Today has been Tuesday, October 31st, 2017. It is All Hallows’ Eve, the night of the saints, the night of ghosts and monsters and spirits, good and evil. It has been five hundred years since a German monk posted on his church wall a set of statements that would shake the foundations of Christendom.

Tomorrow is Wednesday, November 1st, 2017. The Day of All Saints, the dead who have come before us and who yet watch over us. It approaches one year since an evil man rode a fortuitous tide — in which evangelicals played an indispensable role — to the presidency of the most powerful nation in the world. And it begins a month in which wannabe writers dedicate themselves to writing 50,000 words of a novel.

I don’t have a novel to write, yet. What I do have is memory. I have put off facing it, but I can do so no longer. The kairos has come. It is time for me to remember, and to write.

Because I have a story and a song. They’re not much, but they’re all I have.

This is all maudlin and overwrought and I do not give a shit about that. It’s not much, but

it’s all I have.

It’s time to face myself and create the story of who I am. I’m not much, but I’m all I have.

The Aztecs (Classic Who review)

So far in Season 1 the plots have meandered quite a bit — 100,000 B.C., The Daleks, and The Keys of Marinus are the chief offenders — but that changes, for the moment, with this story. The Aztecs comes in four parts, and that feels pretty much perfect: enough time to establish decent characters and develop a satisfying plot without overstaying its welcome. Throw in a memorable argument between the Doctor and Barbara over the limitations of time travel — the first of its kind we’ve seen in Doctor Who, with many more to come — and this feels like a great story.

But it also has major problems, as one might guess from a title such as “The Aztecs.” The first problem is that all the Aztec characters are played by white English people in redface, not by native Central Americans. It’s a similar problem to what we’ve already seen in Marco Polo. Once again the production team has obviously done a great deal of research and provided a (mostly) respectful depiction of Aztec culture, but a group composed almost exclusively of white people can do it only so well. As a white person unfamiliar with the nuances of this culture, I don’t feel qualified to critique the depiction any more than that, but it’s a problem and the rest of our discussing the story should be viewed in that light.

That’s because the Aztec characters introduced in this story, while interesting and well-acted, don’t feel quite believable. They feel like the type of Aztec characters a white person would create, rather than ones actually based in real life. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with creating characters who feel like creations — that’s what they are, anyway — but it is an issue when these racial power dynamics are in play.

There’s Tlotoxol, the high priest of sacrifice and easily the most compelling villain Doctor Who has yet seen, partly because it’s up for debate whether he’s really a villain. When the TARDIS lands inside the Aztec temple and Barbara emerges from the temple wearing an arm bracelet she found therein, the Aztecs proclaim her to be the god Yetaxa. Tlotoxol never believes this claim and constantly suspects Barbara of duplicity — and of course, we the viewers know that his suspicions are well-founded, though we also know, as he does not, that Barbara means his people no harm.

Then we have Autloc, the high priest of knowledge and the yin to Tlotoxol’s yang. While Tlotxol is reactionary and paranoid, Autloc is open-minded and kind. He quickly develops an affection for the TARDIS crew, particularly Barbara (Yetaxa, as he thinks of her) but becomes troubled when her deception and Tlotoxol’s bloodthirst become plain. While Tlotoxol is dedicated to preserving his society, Autloc seems to truly be committed to seeking truth and doing the right thing.

Of course there has to be some character to provide muscle, and that’s what Ixta the warrior is for. He quickly becomes an adversary to Ian, who is in action-hero mode and doesn’t have much else to do in this story. I found their rivalry oddly compelling, maybe because Ixta doesn’t hate Ian — he just sees him as an obstacle to career advancement. They have a few cordial conversations in between their multiple fights-to-the-death—-or-not.

Finally, there is Cameca, a wise and gentle lady who becomes enamored of the Doctor. Yes, here, in the very first season, we have the Doctor’s first romantic entanglement. His engagement to Cameca — to be fair, when he proposed he didn’t realize that was what he was doing — lasts no longer than his later marriage to Elizabeth I. Yet he does seem to have a genuine affection for Cameca, and it’s kind of beautiful and sad to see this brief love between two mature people. (The Doctor is in fact quite young and impetuous at this point, but he obviously looks like an old man, and behaves like a grown-up in this story.)

Notwithstanding the problems of these characters being written and portrayed by white people from a white perspective, they are at least memorable. Already some of the stories in season 1 are beginning to bleed together in my mind, but I can see The Aztecs more clearly than most of them. That’s partly because I’ve seen it twice, but also partly because it works really well as a story.

Most Doctor Who stories feature the Doctor and his companions dealing with power as an outside force — fighting with power, running from power, negotiating with power, etc. Here, Barbara has been given power — she casually dons a bracelet that causes the Aztecs to mistake her for Yetaxa. Tlotoxol can bare his teeth at her all he wants, can plot and scheme to uncover her deception, but while the deception continues, he cannot harm her, and, in fact, must obey her to an extent.

That introduces a really interesting dynamic: A woman — not just any woman, but a companion of the Doctor, which traditionally denotes a subordinate role — takes power and stands against a patriarchy. Of course, it’s also problematic, because the woman is white and the patriarchy is not, which raises the risk of colonialism.

And Barbara kind of leans into the colonialism. As a history teacher she’s quite familiar with the Aztec practice of human sacrifice, but when Tlotoxol attempts to honor her (she is supposedly a god after all) by having the ritual performed in her presence, she orders it stopped. That decision immediately backfires — the intended victim of the sacrifice, far from being grateful to Barbara, is horrified at being denied his honorable death, and throws himself off the top of the temple. Also, Tlotoxol immediately becomes suspicious that Barbara is not whom he thought she was.

Rather than being cautious, however, Barbara doubles down — she announces that she intends to use her new-found authority as a god to stop all further human sacrifice. Is this hubris? Probably, but because the writing does a good job of showing Barbara’s point of view, I had some sympathy for her. She wants not only to stop a barbaric practice, but also to save the Aztec people from destruction. According to her view of history, the horrors of human sacrifice were what caused Cortez and the Spaniards to wipe out the Aztec civilization. So she becomes the Good White Person who will save the Witless Natives from themselves, and thus also from the Murderous White People. (To say the least, that’s a very problematic way to view that chapter of history.)

Barbara’s announcement precipitates her famous argument with the Doctor, as he tries to persuade her not to follow this course. “You cannot change history,” he says. “Not one line.”

That simple maxim will become a lot more complicated in Doctor Who’s future, but it plays out in this story. Tlotoxol, the priest who seeks to maintain order, ultimately wins the struggle over Aztec civilization: The TARDIS crew escapes, leaving him to continue sacrificing humans in peace. On the other hand, Barbara does alter the apparent course of events — she influences Autloc to renounce his position and the Aztec civilization altogether. Which, again, is kinda colonialist, but at any rate the story introduces the idea that time travel is more complicated than it had hitherto seemed.

But yeah, despite its problems, I really like this story. It’s probably the standout of Season 1 for me, and one of the few First Doctor stories I’ve seen thus far that I would consider a must-watch.

Season 1 Story Ranking:
1. The Aztecs
2. An Unearthly Child
3. Marco Polo
4. The Daleks
5. The Keys of Marinus
6. The Edge of Destruction

The Keys of Marinus (Classic Who review)

This story wears its ambition on its sleeve, and that made me kind of love it, even though it doesn’t hang together very well. Now that Doctor Who’s first few stories have jumped between a variety of settings and situations, The Keys of Marinus says, “And for my next trick…we’ll do all of that in a single story.”

Really, this story functions almost like a mini-season, in a more modern sense — episodic TV connected by an overarching plotline. On the planet Marinus, the TARDIS crew are — yet again — locked out of the TARDIS (they get separated from the ship in every story this season except Edge of Destruction) and must go on a quest to find the five Keys of the planet’s Conscience Machine in order to win back access to the space-time continuum.

While the individual stories within the story may not really be sci-fi, the premise definitely is: Marinus is governed by a Conscience Machine that, like, beams moral thoughts into people’s minds or something. The keys to the machine have, of course, been lost and scattered conveniently across the planet. The evil Voord, who resemble humanoid sea monsters, are trying to find the keys so they can control the Conscience Machine and, by proxy, people’s minds. With the convenient aid of teleport devices that have been specially lent to them for this task, the TARDIS crew journeys to various locales — a virtual reality city, a forest temple, a snowy mountain tunnel — and encounters many perils along the way.

The Keys of Marinus is the second Doctor Who story from Terry Nation, who brainsired the Daleks. The Voord feel like his attempt to create a second memorable monster to go along with his first. The Voord have not appeared in Doctor Who since this story. Win some, lose some.

The story bogs down in the final two episodes, where Doctor Who makes its first foray (and by no means its last) into courtroom drama. Ian is falsely accused of murder, and the Doctor must defend him in court. The Doctor-as-lawyer is an amusing idea, and William Hartnell imbues it with dignity and a pleasing touch of absurdity, but the story devolves into a predictable whodunnit. When it finally wraps up, only a few minutes remain to get the TARDIS crew back to the Conscience Machine, defeat the Voord, and escape.

A side effect of the serialized nature of the story is that there’s very little time for meaningful character interaction, since the plot must move along briskly. There’s a creepy scene where Barbara tries to avoid the advances of a wicked mountain man, and I’m kind of stunned that a 60’s show aimed at children would include such barely concealed rapey undertones. It’s the most disturbing thing I’ve yet seen on Doctor Who. Barbara gets away, of course, but blech.

This is not a great story — the smaller episodes, while fun, are not especially memorable — but it does feel ambitious, so I give it props for that. Really, the whole first season of Doctor Who isn’t great — except for An Unearthly Child and possibly the next story — but it’s still fascinating to watch because it feels so adventurous, like it could go anywhere or be anything. Obviously and necessarily, the further you go the less it feels that way.

Season 1 Story Ranking:
1. An Unearthly Child
2. Marco Polo
3. The Daleks
4. The Keys of Marinus
5. The Edge of Destruction

Marco Polo (Classic Who review)

And we’ve reached the first missing story: Every episode of Marco Polo is currently missing (though there are rumors that the guy who found Web of Fear and Enemy of the World also has Marco Polo and is holding out for more money from the BBC, or just because he’s a massive dickhead, or something like that). But thanks to the magic of audio (there are audio recordings available of every single missing Doctor Who episode) and telesnaps (screenshots from the episodes, basically), I was able to watch a fan reconstruction of all seven episodes. Not ideal, but much better than simply skipping it.

This story is, famously, the first “pure historical” in Doctor Who, meaning that it takes place in Earth’s history and has no sci-fi elements other than the TARDIS itself. (Within Season 1, The Aztecs and The Reign of Terror are also pure historicals.) The plot revolves around Marco Polo coming into possession of the TARDIS, and the crew attempting to convince him they’re not sorcerers or charlatans or sorcerer charlatans so they can get it back. Marco is a fairly decent fellow, but he’s not sure he can trust the Doctor and Co., and also he finds out enough about the TARDIS to realize it would make a terrific present to deliver to his Mongol lord Kublai Khan, whom Marco is trying to persuade to let him go back home to his native Italy. The villain of the piece, meanwhile, is a warlord named Tegana, who is traveling with Marco under friendly pretext but who is planning to assassinate Kublai Khan. When the TARDIS crew realizes what Tegana is planning, he attempts to pit them against Marco, with some success.

Overall I really enjoyed this story. For having seven parts, it flowed much better than the interminable The Daleks, which also had seven episodes. Marco Polo’s plot involves the eponymous traveler’s caravan moving through China toward Peking, and the changes in locale offer new opportunities to advance the plot. The story also presents a fairly respectful look at Chinese culture, although this is handicapped significantly by the fact that none of the cast are Chinese or are even from eastern Asia. Still, it’s worth noting that the first guest star of color in Doctor Who history appears here: Zienia Merton, who is half-Burmese and half-European, plays a girl named Ping-Cho who befriends Susan.

The Doctor is decidedly out of his element in this story. He loudly and repeatedly demands that Marco return the TARDIS key to him, growing more impatient and irascible as the story progresses. It certainly reinforces the strong link between the Doctor and his TARDIS; already it seems clear that the Doctor views his ship as more than just a transport device.

Even in telesnaps, without any actual footage to look at, the episode is gorgeous. The telesnaps have been colorized, which allows you to more clearly see the ornately decorated sets and costumes for the caravan and the Chinese cities.

While it is Ian rather than the Doctor who bonds with Marco Polo and slowly gains the great traveler’s trust, the Doctor reasserts control — of a sort — when they reach Kublai Khan’s palace. After refusing to bow to the great Khan — pleading that he has a bad back — the Doctor somehow charms the emperor and, amusingly, beats him at backgammon. One of my favorite Doctor moments of Season 1.

There’s a lot to enjoy in this story, but because it’s a straight historical tale, it doesn’t ultimately feel like it’s Doctor Who. Maybe that’s because I’m used to historical stories having some sort of twist in modern Who — meeting actual ghosts with Charles Dickens, or fighting an invisible monster with Vincent van Gogh. But for better or worse, while the show isn’t really hard sci-fi (in the way that Star Trek or Battlestar Galatica are), it seems like it has sci-fi elements in its DNA, and a story that lacks them seems a bit out of place. Maybe I’m projecting? While the first season of the show is still finding its feet, it’s every bit as ambitious as Russell T. Davies or Steven Moffat were in their first respective series as showrunners. So far we’ve started in modern England, cruised back to 100,000 B.C., met the Daleks on Skaro, faced the near-destruction of the TARDIS, and traveled with Marco Polo. The next story, however, will take this variety to another level.

Season 1 Story Ranking:
1. An Unearthly Child
2. Marco Polo
3. The Daleks
4. The Edge of Destruction

There has been an awakening

A couple weeks ago R and I took our two young kids to see The Force Awakens. They are now experiencing something I never did as a kid, namely, Star Wars — as a cultural touchstone. It’s pretty cool.

They were fairly familiar with Star Wars before seeing the new movie: They’ve played a lot of Lego Star Wars, and we showed them the Original Trilogy a while back. I don’t think they really paid much attention to the stories, though. The older one (6) has resisted the very concept of sitting and watching a movie until recently, so he was watching under protest and kept leaving the room to play video games. The younger one (4, almost 5), though he likes to watch stuff, has never seemed super-invested in a movie. They knew the names of R2D2 (Ardytoo, they call him), C-3PO, and Yoda, but that was about it.

Still, they knew enough about the basics of Star Wars to appreciate most of the nostalgic signifiers in The Force Awakens: the Millennium Falcon’s dramatic (and funny) entrance, the appearance of Old Han Solo and Chewie, the big Death Star-like thingy. Also, I had explained beforehand what would happen at the beginning of the story, and at intervals through the movie I was whispering to try to make sure they understood what they were seeing.

To do that, I had to try to watch Star Wars through the eyes of a child, which I’ve never really done before. My parents saw the original movie when they were kids — my mom still talks about it being one of her formative experiences and also about how my grandma inadvertently sat them too close to the speakers and then got shell-shocked by the ensuing two hours of booming blasters and bellowing French horns. My parents, however, despite their fond memories of the movies, would not let us watch them as kids. The Force, after all, was drawn from Eastern religion and therefore might draw us away from our Christian fundamentalist faith.

I still found out all about the movies’ plots because one of my cousins was obsessed about Star Wars and explained all about Luke Skywalker and his father, Darth Vader, and lightsabers and the Falcon and Yoda. When we went to my grandparents’, my cousin and brother and I would go off in the woods and play Star Wars. The indoctrination was even more insidious than my parents had feared.

In any case, when I was about 14 they finally decided my brother and I were old enough that we could watch the movies. We had studied Buddhism in school — in our Christian fundamentalist homeschooling, that is — so we were now sufficiently armed to guard ourselves against the Force’s faith-stealing allure. Or something.

It was cool to finally watch the movies, but I had already been thoroughly spoiled about Luke and Leia’s paternity and that the little cackling green guy was Yoda and stuff, so it was kinda like opening a Christmas present that you already knew you were getting and had secretly played with a little. It was fun and they were good movies, but they did not rock my world nor did they change my life.

Then we eventually watched the prequels, and they sucked, but they were Star Wars so they were still kind of cool. We liked Episode III, saw it twice in theaters, but when I wanted to buy it on DVD (and keep in mind, I was 16 at the time), my dad said he didn’t feel comfortable with owning something with so much darkness and evil. I was allowed to buy all the soundtracks, though. Say what you want about the prequels, and I will probably agree, but John Williams didn’t lose his fastball when George Lucas did.

So when Episode VII was announced, I was excited, but more because of the cultural significance than because I personally had much affection for the old movies. It’s just fun to see so many people get so excited about one thing, and fun to get excited with them. I did not expect the movie to be great; in fact, I did not see how it could be great. But the experience of seeing the opening crawl and the return of Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, and Harrison Ford in their famous roles would be worth it.

After watching it, I didn’t think it was a great movie, but I left the theater more excited about Star Wars than when I entered. It pushed all the familiar plot buttons, it brought back Harrison Ford for a stunningly convincing imitation of himself in his thirties, and most importantly, it introduced new characters — Rey, Finn, Kylo Ren — who led me on a compelling two-and-a-half hour journey and left me eager to see what they’ll do next.

So we took the kids and I tried to see it through their eyes so I could help them process it. But try as I might, I’m too old to have it capture my imagination the way it captured theirs.

And it did. Not that they gushed about it afterwards; that’s not their style. But as we drove to Sonic for a post-movie snack (we have to bribe the older one with a burger and a milkshake before he’ll consent to watch a movie in a theater), (1) they didn’t say they hated it, as they often do after experiencing a new thing, even if they kinda liked it, and (2) they both named a favorite part — the part at the end when (highlight to see spoilers) R2D2 comes back to life and produces the rest of the map and puts it together with BB-8’s part of the map.

Now they talk about Rey and Finn and Kylo Ren and keep me asking more questions about the movie they watched and the ones they already watched but didn’t pay much attention to. We managed to find some decently-priced figures of the main characters and a few of the ships, and they were thrilled. And now, for the past week and a half, when they go to bed they ask me to tell them part of the  Star Wars story. We started by retelling what happened in Episode VII, which took three or four nights to get through. Then, because they had been playing their Lego Star Wars game and seen the words A New Hope, they asked me to tell them the story of that movie. We finished it last night, and tonight we’re moving on to The Empire Strikes Back. They played with the Lego avatars of Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia and Han Solo for a long time without ever knowing their names, so now they’re not only excited to hear the next part of their story but also excited to play levels with them in the game.

Best of all, they don’t know that Darth Vader is Luke’s father. In telling A New Hope, I tried to carefully frame Obi-Wan’s exposition scene to emphasize that Obi-Wan SAYS Vader betrayed and murdered Luke’s father. They obviously won’t pick up on the significance of that distinction any more than anyone who watched Star Wars in 1977 would have, but later we’ll be able to discuss that Obi-Wan was lying — sorry, I mean, telling Luke the truth from a certain point of view.

OK, have to be done so I can go tell about Luke and the wampa. 🙂

The Edge of Destruction (Classic Who review)

Season 1, Story 3 (Episodes 12-13)

This is just a weird story. I’m not really sure how to feel about it, partly because I couldn’t figure out what was going on for large parts of it. It’s a two-parter and takes place entirely within the TARDIS with only the main cast, who take turns falling unconscious and seeming to go temporarily mad. At a couple of points I thought there was some incorporeal power that was possessing TARDIS crew members in turn — first Ian, then Susan — which made me pretty excited. As it turned out, the problem was simply that the TARDIS was going wonky, which was far less interesting.

Still, though, the story (which, apparently, had to be hastily penned by script editor David Whitaker because the next story wasn’t yet ready for production) brings the conflicts between the two pairs of companions — the Doctor and Susan, and Ian and Barbara, respectively — to the forefront. There’s an especially memorable scene where Susan, mistrusting her schoolteachers while under the effects of the drunk TARDIS, attempts to stab them with a pair of scissors. Seems like intense stuff for teatime television aimed at kids and parents — Carole Ann Ford, who usually has little to do other than act scared and weak as Susan, gives a genuinely unsettling performance.

There are also a couple of lovely scenes between the Doctor and Barbara, whose relationship seems to be the core of this first season (culminating when they clash wills in The Aztecs). Flummoxed by the TARDIS’ weird behavior, he accuses Barbara, and Ian too, of attempting to sabotage the ship. At the end of the episode, after Barbara has solved the problem but is still disturbed by his harsh words, he apologizes and admits to being wrong.

This is a landmark story in terms of establishing the TARDIS as a character. In the pilot episode, having not yet gone inside the strange police box, Ian commented that it sounded as if it were alive. Even though the problem in this story turns out to be a mechanical one — a mere matter of a switch being flipped that shouldn’t be — the TARDIS responds to the problem not by flashing a warning light, but by altering the atmosphere for her four-member crew, and by giving them strange clues. Having seen The Doctor’s Wife, I could watch this and absolutely picture Idris making all these weird choices and being worried that her thief wasn’t figuring things out soon enough. It’s a retcon, but one that fits within the bounds of this short, strange adventure.

Season 1 Story Ranking:
1. An Unearthly Child
2. The Daleks
3. The Edge of Destruction

The Daleks (Classic Who review)

Season 1, Story 2 (Episodes 5-11)

Having established a host of expositional details that will lay a large part of the foundation for its next 50 years, Doctor Who immediately turns around and introduces its most iconic monsters. The Daleks, like the Doctor, are not yet quite what they will become ­­ but their amazing design, their high­pitched voices, and their diabolical scheming are all there from the beginning.

The Doctor’s behavior in this one made me do a double take. Did he really sabotage the TARDIS just so he could take a closer look at the strange nearby city? Yup, he did ­­ and that puts the crew in major peril, first from the planet Skaro’s heavy radiation, and then from the giant plunger thimbles.

But the Daleks are not the only inhabitants of this dangerous planet. We also meet the Thals, who are related to the Daleks, so naturally they not only look nothing like their exterminating kin, but all resemble Hitler’s Aryan ideal for humanity. The Daleks are known for their desire to destroy anything not like them (though, to be fair, that desire comes in later and is not really a part of this story), so it’s weird to have a group of handsome blondes as their diametrical opposite.

The TARDIS crew all continue on the same character paths, though at least Susan does a bit more than scream ­­ at one point the Daleks enlist her to run an errand back to the TARDIS, and she displays some courage.

After escaping the Daleks, the crew discovers they have to go back because they left the fluid link ­­ the one the Doctor took from the TARDIS at the beginning of the story, shutting it down ­­ in the city. This sets up an interesting scene where Ian persuades the Thals to help the crew invade the city instead of fleeing the area. My memory’s a little fuzzy right now, but I don’t recall Ian letting the Thals know that he has an ulterior motive in getting them to fight the Daleks. It’s not as if he’s persuading them to do something foolish ­­ while they want to get far away from the Daleks, they don’t realize the Daleks are planning to pump more radiation into the atmosphere and eventually invade and destroy them. Attacking the Dalek city is probably the wisest course of action. But it does result in several Thals getting killed. Ian doesn’t seem to have a major problem with this.

The climactic battle between the Daleks and the Thals is simply awful ­­– poorly staged and confusingly shot. Part of the reason the shots are confusing, apparently, is because the production crew could afford to make only four Dalek props, so they were never able to show many together in one shot. The TARDIS crew comes out and rolls them around and knocks some of them over ­­ and that’s obviously the inspiration for a similar scene in Journey’s End –­­ but while the 2008 scene has a giddy triumphal quality, the 1964 one feels improbably anticlimactic.

This is not an awful story, but it’s memorable more for introducing the Daleks than for anything else, and at seven episodes it’s kind of a drag. (One episode consists largely of part of the group trying to make it over an abyss, and because the production team can’t film an actual abyss or do effects shots for it, we’re left with the camera never pointing down to the floor, so we can pretend there’s a pit there. It’s shot decently well, considering, but it slows the narrative down considerably with no visual payoff.)

Writer Terry Nation gets most of the credit (and, in a windfall for him, got all of the rights) for creating the Daleks, I’ve always heard that prop designer Raymond Cusick was just as much if not more responsible for their viral success. (Can you use the word ‘viral’ for something that happened in the 60’s?) Having finally seen this story, that seems about right. I guess it’s in the eye of the beholder as to whether the Daleks are scary, but there’s no denying they have a really interesting design, and paired with their machine­-tinged screeching, they are absolutely memorable. I’m looking forward to seeing them in a better story (and since the Season 2 Dalek Invasion of Earth is next in my queue, I’m hoping that one will fit the bill).

Season 1 Story Ranking: (NOTE: While I reviewed An Unearthly Child and 100,000 B.C. as if they were separate stories, fandom generally considers them part of the same serial, so in rankings I will treat them as one serial entitled An Unearthly Child.)
1. An Unearthly Child
2. The Daleks

100,000 B.C. (Classic Who review)

Season 1, Story 1 (Episodes 2-4)

So if An Unearthly Child was a thrilling take­off, 100,000 B.C. is a dull thud of a landing. The first adventure for the Doctor and his companions (or, really, for Ian and Barbara and the weird old guy and his granddaughter) is pretty forgettable and seems longer than the three episodes it covers.
Almost instantly the intelligent, enigmatic Susan whom we met in the previous episode is gone, replaced by a timid version who screams at the slightest hint of danger. This is, sadly, the Susan we will have to get used to for most of the rest of Season 1.

Not coincidentally, the Doctor’s character follows a different trajectory: He becomes more interesting as he and Ian ­­ the two white dudes, and therefore the natural candidates for leading the TARDIS crew ­­ quarrel over how to handle the mounting threat of daft cavemen. The Doctor, at this point, does not appear to be a nice or even a good person. In the previous episode, when Ian and Barbara discovered the TARDIS, he refused to let them leave it and piloted it away from their time, so that they would be unable to tell anyone of the fantastic secret they had discovered. Yes, the Doctor begins his televised career by kidnapping.

In this story he doesn’t seem to care about Ian and Barbara’s welfare at all ­­ at one point he schemes to leave them behind while he and Susan escape back to the TARDIS, though his plan fails. He’s haughty and stubborn, refusing to listen to the others, refusing to work with Ian. It’s interesting that he calls himself the Doctor, because he doesn’t yet seem to have earned that title.

The actual plot of this story doesn’t seem worth recounting; the chief point of interest is how Za and Kal’s struggle for power mirrors that of the Doctor and Ian. The story concludes with Kal getting his skull smashed by Za, which doesn’t seem to bode well for the other pair, but at least the Doctor and Ian manage to work together enough to get the group back to the TARDIS and escape.

More than anything, this story seems to be about establishing the rules the series will follow and laying groundwork for the character dynamics within the TARDIS crew. We learn that the TARDIS is faulty in two important ways: Normally it can change its outer appearance to blend with its surroundings, but it is now stuck being a 1960’s police box; also, the Doctor is unable to control where it will go in time and space whenever it takes off.

I haven’t talked about Barbara yet, so I should probably conclude with that. She’s the best character of any of the three ‘companions’ (though they haven’t yet been given that title): decisive, compassionate, at times forceful. Sadly, throughout this season she often has little agency, for no other reason than that she’s a woman and (as patriarchy decrees) the men should be handling the tough jobs. Nonetheless, her characterization does seem fairly progressive, especially for the era in which this was made. She’s not afraid to push back against the Doctor and Ian’s patriarchal leadership when she disagrees with them ­­ and refreshingly, she’s often right but not always (as we’ll see in The Aztecs). In short, she seems like a real person, not a peril monkey (cough cough *SUSAN*).

When people ask what my job is

People ask me what my job is, sometimes. Apparently asking what someone’s job is, is a thing people do.

This is not a problem for most people who have jobs. They can say, “I sell vacuum cleaners,” or “I work for a cleaning service,” or “I hunt sharks.” And the person who asked the question will then know what the other person’s job is.

When I am asked this question, it’s hard for me to know what to say. My job is hard to describe. If I tell people, “I’m a Rating Specialist,” that doesn’t communicate much. Here, I’ll prove it:

I’m a Rating Specialist.

If you are like most people, that statement doesn’t tell you anything about what I actually do, what my work consists of. What am I rating? How do I rate it? What does it mean to specialize in Rating?

So I usually don’t tell them that. I take a deep breath and prepare to utter several sentences. The sentences usually go something like this:

“I work in the Rate Audit department. Basically I deal with charges on freight bills, making sure we’re applying the rules correctly.” (That was two sentences. Usually this information comes out in three or four sentences. I haven’t practiced saying it enough to get really efficient at it.)

That still probably doesn’t tell you much about what I do, but hopefully it communicates something.

Next time I’ll try to describe my job as a Rating Specialist a little more fully.

An Unearthly Child (Classic Who review)

This is the first of my reviews of Classic Doctor Who. “Reviews” may not be a super-accurate term; they’re just some of my impressions and thoughts. In some cases, especially early on, quite a bit of time may have passed since I saw the story or even since I wrote the review I am publishing. I’m hoping to eventually catch up and write and publish each review very soon after seeing each respective story, but it may take a while to get there. The reviews, particularly these early ones, may be a bit hard to follow if you haven’t seen the serials in question, so please bear with me.

Classic Doctor Who episodes come almost exclusively in serial form, i.e., typically multiple episodes form one story. There is no set number of episodes in a story; there can be as few as 1 or as many as 12 (or 14, if you count Season 23 as one single story…as I haven’t gotten there and won’t for a while, I don’t feel qualified to comment on it).

My first review is solely of the first episode, entitled “An Unearthly Child.” That is also the name given to the first story, which consists of Doctor Who’s first four episodes. I’ll cover the subsequent three episodes in that story in the next review, titled “100,000 B.C.” 

Season 1, Story 001 (Episode 1)

It’s kind of eerie to sit down in 2014 (it was 2014 when I watched it) and turn on the very first episode of Doctor Who. After the unforgettable original theme tune (which is growing on me, and while I first fell in love with the theme via Murray Gold’s various arrangements of it, I may end up preferring the original), our view moves through a junkyard in a long tracking shot, finally coming to rest on a blue box. (It’s filmed in B&W, but whatever, we all know the box is blue.)

In fact, the whole episode is kind of eerie, in the best way possible. It’s presented as a mystery — two schoolteachers investigating the secrets of a strange student, culminating in the reveal of her even stranger and more mysterious grandfather. But of course the REAL culmination is when the blue box’s doors open and we stumble into something that is, yes, bigger on the inside.

I’m writing about this episode after having seen the entire first season, so with the benefit of hindsight, I can say that the dramatic tension in this episode is unrivaled within Season 1. Even as a 21st-century viewer who knows Doctor Who and knows what all the mystery is leading to, it’s a thrilling build-up. I can’t imagine what it might have felt like to see it unfold when it first aired in 1963, with no inkling of what might follow.

The scene in the episode that most surprised me was the one where Ian asks Susan to turn down her loud rock music. When I think of 1960s Doctor Who, I think of black and white, and a stodgy Doctor, and dodgy costumes on hammy actors (maybe the latter have never really gone away). But I didn’t expect rock music, and it was a fun bonus.

It also nicely establishes that while Susan, the titular unearthly child, is strange, she is also recognizably a modern teenager. She is odd and familiar and young and old and seems like she will be an amazing character — unfortunately, she will never live up to that potential because someone else will eventually become all of those things.

Although the Doctor is a fantastic, amazing character, it’s sad and kinda maddening that his granddaughter had to get pushed out of the way to make room for him. Also it quite absolutely makes the prospect of a female Doctor a matter of justice, in terms of the show’s history. People say the Doctor has to be male because he has always only been male. People are factually incorrect. Susan was there first, and even though there is a character named “The Doctor” introduced in this story, she is the one playing the Doctor role. Somewhere out there in a parallel universe is a show where the grumpy grandad leaves the TARDIS in season 2 and we get 50 years of a Time Lord named Susan and her faithful companions.

It is, of course, completely inappropriate for Ian and Barbara to follow Susan home, but within the episode it’s not presented as creepy. It seems like they have an inkling that something extraordinarily odd is going on, and it turns out they’re right. As problematic aspects of Doctor Who go, it seems mild. Maybe I’m underreacting?

The episode ends with the TARDIS taking off and landing, with the same old wheezing and groaning sound that is today, half a century later, accompanying Peter Capaldi and Jenna Coleman on whatever adventures they’re currently filming. [Again, this was written in summer 2015.] The newly minted TARDIS crew inexplicably falls to the floor and struggles to recover, and outside a looming shadow moves toward the blue box. Is it too cliche to say it’s the shadow of infinite promise? (Yes.)