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

by Elizabeth Sandifer

It’s not just that we don’t expect to see another time traveller in AD 1066. It’s that we don’t expect to have a plot involving history other than the Doctor either scrambling to rescue the TARDIS crew or secretly being responsible for some major event in history. Spooner, however, continually subverts those expectations, making the story far more interesting than all of that.

The Master comes from taking a Time Lord like the Doctor and making him into a villain. The Monk comes from taking a comedic historical villain from the Spooner tradition – a tradition that no longer even existed when Terror of the Autons aired – and making him like the Doctor.

there might be something darker to the youth rebellion that Season Two spent so much time advocating.

In a fundamental sense, it is only because the Daleks made a concentrated effort to dismantle Doctor Who that it can be rebuilt in this strange new sense, where we can no longer expect with confidence that we know what kind of adventure we are having.

And so the first thing to realize about Dr. Who and the Daleks is that it is the first time Doctor Who was made entirely for fans. Because this was Doctor Who for people who cared about it enough to pay for it.

In any case, a quick glance at the movie poster gives you a very clear sense of what the movie’s selling points are. In ranked order, these are: Daleks, colour, and Dr. Who.

And the fact of the matter is, once you see Daleks with lava lamps, there’s no going back. I guarantee it.

If you’re wondering why the New Paradigm Daleks introduced in Victory of the Daleks look the way they do, go look at the poster for this movie. This is where that idea came from.

mostly rejected the Cushing films as non-canonical fluff)

Actually, one thing to note about this movie is the degree to which it is clearly influential on Moffat’s version of Doctor Who.

And look at Peter Cushing’s delivery of “We could be anywhere in time and space, which is rather exciting” and ask yourself if Matt Smith would change a single thing about that delivery if he were playing the role.

So his choice of reading material is not a comment on his lack of commitment to science, but rather a comment that he is so well versed in science that he can move on to the next stage of a man’s life: adventure.

this film is where the basic roots of Doctor Who as steampunk come from.

But what’s most interesting about Cushing’s portrayal is that he turns the part into a broad character performance.

Dr. Who is not the mythic hero because of years of past stories in which we know the character, nor is he the mythic hero just because someone says so. He’s the mythic hero because he has his own set of visual iconography and signifiers that the film specifically uses to highlight his presence on screen. When it comes to how the film is put together, the world really does revolve around him.

Who and the Daleks shows how much better the pacing on Doctor Who could be, and provides an extremely compelling case for why the serialized format is less than ideal for Doctor Who.

Doctor Who can work as audio plays, as television, as DVDs, or as comics quite well. But film, in the end, is just not a medium it’s well suited to. 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.

The complaint is that the New Adventures embraced sex and violence in a manner usually reserved for twelve-year-old boys at their first sleepover with nudie magazines.

But unlike many continuity-dense books, The Empire of Glass doesn’t throw all of these things up primarily to fit them together as a sort of intellectual puzzle.

the Doctor’s lengthy monologue about his agnosticism that tends towards atheism is both preachy and unnecessary, explaining more of the Doctor’s worldview than is strictly necessary. (Compare it to the relative deftness with which the same issue is handled about a decade later in The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit.)

And so the books are providing a genuinely important service to the show in that they’re providing context for the episodes. Once we see the Emperor Dalek in a comic, he’s always there. Even if we don’t see him on television, we can imagine the Daleks we see as a tiny subset of a much larger set.

I prefer that definition, by and large, because it seems to perform the useful function of actually having canon work more or less the way the writers treat it as working. Canon is the menu of things you can reference.

Barry McGuire’s staggering piece of apocalyptic folk “Eve of Destruction,” notable for one of the worst rhymes in all of pop music, in which “coagulating” and “contemplating” are rhymed.

the Beatles invented the stadium concert, playing Shea Stadium in New York City,

The soundtrack of every episode of Doctor Who exists,

For most of the missing stories, this is made easier by the existence of Telesnaps – a service provided by a man named John Cura where he would point a camera at the television screen and take photos throughout an episode in case the production team wanted a handy visual record.

But this, to be honest, is the first time Doctor Who has just decided to do a story that plays it totally safe and feels like Doctor Who is “expected” to feel.

the Rills’ robotic servants, named by Vicki in her last act of cute naming as “Chumblies,” (a name that, inexplicably, everyone including the Rills immediately adopts).

Usually after a full change of production staff we get one or two episodes that are odd holdovers from the tone of the last regime. Here we have it in the other direction – an episode that feels like a greatest hits collection released too early in a band’s career – a handful of clever bits in a sea of “meh.”

Vicki youthfully rebels against whatever is put in front of her.

It was not just well directed, but lushly so.

Because while the world of Galaxy Four is not the most innovative world Doctor Who produced under Verity Lambert, it turns out to be one of the best-realized.

The Chumblies are an attempt to do with sound what the Daleks did with visual design.

Throughout this volume we’ve held that one of the basic purposes of Doctor Who in its earliest conception was to be strange.

virtually every story since Planet of Giants has managed to succeed admirably in at least one regard.

Watching “Air Lock’s” majestic sense of world is oddly elegiac, because it’s the last time anyone is going to put quite so much effort into world building on Doctor Who for a long time.

it became necessary to produce an extra episode at the end of the recording block that started with The Rescue, and, ideally, to give the entire cast a break at the same time. So a single-episode, TARDIS-free prelude to the Dalek epic got put on the schedule, and this is it.

The first thing to realize about this story, then, is that it must have been completely mind-blowing to the viewer, who would have settled in and watched in increasing bewilderment as the TARDIS fails to show up.

The episode is just a massacre of all of its sympathetic supporting characters at the hands of the Daleks, and there’s no Doctor at all.

While it is still true that the Doctor can save the day, this episode is a sobering reminder that sometimes he doesn’t.

(This is actually the best argument against making the Doctor truly immortal – an immortal time traveling hero will eventually save every day. For the Doctor’s actions to mean something, he has to be genuinely unable to save everybody in the entire universe every time.)

Nation has, it should be noted, put four different sets of Daleks on the screen now

For the first time since The Daleks, one gets the sense of Nation just writing something he wants to write as opposed to writing for the paycheck.

any list of the ten creative figures with the biggest influence on Doctor Who has to include Verity Lambert. She’s as transformative as David Whitaker, Patrick Troughton, and Russell T Davies.

She, more than Newman, was responsible for the decisions that made Doctor Who a mass success, drawing it away from the frankly dull didacticism Newman had in mind and towards the weird and wonderful show

Verity Lambert died in 2007 at the age of seventy-one. She lived long enough to see the show she started her career on impossibly come back from the dead.

Some of the tropes of narrative collapse from The Chase come in – a character called Katarina is hastily introduced amidst a wave of everyone acting like they’ve known her for three episodes now.

And it does become anti-comedy.

Perhaps being the Doctor isn’t enough. Which is an interesting and even appealing point, but there’s something more unsettling underneath it: it doesn’t seem to be a point the series is making. It seems to be the new concept of it.

The Daleks’ Master Plan, is a mammoth twelve-parter, not counting its prequel, Mission to the Unknown. It is by far the longest Doctor Who story ever, running nearly five and a half hours.