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

by Elizabeth Sandifer

But on the other hand, for all the bizarre anachronism of it, what is perhaps most remarkable is just how watchable it is. It has no business working, but it does.

Quatermass is about a scary universe that might eat us, and Doctor Who is about an amazing universe we can explore.

Science fiction, by virtue of its conceit, is about the world and how it changes, and that’s necessarily political.

a story about a highly educated man who loves other cultures, hates ignorance, overthrows governments, and gets full of moral outrage when he sees people suffering and demands that it be fixed is necessarily more allied with liberal politics than conservative politics.

cosmopolitan, intellectual, anarchistic, and invested in social welfare,

Now if it were set in contemporary London and based around a horrifying non-human threat that could overthrow humanity as masters of the Earth, perhaps running out of some major recent landmark like Post Office Tower, maybe we’d want to talk more about the similarities between Doctor Who and Quatermass. But frankly, what are the odds of that happening?

Vicki, who, while not an ordinary human, fulfilled the promise of the first episode better than Susan ever did. She was very much An Unearthly Child, visibly from our world, but clearly an avatar of its future.

We’ve gone from companions that set the tone of the show to companions that advance the plot well. Which captures the heart of the change.

Under Innes Lloyd, the show has increasingly morphed to where it aspires first towards being exciting, generally in an “action serial for young boys” sense as opposed to the broad family sense of the Lambert era,

since the show started, we’ve been caught between what we see on the screen and what we know we’re going to see.

it’s tough to come up with a compelling reason why someone who had really enjoyed Doctor Who up to this point would watch this. In every regard, it feels like a complete departure.

But before when we did a complete departure from everything we’ve ever seen, we got back to things that felt like Doctor Who shortly thereafter. That’s not going to happen here. On the other hand, Doctor Who as we know it isn’t quite dead yet. The Savages may have been the last traditional Hartnell story, but the transitory period is going to last a few stories, and this story is still unmistakably a Hartnell story.

a pair of companions that exemplify contemporary British youth culture.

Technobabble has always been Hartnell’s Achilles heel, so having him be the knowledgeable consultant to a bunch of men with guns is a rough proposition;

All the moving parts are there, and the story seems fascinating and exciting. But it’s not a story that seems like the Doctor fits in it. So unless the show plans on doing something completely crazy like recasting the main character and heavily altering his personality,

Every fan knows that the way to identify a not-we is that they call the character Doctor Who when everyone knows he’s just the Doctor. Sure, there are some slip-ups in the show, but they’re all just errors.

And it’s hard to square that explanation away with An Unearthly Child and 100,000 BC, on the evidence of which the program should have been called Ian Chesterton.

not so much illegal to smoke as it is illegal to be caught smoking, with virtually no police forces in European or European-descended cultures actually bothering to seek out individual users),

The drugs, in other words, are tools, part of an arsenal of tactics being used to force change.

This is a revolutionary act because of one key assumption: the world is so broken that simple depiction of it is a damning indictment.

“to keep in existence we are having to at least make a show of playing the right games with the law, the Establishment, the etc.”

Marxism tended to be concerned less with trying to set up a functional Communist state and more with understanding how the hell the capitalist state kept surviving. Indeed, the dirty little secret of modern liberalism is that much of its understanding of the wealth gap and class issues is borrowed from Marxist theory.

Debord, in The Society of the Spectacle, writes about how actual, lived human experience has been replaced in society by images of human experience so that all actual/true understandings of society have been driven out.

The idea of détournement is that it alters and parodies known and recognizable images into ones that disrupt the logic of the spectacle, providing gaps to debate and call into question ideological principles that are otherwise taken for granted.

“At your first puff, muscles relax, tension dissolves and suddenly the world is benign. While your body takes a deep breath, your mind gains another dimension: perception sharpens and you discover a tremendous capacity for concentration and details. Your sense of hearing changes from mono to stereo, you look at mundane objects with child-like freshness, everything smells like frankincense.”

A wellspring of love and anguish that those with searching thirsts may drink thereof. As in the Stone Gardens of the Orient, where Soul Wizards sit within the stimulus of their own silences, contemplating the smoothness of the million pebbles, so should we seek to stimulate our own inner gardens if we are to save our Earth and ourselves from engulfment.

‘O see not ye yon narrow road, So thick beset wi thorns and briers? That is the path of righteousness, Tho after it but few enquires. ‘And see not ye that braid braid road, That lies across yon lillie leven? That is the path of wickedness, Tho some call it the road to heaven.

Gnosticism,

creating a world tree that has various planes of reality and human consciousness that one spiritually navigates. And this was huge in Britain in the early twentieth century. And one of the most important planes, known as Tiphereth, has as one of its symbols . . . frankincense. It is a plane particularly associated with spiritual enlightenment and contact with the divine; it’s also the highest plane that man can aspire towards.

British counterculture split the difference, using psychedelic (the word, I should note, means mind-expanding) culture as a tool to try to make the world a stranger and more magical place.

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn basically imploded in an internal power struggle focusing on celebrity bad boy occultist Aleister Crowley.

the same process as psychedelic enlightenment. In other words, that expanding consciousness and exiting this world into a more magical world was not, in fact,

aggressive culture wars within every developed country between the youth rebellions and entrenched power, why a vision of the world as on a precipice and about to plummet into madness would be appealing.

The vast cosmic paranoia of Kenneth Grant doesn’t mean Grant is anything short of eager to speak the barbarous names needed to attain divine madness, and the possibility that higher planes of consciousness will be terrifying experiences doesn’t make revolutionaries any less willing to tear down the world to get to them.

So we are left with two competing ideas – on the one hand, it is necessary to fall out of the world into a better world. On the other, our world is a fragile thing surrounded by terrible monsters. That is the central tension right now in English counterculture.

Nationalism, psychedelia, and cosmic paranoia. That’s England, 1966.