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

by Elizabeth Sandifer

That is, you tune into Doctor Who next week having spent a week trying to guess where the story is going to go so as to check your answer. It’s a game of whether you can come up with something as good as the writers to get the Doctor to the next part of the story.

What makes a Doctor Who episode great is when every episode is a better solution than what the audience can c...

And so reveling in the Doctor as a mythic figure and openly accepting that around twenty minutes into the last episode he’s going to save the day is not a matter of destroying dramatic tension. I...

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.

You don’t need to spend years or decades establishing the Doctor as a mythic character. You can just have him go out there and be mythic, and the audience will go “Oh, he’s a mythic character, gotcha.”

And it’s why you watch Doctor Who. Because Star Trek is never going to have a crowd-surfing Klingon.

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.

Accordingly, the Doctor hits on a very sensible solution – dump Susan off with the first man she’s attracted to and tell her to make babies.

Much of becoming Doctor Who is the process of casting off the odd decisions that didn’t quite work over the course of the first season. And ultimately, Susan is one of them. The Doctor says one day he’ll return. But how? In the end, that’s the Problem of Susan – the most important character in the first episode is the one who turns out to be a bit of a bad idea.

Watching Doctor Who, in fact, requires that we rarely assume a man in a rubber suit to actually be a man in a rubber suit. And so Whitaker pulls off the absolutely brilliant trick of hiding the villain in the most obvious place ever. Nobody will ever think that the man in a rubber suit is secretly a man in a rubber suit.

This is also gleefully meta, in that it makes it clear that the show has known from the start that its effects were wobbly, and thus that the effects have never been about being persuasive illusions, but rather have been tools in a particular sort of storytelling. The limitations of the effects are part of the narrative structure of Doctor Who.

the story’s actual climax. The Doctor is confronted with the accusation that he’s doing harm, not good, and his response is, basically, to fall head over heels for the young girl, turn on the charm offensive, win her over, and save the day, all of which he accomplishes in a few minutes once he puts his mind to it.

This story and the last one are the first time the show has re-invented itself, going from adventure serial to cultural icon.

Davies and Phil Collins, one of the other executive producers, are talking about whether children would believe that they really did kill off Rose. Collins says that he hopes children would not be so cynical as to say, “Oh, they wouldn’t really do that.” And Russell T Davies, in what is, to my mind, the most revealing thing he has ever said on a DVD commentary, says, “That’s not cynical. That’s wise.”

The idea that art might be non-representational is not actually very complex or hard to accept to anyone but a TV/film obsessive.

horror – a sustained, conscious attempt to make things scary in general, as opposed to at specific moments.

we watch the young companion figure – the supposed image of the future of Britain – suddenly go blank, her entire personality taken away. It’s scary. It is genuinely psychologically horrifying.

It’s completely alienating – a refusal to conform to the normative visual grammar of television storytelling in 1965.

The entire visual style of the story is focused on the task of making it seem nothing like television in 1965 seems like.

The Web Planet is supposed to be shockingly weird.

It’s a strikingly bizarre moment, but it’s hard to laugh at it because the series has just taken us completely off the map so that even comic beats like this leave us uncomfortable.

“A silent wall. We must make mouths in it with our weapons. Then it will speak more light.”

It’s easily one of the strangest things I’ve ever watched. But when this sort of absurdity abuts comedy about Zombo the Friendly Zarbi the resulting effect is a striking alienation.

The entire concept of the series is that it’s a means of taking ordinary people – Ian and Barbara – and thrusting them into bizarre situations where they don’t belong.

This is not a story to enjoy in VidFIREd high-resolution glory. This is television to watch in a darkened room on a flickering TV set with a hazy image – much as it would have been in 1965.

So the Doctor is left pondering his next move . . . for a week. Which means the audience is pondering the next move as well. That’s the major point of a cliffhanger – the writerly moment whereby reading the text and constructing it become conflated.

Let’s pause for a moment and help out those who are in less fortunate countries with poor education systems that don’t teach them important things about the world – like America.

Shakespearean theatrical tradition – namely its convention of having the female characters be cross-dressed males. (A situation which, I hasten to add, was played for laughs at the time

This is the first time people who actually have dark skin appeared on the set.

The Beatles have number one again, with “Ticket to Ride.” Those of you who are obsessive Doctor Who fans will glean the particular significance of that. The more normal folks will find out in two essays. (The really obsessive fans now know exactly what book is up in the next essay. If you are one of those fans, congratulations.)

As the youth rebels and starts to change the world, the coolest place in the world is London.

one of the classic bad lines of the series, “Have any arms fallen into Xeron hands?”

Vicki clearly wants nothing more than to overthrow civilizations and give guns to hot young men.

And Gareth Roberts is a part of gay Doctor Who fandom – a segment of fandom that, as anyone vaguely aware of Russell T Davies’s life and aesthetic knows, turns out to be rather important to the history of the show.

“In my day, I was considered quite a looker.” Now try to imagine our grumpy racist of a leading man delivering that line.

That’s what racist times are: times where ordinary people believe terrible things.

Here’s the key to The Chase’s redemption: narrative collapse.

Note, however, that Vicki expresses surprise that the Beatles played classical music – in other words, as mod and hip as the Beatles may be in 1965, Vicki is way, way hipper.)

This, needless to say, destabilizes the narrative considerably. It is, in fact, basically the end of Doctor Who as a concept. If the TARDIS crew can simply watch the universe on television, why voyage into danger? Indeed, the Time-Space Visualizer effectively reduces the TARDIS crew to the same position occupied by the viewer

the Daleks have literally usurped the show. The TARDIS crew is sitting around watching television, and the Daleks are adventuring in time and space.

Ian: Barbara, give me your sweater. Barbara: What, again? Ian: It’s not for me, it’s for the Dalek!)

a Dalek spins around the room for an extended period of time shouting “AM EXTERMINATED! AM EXTERMINATED!”

There’s a great bit where Ian is momentarily terrified by . . . a police box. They’ve returned to our world full of joy and wonder.

since The Rescue, which is the first sustained run of high quality in the series.

Of the eight actors who took the part over while the show was running, as opposed to doing so in new launches, only two – Pertwee and Smith – have ever had their debut story also serve as a companion debut. Furthermore, only twice has regeneration also marked a wholesale change in the major production staff (producer or script editor for the classic series, executive producer for the new) – Tom Baker and, again, Matt Smith – although the Pertwee and McCoy had a reshuffle.

Significant chunks of it were not very good – The Keys of Marinus being the most uncontroversial example.

Why does everyone hate on The Keys of Marinus so much? I found it particularly compelling!

Crucial to this change was that the show embraced a youthful and mildly anarchic view of the world, and took a real joy in it.

the run from The Chase in the summer of 1965 to the beginning of The Ark in the spring of 1966 forms the closest thing to a distinct multi-story arc that Doctor Who will do for some time.

“That is the dematerializing control. And that, over yonder, is the horizontal hold. Up there is the scanner, those are the doors, that is a chair with a panda on it. Sheer poetry, dear boy!”

So following The Chase, the audience was primed for a historical.