WhoThrough: Doctor Who Season Two

The ongoing journey keeps ongoing, watching William Hartnell’s second series.

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.

PLANET OF GIANTS

Despite the new season there’s no attempt made to begin with strong character introductions and a restatement of the concept and relationships. (A product of the constant turnaround of the show. That’ll happen with The Rescue.) When the model ship lands it reads as a model the production hasn’t disguised well enough, not that it’s the actual size of the TARDIS!

Huge step forward technically. The writing brilliantly intercuts two identical conversations rather than play them both out in full. The gunshot that plays like a distant canon is marvellous, and some studiously planned cuts between real size and small size are done brilliantly, and the lighting and design matching well. More effort has gone into the scale here than the movie Cats. Plus the Next Time caption cheekly shown on the TARDIS view screen!

Also: Is this the only story that’s neither historical NOR about an outside sci-fi concept? “I’m not going to give up before I’ve tried at all” says old Doc about climbing up inside a drainpipe – another brick in the building of his eventual show personality. The combining of episode 3 and 4 leaves us sometimes missing exposition for clarity, but does help pace a lot.

It’s worth noting the way the murder generates talk of atypical emotional reactions – it’s dealt with as a character issue rather than ploughed through for plot. There’s something probably profound about the messy way things can’t be seen by characters unless they’re off-camera. (They’re forever not noticing things two feet away until we pan with them.)

THE DALEK INVASION OF EARTH

The series stepping up to use of location and specific models reminds me of the step up of Red Dwarf series two. Some ambition in the parallel back stories being told with flashbacks and VO. (Much like the pilot but barely since.) Raised areas on set, under-floor areas – whole extra dimension.

Robomen (no robowomen) inevitably feel like proto-Cybermen. “Can you cook?” “Men, you say?” Nation’s stock sexism returns – being a man in a wheelchair automatically trumps being a woman for usefulness. Still, Barbara drives a truck into a Dalek! Susan’s ankle, wheelchair Dortmun, Ian’s companion Larry, Susan’s shoe – lots of leg injuries, which I guess is a theme? Ian in a suit in a mine is SO 1970s 007, as is dealing with a bomb and keeping his feet either side of a trap door.

The action sequences are hard to track, shot to shot relationships aren’t great – who can tell if the rebels’ bombs work or not? There’s more romantic chemistry between Barbara and her travelling companion Jenny than Susan and David. Some rather good process filmmaking – Ian’s mine cart descending, Barbara driving her truck.

Doctor leaves Susan, stops the Daleks – he’s a real protagonist here.

THE RESCUE

Amazed we don’t see the “Come with us, the whole of time and space” scene clipped endlessly! It’s the original invite to adventure to a young companion!

Doctor much funnier than he’s been before. Deliberately playful, yes, but also sometimes just unwittingly funny. The writing and character both freed up by the loss of Susan. Good surprises – the attempted murder of Barbara, the reveal that Vicki found her, that the monster’s not dangerous, that Koquillian isn’t human…and then is Bennett. (On body count alone he’s maybe the worst villain yet!)

Confrontation courtroom scene a prototype for innumerable Doctor victories hereafter, complete with villain killed but not at the Doc’s hand. The two mute Didonians play as metaphor for the accusing dead – ghosts of Bennet’s victims. Which, while clumsily introduced, is emotionally valid and haunting. It’s all very RTD.

Hilarious Doctor. Ian cracking character jokes. The crew separated by the villain rather than by choice or fluke. The show is starting to really become itself. Barbara killing the creature really pushes Vicki away from the crew, making the near-inevitable outcome a harder, more dramatic journey. Meanwhile you have the Doctor touched to find he’s being talked about well over the intercom. It’s the most emotionally capable story thus far by miles. Even just Vicki connecting the ending to the death of her father – whom it’s be easy to forget Bennet killed in his mass murder – is unusual.

THE ROMANS

Totally chucks away the cliff-dropper from the last story. Lovely technique to that big cliffhanger and then: “we open on Ian unconscious…and he wakes and feeds grapes into his mouth”. While it might lack drama, “the gang treat time travel as a chance for a holiday” is another step towards earning the show format, that we want to travel.

Nero becomes a real caricature in ep three. Uncomfortable comedy staples of chasing unwilling women roguishly and being followed by an idiot sycophant. Even a comedy death. Also plays the main characters failing to meet in Rome – despite proximity – repeatedly. Vikki really seems to take it all as a romp, she’s having fun – and refuses to be infantilised by the Doctor. A long way from Susan already. And it’s rubbed off on the Doctor, who’s positively playful throughout. Hartnell honestly seems transformed, in the writing and performance – so much lighter and more fun. Partnering the Doctor with Vicki really helps refocus that relationship, make it clearly not a redux of Susan – it lacks all those problems.

Meanwhile Barbara gets to battle death, tension and indecency. So while we have to park Ian – and look how clear it is now that the fighting side of the show is the dullest – the split otherwise works well. Can’t decide if “Lyre player” is a deliberate pun. Ian and Barbara are in serious flirt mode by the end. Episode 4 contains, I think, the first ‘wipe’ edit on the series. A shame to present the fire of Rome as a remote, historical fact – watching like its television – not the visceral, deadly thing it was.

THE WEB PLANET

Blimey, the TARDIS Hartnell scenes in part one are struggling – dense with awkward pauses. Then the women get a scene together and it’s instantly got rhythm. Liking Vicki – her early chat with Barbara playing off the difference in their eras is a pleasure. (Though why we’re limited to aspirin for painkillers when the Doctor’s handing out atmosphere-breathing pills I’m not sure.) Vicki assumes Ian buys Barbara jewellery. Canny lass.

Great cliffhangers at the end of ep one – Doctor loses his TARDIS, Vicki taken away, Ian trapped and Barbara headed for an acid pool. That’s as precisely structured as has been managed so far. Making up for the weird low-key intro of the ant people earlier.

The medical worries of the Who cast is always at mum level – aspirin, cotton wool, bathing ankles in water, dab on some iodine, all kinda stakesless and safe. Ian’s amusingly petty about his pen and tie for a guy on an alien world. Amazing how much of this era of Who relies on ignoring or actively dismissing the obvious. (Barbara sees a light, Ian sees a figure, Vicki has a mental attack.)

There’s a real power to the image of the Doctor standing defiantly among encroaching Zarbi in episode two. The “Doctor can’t be heard when speaking to the Animus” scenes are written smartly to sell the effect, but totally mis-shot/cut so only the dialogue is explaining it, not the subjective experiences in the scene. I think we can be confident the Doctor said “red box” deliberately to try out a hypothesis with his specimen.

Some key template stuff coming together here, building on things from the Tribe of Gum – the Doctor landing between two factions who have lost sight of their original history, a companion meeting an odd alien who’s less disposed to keep fighting. But it’s a huge mistake not to characterise the Menoptra more individually – they all sound the same, behave the same, and it fails to personalise the conflict.

Vicki befriends Zombo and names him, just like she named Sandy in The Rescue. (And like Susan ‘named’ the TARDIS.) Something about the madness of the visuals make it harder to track the plot, perhaps because it’s strangely low-key stuff that centres around devices and objects rather than anything emotional. Even discovering the Optera plays oddly genteel.

Reaching the Centre in the final episode plays, like in the Rescue, as real progress and feels climactic because of the move to a new space.

I can’t stop saying “animoos”.

THE CRUSADE

Love the characterisation of King Richard. Trading his sister for a deal, dictating while scoffing and self-correcting, refusing to help save Barbara and his decoy. Vicki’s need to dress as a boy seems to be barely established, and not used for much – a real waste of a vibrant new lead. I’m not at all on the Doctor’s side during the theft and subsequent deviousness about clothing.

I struggle to find tension in the characters getting further separated as the show’s already proven it will always bring them back together, even if it has to rely on lucky and coincidence – recovering Barbara is the entire main story, rather than something to do while also facing their own plots. Too sightseer for me.

The Doctor is getting jolly physical lately – scrapping and grabbing a sword and ducking under tables to steal; the part is getting ever more youthful. Ironically it feels like they’d have hidden Hartnell’s real-life ageing better by asking him to do more physical stuff, less dialogue.

Ian’s in full-on ‘worried boyfriend’ mode now, and the threat that Barbara be made part of a harem is so typical of the ‘sexually threaten a woman to motivate a man’ genre. Joanna’s brief “There’s something new in you, yet something older than the sky itself” speech about the Doctor is so similar to the celebrity historicals of RTD, where the big names often have a preternatural sense about the TARDIS crew.

Mostly it feels like there’s no core idea to this story, no main thing it’s about, but rather it adds things when it needs to just to keep the runtime going. Though those things include Barbara on her knees, Vicki cross-dressing and Ian staked out on the ground, so at least it’s pleasingly kinky.

THE SPACE MUSEUM

Ian seems to know he’s always wrong and gives up trying to explain the silent talkers. Vicki has some great silent reactions that really give the character more heft despite being underwritten. Had a fun reaction to museum aliens – I want to see them in a story!

AMAZING first: You arrive in episode one after the first cliffhanger and have to work out how you got to it! The way time catches up feels, oddly, like how a Zoom call will freeze, then play bad quickly to catch up with the present. Cutting back to find the Doctor has tied up his captor is the show knowing “this is the kind of thing the Doctor does”. His Dalek impression is the same joke as Ten asking “Are you my mummy?” in a gas mask.

Surprisingly good Ian fight in episode 3, well choreographed and shot to make it both clear and exciting, which is close to a series first. Ian becomes a strategist at last – talks a guard out of firing, uses a rock to mislead another. The Doctor’s two face-offs with Lobos have Hartnell showing some real anger under the twinkle. He’s also alien: he’s awake when frozen, which a human couldn’t do.

Vicki laughs to herself when the Doctor gets too patriarchal – “don’t touch anything” – and it totally takes the edge off that behaviour, makes it a character trait rather than the show’s opinion of gendered relationships.

The rebels whining about having no weapons then cutting to Ian easily obtaining a gun really does make them look feeble. But then, they introduce Lobos – or first glimpse of an alien culture – by having him…moan about his job; a very drab conflict. The Doctor fighting the mind probe is gloriously fun.

I do like how the future knowledge haunts the cast throughout, and that it’s so…weird. Good direction helps a lot, and while the factions are kinda lame, there’s something clear about making one group laughable patriarchs and the other group daft hipster youths. The score keeps doing lovely (pre-)Planet of the Apes kind of music.

There’s a pleasing commitment to high-concept ideas. The jumped timestream in episode one, the mind probe in two, the logic lock (and Ian’s gunpoint confrontations of logic) in three, the defrosted Doctor in four. The Doctor implies he stayed alive by running questions through his head, by keeping his mind going as a functioning computer – file that with Vicki’s computer lock that needs the truth, and Ian’s logic-puzzle win at being held at gunpoint, and it feels like we have an Azimov fan here. The “turning the lights on” metaphor at the end is lovely.

THE CHASE

A story where the Doctor’s duplicate is played by an actor who look different, but two separate characters are played by the same actor. And where the doctor kills his old self to move forwards.

“Just like me, always wants to know what’s on t’other side of the hill.” Hartnell’s less-RP accent comes out as the character comes together: he and Vicki as adventurers. He’s become like her…and now the show is about adventuring for fun. And with the character and dynamic in place, there’s no need for Ian and Barbara.

Nation’s plots always seem to start for forced reasons. Daleks in the desert feels (precognitively) so much like Star Wars – twin sons like Tatooine…and the Time-Space visualiser from Devs!). With Nation writing women get scared easily, get stuck trying to rescue a Dracula robot and knock out the wrong people. And the crew callously leave folk to die – the fish folk, the crew of the Mary Celeste.

Sketch with American tourist a prototype for Love & Monsters. It’s a shame we skip the simple heroism of Ian giving up the chance to stay in modern New York – a choice he makes to save the population from the Daleks. (Barbara’s yearning is clear, but she gets no say in the decision.) But that’s Nation all over – each time jump is just a time-filling ‘bit’, there’s no story there for the characters or plot for the episode, just a run of shaggy dog tales. Cut episode 3 – and half of 4 – and nobody would notice.

The urge to write more comedically helps the character scenes quite a lot (having a sense of humour always makes characters feel more alive) but as is often the way, there’s a sacrifice of verisimilitude to do it – the Daleks become daft, the story sillier. (The Doctor can’t even tell a fake laboratory from a real one.) Though there’s a tension to Morton Dill not taking a Dalek seriously…

Gosh there’s something deeply prototypical about Vicki bothering the Doctor while he tinkers in the TARDIS. (And annoyingly 80s about her doing it to everyone else.) The lightweight ‘gliding’ Dalek moves better on the sand than the ones they make trundle over rocks or cobbles – should have done more with that method.

The robot Doctor: Vicki is very good at fighting being patronised and making that feel like a real obstacle, convincing people quickly and credibly. It’s extraordinary how nasty Barbara being attacked by the ‘Doctor’ feels. The Doctor fighting himself is the end point of the character’s reinvention as a younger, more active hero…until regeneration, anyway.

A regular Terry Nation trick is to have two dangerous things face our heroes and then have them fight each other so our gang can escape. (We’ll call this the ‘end of Jurassic Park’ manoeuvre.) Happens with the Daleks and mire beast, then the House of Horrors, surprisingly doesn’t really happen with the fungus plants, but does with the Mechanoids.

Really canny use of the Time Space Visualiser in the first and last episodes – an alert to danger, and a way for the Doctor to know Ian and Barbara are home safe.

Pretty sure this episode partly inspired my Dalek Who sketch.

THE TIME MEDDLER

And here’s the Doctor fighting a mirror of himself once again! Funny to do two stories back to back where the enemy has a time machine too. What is this, the Moffat era?!

The Doctor doesn’t need to go to the monastery, but the mystery of the monk and the chanting draws him in – full Doctor mode. Steven’s new-companion scepticism about time travel is a useful restatement of the format for newcomers, but also blends nicely with the Monk bringing in items from the wrong time period.

Vicki has unequivocal faith in the Doctor, the TARDIS. Protective, defensive, and certain of how things work. That’s the bond we’ll know best as the show goes on. The Monk’s trick with the chanting works cos it functions exactly like the show saving costs. We don’t suspect the monk because there’s not yet been aliens in a historical – from now on we’d suspect such a character instantly. Having braced for some killer Doc-Monk banter in part two…we get none, cos Hartnell’s on holiday.

But the pivot to the Monk as a new, mysterious protagonist is a stronger move then we might expect. Indeed, we start to watch him struggle to keep his scheme from falling apart – tending a sick man, trying to get that dealt with quickly – as the lead. This might even be the best solve for the structure of a four part story: arrive to trouble and mystery in episode 1, work on the antagonist in episode two so they gain shape and profile, reveal the plan in episodes 3, stop it in 4. This totally stops episode 3 ending up a runaround.

With the locals, Steven’s not just discovering what’s true, he’s finding Vicki’s approach – kind and curious – more effective than responding with cynicism and belligerence. That’s what gets them food and frees them from their captors. The story’s surprisingly good at not letting Steven be ‘the man’ of the piece – Vicki susses his “describe the Doctor” trick, but also that the Monk will have done the same, and when they both say “follow me” Steven ends up going where Vicki leads.

The second guessing mind games! Vicki working out the trap, Doc aware he’s being conned into a habit…shame they both fall for it anyway. That the Monk maybe helped build Stonehenge brilliantly fights the Doctor’s “no interference” take, since the Monk’s efforts have already become history. Vicki explaining the TARDIS and its camouflage at the start of the story is brilliantly hidden set-up for later.