doctor who

There’s a lovely scene in the middle of “The Dead Planet” where the four main characters linger by the TARDIS’ food machine. They’re settling in for the night, and Ian and Barbara are hungry. The Doctor tells them they can have anything they want, and Barbara asks for bacon and eggs. (Odd choice for dinner, but I suppose time travel throws off your inner clock somewhat.) The Doctor and Susan program the machine and out pop two little bars, which Barbara and Ian are amazed to find taste just like bacon and eggs. The Doctor, pleased by their reaction, explains how it works to an appreciative Ian. The food machine is very ’60s sci-fi and the characters are all getting along and there’s no danger. It’s nice.

Of course, the rest of the episode isn’t so nice. The Doctor has been clashing with Ian and Barbara – they’re angry he’s not prioritizing getting them home, and he’s resentful about these unwelcome passengers telling him what to do. Someone frightened Susan in the forest, and she’s upset that her grandfather doesn’t believe her. The Doctor selfishly sabotages his own ship so that they’ll be forced to visit the city he, and only he, wants to explore. The episode ends with Barbara, lost in the city and separated from the others, being threatened by something advancing towards her – a Dalek, though we won’t know its name, or how dangerous it truly is, until next episode.

Oh, and they’re all getting sick. They have radiation poisoning, but they don’t know that yet.

This is a TV show, so everything will be better in a couple of episodes. The Doctor and his friends will come together and the baddies will be sorted out. Because it’s not real life.

Early in the episode, while they’re exploring the strange dead petrified forest they’ve landed in, Susan finds a flower. It’s stone now too, like all the other vegetation, but it’s beautiful nonetheless. Ian helps her uproot it, warning her to be careful because of how fragile it is. Susan’s excited to take it back to the TARDIS, but then Barbara calls out, and Ian, distracted, crushes it in Susan’s hands. Later, Susan finds a second flower and stops to pick it up, but when she’s frightened by a mysterious hand touching her shoulder, that flower too is destroyed.

It’s okay to need nice moments. Sometimes you need to linger by the food machine. But you can’t stay there too long.

Flowers are being crushed, and the poison is seeping in, and the Daleks are here.

I’m now rewatching all of Doctor Who twice at the same time – for my series of blog posts, I’m only through the first story, but for my just-for-fun watch-through, I’ve finished season four. Here are my rankings of that season with some quick thoughts. And since I’ve finished all of William Hartnell’s era, I’ve ranked all of his stories too (without quick thoughts, since I’ve already given them). See the index for previous rankings, or for my blog series. First, season four:

1. The Evil of the Daleks – The animation really helped me on this one; I’ve found it dull when watching the reconstruction. The Daleks really live up to this story’s title here – pure malevolence.
2. The Tenth Planet – I quite like Hartnell’s regeneration, so a sense of this story’s “historical importance” may be inflating its ranking. But I’m also a fan of original-flavor Cyberman – even without those last few moments, this one’s pretty great.
3. The Power of the Daleks – Another where the animation raised my appraisal. I’d never agreed with fan consensus about this story’s worth, but now I get it. The Daleks’ final attack is particularly brutal.
4. The Macra Terror – I don’t get why everyone feels the need to apologize for this story. It’s bonkers in the best way, and I loved it even before the animated version was released. Plus it’s a great story for Ben, and I love Ben.
5. The Underwater Menace – I do love when Doctor Who loses its mind. Like The Macra Terror, this one is certifiably bananas. I adore it.
6. The Faceless Ones – Drags a bit in the middle, and Ben and Polly being dumped after two episodes is unforgivable. But the ideas are really out there, and I like the ambition of it.
7. The Moonbase – Another that drags, and at only four episodes, there’s no excuse for that. But it’s a great showcase for Polly, another of my fave companions.
8. The Highlanders – Not a bad story by any means, and once again a great story for Polly. But I’m not a big fan of the pure historicals, and my attention wandered.
9. The Smugglers – Maybe an animation (or, dare to dream, the original episodes turning up) would raise my estimation, but I always find this a difficult watch. Hartnell gives a great performance, though, despite what we know now about his declining health at the time.

And a recap of the First Doctor era:

1. The Daleks
2. An Unearthly Child
3. The Dalek Invasion of Earth
4. Marco Polo
5. The Daleks’ Master Plan
6. The Tenth Planet
7. The Chase
8. The Time Meddler
9. The Keys of Marinus
10. The Edge of Destruction
11. The Aztecs
12. Galaxy 4
13. The Web Planet
14. The Celestial Toymaker
15. The Rescue
16. The Savages
17. The Myth Makers
18. The Massacre
19. Planet of Giants
20. The Space Museum
21. The War Machines
22. The Crusade
23. The Ark
24. The Reign of Terror
25. The Sensorites
26. The Romans
27. Mission to the Unknown
28. The Smugglers
29. The Gunfighters

I wrote last time about empathy, and how it’s not yet a core element of the Doctor’s character. Rewatching “The Firemaker,” the final episode of An Unearthly Child, I’m struck by how much writer Anthony Coburn has centered the idea of empathy throughout the whole story, with the theme coming to a head in its conclusion. It’s not just the Doctor who has to learn how to show compassion for strangers in this story; it’s all of humanity.

We have to take Coburn’s views on prehistoric humans with a big grain of salt, I think. Call me a cockeyed optimist, but I like to believe, recent world events notwithstanding, that empathy for strangers has always been an integral part of humanity, and, for most, it takes a strong motivating factor (fear, desperation, end-stage capitalism) to override it. But in the world of Doctor Who circa 100,000 BC, it’s every tribe for themselves, and even within the tribe, empathy isn’t a given. When Ian tells Hur he’s a friend, she thinks that’s his name, because the word doesn’t exist in their language. Assuming the tribe isn’t speaking English, which would be pretty unusual, we jump ahead thirteen seasons to The Masque of Mandragora and return with the idea that the TARDIS is mentally translating the tribe’s actual language. This suggests that they don’t just not have a word for “friend;” they don’t even have the concept.

Last episode, Barbara, Ian, and Susan helped Za survive a beast’s attack, to Hur’s utter bewilderment. When Hur tells Za what they did while he was unconscious, her face is a mask of confusion. She doesn’t understand why they didn’t kill him; the closest she can come to describing their behavior is analogizing it to a mother with her baby. In this episode, the Doctor and crew go even further in helping Za. The Doctor proves Za’s innocence in the murder of the old woman and encourages the tribe to drive Kal out, firming up Za’s claim on leadership. Ian shows Za how to make fire, further solidifying the caveman’s position.

Of course, the TARDIS team aren’t doing all this out of empathy. They saved Za’s life because of their compassion, yes, but everything after that is just bargaining. They help Za because they hope he’ll let them free in return. He doesn’t, of course, but the way in which he refuses them is what’s so interesting. The actor who plays Za, Derek Newark, does an incredible job making the most of the minimal dialogue Coburn’s script allows him. Za wants to keep the travelers, merging their tribe with his, but he never really gives a reason. It’s possible he wants to see if they have more secrets as powerful as fire to share, but he never says this. He justifies his imprisonment of them by saying there’s nowhere better they could go, but he doesn’t sound like he quite believes it. He makes sure they have food and water, checks to be sure no one has hurt them, reassures them that they’ll be better off with his tribe. All the while, Newark conveys how strongly Za feels… something for these newcomers, a want for them not to be angry with him, a need to keep them close. An emotion he feels strongly without understanding what it is or why he feels it.

In Za’s utilitarianist society, the right thing to do would be to kill them, and no one in his tribe would bat an eye. He has what he needed from them; now they’re just four more mouths to feed. But Za’s been infected with their empathy.

In the Moffat era, many years from now, we’ll get the idea that the word “doctor” comes from the Doctor himself; that his compassion seeded the idea of a healer, a helper, a thinker, throughout time and space. I think Coburn is suggesting something similar, but subtler, here. (And I love Moffat, but it’s not hard to be subtler.) The Doctor is responsible for seeding empathy in the human race, at the same time as he was learning it from his new, unwilling companions.

Of course, a few minutes later, after they escape and are fleeing back to the TARDIS, Barbara trips and the Doctor almost tramples her running past in his mad dash to safety. So he hasn’t fully learned empathy yet. But he’s got time.

In “The Forest of Fear,” the third episode of Doctor Who‘s first story, the Doctor tries to murder a helpless man by bashing his head in with a rock. Well, he almost tries. Well, he probably almost tries. Ian grabs his wrist to stop him as soon as he picks up the stone, and the Doctor claims he was going to ask the wounded caveman, Za, to draw a map in the dirt showing the way through the forest. But the Doctor’s acting pretty sketchy and is almost certainly lying. You see, although Za has been seriously injured and is no longer a threat, his tribe is likely still after them. The Doctor wants to abandon their enemy to die, but Barbara, Susan, and Ian refuse to prioritize their safety over his life.

This is a pretty famous moment in Doctor Who fandom, and for good reason. The usual take is that it shows how much the Doctor changes after the first couple of stories. Not only wasn’t he originally the hero of the show, he was sometimes an antagonist, working against Ian and Barbara almost as much as he worked with them. The Doctor we come to know would never murder a helpless enemy.

Except… wouldn’t he? While I do think this moment is an excellent example of how the Doctor’s character changes, I’m not so certain it’s in quite the way everyone says. Are we really pretending he wouldn’t kill a helpless foe? He straight up murders the already-defeated Solomon in Dinosaurs on a Spaceship. In Terror of the Zygons, after setting the aliens’ ship to self-destruct, he locks the door behind him so none of them can escape the blast. In Remembrance of the Daleks, the Doctor has already sabotaged the Hand of Omega, foiling Davros’ plan, but he uses it to destroy the entire planet Skaro anyway – not just killing defeated enemies, but committing genocide against them. And there are countless examples of him killing foes in combat without feeling an ounce of remorse. There’s no second chance for the Sycorax leader in The Christmas Invasion, and Shockeye in The Two Doctors gets his “just desserts” when the Doctor suffocates him with cyanide.

All these examples are arguably justified by the Doctor’s concern for innocent lives. With Za, though, he doesn’t care at all about saving Ian and Barbara – moments earlier, he was prepared to leave them to die in order to save himself and his granddaughter. Self-sacrifice to protect innocents sounds more like a quality of the Doctor we now know and love; is that the change this moment illustrates?

Well, no, not really. Sure, the Doctor is much more concerned with saving lives now than he was then, but we can’t say it’s always his first priority. She’s quite happy to let Ko Sharmus sacrifice himself in her place in The Timeless Children, not offering even a token protest. The whole point of The Almost People is that the Ganger duplicates are sapient, which doesn’t stop the Doctor from liquifying Ganger-Amy. He floods Atlantis in The Underwater Menace without knowing if any of the innocent Atlanteans – not to mention Polly and Jamie — have made it to safety. And, revisiting Remembrance of the Daleks, was he really sure there weren’t any Thals still wandering around the radioactive forest when he turned Skaro’s sun supernova?

Obviously, I’m picking and choosing, and there are far more counterexamples of the Doctor putting life, all life, first. It’s a sixty-plus years old show, after all, which has had many, many writers, not all of whom are going to portray their main character’s morals consistently.

But this moment with the stone and the caveman – it doesn’t feel out of place because the Doctor’s trying to kill a defeated foe, or because he’s putting his own skin first. It’s out of place with what the show becomes because the Doctor doesn’t understand why he’s wrong to do so. Barbara says to him directly, “You treat everybody and everything as something less important than yourself,” and she’s right. When Hur, Za’s mate, can’t understand why the strangers would want to help them, Ian says “How can we explain to her? She doesn’t understand kindness, friendship.” There’s an implicit comparison there to the Doctor, who, throughout this entire scene, expresses bafflement at, and disdain of, the teachers’ and his granddaughter’s acts of mercy.

I said Barbara was right when she said the Doctor treated everyone as less important than him, but she’s not completely correct – the Doctor does value Susan, his only family, and it’s for her sake that he risks his life to linger while they help Za. At this point he feels some responsibility for getting Ian and Barbara into this deadly situation, but it only goes so far – he tries to abandon them in this scene, leaving them to die in pre-history. It’s because he can’t force Susan to come with him that he doesn’t.

It’s a cliche that villains don’t feel love. Real-life villains don’t lack love, they lack empathy. They can love those in their immediate circle, but are incapable of feeling empathy for those outside it. That’s the difference between the Doctor of these first stories, and the Doctor as we’ll come to know them. Yes, there’ll always be inconsistencies across writers. He’ll still be the sworn defender of life in one episode and a slaughterer of monsters in the next. Nevertheless, the Doctor of An Unearthly Child, who stands over a helpless man contemplating murder, has transformed into the Doctor of Joy to the World, who takes time out from saving the world to comfort a dying hotel manager. Those words of comfort, not the willingness to kill or the instinct for self-preservation, are the real reason the scene with the rock would feel out of place in Doctor Who even a few episodes later, let alone today.

Doctor Who is every genre. The show as a whole has a science fiction candy coating with a delicious fantasy core, but follow it from story to story and you’ll stuff yourself on other genres – horror, western, pirate, murder mystery, slice of life, romance, and on and on and on. But the first serial, An Unearthly Child, beginning with its second episode, “The Cave of Skulls,” tackles one of my favorite genres of all. Shakespearean drama. More specifically, it’s a Shakespearean historical.

Yes, I know, it’s about cave people. But it’s also about a struggle for leadership with life and death stakes. It’s about a son of a dead ruler struggling to live up to his father’s legacy. It’s got a populace in turmoil, a father who disapproves of his daughter’s suitor, and a widow spitting barbs so vicious that Henry VI‘s Queen Margaret could study at her feet.

And they’re not speaking in iambic pentameter, but the language is nevertheless elevated. Take this speech from Kal, exaggerating his abduction of the Doctor in order to score political points over his rival, Za:

“When I saw fire come from his fingers I remembered Za, son of the firemaker. And when the cold comes, you will all die if you wait for Za to make fire for you. I, Kal, am a true leader. We fought like the tiger and the bear. My strength was too much for him. He lay down to sleep. And I, Kal, carried him here to make fire for you.”

Poetry! Writer Anthony Coburn uses our cliched expectations for how primitive people would have spoken – speaking of oneself in the third person, using simple words and short, clipped sentences. But within these self-imposed dialogue restrictions, his characters express a broad range of powerful emotions and epic motivations. His tribespeople are unlearned, not stupid. Kal begins to win the tribe over with the speech above, but when the Doctor says he can’t make fire, they waver. Za seizes the moment to win them back:

“You want to be strong like Za, son of the great firemaker. You all heard him say that there would be fire. There is no fire. Za does not tell you lies. He does not say, I will do this thing, and then not do it. He does not say, I will make you warm, and then leave you to the dark. He does not say, I will fight away the tiger with fire, and then let him come to you in the dark. Do you want a liar for your chief?”

Kal just called Za “son of the firemaker” to mock him, to highlight how he’s failed to provide the life-giving fire that should have been his inheritance. But when Kal fails to deliver his promised fire via the Doctor, Za flips this back on him, calling himself “son of the great firemaker” to emphasize his legacy, and, implicitly, his right to be leader.

Zap these two forward a couple of tens of thousands of years, and they’d fit right in on opposing sides of the War of the Roses, or trying to bring down Richard II.

An Unearthly Child has an unfair reputation for being boring. Some fans recommend watching the first episode, then skipping ahead to the Daleks. But they’re wrong! There’s so much to love here. Coburns’ script is full of subtleties woven within a bleak and brutal storyline. It’s a five-act courtly drama played out across three half-hour episodes in a prehistoric cave by people wearing animal skins. It’s fully genius and partly ridiculous, which is what Doctor Who is when it’s at its best. It’s the perfect place to begin.