Does it Need Saying: The Aztecs

An homage to the serial's original title, Doctor Who and
the Fatal Drop Off a Soundstage With Shoddy Rear
Projection.

It is May 23rd, 1964. The number one single is Juliet by the unremarkable "The Four Pennies," who will peak at #1 for a week before yielding to Cilla Black, another star from the increasingly vital Liverpool.

The crucial thing to understand about Liverpool's dominance of the musical scene - a dominance that will not see serious challenge in import until Manchester's centrality some years later - is that Liverpool was a declining industrial city. The rise of the Merseybeat scene is specifically a rise of an economically depressed youth population.

I highlight this because Doctor Who is unmistakably a product of privilege. An academic and some schoolteachers traveling freely is not something that stems from the working class. In fact, its relationship to the working class is positively problematic. Susan, in the first episode, demonstrates that she is capable of living life without even understanding what money is or how it works. The Doctor, by definition, has no use for money. This tension will not be adequately addressed until December 25, 2009. Today, 45 years earlier and change, we have one of several colossally inadequate attempts at addressing it.

As I said back with Marco Polo, one interesting facet of the subgenre of Doctor Who known as the historical is that the first three were centered non-European cultures, and then no more ever were. This is the third and final of these, and is furthermore (I believe) the first Doctor Who story set entirely in the New World for over 40 years. Set in the 14th century, at least a century before Cortes came along, the shadow of European colonialism and its attendant socio-economic issues hangs explicitly over this story.

In her excellent article "Sociopathic Abscess or Yawning Chasm? The Absent Postcolonial Transition in Doctor Who," Lindy Orthia explicitly calls out The Aztecs as one of the explicitly pro-colonial stories of Doctor Who, and thus as one of its most problematic stories. The story features Barbara explicitly trying to change Aztec culture to abandon human sacrifice in the belief that doing so will allow the Aztecs to survive Spanish colonization. This trope may be more familiar to a contemporary reader as the underlying assumption of Mel Gibson's spectacular racist epic Apocalypto - that the fundamental problem with Pre-Columbian America is human sacrifice, and that this constitutes a sort of original sin that dooms the culture. (That Gibson took such care to depict the culture accurately and with native actors while simultaneously arguing that its extermination at the hands of the Spanish was a sort of inherent justice makes his movie all the more shocking. At least Doctor Who has the decency to obliviously cast white British actors who ham their way through the parts, thus giving the racism that smiling liberal face of willful ignorance that continues to protect discrimination so well.)

In terms of the issues of class and social justice, then, The Aztecs marks not so much a turning point as an institutional collapse in which the tensions and ambiguities of the first stories give way to unadulterated European colonialism, based, as always, not on overt racism but on the far creepier image of the White Man's Burden. In fact, The Doctor seems quite afflicted with the White Man's Burden, cursed to "hear the truth you've spoken twisted by knaves".

If anything blunts this accusation, it is the fact that thus far the Doctor is not clearly a figure of social justice. The flashes of social justice demonstrated against the Daleks have not been seen since. Once the Doctor embraces the ethos of social justice his failure to transcend the cultural biases of his writers becomes problematic. This early on, as they say, he's still cooking. In this story, in fact, he is an actively regressive character, upbraiding Barbara for trying to change history in the first place.

Those that find the Doctor's famed quote from this story, "You can't rewrite history! Not one line!" odd given later developments are not alone. Indeed, it's hard even given earlier developments. It's quite a challenge to figure out why the Doctor can actively aid the genocide of the Daleks while not being able to interfere in Aztec society. But the incoherence of the specifics do not reduce the degree to which the Doctor is expressing the beginnings of a major theme here - one that is, if not the much-needed social justice theme, at least closely intertwined with it. That theme is that the Doctor, despite the freedom of his travels, is held to a higher duty of some sort.

Indeed, given the casual racism of Barbara's position - which amounts to viewing the Aztecs as noble savages - the Doctor's non-interventionalist position of wanting to get back to the TARDIS with minimal fuss is, in many ways, the more liberal position. After all, it is clear that the Doctor is not in favor of human sacrifice - he speaks derisively of Tlotoxl as "the local butcher," and praises Autloc for renouncing the savagery of Aztec society. The Doctor's position, underneath its veneer of arbitrary plot expediency, is actually remarkably subtle, albeit only in hindsight, which helpfully resolves what was ambiguous in 1964 into subtlety today.

(Were it that Ian, whose involvement in this story mostly amounts to whacking people in the head and, on occasion, wisecracking about it, showed any similar depth, he might not be quite as worthless a lump of a character as he, frankly, is shaping up to be. Instead, after an interesting role challenging the Doctor's moral authority early on, he is rapidly settling into a bland action-man template that will basically continue to work awfully until the male companion is all-but-abandoned.)

The ambiguity of the Doctor extends to the Doctor's inadvertent marriage to Cameca in these episodes, giving us the first hint of a romantic side to the character. It is easy to dismiss the brief romance in this story as an aberration, but if it is an aberration, it is a deliberate one. Visual storytelling is used throughout these episodes to cement the fact that the Doctor does genuinely care for Cameca - from his active decision at the end not to abandon the brooch she offers him to the long close-up of his look of happiness, which is held long enough that the audience expects it to fade... only to see that it does not, and the Doctor is actually smitten by Cameca.

The problem with romance and the Doctor is that the Doctor, in the end, is defined by his desire to leave. A life defined by escape is not one that enables romantic relationships. Cameca knows this, and at the end begs to go with the Doctor, but is, for reasons that are not made clear at all, refused.

Perhaps this is because, for all the warmth shown between them, by far the most interesting and nuanced scenes of this episode are the ones in which the Doctor and Barbara interact. From the harshness of the Doctor's insistence that she not alter history to his eventual apology for that, Hartnell and Hill light up the screen in this episode. Their chemistry, combined with the fact that this is probably the most tightly paced and plotted Doctor Who story to date, makes it all the more visible that Susan is off in a corner for most of the story and Ian has nothing to do.

I am not arguing that Doctor/Barbara shipping is the optimal way to read the first two seasons of Doctor Who here. It's not. As much of a coal lump as Ian is, it is the odd triangle of the three of them that is the defining relationship thus far in Doctor Who. The Doctor and Ian grudgingly respect each other. Ian views the Doctor as a potential competitor for Barbara. But, crucially, the Doctor does not desire Barbara. He loves and respects her - in many ways, he is more affectionate towards her than he is towards Susan. But there is no evidence of sexual tension on his part. The Doctor, in short, simply opts out of his role in the romantic triangle, which turns out to be by far the most interesting option.

The problem with this triangle - and as I said, even with Ian's problems, it's a pretty stable triangle worthy of keeping upright - is that the TARDIS crew, at the moment, is a quadrilateral. Because Carol Ann Ford was on holiday for most of the production of this story, her involvement is minimal, and we have been able to avoid a significant discussion. Next week, however, we will have to confront the Problem of Susan head-on...


Do you own The Aztecs on DVD yet? If not, consider buying it from Amazon via this link. I'll get some of the money if you do.

Another Self-Aggrandizing Artifact: The Keys of Marinus

Susan is understandably upset at being
grabbed by a man in a skintight rubber suit.

It is April 11, 1964. The Beatles have the number one single with "Can't Buy Me Love." In the next six weeks, we will discover why the Beatles are unable to buy love - namely that, as Peter & Gordon observe, this is "A World Without Love," making the Searchers' admonition "Don't Throw Your Love Away" sound practice.

While Marco Polo was airing we seem to have drifted away from the news. It is perhaps worth going back and noting that, since late February, Jimmy Hoffa has been convicted, Muhammed Ali has become heavyweight champion of the world, Kitty Genovese was murdered, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor married, Jeopardy debuted, and Britain continued to lose control of Yemen as its empire continued to collapse. In the next six weeks, the Rolling Stones will release their first album and the first BASIC program will be compiled and run.

This last fact is perhaps the most interesting, occurring as it does at the midpoint of "The Keys of Marinus," a serial with what can, in hindsight, be identified as video game plotting. The Keys of Marinus went into production in part because a smattering of other serials. Three separate serials imploded - one about a miniaturized TARDIS crew, one entitled The Masters of Luxor by 100,000 BC writer Anthony Coburn, and one entitled The Hidden Planet by Malcolm Hulke, who would go on to write several genuinely classic episodes of the series. As a result, Terry Nation, who had just written The Daleks, was drafted to bang out a script in a hurry.

Due to the compressed time-frame, he opted for an extremely episodic structure in which the serial would go through, essentially, a different adventure each week. The extremely bare plot structure - the Doctor and his companions must rescue the five microkeys that will power up a machine that can subdue the evil monsters, the Voord. The keys are scattered across the planet Marinus, and the TARDIS crew is given teleporters so they can get from key to key.

The result is a Doctor Who plot that feels like a video game - collect the MacGuffin from each level and move on to the next one before finally confronting the Voord. Except, of course, that Spacewar! had only been developed three years prior, and there was nothing resembling a video game industry yet. It was, in fact, the development of BASIC would be integral in the nascent hacking movement of the 1970s that would eventually translate into the video game industry and, in 1975, would finally provide Adventure, which would begin to codify the video game plot.

There are several things to conclude here. First is that video game plotting is not integral to video games, but in fact stems from the highly serialized form of old-time radio and early film. But The Keys of Marinus, quite honestly, feels more like a video game than radio or film serials do. It seems, not for the first time, about a decade ahead of itself. Much of this comes from its combination of serialization with infinite flexibility. Ironically, this infinite flexibility is realized in The Keys of Marinus not through the mechanism that will provide it through most of the series, the TARDIS, but through a bunch of transporter bracelets that bop the TARDIS crew around an improbably strange planet.

All the same, The Keys of Marinus is fantastic for the sheer amount of weird stuff it introduces to the show. None of it is major canon or ever returns, but you get a planet with a glass beach and acid sea, monsters in fantastic rubber gimp suits called the Voord, mind controlling brains with eyestalks, killer vegetables that psychically scream, snow wolves, robotic knights with plastic capes, and a courtroom drama that out-hams Phoenix Wright. All in just under two and a half hours. It is with this episode, in other words, that Doctor Who becomes completely barmy. This culminates in the final episode, where the audience is treated to the spectacle of a man in awkwardly tight rubber shouting "My power is absolute!"

It's telling, then, that it is this story that first sets in place the idea that the TARDIS crew actually enjoy their adventures. Sure, Ian's grudging trust for the Doctor is still, well, grudging, and Barbara is perhaps a bit tired of all the endless kidnapping, but they enjoy themselves, leading to the first time an episode has started with the crew just milling about the TARDIS and landing - a category of scene that will eventually become not only standard, but arguably the bread and butter of the series.

(Certainly there are some stories in the Tom Baker era that are fine right up until the Doctor and Romana leave the TARDIS, at which point the whole thing goes to hell in a handbasket, due only half to the fact that the plot is crappy and it has a giant furry bull monster, and half to the fact that, frankly, when you have Tom Baker and Lala Ward available for light banter, it's very difficult to come up with a compelling reason for them not to do so at great length.)

This, much more than the aberration of Marco Polo, feels like the first episode of Doctor Who we've seen - the first time all the parts of the show are there and firing, if not on all cylinders. The somewhat insane relationship of the show to science is clear here, with a tedious explanation of geothermal energy and Iceland juxtaposing with insane technobabble. Furthermore, the production schedule is just lethal. The first season of Doctor Who has 42 episodes in it, which necessitated giving actors a break. As a result, the Doctor is completely absent from two episodes. Furthermore, Susan is in captivity for most of these epiosdes, at times leaving Ian and Barbara, or, in one case, just Ian to carry the weight of the episode. This required making the companions tougher and more competent - Ian and Barbara have to be able to carry the story for fifty minutes - a move that will pay huge dividends in late 2005.

But the constant shuffling of characters is, somehow, handled terribly. Despite the preposterous number of odd ideas in the story, it drags. Part of this probably is the shuffling of characters - repeatedly reducing your cast to a handful for long stretches means you have little to work with and have to extend scenes - a habit the actors clearly got into. There's a fantastic bit in the final episode where an actor goes on with his exposition about how they're all going to explode a bit too long, and William Russell basically shoves him down a corridor to begin some intense running. Well, walking. We still have Hartnell, after all. I'm also fairly sure the last three minutes of the episode consist solely of every guest character saying goodbye to every main character in a sort of horrifying ode to The Waltons 8 years too early. "Goodbye, Susan. Goodnight, John-Boy."

But even in the slow bits, there's a sort of manic energy to this story that Doctor Who has not seen before. As though the sheer pluck of vintage 60s sci-fi has found its ultimate expression and final form - a show where mad ideas can be stacked next to each other and swapped about at high speed. Doctor Who is a show that can go from evil snail brains to psychic vegetables in a matter of minutes before sticking all its characters on a deadly snowy mountain.

Why would you ever watch something else?


Do you own The Keys of Marinus on DVD yet? If not, consider buying it from Amazon via this link. I'll get some of the money if you do.

The Assembled Hordes of Genghis Khan Couldn't Get Through Those Doors, and Believe Me, They've Tried (Marco Polo)

It is February 22, 1964, and the number one single is The Bachelors with "Diane." Over the next six weeks, Cilla Black and Billy J Kramer and the Dakotas will both also make it to number one before The Beatles regain the spot on April 2nd. This feels something like a restoration of order, which, to be fair, is also true of the end of Marco Polo, the fourth Doctor Who serial which airs its final installment on April 4th. 


Somewhere between April of 1964 and the present day - specifically between March 9, 1967, and late 1974, however, due to space-saving measures at the BBC, who inadequately anticipated the eventual demand for home video versions of television shows (in part spurred on by Equity, the actors union, which feared that home video and repeats would eventually render the making of new television obsolete), the master recordings of numerous Doctor Who episodes, including all seven episodes of Marco Polo, were junked. As a result, no recording of Marco Polo is currently known to exist.


Doctor Who is, as I have said, eternally unfinished. Another way of putting it - as Paul Magrs in fact has - is that it is incomplete. In the case of the missing episodes, this is literally true. Parts of Doctor Who's history are missing. Important parts. Some unimportant parts too - there's not a lot of people hugely bent out of shape over The Space Pirates going missing. But there are at a minimum a half dozen stories that are both highly historically important and have missing episodes, and Marco Polo is clearly among them.


A fundamental premise of this blog is that there is such a thing as a story of Doctor Who. But it's the story of a time-traveler, and that shows. It is a story that goes back and revises itself, so that early episodes are at times best read in terms of later developments - as evidenced in the incongruous opening shot of the TARDIS in An Unearthly Child. Impossibly, the future of Doctor Who causes its past.


There is a sense in which this is only possible because of the missing episodes. Because the past of Doctor Who is incomplete, it is possible - indeed necessary - to rewrite it. As it happens, reasonable reconstructions exist. The audio for every Doctor Who story is preserved, as, for most, are a good number of still images. As a result, fan-made reconstructions that wed the audio to the still images exist, which is how I watched Marco Polo. But even still, there is always a sense that one is reconstructing - trying to uncover a past that is lost.


This is doubly true for this episode, as it is a purely historical piece. This is not the first historical we've seen - 100,000 BC has no sci-fi conceits beyond the TARDIS. But that story shares space with the story of what the TARDIS is in the first place, something Marco Polo does not. At its heart, Marco Polo is every bit as much of an bottle episode as The Edge of Destruction was - it's just that Marco Polo was a bottle episode with lavish sets and a couple of guest stars.


What I mean by this is that despite spending quite a bit of time making the story look pretty (and the still photographs existing from the episode are gorgeous), the whole story is basically set in Marco Polo's caravan, with minimal intervention from anyone other than Polo, Tegana, the villain of the piece, and Ping-Cho, the token young Asian girl.


I suppose this opens up the question of race in Doctor Who in a thorough fashion, though we touched on it back with The Daleks. Then, as now, the issues of race are problematic. We'll start with the good news - only fourteen episodes into the series, in February of 1964, the show cast a minority actress, Zienia Merton, a Burmese-English actress. Less good - despite being Burmese, she is employed to play a Chinese girl. And she is the only minority actress in a serial set in China, with the rest of the parts basically being played in yellowface. Still, when I made a mental note to myself while watching The Daleks to remark on the first time a minority actor or actress appeared in Doctor Who, I in no way believed it would happen that quickly.


It's also notable that, thus far, the series is two for two in focusing on non-European cultures in its historical episodes (assuming, as I do, that 100,000 BC took place during early human migration out of Africa). In the next historical story, The Aztecs, it will go three for three. Unfortunately, over the nine other pure historical stories that exist in televised Doctor Who, the score will never advance beyond three. Still, it is notable the ways in which concerns about race are embedded (awkwardly) at the start of Doctor Who inasmuch as those early concerns make it possible for the series to consider the matter organically at a later date. 


To my mind, this is the main way in which Marco Polo is interesting in general, however - in terms of the ways in which it does, and, more importantly, does not anticipate later Doctor Who. I have already said that Doctor Who canon is additive - that nothing is undone, only amended. But there are aspects of the show that have largely been left to lie - the focus in early episodes on ostensibly hard science, for instance. (Which continue here with a scene that spectacularly fails to make condensation exciting.) Historicals are another one of those. The first season of Doctor Who is an almost exact split between historical and science fiction episodes. The second season is only 20% historical, the third about 30%, the fourth 18%, and then all remaining series 0% save for season 19, which did a quick two-parter for old time's sake and is thus 8% historical.

There are two main reasons historical stories declined. The first is that they were unfathomably boring stories that existed only to fulfill the original educational remit of Doctor Who. The second is that it turned out there was a much better way to do them. We'll get to the second one later, but the first is a significant problem. Given that the show is not huge on completely rewriting history (as we'll see shortly), there are already some heavy limits on a historical plot. In Marco Polo, the odds of Tegana murdering Marco Polo before he returns to Italy or of assassinating Kublai Khan are exceedingly low. This is not a matter of lacking suspense - after all, it's also extremely improbable that the Doctor is going to die in a cliffhanger. Doctor Who has always been a show more about the question "how are they going to get out of this one" than "are they going to get out of this one." The problem is that for a purely historical adventure, the answer is pretty limited in scope. They're going to get out of this one... much like the history book says they will.

As a result, Marco Polo amounts to seven episodes of an idiot plot in which the complete inability of the main characters to figure out that Tegana is evil (something that the audience knows almost immediately) and persuade everyone else of this is the only thing that keeps it from being a two episode story. The contortions necessary to prevent this, however, require the Doctor to basically be absent from most of the story to let Ian carry on proceedings somewhat less competently.

The most jarring part of this is that it interrupts the arc we've been enjoying thus far in which, with each episode, the Doctor becomes more like the Doctor. Here, most of that is discarded, leaving the Doctor's major plot threads to involve being thirsty, being cranky, or both.

Instead, inasmuch as the episode advances anything about the characters, it focuses on the companions. Ian and Barbara continue to be odd proto-companions who are defined by their lack of desire to be traveling with the Doctor. In fact, Barbara reiterates in this story her wish to eventually leave the TARDIS forever.


But perhaps the more interesting developments come in the equation of Ping-Cho and Susan, who the story situates as close mirrors of each other. Susan's young age is reiterated - sensible given that the series has yet to make any moves towards establishing the Doctor as functionally immortal. The major contrast between them, then, comes in the form of Ping-Cho's preparation for an arranged marriage and Susan's horror at the concept. Central to this, then, is part of the Problem of Susan - the fact that, as a fifteen-year-old girl, she is sexualized, but the show is unable to give any useful outlet for that sexuality as long as she is familially linked to the Doctor. Later companions will be sexualized in terms of the TARDIS crew, but that option is not available to Susan. This, among many other things, will eventually make Susan untenable as a companion, albeit by far the most interesting failure the show has ever produced.

Marco Polo, then, is in many ways the first dead end we have seen on Doctor Who. It's interesting - well-scripted for what it is, lavishly produced, and, perhaps most intriguingly, missing. But it is also, unmistakably, not quite Doctor Who.

A Far Wider Academy of which Human Nature is Merely a Part: 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 and something of a significant colonization attempt, although for our purposes, the more intriguing product would not make its way to the US until 1972.

In the alarmingly more intelligent 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. As a result, 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 (I don't think, at least)

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. At which point 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.

The thing about early Doctor Who, though, is that even the rush jobs are massively significant. Doctor Who's canon 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.

But in early Doctor Who, it was all knobby bits. So in these first episodes, a lot of things get established. We have the Doctor already. We have monsters. This story gives us two more things - companions and the TARDIS.

We have the TARDIS already, of course. It's where the show started, its incongruous and brilliant central premise. But this is where we are finally allowed to have a look at her. The pronoun, by the way, is not merely an homage to naval tradition. The pronoun is because this story has five characters in it, even if we don't see one of them until the very end. Because the TARDIS is not just a narrative contrivance. I mean, it is a narrative contrivance, but it is the single best narrative contrivance ever invented. Golden apples, spaceships, evil rings, they have all basically spent their time since November of 1963 sitting around feeling inadequate. The TARDIS has them beat.

Yeah, there's still the clumsy attempts to make it all make sense. They try to explain why the central column rises and falls, and do a terrible job that is rightly ignored. Most of these clumsy attempts at explaining, actually, get quickly derailed. Even in past episodes. There's an awkward scene in The Daleks existed talking about the TARDIS food dispenser and how it makes energy bars that taste just like the real objects. And it made sense, except for being really stupid and pointless and tedious. But here, the ship, quite frankly, goes a bit mad, starting early in the episode with a long shot in which we can clearly see that the food dispenser has separate buttons for water and... milk. This is absolutely fantastic. Because of course alien species love bovine lactation. Of all the liquids in time and space, they pick water and bovine lactation. Which is clearly about making tea. (Actually, there is a fair case to be made that this sequence is the root of the bit in Hitchhiker's about trying to get Eddie to make tea) I mean, that, right there, is the end of any claims that Doctor Who might somehow, if you think about it long enough, make sense. No. Doctor Who might somehow, if you think about it long enough, drive you very productively mad.

From there, the TARDIS's level of completely and inscrutably insane ratchets up progressively over the episode, including the first time I, at least, noticed the TARDIS coatrack, which is just so perfectly weird that some day they'll have to write an episode around it. Then come the TARDIS memory banks, which begin to establish the ship as alive.

When the memory banks are viewed, one thing that is displayed is the planet Quinnis, in the Fourth Universe. This is a throwaway. The nature of the Fourth Universe, and how it differs from universes 1-3, and, for that matter, which universe Doctor Who takes place in is never explained. All that is known is that this is where the Doctor had an adventure once. With Susan.

We should speak of Susan. I mean, we will need to speak of Susan a lot. She is a scary character - especially in this story, stabbing things with scissors and speaking ominously. She is fiercely loyal to the Doctor, even as she at times believes he has gone too far. But she is also not enough, somehow. There is, if you will, a problem of Susan, though not the first such problem in English fantastic fiction. Here, perhaps, we follow in someone else's archetypes.

The problem can be stated thusly - it is clear that, in order to become the Doctor, he needs companions other than Susan. Barbara snappishly points this out to him, noting that she and Ian have saved the Doctor's life more than once in their adventures thus far. She is not wrong - the Doctor's adventuring would have been disastrous without them. And in this story, his lack of trust in them is nearly catastrophic. Indeed, this story is unusual in that the Doctor takes on the role of villain, cruelly nearly throwing Ian and Barbara out of the TARDIS, apparently into deep space, the time vortex, or some similarly inconceivably awful place.

Susan is not sufficient as a companion. What, then, is the role of a companion? This question will recur, but here it is clarified. Not only have the companions saved the Doctor's life, it is Barbara, crucially, who understands that the TARDIS is, to some extent, sentient, and that the bizarre happenings are its version of a warning. This is, notably, something the Doctor does not grasp. He does not understand that the TARDIS is a magical box. He declares that it can't think. But it can, and in this moment, in Barbara's explanation, the TARDIS becomes a character.

It's her explanation that's wonky. First, all the clocks in the TARDIS melt. Then the fault indicators begin lighting up every fifteen seconds. From these two facts, Barbara, in the show's first real piece of completely nonsense technobabble (other than perhaps "Time and Relative Dimensions in Space") proclaims that "We had time taken away from us, and now it's been given back to us because it's running out," a declaration that makes no sense whatsoever, but is apparently the key to understanding the problem.

From there the Doctor connects the dots, culminating in a bizarre monologue about the forces of creation and destruction. The problem, as it turns out, is that a spring has busted on a switch (which is conveniently labeled. In Sharpie.) and it's stayed on. Which is, in many ways, the full establishment of the TARDIS - on the one hand, it is a magical box that can think and communicate with its inhabitants. On the other hand, it can accidentally have a spring get stuck and proceed to nearly explode. Which is, shall we say, a bit of a design flaw.

Inasmuch as the Doctor can be humbled, by this, at least, he is. He does not quite apologize to Ian or Barbara for nearly throwing them into deep space. But he does act graciously towards them, accepting that he needs them. And so the Doctor has his magical box, his friends, and his freedom. And with this story, the elements of Doctor Who are, by and large, in place.


Do you own The Edge of Destruction on DVD yet? If not, consider buying it from Amazon via this link. I'll get some of the money if you do.

Afraid and a Long Way From Home (The Daleks)

It is December 21, 1963. The Beatles continue to hold the #1 chart position with "I Want to Hold Your Hand."

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 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 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. Not yet.

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, at this point a character mostly used so that everyone else has someone to rescue, is menaced by an unseen monster with a bizarre arm.

And for the third time in a month, everything changes.

Five days later, "I Want to Hold Your Hand" is released in the US, changing the Beatles from the most popular band in England to the most popular band in history, sparking so-called Beatlemania, which will itself inspire the name of the eventual Dalekmania. Two days after 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, but they do not seem the 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, a problem that will increase over the next three years, eventually forcing his 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.

And after the next episode, we see exactly what this means. For the first time, 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.

What is interesting is that the fundamental thing about the Daleks that is evil 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. (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.

The end result of this is that there becomes a strange irreducibility to the terrible evil of the Daleks. It is not merely their xenophobia. This becomes clear over on their end 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.

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 rom 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.

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 until the controversial 2010 redesign. 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 throwings 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...

Do you own The Daleks on DVD yet? If not, consider buying it from Amazon via this link. I'll get some of the money if you do.

I sometimes wonder why I like the people of this miserable planet so much: 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." The Kennedy assassination has long since turned to farce with Lee Harvey Oswald himself being murdered two days later. Now the world waits uncomfortably, aware that the progress of history has been diverted, but not knowing where, or towards what.

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. Who can blame us for doing so?

Escape is treated by the captives as 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, and it is 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. 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. The three episodes' most striking feature, in many ways, is Barbara's nervous breakdown as the four leads wander through a forest (having escaped 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.

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 is 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. 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. 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.

Strange, then, how little regard he pays us, being 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, but an old 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.

At the end of the story, he is still not quite the Doctor yet. Much of the story is about the conflict between him and Ian over which of them should be the leader. In time this matter will be settled, 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, helping further establish the theme of the Doctor as lover and protector of humanity even though that theme is not needed for years to come)

And yet in the Cave of Skulls, he comforts Barbara. 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) And 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.

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.


Do you own 100,000 BC on DVD yet? If not, consider buying it from Amazon via this link. I'll get some of the money if you do

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, at the time of writing still narrowly the most successful English football club of all time. Since 6:30 PM the previous day, the BBC has been running news coverage of the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy.

At twenty seconds past the minute, eighty seconds off 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 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.

The effect is mysterious and chilling. The credits give way, although the haunting theme music does not, as a camera moves around an old junk yard, 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.

(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. 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. Thus I, in a viewpoint that has essentially no credibility in mainstream fandom, opt to treat An Unearthly Child as a one-episode story preceding a three-episode story entitled 100,000 BC.)

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 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, though the writers could not have possibly known about it.

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.

And then it goes wrong. They force themselves past him, into the blue box, and fall out of the world and into another. It is another triumph of design in the show - a stark white of iconic 60s futurism would age gracefully into retro-futurism. And, of course, bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.

The show is Doctor Who already. A show about a magic box that can take you anywhere. A show about running, and escape. But the Doctor is not yet the Doctor. He is scared. 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, he runs. It is the first moment of depth in the cantankerous grandfather. 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? Where has he taken Ian and Barbara, and what is going to happen to them? Already, in the first episode, Doctor Who is about its own mystery. About the question of what Doctor Who is 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.

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. But 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.

Do you own An Unearthly Child on DVD yet? If not, consider buying it from Amazon via this link. I'll get some of the money if you do.

A Mad Man With a Box

About a month into its 48th year of existence, the Christmas special of Doctor Who was watched by 1/6 of the population of Great Britain. I would compare that to some television show for Americans, but there isn't one. Nothing in America is that proportionally popular. Certainly nothing sci-fi or fantasy.

Doctor Who was the first non-news program to air on the BBC after the Kennedy assassination. The show has not been on the air all 48 years since it debuted - only 32 of them - but there has not been a year when some officially sanctioned Doctor Who stories have not come out. And there is no reason why that should ever stop being true. Because there is no way to run out of Doctor Who stories. At least, not without running out of stories entirely.

Doctor Who is a story about a man with a magical blue box that can go anywhere and any time. The man is, for all practical purposes, immortal. When something happens that would kill him, he just changes into a new man and walks away to new adventures.

John Lasseter, with whom I am hesitant to ever argue about storytelling, has said that there is only one story in the world. A man comes into town, and everything changes. By this standard, every story is a Doctor Who story, as every Doctor Who story is exactly that - a man with a magical blue box comes into town, and everything changes.

And so as long as there are stories, there are Doctor Who stories. When the stars go out and the universe freezes, around the last fire on the last world, there will still be Doctor Who stories to tell. And when we are done telling them, at long and final last, in the distance will be a strange wheezing, groaning sound. And out will step an impossible man, and he will save the day.

I believe this. I believe this because to disbelieve this is to disbelieve that stories have power. To disbelieve this is to disbelieve that there is hope. To disbelieve this is to believe that there is such a thing as being alone. I believe this because disbelieving it is too awful to imagine.

This is the story of a story that can never end. This is the story of how a daft idea from the bowels of the BBC in the 1960s changed everything. This is the story of an impossible man, and his magic box, and everything that happened after.

Because there's something you'd better understand about me. Because it's important, and one day, your life may depend on it.

I am definitely a mad man with a blog.