Doctor Who Project: The Rescue

I think we have landed. But the Doctor’s never slept through a landing before!

After an epic story in which the Doctor and his companions save Earth from the Daleks (for the first of many times), our stalwart travellers move on to a thin wisp of a story designed, seemingly, for one purpose only: to replace Susan, who stayed behind with the human resistance to help rebuild a Dalek-ravaged Earth. “The Rescue” (Production Code L) introduces us to Vicki, a young woman who is one of two survivors of a spaceship crashed on the planet Dido.

Meet Vicki

From the first, Maureen O’Brien portrays Vicki as optimistic and independent, uncowed by the fate that has left her an orphan on a strange planet. And the fact that she is an orphan is key here, for it allows her to become the next companion, unencumbered by any emotional ties to her twenty-fifth century Earth (notably, an Earth in which there is still a United Kingdom, as the wrecked spaceship bears the markings “UK 201”).

Britannia rules the stars?

As always, the TARDIS lands somewhere strange, the party gets split up, Ian and the Doctor eventually find Barbara—who has managed to kill Vicki’s giant monster pet in the interim—and the Doctor unravels the central narrative mystery (why the peaceful Dido people have apparently killed all the other human survivors of the spaceship crash).

But to focus overly much on the plot of this two episode story is to miss the character development that takes place over the story’s forty-five minute length. Both Howe and Walker and Wood and Miles (whose About Time series of Doctor Who guides I’ve only recently discovered) point out that while the story is perhaps not gripping stuff, it establishes Doctor Who as a series where continuity matters. It’s not planet- and time period-of-the-week; it’s an ongoing story with characters who grow and change and remember what happened the week before.

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Doctor Who Project: The Dalek Invasion of Earth

What’s worse? The alligators down here or the Daleks up there?

At last, they return! The Daleks appear once more after their resounding first season success in “The Mutants,” invading Earth in Terry Nation’s “The Dalek Invasion of Earth” (Story Production Code K). This time, the Daleks want nothing more than to, um, empty out the core of the planet and replace it with an engine of some sort.

But whatever! It’s the Daleks! And they’re in London!

This story, which Howe and Walker claim “surely ranks as one of the series’ all-time greats” in their Doctor Who: The Television Companion, starts in familiar enough style, which is to say that our travellers leave the TARDIS, become separated from it because of Susan—this time she brings an entire bridge down upon it—and then become separated from each other. Even Ian comments upon the party’s tendency to split up: upon realizing Barbara and Susan are missing from the landing site, he exclaims, “Why, why do they do it?”

Still, the separation works to good effect in this six-part story, as Susan and Barbara are spirited away by the human resistance to the Daleks and Ian and the Doctor are captured by the Robomen, the human semi-cyborgs enslaved as footsoldiers by the Daleks, who are few in number on Earth. The development of the resistance figures adds depth to the story, as thus far in the series, our sympathies have been almost entirely on our travellers finding their way back to the TARDIS. Very few secondary characters have been roundly developed in the series so far, and as will become obvious, the development of one resistance figure in particular takes on real significance.

The capture of the Doctor and Ian gives good reason to explore the Dalek saucers and to see lots of Daleks rolling around. There’s probably a good ten minutes of scenes showing nothing but Daleks moving back and forth in this story. The audience wants what the audience wants.

That said, Terry Nation wisely holds off on revealing the Daleks until the very end of the first episode, where one rises ominously from the murky Thames…

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Doctor Who Project: Planet of Giants

Oh, please don’t keep talking on the twentieth century level. I’m talking about time travel!

Having escaped the French Revolution with his head (if not his fancy hat), the Doctor tries yet again to get Barbara and Ian back to the twentieth century. Given that they’re so close, just a few hundred years off, he attempts to “sidestep” into the 1960s with a simple frequency change on the TARDIS controls. And it works! They’re in England even. Of course, they’re about an inch high when they leave the ship, starting the second season of Doctor Who on the “Planet of Giants” (Story Production Code J), but hey, it’s a start.

Because the TARDIS door opens mysteriously upon materialization—a time Susan declares “the most dangerous moment” in the operation of the TARDIS—the “space pressure” exerted upon the TARDIS at this point shrinks the Doctor and his three companions, a fact they finally realize when they confront giant ants and earthworms and matchboxes.

Doctor Who 009 (1964) Hartnell-Planet Of Giants2 by Père Ubu via a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.

The travellers split up upon arrival, with Barbara and the Doctor going one way and Ian and Susan the other. This particular grouping allows both Susan and the Doctor independently to come to the realization that they have landed on Earth in a shrunken form.

Indeed, this story presents Susan as a canny and calm time traveller, piecing together clues about their predicament, showing knowledge of TARDIS operations, clambering up corroded drain pipes, striking oversized matches, and even reminiscing with her grandfather about that time they suffered through a World War I zeppelin air raid together.

Until, of course, she screams and screams when she sees the dead giant ant and the not-dead giant cat. In her defense, it is a very giant cat.

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Doctor Who Project: The Reign of Terror

I get the impression they don’t know where they’re heading for. Come to that, do any of us?

And so the first season of Doctor Who concludes with a six-part story set in far off and fantastical…France?

Revolutionary France, to be precise, during the period of Robespierre’s rule that gives our story its title, “The Reign of Terror” (Story Production Code H). The Doctor has brought Ian and Barbara “home,” as he promised (or rather threatened) to do after dealing with the Sensorites. France seems to be close enough to England for the Doctor, but by the time he realizes he’s off by two hundred years, he’s already been knocked unconscious, dragged out of a burning building by a French ragamuffin, and forced to work on a chain gang. And then he winds up looking like this:

Doctor Who 008 (1964) Hartnell -The Reign Of Terror3 on flickr.com by Père Ubu via a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.

Not entirely sure which is the greater indignity…

The Doctor has the sensible notion not to leave the TARDIS at the beginning of the story, but then, persuaded by Ian’s offer of a drink to make their parting amicable, off they go. Once Ian realizes that they’re not in England (or even the twentieth century), it’s his turn to wish to return to the TARDIS:

Ian: You know, I think we ought to get back to the ship while we still can.

Doctor: Nonsense. It was your idea to explore, anyway. Besides, that might be very interesting. Walk will do us good.

Once again, the writers contrive to split up the travellers, with Ian, Susan, and Barbara (who instinctively change into period clothing they find alongside bread, wine, maps, and daggers in a trunk in an abandoned house) captured by revolutionary soldiers and dragged off to await the guillotine; the Doctor, meanwhile, has been knocked senseless by royalist sympathizers hiding the house and remains undetected by the soldiers, who set the house ablaze. Then you get the kid, then the long walk to Paris, then the chain gang (from which the Doctor escapes by smacking the road works overseer over the head with a very large shovel). It’s a six-part story for a reason.

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Doctor Who Project: The Sensorites

I don’t know why we ever bother to leave the ship.

Why, indeed, is it that the Doctor and his companions leave the safe (usually) confines of the TARDIS every time they jaunt, unguided, through time and space, other than the fact that there wouldn’t be much of a show without this reckless behavior? Barbara asks this very question at the beginning of Peter R. Newman’s “The Sensorites” (Story Production Code G), spurring the companions to reel off all of their extra-TARDIAL adventures to date: pre-historic earth, the Daleks, Marco Polo, Marinus, and the Aztecs. And the Doctor replies, “It all started out as a mild curiosity in the junkyard and now it’s turned out to be quite a great spirit of adventure.”

“The Sensorites,” alas, is one adventure our fearless travellers would have been better off just staying in the TARDIS for. They certainly try, for as soon as they leave the TARDIS and see that they’ve materialized inside a spaceship crewed by two seemingly-dead humans, the Doctor himself is keen to get right out of there. The first ten minutes of the story seem like an apology for the plot to come, with each character in turn suggesting that they get right back in the TARDIS and leave, but as soon as you see Susan lock the TARDIS door, you just know they’re getting locked out.

By these guys, no less:

Doctor Who 007 (1964) Hartnell -The Sensorites1 on flickr.com, by Père Ubu, via a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.

In fairness, Howe and Walker make a good point about the story’s attempt to portray an alien culture with, well, alienness and in a subtle and sympathetic vein. But the real interest for Doctor Who fans is in the continued development of the companions and the early stirrings of canonicity.

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Doctor Who Project: The Aztecs

What’s the point of traveling through time and space if we can’t change anything?

You can be forgiven for thinking that John Lucarotti’s “The Aztecs” (Story Production Code F) is about the Doctor and his companions’ adventures amongst the Aztecs. An understandable mistake, because it’s about the Aztecs as much as Moby Dick is about a whale. Which is to say, yeah, of course, but not really.

No, “The Aztecs” is Doctor Who‘s first real examination of time travel and its limitations and potential paradoxes. The Aztec setting is really just window dressing, both scenic and moral, in this story, with endless parades of Aztec warriors processing back and forth whenever Barbara, mistaken for a reincarnation of Yetaxa, an Aztec High Priest, needs to go anywhere, and the issue of human sacrifice serving as the focal point in the Doctor and Barbara’s struggle about whether or not to intervene in history.

Not Barbara. Yetaxa.

The action in the story revolves around the TARDIS materializing in an Aztec tomb with a one-way door that all of our intrepid time travelers manage to go through. This device of rendering the TARDIS inaccessible has been used in every story to date, save “The Edge of Destruction” and “The Daleks,” where the TARDIS was inoperable instead, a narrow distinction. Thus far in the series, the writers have not developed a story where the Doctor would want to stay in the setting and resolve the plot’s convolutions, and “The Aztecs” begins to give us some background about just why the Doctor doesn’t wish to meddle.

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