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September 22 - October 9, 2020
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 deeply problematic (a fact that will become glaringly obvious in the Pertwee volume).
The Doctor, by definition, has no use for money. This tension will not be adequately addressed until very late in the program’s history – really not until Russell T Davies takes over. But it will be inadequately addressed repeatedly,
Lindy A. Orthia (who also compiled the definitive list of homoerotic screencaps in Doctor Who)
The problem with romance and the Doctor is that the Doctor, in the end, is defined by his desire to leave.
Doctor is always going to escape. He has to.
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 obvious proxy for this competition is a love triangle with Barbara. (See Arthur, Lancelot, and Guinevere.)
the Catholic Church formally condemns the birth control pill, confirming the existence of the sexual revolution.
The Ood of the new series are explicitly modeled on the Sensorites, both visually (complete with the appendage originating from the head area that is a long cable) and conceptually (a vulnerable psychic species), and it is eventually revealed that their planet, the Ood-Sphere, is in fact spatially near the Sense-Sphere.
thus far, the most defining characteristic of Doctor Who is its ability to juxtapose.
the Doctor has already become an odd, liminal figure.
The show, like the character, has to earn its identity. Part of this is conceptual – stories like The Keys of Marinus embed the idea that Doctor Who is about wild variety, stories like Marco Polo embed the idea that Doctor Who is about learning more about strange places, and stories like The Sensorites embed the idea that this is a serious science fiction show.
The Doctor is unable to allow Susan to be an interesting character because, in some sense, this detracts from his own vision of himself. If she is not subservient to him, she is useless to him.
C.S. Lewis, of course, died the day before Doctor Who premiered, and so it is fitting that the show would inherit this problem from his work. Put simply, the Problem of Susan is the problem of sexual maturity in children’s literature.
much of children’s literature is about sexual maturity. Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan are perhaps the most explicit classic examples. (Hence the existence of Alan Moore’s Lost Girls,
he was visibly incompetent at adventures in still-recent stories. The Doctor, at this point, is a creature of pure action – in most ways indistinguishable from the TARDIS. (This tension eventually becomes The Doctor’s Wife.)
Susan, defined by the tension between the desire for home and the desire for escape, is incompatible with the Doctor, who desires only endless escape.
In real news, a Rolling Stones concert in the Netherlands gets wildly out of hand and is stopped after fifteen minutes. Also, the UK conducts its last executions, putting Gwynne Owen Evans and Peter Anthony Allen to death via hanging. Bob Dylan gets the Beatles smoking cannabis, and Mary Poppins makes its premiere, launching, in one sense, the dawn of “Swinging London” as a cultural concept.
the Doctor is not yet a hero character. Every story thus far has hinged on the TARDIS being inaccessible or inoperable.
If The Reign of Terror introduces a major theme or advances the story of Doctor Who significantly, it is the story that sometimes Doctor Who is . . . a bit of a disappointment.
Doctor Who survives because the story is never complete.
Rather, it is an argument that Doctor Who was immortal here, at the end of its first season, in the first narrative gap to really exist,
This line, which had quite a lot to prove following the somewhat calamitously bad TV Movie they were spinning off of and the fact that they were started by forcibly canceling the much beloved Virgin Books line.
“Goodbye, John. Hope you don’t mind dying. Never seeing that baby of yours. Becoming a martyr.”
This is why we can’t rewrite history – because we so fetishize the present as an ideal society that we cannot risk changing it.
But here I want to talk about their capacity for bizarrely esoteric fanwank with no obvious market in the realm of sanity.
It is easy, in 1964, to be afraid. The year is closer to World War II than it is to Nintendo. It is in no way clear that the defeat of the Nazis was anything other than a postponement of the end of the world.
this is the first time that Doctor Who has been set in contemporary England since Ian and Barbara fell out of the world.
a fundamental ambivalence in the relationship between the series and contemporary Earth. It can visit contemporary Earth, but only if it makes it as strange and alien as any other place.
Barbara, who continues to be jaw-droppingly impressive. She and William Hartnell are, by this point, the heart of the show – it positively sings when the two of them are on camera together.
Heck, Jacqueline Hill even makes gripping television out of a sequence in which a giant rubber fly is pushed into shot behind her.
Enormously well-done shots and stagings juxtapose laughable crap on a regular basis. Crucially, the design team is already aware of this.
the camera pans up from the dinky miniaturized TARDIS model to reveal that it is in fact a dinky miniaturized TARDIS in an ordinary-sized back lawn, making the low quality of the model shot part of the storytelling. What we initially mistake as a tiny model TARDIS masquerading as a real one is in fact . . . a tiny model TARDIS. This is remarkably savvy, and demonstrates a self-awareness on the part of the show
it is not as though this was a simple transition where the books segued into the series. Even though the main line of the books featured the Eighth Doctor and Davies started with the Ninth, he conspicuously failed to connect them. In fact, he almost went out of his way not to.
to resolve the unresolved plot threads of The Aztecs and explain coherently every single continuity error in the whole of Doctor Who.
What is most interesting about this decision is that the novel works in two registers. To the sort of obsessive Doctor Who fan who would be reading a First Doctor novel published in the same month that the Tenth Doctor has his first major appearance, the novel makes perfect sense.
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.
If a later adventure of the Doctor invalidates a previous adventure, that is resolved simply by deciding that, yes, the Doctor changed history and is no longer in a universe where his own past adventures happened.
If the entire universe changes at the start of every episode when the TARDIS doors open then it is the Doctor, who remains consistent as he freely alters the timeline in both big and small ways, that becomes the central character of the show.
when he is clearly having trouble explaining, when he is feeling guilty for having hurt her, she, in the midst of her rage, still steps in to comfort him, prompting him to continue. It’s an absolutely note-perfect scene.
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.
Barbara, more than any other character, is the one that pushes the Doctor to become the Doctor.
Jacqueline Hill, to be frank, deserves as much credit as anyone on the planet for inventing Doctor Who.
you need to have a sufficiently developed sense of what the monster should be so that you can create an imitation of that role. Of course, the show doesn’t quite have that yet. It has a sense that monsters are good things to have around, but if we’re being honest, it’s not until Season Four that it’s going to actually come up with a second monster design that works well and recurs.
And it appears that it is the image of a Dalek emerging from the Thames that finally completes that process. Once the Dalek shows up, all the Doctor really wants to do is have a proper chinwag with it, which is really the moment where you know the show you have is Doctor Who.
The show is the fusion of four distinct elements that add up to make the greatest concept in television ever. The TARDIS is the first of these
two more elements clearly emerge. First, monsters, of which the Daleks are the archetypes.
Next are the companions,
the fourth part, which makes its appearance here in something approximating its full and final form. That, of course, is the Doctor himself.
The tension of Doctor Who is not whether the characters are going to survive or win. It’s not even when they’re going to win. It’s how.
