TARDIS Eruditorum - An Unofficial Critical History of Doctor Who Volume 1: William Hartnell

by Elizabeth Sandifer

Barbara simply does not belong in this setting. Eventually the show will get to the standard of people being absolutely thrilled by the adventure and excitement that traveling with the Doctor entails. But here, as she collapses, screaming in anguished confusion and wondering what has happened to her, there is none of that wonder. Falling through a hole in the world is not an easy proposition. Travel in the TARDIS is not a gift. It’s a nightmare.

From the start the series is about the image of falling out of the world – of tearing apart your entire sense of who you are in favor of the utterly unknown and foreign.

In part three, the Doctor knows that escaping to the TARDIS will cure Barbara. Nothing is actually keeping him from the TARDIS. But he insists on staying because Barbara wants to stop the insecticide from being made. Even though Barbara is dying, the Doctor opts to stay and fight for what is right. This switch is crucial – the Doctor is steadily becoming a crusader for good – one who will put himself and the people he loves in danger to do the right thing. Equally importantly, he does so because of his relationship with his companions. And, for that matter, he’s becoming a pyromaniac, declaring that he loves a good fire.

Planet of Giants is all about making domestic objects terrifying. This is, in Steven Moffat’s view, the heart of Doctor Who – he has said many times that Doctor Who is set under your bed.

In fact, the Doctor finally admits, every time he opens the TARDIS doors, he changes history. After all, the TARDIS was designed to observe history. That’s why it has a scanner and chameleon circuit – so it can disguise itself in a given time period and simply watch in silence. The biggest aspect of the Doctor’s renegade nature is not that he runs around the universe willy-nilly – it’s that he ever leaves the TARDIS. The reasons he lied to Barbara in The Aztecs are that he felt this explanation was overly complex and put too much responsibility on her, and that he really doesn’t want to muck with time because it would attract the attention of his people.

(Yes, two sequences form the emotional heart. It’s a Doctor Who book. It can have two hearts.)

I don’t even know what to say here. That’s just a phenomenal scene. One that I wish Hartnell and Hill had gotten to act. Or, heck, gotten to read. It’s Jacqueline Hill, in all of this, that I really feel bad for. Her career started in 1953. She was over halfway to her death when she started on Doctor Who. And after Doctor Who, she basically retired, waiting thirteen years to take on her next acting role, instead raising children. From there she had a brief eight-year career in which she made only a handful of appearances. She then retired again, and died of cancer in 1993 at the appallingly young age of 63. And reading what seems to be the one main interview with her on Doctor Who, I’m not sure she was, during her life, entirely aware of how brilliant she was as Barbara. Working on the show, she got grotesquely uneven material – as she points out in the aforementioned interview, she was often reduced to looking scared at the ends of corridors. But she could do things with those meager scenes that were truly incredible. And more to the point, as I’ve said, when she is on screen with William Hartnell, the series just sings. Those are the scenes that really, firmly establish what the Doctor/companion relationship is. But more to the point, Barbara is, as a character, uniquely capable of pushing the Doctor into emotionally uncomfortable moments. There really is no other character that the Doctor could have the scene quoted above with – nobody else in whom he would ever be able...

It’s worth thinking about why the Doctor didn’t last as an amoral or dangerous character. The real problem with having the Doctor be a morally ambiguous character is that it means that the character who knows what the hell is going on and the character who wants to fix things are two different characters, and that’s very hard to work with.

In that regard, Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks is the first Doctor Who story. Certainly it’s the first enduring one – the first thing to both feel like Doctor Who seems like it should and to be widely read and picked up for years later. This was, for the first decade of the program, the enduring document of what Doctor Who was. It’s entirely arguable that in real and practical terms, this is the single Doctor Who story with the most influence and impact.

The Doctor fights because his companions want him to, and he loves his companions. And inasmuch as the companion is the audience identification figure, this is how – because they stand in for his broader love of humans, and thus stand in for the audience’s desire that he fight.

that’s what the Doctor injects. He takes the danger his companions are in and turns it into fun.

Fanwank stories that are all about making allusions to past stories are pandering to long-term viewers. But if your show positions the Doctor as a mythic character continually, then writing explicitly around that fact isn’t pandering to long-term viewers, it’s doing what you said you were going to do.

And that’s part of the genius of Doctor Who in this episode. Exactly a year on the air, and it’s figured out that if you just have William Hartnell walk around acting like he’s totally confident that he’s got everything under control and like he’s having the time of his life, the rest of the show will click into place behind it.

If the role of the companion is to push the Doctor into having fun as a hero, then Susan is an abject failure, as the Doctor’s primary motivation with her is to shelter and protect her. This becomes somewhat clear in this episode. In a restaging of their feud in The Sensorites, the Doctor and Susan differ on whether they should head north or try to get back to the TARDIS. In this case, as before, it’s Susan who wants to go get into danger and the Doctor that wants to retreat. In other words, because the Doctor is the parent figure to child-Susan, he is unable to adventure.

(who, if it’s not obvious, I have the sort of tremendous respect for that it is only possible to have for people with whom you disagree almost completely)

The thing that you miss if you watch the show on DVD – the thing that is not intuitively reconstructed if you stop and think about this – is that in a given 168-hour week, Doctor Who is on for 25 minutes, and in the midst of a cliffhanger for 167 hours and 35 minutes. The bulk of the show is in fact the writerly moment – trying to figure out where the narrative is going.

Far from being disrespectful to Hartnell and the era of Doctor Who he represents, this revision is, I think, the ultimate kindness. Here is a man who has every reason to hate the conservatism of William Hartnell’s Doctor – a gay man who is old enough to vividly remember the horrific fight over Section 28. And yet he doesn’t mock. Even in a novel that takes seriously the ugliness of the past (the novel has a substantial and kind of upsetting description of a bear baiting), the ugliness of the past of Doctor Who is, in the end, forgiven.

Because what makes Doctor Who brilliant is there’s no such thing as the iconic Doctor Who story that captures the feel of the show. The feel of the show is the vertigo when you’re pulled from one story to another. Film, focusing as it does on individual stories, can never capture that.

the alternative, as we’ll talk about way down the line, is to argue the fact that the Virgin New Adventures aren’t canon. These, of course, are the books that were so important to Doctor Who’s development that Davies went and commissioned Paul Cornell to rewrite his book Human Nature as a TV story. Which is, of course, used as evidence that the book version can’t count. This is canonicity at its most perverse – books that are so important to Doctor Who that they can’t be canon.

Of course, not a lot of twenty-eight-year-old Jewish girls were Verity Lambert. By that point in her career, she’d already managed such accomplishments as keeping a live TV show running on camera after the lead actor dropped dead between scenes, and keeping order while the proper director scrambled to rewrite the script. She was known by anyone who met her as a force to be reckoned with, and rightly so.

The other attempts to create “the new Daleks” have been interesting visual designs, but not the sort of lurking Otherness of a proper monster. Look at something like the Chumblies or the Mechanoids and you get an alien, but the point is their strangeness. They’re objects of wonder. The Zarbi are the closest thing to proper monsters we’ve really seen, and they’re really just benign cattle under mind control. Doctor Who monsters in the proper and traditional sense really just haven’t been a part of Doctor Who thus far, leaving the Daleks to be the one thing you can turn to when you need ultimate and inconceivable evil.

The Doctor rarely arrives at moments of crisis and intervenes. Instead, he arrives at relatively normal moments and makes chaos.

if you asked someone in the week before the last episode of The Savages and the first episode of The War Machines what sort of show Doctor Who was, you’d surely get some pretty interesting answers, including ones that don’t necessarily sound a lot like the show we know today.

the Hartnell era wasn’t assumed to be revisitable except in a hat-tip sort of way until much later in the show. But, ironically, doesn’t that ultimately help O’Mahoney’s case? If the Hartnell era was made with the idea that it wouldn’t be visitable except via memory and reconstruction, what’s so bad about a story that obviously doesn’t fit in at the time? The Hartnell era’s assumption, if it even vaguely imagined that anyone would care at all about it in 1996, would be that it would be a dimly remembered aspect of the show. So a novel that takes strands of dim memory and folds them into something strange and new is . . . not actually entirely unfair.

perhaps the biggest problem this novel has is that it exposes just how much strain we put the Hartnell era under. I mean, at the end of the day, this is three seasons of hastily made television with a cranky leading man who was going senile and multiple production teams. And we rely on it to provide the design document for fourty-five subsequent years of Doctor Who. Every subsequent era is assumed to have to justify itself in terms of the Hartnell era, and has be able to read the Hartnell era as a logical antecedent to itself.

The book is, in many ways, a Sadean story about Dodo, the innocent cipher of a companion. And so we return, once again, to the Problem of Susan, this time in its most explicit formulation. The central problem of the book – the entire issue that divides people on it, frankly – is whether or not the audience will accept the sexualization of an otherwise unsexualized character who, in any realistic portrayal, would have been sexually awakened. The book confronts the show’s decision to take what was ostensibly supposed to be a working-class London girl from the swinging sixties and make her a sexless cipher with no clear character traits. And it makes the argument, a not entirely uncompelling argument, that the desexualizing of her was what made her not work as a character.

it’s worth noting that Pedler’s original conception of the Cybermen was as a race of “star monks.”

this is part of being a Doctor Who fan. You are absolutely guaranteed to see the show die in front of you, and then get replaced with a strange, different show using the same name.

Which is the strange and remarkable thing about Hartnell; his is the only era of Doctor Who that it is almost impossible to pay homage to. Comb through the new series and you can find homages to Troughton, UNIT-style romps, Hinchcliffian scarefests, banter à la Williams, Saward-esque runarounds with pseudo-space marines, and seething political analogies to do Cartmel proud. The one thing you won’t find – and never will find again – is a William Hartnell story. This is because none of them can be him. Not my Doctor. Now my Doctor, I’ve seen him cower in fear and then, made a companion at last, learn to be a man. I’ve seen him stare down monsters and make them blink. I’ve seen him quietly die as he does his duty, with no one to understand. I’ve seen him stand by and make a man of a boy, and a hero of a man. I’ve seen him make a woman of a girl, and a goddess of a woman. I’ve seen him grow from less than a man to more than a man, and then just swagger off to his TARDIS and open it with a tap of his ring – The Doctor in the TARDIS. My Doctor.

Newman, it seems to me, offers a very similar solution to the Problem of Susan – one that finally makes sense of the troubling end of The Dalek Invasion of Earth (even more sense than Guerrier’s, in many ways). In the end, Susan and the Doctor were equal partners in their rebellion, running off together. The Doctor’s last, great act of love for Susan was to force her to rebel one final time, and to run away even from him.

There is a line of discussion about the pilot that it contains an alternate explanation for the Doctor and Susan’s origins, and that they are not aliens in it. This is nonsense – the Doctor explicitly says that he and Susan are “not of this Earth,” and the line about being “cut off from our own planet” remains, with the added note that they are cut off by “eons and universes.” That Susan later clarifies that she is from the fourty-seventh century might be interesting in terms of later debates over the exact temporal placement of Gallifrey, but since Gallifrey is still over a decade away from being named, this can’t really be taken as a substantial alteration to the initial mythos.

To treat the Hartnell era as equivalent to the forty-seven years of history that followed it is to miss the real truth of its genius: that it came up with a way to cause that history. That’s a story worth telling too.