Doctor Who review: An Unearthly Child

This is where it all starts. The Doctor, the Tardis, the companions, time and space travel, all of it. Nearly 60 years of Doctor Who began in a junkyard in London in 1963. And what an underwhelming start it was.

Don’t get me wrong, the first of the four episodes in this serial is genius. Absolutely iconic and perfect. There is no way it could have set up the show we would come to know and love better. I think almost all the iconic elements of Doctor Who, all 58 years of it, can be found in the first episode of An Unearthly Child: the character of the Doctor, the companions and the Doctor-companion dynamic, time and space travel, character-driven storytelling, the moral overtones. These things would develop and evolve as the show got older, but it’s astonishing and a testament to the genius of the show’s formula, that the next 60 years of Doctor Who were, for the most part, all there in the very first 25-minute episode.

It’s the rest of the three episodes in this pilot serial that are underwhelming. Sure, it’s all orthodox, standard-issue Doctor Who, but it’s mediocre Doctor Who, too. There’d be a lot more of that to come. 75 minutes of mind-numbing caveman politics and the Doctor and his new companions trying to extricate themselves from the cavemen’s dim-witted clutches does not engaging television make, even, I expect, by 1963’s standards.

But let’s get past that and focus on what An Unearthly Child does right. First there’s the character dynamics. Right from episode 1, the show establishes the formula that would prove its success: the Doctor-companion relationship, and the focus on the companions as the main characters, the audience avatar (in this case, Ian and Barbara), rather than the alien Doctor. Ian and Barbara are introduced as likeable and very strong characters, anchors of familiarity when the viewer is suddenly transported into the unfamiliar world of the Palaeolithic alongside an alien girl and her eccentric grandfather.

The Doctor himself is established strongly. In our first meeting with Hartnell’s First Doctor, we’re left with an impression of him as a mysterious, enigmatic figure, someone with an identity to hide. As the serial unfolds, we’re shown more of the Doctor’s character. This isn’t the fully-developed Doctor we see by the time he takes the form of David Tennant strutting across our screen in his trenchcoat and Converses moralising to anyone who’ll listen; the seeds of David Tennant’s Doctor are there, but the Doctor of An Unearthly Child is still very much a Doctor working out who he is, what he’s about, and what his values are.

There’s the infamous scene where the Doctor tentatively takes up a stone with the intention of cracking open a caveman’s skull, only to be stopped by Ian, the voice of sense and virtue. But this also isn’t the Doctor we would later see who would boldly take charge of this shitty situation and try to fix it and (hopefully) leave everyone happy—Hartnell’s Doctor doesn’t give a damn about the cavemen’s problems, he just wants to remove himself and his friends from their capture, even if that involves decapitating a caveman, something later Doctors would not contemplate. Even though he’s played by an older man, it’s obvious that Hartnell’s Doctor is very much a younger Time Lord than David Tennant’s and Matt Smith’s Doctors.

Episode 1 Susan is wonderful, enigmatic and interesting in her own way as we’re shown clips of her blurting out very un-teenage girl-ish things in class, and of Ian and Barbara pontificating about her strangeness and plotting to stalk her to her inexplicable home. From episode 2 she’s already devolved into the screeching, air-headed teen girl she would remain for the rest of her tenure by the First Doctor’s side. Which is a shame, because the Susan we’re introduced to in episode 1 had the potential to be a genuinely strong and interesting companion.

There’s not much to say about the actual plot of this pilot serial other than that it’s about cavemen bickering non-stop over how they can make fire and who gets to be boss caveman while they keep the Doctor, Susan, Ian and Barbara captive for no clear reason. It does drag awfully, but the dialogue between the Doctor and his new companions as they work together to figure out how to get themselves out of their situation is worth the watch. If you see the derivative caveman rubbish as the generic backdrop to the story of the Doctor and his companions’ first adventure and how, as new travel companions, they work together to fix the unfortunate situation they’ve found themselves in, it’s actually not a bad story.

Look, as a simple pilot whose purpose is to introduce the main characters, establish the formula of the show, what they do, what the show is about, and what the audience can expect from future episodes, An Unearthly Child does the job. It will feature on no list of all-time Doctor Who classics except with sole reference to the first of its four episodes, which was genius, the remaining three being mostly forgettable filler. But it’s done what it’s supposed to do, and whet the audience’s appetite for more adventures with the Doctor, Susan, Ian and Barbara.

Rating: 7/10.

Susan should be the next companion

Susan Foreman, the Doctor’s granddaughter, was left by the First Doctor on Earth in the 22nd Century at the close of The Dalek Invasion of Earth, Susan having fallen in love with David Campbell, a London freedom fighter, during that serial. It was the Doctor’s first goodbye, and his goodbye to the only member of his family to travel with him. I think she should be brought back as the Doctor’s companion for series 9.

Just bear with me, here…

A brilliant idea came to me while I was laying awake at midnight pondering Doctor Who (as, I’m slightly ashamed to say, I do), a “master plan” for series 9. I suspect that the “searching-for-Gallifrey” plot will be explored to some extent in series 9 — to what extent, it’s hard to predict. However, what I would propose is for the searching-for-Gallifrey plot to constitute a strong story arc encompassing the whole of series 9, and ending in its resolution in the finale, in which the Doctor finally arrives at Gallifrey (but has some conflict to overcome there — a tyrant to overthrow? The threat of a renewed Time War? A terrible decision to make?). Such an arc would be similar to the Key to Time arc — the Doctor’s search for Gallifrey would take him all over the universe, all over time and space (I haven’t fleshed out the details). For one series, the Doctor would finally have a destination, a purpose to his travels.

Which is where the Doctor’s granddaughter comes in. Assuming, and it looks probable, that Clara Oswald doesn’t return in series 9, there would be a vacancy open on the TARDIS for the position of the Doctor’s best friend. Susan should take that role. If the Doctor is looking to find and restore the home planet of the Time Lords, surely a Time Lord is most appropriate to accompany and aid him in such an endeavour? He can’t conscript a human girl for what could potentially be a long, arduous and dangerous quest. He couldn’t burden a human with that. He either needs to go it alone, or team up with the only other Time Lord left in the universe. Besides, a “going-home” quest is inherently a family affair. It is only appropriate that the Doctor seeks the company and help of another Gallifreyan for an objective in which both have a deeply personal interest. More appropriate, still, that that other Gallifreyan is the Doctor’s own kith and kin. Susan would have as much an interest in finding her lost home again as the Doctor.

How could this turn of affairs be brought about? The Doctor could, upon resolving to find Gallifrey, decide to seek out his long-lost granddaughter to ask her to join him. The Doctor links up with the TARDIS telepathic interface, asking the TARDIS to take him to Susan.* The TARDIS materialises in 23rd Century London. The Doctor is eventually confronted with a familiar female figure. She peers at him unsurely, and poses a tentative question, “Grandfather?” She looks different: she has regenerated, and is older than when the Doctor saw her last, but he recognises her instantly as his Susan. “You came back,” she coos tearily, and they embrace. She explains that, although she and David lived a long and happy life together, David had died long ago, and that she has been living out a lonely existence on Earth ever since without contact with her family or the Time Lords. The Doctor explains the resolution he’s made to find Gallifrey. He asks Susan if she wants him to take her with him, take her back home. She agrees, admitting that there is nothing left for her on Earth.

The reason it should be Susan who accompanies the Doctor on his quest to find Gallifrey, rather than some other Time Lady (such as Romana), is the potential for character development for both the Doctor and Susan. The Twelfth Doctor has been presented in series 8 as being less dependable, less “user-friendly”, less attuned to his “human” side (so to speak); darker, meaner, morally ambiguous. That’s what 900 years’ spent on Trenzalore watching people he knew and loved continually die around him, while he, only, remained, did to him — it made him, in the most painful way possible, come to the realisation that he, the Last of the Time Lords, was “nobody’s boyfriend”. Here, now, is a chance for the Twelfth Doctor’s character to mellow. In being reunited with his granddaughter, the Doctor finally has someone to care for and someone whom he is finally allowed to love with all his being. Not just anyone, though, someone like him, a Time Lord who supposedly knows what it’s like to have buried loved ones and to be alone. Susan’s experience on Earth parallels the Doctor’s experience on Trenzalore. To have each other would be the best possible thing for them.

Moreover, returning Susan could present a further opportunity to develop Susan’s character. Susan was the archetypal Classic Who “cardboard cut-out” companion whose job was to look pretty, scream, ask questions and get rescued a lot. Carole Ann Ford herself apparently resented her character’s being portrayed in this way. “New Susan”, Susan 2.0, Susan 2000 (or whatever) will have aged and matured, have become self-reliant (perhaps a cause for tension with a paternalistic grandfather?), and will have generally have changed during her time on Earth, as well as having undergone personality change due to her regeneration, in any case. Here’s the opportunity to reimagine Susan as a modern companion, a strong and capable female lead character, dear but at the same time invaluable to her grandfather.

Other opportunities presented by the return of Susan could include delving deeper into the Doctor’s past and his other family. Could we meet, or at least be told about, the Doctor’s children, siblings, or, pray, his (first) wife? Could the writers pick up where Andrew Cartmel et al. left off in 1989?** The opportunity is there, if the writers are man enough to take it. A further opportunity for Doctor Who, in this idea in general, is to move the programme away from its very Earth-centric preoccupation, to get the Doctor out into the universe and move towards more hard science fiction. In this way, Susan would be the first non-human companion of the revived series.

I know there are reams of potential continuity problems with this idea. For example, I’ve completely ignored all of Susan’s history in the extended media (having consumed none of it). I’m relying on the production team’s ability to retcon at whim to avoid these tricky questions. The extended media is, after all, secondary to the television series, and not necessarily canon. If the extended media is to be taken as canon, I’m sure there is still nevertheless a way to somehow reunite Susan (wherever she is) with the Doctor. That said, the biggest problem with my master plan is the question of what happened to Susan in the Time War. The “Last of the Time Lords” mythology would seem to suggest Susan is not in the universe — she either perished in the Time War or was trapped along with all the other Time Lords in Gallifrey’s pocket universe. It is true enough that the Doctor seems to have made no effort to locate Susan after the Time War, which would imply she really is lost or dead. If that is so, I truly am stumped. Having said that, Susan’s fate is never explicitly stated. There may be a way yet for the Doctor to be with Susan. If nothing else, the Doctor could always discover that Susan had a son or daughter with David he never knew about, whom she left on Earth to protect from the Time War…

#bringbacksusan

* Alternatively, the Doctor could simply set the co-ordinates to 22nd or 23rd Century Earth. Dark Water seems to suggest that the TARDIS’ telepathic link, when employed to take a person to another with whom one’s timeline is “intertwined”, takes one to that person’s destination with respect to one’s own point in one’s relative timeline. So, if 2000-year old Doctor linked up to the telepathic interface and asked the TARDIS to take him to Susan, he may well meet up with 1800-year old Susan, or worse, Susan’s grave.

** Whether the writers adopt the Lungbarrow interpretation of the Doctor’s and Susan’s respective origins or retcon it is up to them.