WhoThrough: Doctor Who Season One
An ongoing journey through every series of Doctor Who begins ongoing.
When my wife and I first married in 2014, we enthusiastically committed to watching a Doctor Who story a week, in order, until we were done. Five and a half years later, we finished. (With The Timeless Children. Which at least has the decency to bookend An Unearthly Child nicely as a title.)
And with that done…we decided to start all over again.
Posted here are a combination of my notes from the first and second WhoThroughs. Scattered sentences and thoughts. Likely some of it won’t make sense unless you’re familiar with the episodes.
But if you love the show like we do, hopefully you’ll find some interesting observations ahead.
AN UNEARTHLY CHILD
Does Susan cry out deliberately to start this whole thing? Kudos for working out how alien Susan would be. (That won’t last.) What force mysteriously opens the door to Foreman’s yard at the beginning? Audience curiosity?
For-man, forward-man, man from the future? Also a good POV thing: that we don’t see the TARDIS dematerialise or arrive, it’s all from the monitor’s perspective, conveying how it feels. Barbara and Ian’s snooping trip is totally a date.
Interesting how it’s a real template for so much that followed. Capture, escape, misunderstanding. The episodic structure is hugely like the Who we know. Change the cavemen to an alien race and fire to some bit of weaponised tech and it’s a SF story. Fire’s science fiction to the tribe of Gum.
Eps one and two both go big on flashbacks (is the early fire scene one?) which is a useful device we’ll take a long time to get back to. Writing of the angry Doctor in episode 2–4 feels more based on the original pilot than the remounted version. The bloody chest wound would be unthinkable in colour. This is the first time “water as a thing that will cure all ailments” shows up.
THE DALEKS
Seems more notably sexist – women being assumed less capable, Ian being wrong yet immediately ending up in charge once he admits it. Daleks are like Jason Voorhese – icons assembled over several stories. The design is for one adventure – they have the look, but the vulnerabilities are designed to make them defeatable one-offs. They need static electricity, they need radiation. Not the huge powerhouses yet. They’re built to work one way and designed to be limited. They’re not what they become – it’s all concept, design and voice. Their bigger ambitions and internal issues will come later.
Barbara’s tense corridor journey is very effective – canted angles and her placing a hand over the camera. The confident, all-knowing Susan has totally evaporated. Why isn’t seeing an intimidating Thal the cliffhanger at the end of part two?
Susan’s signed message is very WWII spy-craft, as is the escape and capture stuff; resistance in the woods. “If we don’t get that fluid link we’ll die” they say without it being true whatsoever. How did Barbara end up with some chap’s trousers? I badly want to write a counter-story to this that rejects “mutant” as a synonym for “ugly”.
By starting the Daleks off as unknown, rather than evil, they’re not just scary, we’re able to relate to them – that, surely, is part of why they took hold so hugely, those early days of them being monsters who bring you lunch and chat to you. I can’t tell if Ian’s jump across the ravine is intended as a visual mislead – grabbing a ledge that turns out to be above the standing platform – or not.
THE EDGE OF DESTRUCTION
Interesting use of Susan. Having normalised her right after episode one – she was the odd, unknowable mystery who quickly became a more regular girl – she’s now back to being unknowable, dangerous even. The scissors come out and she’s kinda chilling.
Someone told Ian to play it stunned and he kept going for much longer, it feels, than the script intended. Barbara tearing strips off the Doctor is downright defining.
MARCO POLO
Forced to start with the typical awkward racism, but I wish we could see the full version of this – the visuals look awfully impressive compared to what came before, and it’s sad not to see the first story where the TARDIS crew operate as a team. The DVD reconstruction sadly omits the cave business, so thank goodness for Loose Cannon.
In the full reconstruction it’s much clearer: this team are actually nothing of the sort. Plot about the TARDIS falling into the hands of primitive men a nice idea…and thus mostly ignored in favour of endless polite tussles with Polo over Tregana. TARDIS stuff is basically only there to justify it being available at the end of the journey. Handily a couple of chaps kill themselves to solve the plot. And Marco comes clean for no reason.
Four guest characters, the squabble over the TARDIS holding the status quo, and one betrayal – there’s simply not enough here for seven episodes, especially not when the passage of time plays no role in creating drama. (This could all happen over two days. Moffat would do it in a scene.)
There’s a real effort here to make the travel seem significant – from snowy mountains to villages, towns, desert, caves, an oasis, a palace… If you saw it, it might feel huge, even though nobody says “Wow, the Great Wall of China!”. But the audio only draws attention to how the gang never experience much local culture in each place, and the story of each scene picks right up from the end of the last one. Even if it was weeks ago.
The exploding bamboo would, once his character was figured out, be something they’d make the Doctor’s idea. (Indeed, Ian pretending to be drunk would become the Doctor’s ruse come Tennant.) The fish pond dialogue is the final end of Susan being an alien oddity, lumbering her (and now miscast) as a banal child.
THE KEYS OF MARINUS
Susan has no idea alien worlds might differ from Earth – we’re all done with the alien child she was and it’s a damned loss, leaving the role miscast. How weird to skip the scene of the team saying no to Arbitan, the argument. (Well, typical for Nation, who’d rather faff around with secret doors than do drama.)
Pipe in the cave, ceramic cup – not very alien. Nice to see a single world be so varied, different cultures and weather and science. Though it doesn’t feel like it creates a coherent, whole world (repeated isolated loners and love of hidden revolving doors aside). And it’s Doctor lite! Funny the Voord don’t chase them, create extra tension and thrust. Or that nobody questions the mind control at the start, but we feel it totally in ep two.
Split screens, dissolves, Barbara alt POV, matching models to real. Ep two wonderfully disturbing – the lab that’s just a crappy mug on a table, the brains, Ian hypnotised and killing Barbara. The Doc wants a laboratory. Ian’s ‘always right’.
The Doctor’s argument for splitting up is pitiful. “You can tell it’s a fake microkey, this edge is is slightly shorter”, DE302 – why are these details and acts of deduction always so banal with Nation? When you capture Ian, he tries to escape, when you capture the women they scream and wait for rescue…or are just the first complain a place is cold or loud or strange.
Episode five starts with confusing abruptness (how did Ian end up here?) but I love this idea of just dropping into a new genre every episode. The ep five cliffhanger – Susan’s kidnap – is a proper stakes raiser, however cliched, and arguably trumps a lot of what we’ve had before.
I’m trying to figure out if there’s an argument that the Marinus computer being down is what leaves us with a world of loners you can’t trust.
THE AZTECS
Us being ahead of the Doctor/Ian – the fight he’s helping to rig – is unusual for the show. Big revision, actually, but odd omniscient POV; ditto Barbara agreeing to Susan being punished. Weird 60s assumption that men can do fighting – Ian’s a teacher, he’d die in this fight. (Or would he? He would have done notional service.) Barbara pulling a knife on the bad guy is proper steel. The poison, too. This is her story. And she’s tough as. Doctor gets the comedy B-story.
“Ooh, look, cartoons!” Jesus, Susan. She’s literally shoved back into being at school here and this time isn’t frustrated at all at how wrong and primitive thing are. After the last story I’m so done with secret doors getting the plots started.
The Doctor tripping into a romance feels like something we’d only come back to in the modern show. Loads of lovely, ambitious direction – implying space behind the camera, moving into close-ups from wide shots (Ian’s bloody wrist feels like an Indiana Jones shot). It really doesn’t feel strongly-enough played that Barbara is trying to prevent a genocide.
In the final episode the Doctor takes Barbara’s side – telling his lady friend that the gods want an end to sacrifice. She’s changed him.
THE SENSORITES
Ian wanting to hit stuff, knock doors down; but also being against splitting up. Feels like a reaction to episodes thus far. Especially with its non-human aliens who aren’t evil and the general lack of set-piece cliffhanger danger – instead it’s personal, moody, emotional. Sensorite as a caste, not a species. Doctor is the lead for the first time – Ian laid up, guest bloke gone bonkers.
With talk of the Tower of London we have our first official “adventure before the show”, shifting the Doctor from someone who’s learned to be himself to someone who always was – in a scene where they also talk about how much they’ve all changed. (Later Beau Brummell and a world with psychic plants are also cited as previous adventures.)
The transition from TARDIS to spaceship is extraordinary, and so casual; a move from set to set, and then a match cut where we pan back…and the TARDIS prop is in place behind them.
While it’s a compassionate kind of story, the gang still take on the news that an entire species is dying as an idle curiosity, a question to note while getting the TARDIS lock back. The “curing our poisoning is a trick” plot reads incredibly Covid in 2020.
Gorgeous timing with the captions every episode, where characters hold position while they’re superimposed. It actually works, it doesn’t go all Police Squad. The Sensorites are rather what the Thals would be if you wrote them properly – gentle and vulnerable to any level of aggression.
THE REIGN OF TERROR
Doctor and road diggers is everything we think the Doctor is: gets into trouble standing up to bully, starting a quarrel over people, no personal stake in it, then gets out using his wits and the friends he makes along the way. Along with helping Sensorites the Doc is getting defined.
Meanwhile Susan is screaming and moaning and jumping on a bed to avoid rats and catching a horrible cold. Barbara very proactive, and lovely stuff with the danger or romance with a man later revealed as on the other side and killed.
“We’re not even French” – back then this apparently didn’t make anyone wonder why everyone was talking in English without even French accents. (We’ll call this the Planet of the Apes exemption, it pretty much sits being acceptable in the 1970s.)
Series one ends with a transition to the heavens as the Doctor talks about the adventure to come, dubbed after the fact but pretending to be lines from the scene we just left, spoken to the companions. Which is to say: literally the same thing that ended the classic series in 1989 as McCoy’s Doctor gives a very similar speech to Ace.
Come back soon for season two!
