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.

Thoughts on: Empress of Mars

(Gallifreyan Ramblings has an all new look! Read this on my blog!)

There’s a show from the 1970s called Ripping Yarns. It’s one of my favourite comedies, one of the many produced by the BBC around that time, written by and starring Monty Python alumni Michael Palin and Terry Jones. Over nine episodes, each with different settings and characters, it parodied the early 20^th Century “boys own adventure” stories targeted at the strapping, wholesome young boys of Imperial Britain. It ventured to such exotic settings as a German WWI prisoner of war camp, the Andes, the British Raj and Cornwall, always following some exciting and pseudo-heroic adventure.

Empress of Mars felt a bit like Doctor Who if it were made into a Ripping Yarns episode. Like Ripping Yarns, this episode is consciously parodying “boys own adventure” type stories of the early 20^th Century, which often featured hardy and romantic Victorian soldiers camped out in some far-flung frontier of the Empire. Just substitute Mars for Burma and an Ice Warrior carrying a serving tray for native servants and you’ve got yourself a Doctor Who story, with material for trite political commentary to boot. Actually the political commentary, such as it was, was fairly superficial, which makes this episode a deviation from the norm for this series. Maybe that’s a good thing, because I don’t think Gatiss really had his heart in pushing a political message in this episode. He really just wanted to make an Ice Warrior serve the Doctor and a couple of Victorian British Army officers tea in a cave on Mars. Which is absolutely fine.

But it’s also indulgent because it’s got Gatiss’s favourite era and Gatiss’s favourite monsters. It looks like Gatiss asked Steven Moffat to have his Christmas and his Birthday presents on the same day. In that sense it looks a lot like a parting gift to Gatiss from Moffat, and I wouldn’t be surprised, and I think Gatiss wouldn’t be surprised, if this were the last we saw of him. This wasn’t as good an Ice Warrior story as Gatiss’s previous one, Cold War. That was an exciting, atmospheric base-under-siege which managed to do something novel and interesting with a monster which was always going to take a bold writer to extract from the 1960s, in all its bulky, slow-moving, hissy-voiced beauty. The Ice Warriors weren’t really that interesting in this one. They had a new gun, the latest in Doctor Who’s growing catalogue of Interesting Alien Weapons, following the Zygons’ electric tumbleweed from last series. They also had a queen, the Ice Empress Iraxxa. I’m interested by the idea of an Ice Empress, but I found it difficult to take Iraxxa seriously when she seemed to be played for self-conscious pantomime up until the last two minutes of the episode. The screechy, comical voice that sounded too much like the Empress of the Racnoss didn’t help either.

It’s worth noting that Mark Gatiss is actually tremendously funny (he wrote Robot of Sherwood, after all, one of the all-time funniest Doctor Who episodes), and seems to have a very similar sense of humour to the Monty Python troupe. Empress of Mars unfortunately doesn’t feature the overtly silly public-schoolboy humour of Monty Python and Ripping Yarns, but there’s definitely a cheekiness and a mirth in the way it makes the quasi-comical Victorian soldiers throw dash-its and tally-hoes and old-boys back and forth, and the way it makes the British look terrifically and resolutely domesticated, not to mention hopelessly class-conscious, even marooned on Mars. It felt like Mark Gatiss was having fun when he wrote this, and it was fun.

It’s worth saying where I might put Empress of Mars in a ranking of Gatiss’s episodes. Of the nine episodes Gatiss has written for Doctor Who since 2005, I think I’d put it somewhere on the bottom end of that list, probably between Victory of the Daleks and The Idiot’s Lantern, making it seventh out of nine. The delightfully funny and fun Robot of Sherwood would go at the top. It’s worth comparing it to other Gatiss episodes because Gatiss’s scripts have always been a bit different from other present-day Doctor Whos. Gatiss doesn’t shoot straight down the middle. His scripts are offbeat, a bit quirky, a bit left-of-field. Carnivorous sentient televisions, animate dollhouses, robot occupations of 13^th Century Nottinghamshire, and Victorian soldiers on the Red Planet. Imagine Mark Gatiss as showrunner. It’d be weird and unpredictable. Probably more shit more often than Doctor Who is now, but at least it wouldn’t be boring.

For all the glorious unconventionality of the idea of putting Victorian soldiers in an Ice Warrior hive on Mars and making them fight each other, this episode actually holds back on the quirkiness and weirdness that usually characterises Gatiss episodes. It’s actually a fairly conventional narrative when you compare it to the rest of Gatiss’s playlist on Doctor Who, and fairly conventional Doctor Who, at that. And I’m not sure that it really worked. There’s nothing conspicuously wrong with it – it’s enjoyable enough. But it was, as the kids say, just ‘meh’. Gatiss’s episodes are weird. That’s what Gatiss does, and does well. I basically regard Sleep No More as peak Gatiss—it was the weirdest Gatiss has ever gone, and it was a triumph, a flawed triumph, but a triumph nonetheless. Admittedly plenty of people didn’t like it. But the one thing no one can dispute about that one is that it was memorable—you’re never going to forget it. You can’t really say the same about Empress of Mars. And that’s its problem. Gatiss compromised on doing what he does best in order to get all his favourite characters onscreen at the same time, and ended up producing a story that was indulgent and high-concept, but just a bit boring. It felt conspicuously like a filler episode, something every filler episode should want to avoid.

Rating: 6/10.

I contributed to a fan piece: what makes a good season finale?

Hello dears,

I was asked by Matt from the Talking Tardis blog to contribute to a fan piece about what makes a good season finale.

You can read my answers, along with those of Whovian artist Jeph and Oncoming Storm Radio producer Paul Mabley, here. We give our answers to the following questions:

• What do you look for in a season finale?
• What are the key differences between the Russell T. Davies finales, and the Steven Moffat finales?
• What’s your favourite modern-era finale, and where does “The Doctor Falls” rank in comparison to the previous nine?

I enjoyed reading the others’ responses, and Matt did a good job arranging this and putting it all together.

Go and have a read! And check out more of Talking Tardis‘s content while you’re there!

I’ve been watching: A Series of Unfortunate Events (Netflix)

• Like any good Millennial who remembers reading Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events as a child, I was thrilled when I found out that Netflix were going to make the novels into a TV series. I mean, who wouldn’t be super excited if they found out that one of their favourite childhood book series was going to be made into a multi-season TV show? The 2004 film was good, but it was just one 2-hour film and it only covered the first three books. A long-form TV series (it looks like it’s going to be about three seasons, given the current rate of 4 books per season) covering the whole book series is much better.
• I have to say, though, while I like and appreciate that a TV adaption has given the writers room to develop each of the stories, I feel slightly underwhelmed by the result. I’m not sure precisely what it is, but one thing I can identify that I didn’t like was that the mood was all wrong. It was all a bit too flippant and whimsical for a series about tragedy and misfortune. Disconcertingly, all the characters apart from the Baudelaire children themselves were written like they were in a comedy—the Baudelaires were the only characters played straight, and it produced the jarring impression that everyone was in on a mean joke on the Baudelaires.
• I mean, I get that this kind of dark humour was part of the novels, but I feel that the tone was still taken too far in the direction of comedy, which I felt trivialised the dangers and tragedies that befell the Baudelaires. I watched the 2004 film after I watched the Netflix series, too, and I thought the film got the tone much better. It still had comedy, but it felt darker and more somber, as it should. The constant cameos of the Baudelaires’ parents, frequent reminders that the Baudelaire orphans aren’t actually orphans and that their parents are coming for them, also detracted from what was supposed to be a tone of bleakness and misery.
• I also thought—and I’m surprised to find myself saying this—that it was almost too faithful to the novels. Usually I’m one of the bothersome people who criticise screen adaptions of books for not being faithful enough to the text, but here I think it stifled the making of artistic decisions that might have allowed the stories to translate better onto screen, ultimately at the expense of the show’s pacing and writing. Again, I feel like the film, which took more creative liberties, succeeded better in this respect, despite cramming three books into two hours.
• All that said, I don’t want to make it sound like I didn’t like the show. I did like it, on balance. I watched it all the way to the end and I’m looking forward to the next season. I guess it’s just easier to talk about the things that annoyed you than to give praise. But one thing I will definitely praise is the acting of the three Baudelaire children (well, two, since one was a baby and wasn’t really acting). Malina Weissman and Louis Hynes were as good as Violet and Klaus Baudelaire as you could have asked for, and definitely two more young stars to watch out for brought into the limelight by Netflix, along with the Stranger Things kids. Neil Patrick Harris was also very entertaining as Count Olaf, but I do think he could have been much better if the writers allowed him to pull back on the self-conscious comedy.