Movement Point

Even after all this time he cannot understand. I dare not change history.

Early Doctor Who specialized in the “historical” story, in keeping with its original remit as an educational show and, indeed, as a means of leveraging the BBC’s enormous investment in period costumes, sets, and actors. By the middle of the third season, the show had already visited prehistoric times, Kublai Khan’s China, the Aztec empire, revolutionary France, Nero’s Rome, the Crusades, and mythological Greece, not to mention Britain in various times and places. But is an historical Doctor Who story actually an “historical” if no one knows the history involved?

In John Lucarotti’s “The Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Eve” (Story Production Code W), the Doctor and Steven arrive in sixteenth century France just outside of Paris, fresh from the deaths of pseudo-companions Sara Kingdom and Katarina—though notably the story does not make mention of those events. One might have expected lighter fare after the dark ending of the prior story, but instead we are treated to the eponymous massacre of Protestants by Catholics in Paris and surroundings in 1572. Even for contemporary viewers, the history on display here is not considered common knowledge. Lucarotti spends several scenes establishing the animosity between Protestants and Catholics in the era, ostensibly for Steven’s benefit, as he is as lost as the viewer. Prior historicals never spent this much explicit effort setting the stage for events.

The effect mirrors the kind of exposition one finds in stories taking place in far futures, where, say, the conflict between the Sensorites and the humans needs to be explicated for the plot to function. There’s a tension in this story that is lacking in the other historicals—while the title hints at what is to come, the viewer’s own historical knowledge doesn’t fill in the gaps in the same way that the presence of Nero guarantees that Rome is going to burn by the final episode. Thus, there’s a real uncertainty as to the target of the assassination plot by Catherine de Medici revealed early in the story: is it King Charles of France, the Protestant prince Navarre, a member of the court? The end result is the most compelling of the historicals to date, mostly because the Doctor doesn’t actually do anything at all in the whole story.

Lucarotti’s story features less of the Doctor than any other story to date (though not less of William Hartnell), as our time traveller is absent from the middle two episodes, leaving lone companion Steven to carry the narrative burden, which Peter Purves carries off nicely. Steven could have avoided all the trouble in the story, though, if the Doctor had given him sous instead of golden écu.

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Now come on, start thinking! It’s you against the Doctor now!

After a story (well, an episode/teaser) where the Doctor and his companions aren’t present at all, we have a story where they might as well not be. The real stars of Donald Cotton’s “The Myth Makers” (Story Production Code U) are the Greeks and Trojans: Achilles, Odysseus, Agamemnon, Paris, Priam, Cassandra, and Troilus, thanks to a classical British education that made these characters quite readily familiar via the Iliad and the Aeneid.

Long stretches of “The Myth Makers” are given over to the various Greeks and Trojans absent our time travellers, who conveniently separate from one another and then find one another at the worst possible moments to provide some semblance of narrative motion. And the guest actors make the most of their screen time, playing with gusto. This story has perhaps the least dialogue for the main characters of any since “The Crusade.”

But at no point does the viewer have a sense that the Doctor and company are in any danger, because of the assumed familiarity with the underlying story. Not, of course, that even the most casual of viewers would think that they could ever be in real danger—we’re still several stories from the first regeneration and have yet to experience the first companion death—but even the episode cliffhangers lack drama, because everyone knows that the Trojans wheeled the Horse into Troy and were thusly caught unawares by the Greeks. As Vicki herself says to Cassandra, “I don’t have to prophesy. Because as far as I’m concerned, the future has already happened.”

Indeed, the only real danger is to the set, because the actors playing Paris (Barrie Ingham) and Cassandra (Frances White) practically chew the scenery. For a story that ostensibly took some pains towards historic verisimilitude (alas, the footage is missing, leaving only audio recordings), the Greeks and Trojans speak mostly like contemporary Englishmen fresh off the West End stage.

Still, unlike the earlier historicals, where the Doctor inadvertently causes, inspires, or otherwise motivates historical events to occur (Nero’s burning of Rome, the fall of Robespierre), in “The Myth Makers,” the Doctor gives the Greeks the notion to build the Trojan Horse, even though he initially rejects the idea as “some good dramatic device” invented by Homer.

This direct intervention in history, albeit under duress, can, perhaps, be squared with his insistent “hands off” approach formulated in “The Aztecs” by noting that the Doctor here doesn’t change history; he merely sees it through to its “proper” end. The Greeks conquered the Trojans, according to the myths, and just because they conquered the Trojans with the Doctor’s help doesn’t mean that they didn’t always have his help, even though the Doctor gets the idea for the Trojan Horse from stories about the Trojan War written after he helped. Chicken, egg, time, loop . . .

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