing that has been seen on television before. The credits give way, although the haunting theme music does not, as a camera moves around an old junkyard, finally coming to rest on a Police Box. This sequence is hard to comprehend in 1963, as there is nothing particularly strange about a Police Box save for its apparent location in a junkyard, which, by virtue of being a junkyard is sort of, by definition, a place full of odd things. And yet the camera lingers, stressing the strangeness of this object that does not yet have strangeness.
With 48 years of history to contend with, Doctor Who has inevitably changed. One must ask, then, when it became Doctor Who. The answer, it seems, is right here, as mysterious, haunting theme music gives way to an iconic shot. Never mind that the shot cannot possibly be read as iconic in this original context - everything about the camerawork and the music tells us it is iconic. Everything tells us this Police Box is the most important thing about this show. Before we see a single character, before we see the Doctor, before we see a hint of science fiction, we see a Police Box.
I should say here that An Unearthly Child, the first episode, is usually treated as one story along with the following three episodes. Because in its first seasons Doctor Who had individually titled episodes instead of story arc titles, the name for this story is disputed. The other names all refer to the plot elements of episodes 2-4, which are, for all practical purposes, a completely different story from the one in this first episode. The episode titled An Unearthly Child was rewritten by Anthony Coburn from an original script by C.E. Webber, and was reshot before transmission, both facts that I think serve to separate it in a meaningful sense from the three episodes that follow, which are pure Coburn. Thus I, in a viewpoint that has essentially no credibility in mainstream fandom, opt to treat An Unearthly Child as the title of the one-episode story preceding a three-episode story entitled 100,000 BC. This entry is going to stick entirely to the first episode.
As an episode, then, An Unearthly Child is a simple character piece. Only four characters meaningfully appear - Susan Foreman, a teenage girl, Barbara Wright and Ian Chesterton, a pair of her teachers, and The Doctor, her cranky old grandfather. The story is mostly about Susan - the eponymous child lacking earthiness. Her teachers, Ms. Wright and Mr. Chesterton, are at once enamored with her and scared of her. Enamored because she is a genius, and they know it. Scared because she is the wrong sort of genius. She knows things that people aren't meant to know. She speaks of the future - at times quite rightly. In a moment of inadvertent brilliance that makes this episode sing nearly 50 years later, she predicts the decimalization of British currency with confidence, although this was merely, at the time, a possible future.
So this is where it starts. A mysterious Police Box, and a magical girl, and a mystery that two regular, unimportant people can't quite get over. A mystery that brings them out on a cold London night to 76 Totters Lane to try to find out where this girl came from. There, they meet an old man. Smug, superior, and unfriendly, he does not want them there. This is his mysterious girl, and his mystery. We are set up for some sort of conflict, but exactly what isn’t quite clear. We are, thus far, being pulled along a version of what Tzvetan Todorov calls the fantastic – a sort of tightrope walk between two possibilities. A strange and aberrant event happens, and the story focuses on whether this event is supernatural or the product of a fractured, insane mind. In a Todorov-style approach to the fantastic, the resolution of this ambiguity is delayed until the end, and that’s the primary tension of the story.
That’s clearly where we’re going – this story is, it seems, about the mystery of Susan, and whether she’s unearthly and fantastic, or whether there’s a mundane, psychological explanation – perhaps some bit of social realism, a proto-Cathy Come Home. And then, suddenly, it goes wrong. The two teachers force themselves past the old man, into the blue box, to try to rescue Susan from whatever awful things he’s doing to her.
Instead, they fall out of the world and into another. It is another triumph of design in the show - a stark white of iconic 60s futurism that would age gracefully into retro-futurism. And, of course, bigger on the inside than it is on the outside – a massive cathedral of lights and switches unlike anything that would be imaginable inside a Police Box. Suddenly the mystery we thought we were solving is removed, and we see the one we’d almost forgotten in the fuss – the mystery of that strange Police Box in Totters Lane.
Right here is where the show becomes Doctor Who. A show about a magic box that can take you anywhere, and the madman who flies it. A show about running, and escape. But the Doctor is not yet the Doctor. He is scared. And these two schoolteachers are a threat to him. He is running. He wants to go home, and can't. He wants to protect his granddaughter. But more than anything, he wants to be free. He'll throw Susan away to be with Ian and Barbara if that's what it takes. But he is so scared of the idea of anyone having power over him that, even with Susan promising him again and again that they are good people, he will not just let them go and let everything return to normal.
So in a mad, daft gesture, one that doesn't make any sense at all (but that will, in a sense, characterize every other decision he makes on the show, and every decision we imagine him making before this point), he runs. It is the first moment of depth in the cantankerous grandfather. He’s scared, and he runs. And the mysterious swirls of the credits return, and a strange wheezing, groaning noise echoes out, and the TARDIS is somewhere else. Ian and Barbara, helpless, unconscious on the ground, have fallen out of the world, dragged along by a madman with a box.
In this first episode, the questions are obvious. Why is he running? What is he afraid of? Who is he? Already, in the first episode, Doctor Who is about its own mystery. And yet the real mysteries are not the ones about the origins of this strange man who fashions himself, seemingly in response to Ian’s suggesting the word, a Doctor. The real question is this – where are we going? Where is this TARDIS thing taking Ian and Barbara?
Or, to put it more broadly, what kind of show is this going to be? It doesn't know yet. It doesn't know what it will become. Doesn't know the history and wonder that's coming. Perhaps it's even scared of that history. Running from it. It is, after all, a massive history – unimaginably large even when living it, little yet when imagining it from as small a seed as this.
But that history is here. Right here, in this first episode, with its haunting theme music and impossible knowledge of the future and obsession with a Police Box. The episode was clearly made 48 years ago. It is not timeless. Why should it be? Timeless things are things that never happen. Doctor Who happened, and happens still. This is unmistakably 1963 British television drama. And yet it feels, every second of the episode, like Doctor Who. It feels like it was made by people who knew what Doctor Who was.
It's impossible. The fact that a Police Box would look out of place everywhere in the universe within six years, that the theme and TARDIS console would be iconic, that Britain would go to decimal currency, none of this could have been there in 1963. But watching it, that knowledge does not feel like a secret history, but like a real history, there and unfolding in front of us. And when we stare into it, it is impossibly big.
It is 5:40 PM on November the 23rd, 1963. American President John F. Kennedy has been dead for less than 24 hours. And everything in the world has changed. Forever.
Why I Like The People Of This Miserable Planet (100,000 BC)
It is 100,000 BC. There is no number one single. There is no music industry. Indeed, there is no industry period. There's not even really a humanity, period, with the great leap forward of behavioral modernity still lurking 50,000 years in the future. The peak of the ice age currently being enjoyed is about 80,000 years in the future. On a hillside, a blue box appears with a strange wheezing, groaning sound.
More usefully, it is the 30th of November, 1963. The Beatles recapture #1 with "She Loves You," the biggest selling single of the 1960s, which is charting for the second time. It will hold that chart position for two weeks, before giving way in the final weeks of the year to "I Want to Hold Your Hand." Other artists in the charts include Kathy Kirby, Cliff Richards, Dusty Springfield.
In practical news, The Kennedy assassination has long since turned to farce with Lee Harvey Oswald himself being murdered two days later, prompting now President Johnson to appoint the Warren Commission to figure everything out. Now the world waits uncomfortably, aware that the progress of history has been diverted, but not knowing where, or towards what. In British news, both Kenya and Zanzibar attain independence, part of a wave of colonial independences we’ll be seeing over the course of this book. And, in news of interest because we’re looking at television, instant replay is invented in the United States.
While on UK television, we have… well, first of all, we have an odd metaphor for television in the form of the TARDIS itself. In later episodes, the disparity between the internal and external sizes of the TARDIS will be explained in terms of the interior being a different dimension. But last week, in the first episode, it was instead explained by analogy, with the Doctor referring to the way in which television allows a much larger world to be contained in a smaller space. It is an odd analogy, in no small part because, in the context of a fictional TV show, it appears to suggest that the interior of the TARDIS is fictional even within Doctor Who. Still, it is an explanation of sorts. We were invited to leave our world via the television. We were, in other words, invited to indulge in escapism.
To the captured, escape is an end in itself. It is not until you escape that you quite realize that escapes are not merely exits but entries. When last we left them, Ian and Barbara have fallen out of the world. Now we come to see where they have landed. Where their escape from reality has brought them. The answer – as the title of the second episode suggests – is “somewhere terrifying.” Almost immediately, everything goes wrong. The Doctor is kidnapped by cavemen, sending Susan into a panic such that Ian and Barbara, skeptical and afraid as they are, go to help him.
The rescue is a complete disaster, and the four of them quickly find themselves tied up in the Cave of Skulls, named for its primary decorative feature, a large number of skulls that have been split open by an axe. And here we see something that, to anyone aware of the future legacy of Doctor Who, is bizarre. The Doctor panics and seems to wholly give up hope on escaping. He is, in other words, in no way the hero of this story.
From here the story is a fairly staid and at times repetitive sequence of escapes and recaptures. But over time, the reality of all of this sinks in. These three episodes' most striking feature, in many ways, is Barbara's nervous breakdown as the four leads wander through a forest following their escape from the Cave of Skulls.
The breakdown is stunning in its realism. Eventually the show will get to the standard of people being absolutely thrilled by the adventure and excitement that traveling with the Doctor entails. But here, as she collapses, screaming in anguished confusion and wondering what has happened to her, there is none of that wonder. Falling through a hole in the world is not an easy proposition. Travel in the TARDIS is not a gift. It’s a nightmare.
Just ask the Doctor. We don't know yet where he came from, or why. In one telling sequence, Ian speculates that if only we knew his name, we might understand him better. Aside from being an excuse to work the words "Doctor who?" into the actual episode, this question is one of the episode's central dramatic tensions. Prior to Barbara's breakdown comes what is, in many ways, an even more interesting moment of breakdown - the Doctor's. As the party sits, tied up and terrified in the Cave of Skulls, he apologizes, saying that this is all his fault. He has not learned to be the Doctor yet. He's just escaped. We first see him having fallen through a hole in his world, and now he, like Barbara, is left to figure out what this means.
In many ways, we know more than he does, although that is perhaps not clear yet. After all, on one level, nobody knows anything about the Doctor yet. The words "Gallifrey" and "Time Lord" have not been thought of yet. William Hartnell doesn't know that he's playing a Time Lord. He doesn't know why he fled his homeworld. But most of this is irrelevant. He's escaped. He's not there anymore. What matters more is where he is now, and who he is.
It is telling that the first adventure in which he needs to become the Doctor is set... well, that's the funny bit. It's not clear where it's set. The production materials suggest the title of 100,000 BC. History-wise, the date is tricky. The episode talks as though the major problem facing the tribe of cavemen is the looming ice age. They display behavioral modernity, by and large, with a religious system centered on the sun. That would suggest a later date than 100,000 BC – a date, we should note, that exists on some production documents, not in the story itself. But the main thrust of this isn’t the date – it’s the era. This is humanity at their dawn – as they are in the process of becoming human.
The question of where, on the other hand, is even trickier, as the range of dates is right along the periods of early human migrations. But the implications are telling. Historically, somewhere around 100,000 BC, a small family of humans crossed the Red Sea, exiting Africa and going on to populate the planet. And the Doctor gave them fire. He aids in their ascension from ape to man. The Doctor will not actually defend present-day Earth from evil threats for almost three years. But here we see, in his first adventure, the Doctor brings us fire. In this regard, we are his creation. This is the story of how the Doctor, in his first adventure, creates humanity, to some extent, it seems, just so he can defend them.
Strange, then, how little regard he pays us. He is perfectly willing, at one moment, to bash a man's head in simply because it would make his escape more convenient. As with much in these episodes, it feels wrong. This is not the Doctor, our hero. This is a nasty man every bit as scared as Barbara. Or, perhaps more accurately, despite being played by the oldest actor to take the role, this is a young man in over his head and freaking out over it.
And interestingly, he never becomes the Doctor in this story. Not quite. Much of the story is about the conflict between him and Ian over which of them should be the leader. And it’s not quite solved here. In time it will be settled and the show will become Doctor Who as we more or less know it. But for now the conflict is, roughly, between Ian's good nature and the Doctor's actual competence. The Doctor wants to be leader in this story more because he does not want to follow and be imprisoned than out of any actual good naturedness. This story is paralleled in the conflict between Kal and Za for leadership of the tribe, with each of them being pale and less sympathetic versions of the Doctor and Ian. This story, at a fundamental level, is about forming the show and deciding who the main character is, with this act, in a move of massively mythic proportions, paralleled with the creation of humanity and the establishment of the direction of human development.
And yet the seeds of the Doctor – the real Doctor, the one we know – are there. In the Cave of Skulls, he comforts Barbara, saying, in yet another line with resonances with the future, “fear makes companions of us all.” And later, it is he who is inventive enough to engineer an escape from the cavemen via some clever manipulation. Already in this story he is learning to be the Doctor.
But he's not there yet. In part because he does not trust any of his traveling companions save Susan. Crucially, his traveling companions trust Susan and not him, establishing and sustaining Susan's role on the TARDIS. As the show settles and the Doctor and Ian’s conflict is resolved, Susan will slowly be squeezed out. But also in part because he still has only escaped. He has not realized where he is yet. This is made literal in the closing moments, where the Doctor explains that he can't simply return Ian and Barbara home, as he has to first land somewhere he knows where is. Until he realizes who he is and what role he has in the universe, he can’t actually control his ship.
But perhaps most importantly, the Doctor cannot be the Doctor yet because there is something he doesn't know about the universe. Something he won't learn until the next story: monsters are real.
A Man Who Never Would (The Daleks)
It is December 21, 1963. The Beatles continue to hold the #1 chart position with "I Want to Hold Your Hand,” with the number two slot still belonging to their earlier single “She Loves You.” This, then, is the height of Beatlemania. During this story come its crowning events – the release of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” in the US, two record companies with dueling releases of the first US Beatles album, the crowds greeting their arrival in New York, and finally, their famous appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. They’ll continue to hold the number one slot into 1964, finally losing it in late January to The Dave Clark Five’s “Glad All Over.” Also around are The Swinging Blue Jeans with “Hippy Hippy Shake,” The Hollies with “Stay,” and The Searchers with the next number one, “Needles and Pins.”
In the news, Barry Goldwater begins his doomed challenge to Johnson for the Presidency, Johnson declares a war on poverty, we start to figure out that smoking is bad for you, John Glenn leaves the space program to become a politician, The World Trade Center plans begin, and apparently nothing interesting happens in the UK ever.
Doctor Who continues apace with another claustrophobic episode featuring the four main characters and nothing else. The show is still feeling its way around, uncertain of what it is. But as with the first episode, it is already clear that it is something. Most notably with Ian's line describing the Doctor as having "a knack for getting himself in trouble," a character trait that will sustain 48 years and counting of stories, but that, notably, Ian has little basis for. It’s another wholly forward-looking line.
But in other ways, the show seems lost, following the trends of futuristic design laid out by classic movies like Forbidden Planet instead of breaking new ground. The dead world of Skaro is a monument to retro-futurism. The TARDIS is not yet a magical box, with excessive effort being made to actually explain how the thing works. The fact that the change of the Doctor and Susan to aliens instead of futuristic humans was a last-second production decision is still clear, with both acting as though the TARDIS is just future technology that any species would acquire given time.
And on top of that, the Doctor is still openly cruel. When his companions - including Susan - beg to leave the planet, he frankly betrays them all, deliberately breaking the TARDIS so that they have to go to the futuristic city and explore. Here we have our first inkling of why the Doctor does what he does - his burning need to explore and see new things. But it is not yet wedded to any sense of kindness. He is not a hero. He’s just about the least sympathetic character on the show.
The show also presents its first aliens. Initially they find a metal creature in the forest, and the Doctor chastises Ian for failing to adequately imagine how much the universe can differ from his experience. Then, in the episode's iconic cliffhanger, Barbara is menaced by an unseen monster with a bizarre arm.
And for the third time in a month, everything changes.
This cliffhanger, although iconic, is also misunderstood, treated as the start of Dalekmania, Doctor Who’s own parallel to Beatlemania. But the tension of this cliffhanger is not that Barbara is menaced by the Daleks. The Daleks don’t exist yet. The cliffhanger is about Barbara’s terror at the unseen monster.
It’s not until two days after “I Want to Hold Your Hand” reaches the US that the Daleks are named. But what, exactly, are they? For the second episode, at least, this is held in check. They are devious, and we are certainly not inclined to trust them, especially after the wonderful establishing shot where we pull away from the TARDIS crew to see that they have entered a room full of faceless, anonymous robotic monsters. But they do not seem to be the unquestionably and unambiguously malevolent evil that we will someday know them to be. The Doctor is not a help here - he does not recognize them, and they do not recognize him. This is their true first meeting, and it is a wary one in which each of them tries to feel out and understand the other. The Daleks seem to warn of a greater threat, the hideously mutated Thals living out in the wilderness.
Meanwhile, the show takes a turn to the crushingly bleak, with the characters slowly dying of radiation poisoning. The Doctor manages to negotiate for Susan to be allowed to go get the anti-radiation drugs needed to save them. At the end of the second episode, the Doctor lies near death, and his companions, who by now know he sabotaged the TARDIS, seem to want to keep him alive only because they need him to fly the ship to get them home.
(It is here also that Hartnell flubs his first line as the Doctor. This is a problem that will increase over the next three years, eventually being part of why he is forced into retirement. This is an uncanny bit of foreshadowing, given that Hartnell is the only actor to play the Doctor who has no gaps whatsoever in which a large number of additional stories can be added. He has companions the entire time that we can use signs of aging to verify time via, meaning that his eventual regeneration, for the character, comes only a few years after his first appearance. This is secondarily true of Troughton, but with a big asterisk we'll get to later, and actually may not be true of Hartnell, but we're years away from getting to that bizarre retcon. And before some wise-ass fan asks about Davison, there is no reason to assume Nyssa or Turlough age at human rates, and also, he takes a brief solo trip in Frontios that can theoretically be of any length. So there, I know my pedantry as well as you do. Which is to say, go ahead. Ask me about Eccleston. Make my day.)
It is not until the start of the third episode that we begin to see the Daleks as monsters, though that is accomplished in a scene that is, in hindsight, deeply uncomfortable. Susan, emerging from the TARDIS, encounters a Thal. The camera holds on Susan as she reacts to it, finally saying that she had expected the Thals to be disfigured, but that "You're perfect." With that, the camera cuts to a strapping blonde Adonis of a Thal, indicating the definition of perfection. The degree to which this definition is Aryan is all the more chilling given that Carole Anne Ford, who plays Susan, is Jewish.
But underneath the flagrant racialism is the beginning of a vital point about Doctor Who - the fact that the show is, at heart, anthrophilic. That is, it loves humans. The Doctor is in the end more human than alien. "Good" species are the ones that look human. The other species of the universe are, by and large, monsters.
In an odd way, this revelation – the fact that the Daleks are contrasted with “perfect” humans – is what creates monsters. After Susan meets the Thals, the Daleks begin talking of extermination, and gun down the Thal leader for no reason other than because they want to kill him. This is where the Daleks become monsters, and Doctor Who acquires one of its fundamental dualisms: people and monsters. But this should make us uncomfortable. Monsters are monsters because they don’t look like us. For all the importance monsters have to Doctor Who – and the monsters are a genuinely important part of the show – there is something ugly about the idea of them.
What is interesting is that the fundamental evil of the Daleks is explained by their hatred for things that are not like them. In other words, by the Dalek equivalent of anthrophilia. At the heart of this is a question of race. By and large, the United Kingdom has a much less troubled history of race in the 20th century than the United States, making the appeal to multiculturalism in this story less pressing in its native cultural context than it would have been in the US some six months before the massive filibuster on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was broken in the Senate. To give an idea of how entrenched racism was in the US, Senator Robert Byrd, who did not leave the Senate until his death in 2010, joined a filibuster led by President Pro Tempore of the Senate Richard Russell, who declared that "We will resist to the bitter end any measure or any movement which would have a tendency to bring about social equality."
But here in the early days of 1964, there are still racial troubles in the UK, even if they are overshadowed by the horrific racism in the US. Indeed, the darker side of racism in the UK is its invisibility, and its close links with the supposedly proud colonial history of the country. At this point, Doctor Who treats racism in a manner that can only be called uncomfortable. It will be a long time, if ever, before any serious case can be made that this has changed. Indeed, the show quickly hedges against any claims that it might be liberal by painting the Thals as deluded fools for their pacifism. For all that might be made of the Dalek/Nazi parallels in which the Daleks’ hatred of the Thals mirrors the Holocaust, that’s not the main thrust here. After all, we like the Thals because they’re nice Aryan lads. The thing we don’t like about the Daleks is that they’re not human. The Thals need to buck up and learn to fight bad guys. The idea that racial issues are in play in a positive way in this story is strained at best – the best we can say is that the racial subtext is incidental. The worst we can say is that it’s actually deliberate.
The end result is that there becomes a strange irreducibility to the terrible evil of the Daleks. It is not merely their xenophobia. This becomes clear in their portions of the plot, as they come to realize that the massive radiation levels on Skaro are now necessary to sustain Dalek life (in a bizarrely psychedelic scene) and decide to irradiate the planet and exterminate the Thals. What is interesting at this point is that the Daleks are not wrong. Contrary to the Doctor's insistence that the two races could live in peace, one of them needs radiation to live, and the other needs a lack of radiation to live. It is an unstable, primal state, and the Doctor actively chooses to let the Thals live and the Daleks die. But why?
In the end, the closest thing to a moral difference that can be drawn is that the Thals, perhaps naively, would never try to exterminate the Daleks for their own survival. In fact, it is the Doctor that orchestrates this, planning to drain the Daleks of the static electricity they need to survive. (A quirk of Dalek physiology that will be ignored from this point on, fitting in mostly with the obsession with trying to make the show scientifically plausible that will soon be abandoned) When this finally comes about, the Doctor says, cruelly, that he does not want to save the Daleks, and anyway, that he can't. There is a moral distinction here that is not yet fully formed. The Daleks are monsters because they recognize nothing that isn't Dalek. This, in the end, is why the Doctor hates them. Because he is, in the end, interested in the vast strangeness of the universe, in seeing and learning everything. It is not that the Daleks are willing to kill to survive. It is that they don't care about it. It’s that they consider killing to be a natural solution to their problems.
The Thals, whatever their flaws, do care. Standing in the wreckage, the Thal leader mourns that there should have been another way - a refrain that the Doctor will someday echo in sorrow. But he has much more to learn about being the Doctor between now and then. As this story ends, the Doctor, with obvious glee, provides the Thals with guidance on how to start a new civilization. He declines to stay - he is too old to be a pioneer, though once, he says, he was. But his love of creating a situation like this is obvious. It is the first time since Ian and Barbara intruded on his life that he appears happy. Here, for the first time, he is truly learning to be the Doctor.
But to learn to be the Doctor, he needed a monster. And those monsters have also learned this episode. Much of them is already in place - the Dalek design is sufficiently iconic to be almost wholly unchanged through the show’s history. Other parts of them need to be set - although they love exterminating, they have not yet learned the fundamental joy of shouting "Exterminate" a lot. They have also not learned that they really want to avoid lengthy dialogue scenes. But they have learned that they have an enemy. That there is a man with a magic box who will always show up, and will not let their callous destructiveness stand. In hindsight, the Doctor's late revelation to them of the existence of the TARDIS is one of the great throwing downs of the gauntlet in history, the commencement of a 48 year struggle with no end. Before long, both sides will meet again. And this time, the Daleks will, not for the last time, extract a terrible price from the Doctor.
But for now, having learned from these monsters his role in the Universe, the Doctor moves on, seemingly happy. The TARDIS takes off. And then there is an explosion, and something, as usual, goes terribly wrong...
It Has To Come Out of a Cow (The Edge of Destruction)
It is February 8th, 1964. In the UK, the number one single is "Needles and Pins" by the Searchers, a Liverpool band. The songwriter, however, is American Sonny Bono, future Republican Congressman who will go on to author a massive copyright extension act that is itself a compromise over his own loathsome view that copyright should be perpetual. He will then ski into a tree and die.
Speaking of America, however, the number one single over there is fellow Liverpool band the Beatles, who have just touched down yesterday at JFK to a throb of fans, offering both a strange juxtaposition with Byron de la Beckwith getting away (for at least the next 30 years) with the murder of Medgar Evers.
In the context of Doctor Who, the series third adventure, a two part serial hastily cobbled together in order to get the series to fill out its 13-episode initial order without requiring the use of any additional sets or characters, is a bit lackluster. As a result of these budgetary crises, both episodes feature only the core cast - something that has, admittedly, happened twice previously in the series, but that will not happen again for more than a decade, and will never again happen for an entire story.
We also have the writing debut of David Whitaker, the show’s script editor for its first year, and one of the most influential figures in its development. This is miles from his best script, and yet it may well be his most important.
Its flaws are largely ones of circumstance. The rush nature of the story is all too clear at points. The opening ten minutes or so are horrendously awkward, with Ian and Barbara alternately acting like children and dementia patients, often changing over mid-word. It’s bewildering, and not in a good way. And then, just when it seems like this is going to be a disaster, the episode improbably picks up with an absolutely insane and thoroughly chilling scene in which Susan deliriously stabs a whole lot of things with scissors.
In the early days of Doctor Who, however, even awkward rush jobs can be huge. Doctor Who's canon, you see, is wholly additive, with new things just sort of being grafted on to the knobby bits as time goes on. Basically, it's a giant narrative Katamari. Nothing is ever contradicted or removed. In the event of a contradiction, basically, you've just created a new knobby bit. The only thing likely to happen to a bit of Doctor Who continuity is that it will be smoothed down until it's actually a good story, which, to be fair, it has not always been to start.