What happened was that I got distracted with other things, some of them important, some of them less so. Like that Doctor Who marathon that Twitch was showing a couple of months back for instance. Until then my exposure to the classic series had been pretty pitiful, I'd seen maybe two stories from each Doctor, so I'd always felt like I'd missed out on an important part of British pop culture and there was a gaping hole in my sci-fi knowledge. Then Twitch announced it was showing the entire classic series (more or less) for free over two months and I figured it was an opportunity I couldn't miss. In fact, I even watched some of the stories that they skipped, if there was anything still surviving of them to watch.
Turns out that 8 weeks of 16 episodes a night is actually quite a lot to sit through. But I somehow made it through and my evenings were finally my own again. Then I had my second bad idea!
I had no intention to write about any of the serials for Sci-Fi Adventures because I wouldn't be able to rewind to the stories to check things, getting good screencaps would be a pain, and there was something like 140 of them, so I didn't bother writing up proper notes, or coming up with reviews as I went along. But then afterwards it occurred to me that this was it, I'm never going watch all these stories again, this was my one and only chance to ever write about the whole of classic Doctor Who like this. So I've gone and written mini-reviews of every story I watched using whatever notes and screencaps I did take, the chatlog of conversations I had while watching, and anything that was left in my brain after a few months. I can definitely relate to the Doctor's memory problems now; a lot of the series is still in there but it took a bit of prodding to come out.
What you'll find below are my first 19 reviews covering the whole Hartnell era. I didn't write a synopsis for any of them but I did include some SPOILERS. I'll only be spoiling up to the serial you're currently reading though, so I'm not going to go into a rant about Dodo or whatever midway through The Aztecs.
But there's also a twist as I'm trying something new this time: ratings! I figured if I was going to put a whole lot of serials next to each other it'd be nice if there was a way to compare my feelings about them at a glance. I've even added a convenient tinted bar down the side of the review to colour your perception of my text.
Rating things doesn't come naturally to me, that's why I don't typically do it, but I've given it some thought and I think I've come up with a rating system that I can apply consistently and fairly to every story, whether it's from 1966 or 1996. Basically it's a 1-9 scale measuring how much I gave a damn about what I was watching, with 5 being the point where it had my full attention. Doesn't matter why I liked it, maybe I thought the archaic effects were charming, maybe I was fascinated by an alien's terrible makeup, I'm rating the cake not the ingredients, and my scores are entirely subjective and useless. Though I will be adding bonus points for moments of conspicuous greatness and subtracting them if something really bothered me.
| 10 | Really 9's the highest score, but I put this here to feel better about giving flawed episodes the top mark. |
| 9 | One of the highlights of the whole series and my friends wish I'd shut up about it. |
| 8 | Damn good episode. |
| 7 | A decent episode of Deep Space Nine or Babylon 5. |
| 6 | Good, but not awesome. |
| 5 | Pretty watchable, kept my interest. |
| 4 | I realised I'd been sketching things on a sheet of paper. |
| 3 | I decided to play some Pillars of Eternity on my other monitor. |
| 2 | I turned it off after 10 minutes and wondered what took me so long. |
| 1 | I thought nothing could be this bad, but classic Doctor Who proved me wrong. |
I've been informed that classic Doctor Who serials are supposed to be enjoyed over a few days or weeks, not binge watched for seven hours a night, so you won't be shocked to find that they rarely held my full attention. Plus I didn't watch the series as a child and I have no nostalgia for it, so that's going to hurt the scores as well. Expect lots of '4's.
| 1963-64 - Series 1 | |||
| 001 | An Unearthly Child | 4 parts | 3 |
 First is An Unearthly Child, an adventure in space and time that took our heroes all the way from a junkyard in 1963, to a forest in 100,000 BC, to a cave, back to the forest, back to the cave again... and so on. If the serial had purely been about the two teachers investigating a mild curiosity in a junkyard I'd be talking about how surprisingly great it was, but 75% of it was about people in furs fighting over control of a tribe (while the Tardis crew figured out who was leading their own tribe) and I'm not sure it's even possible to make caveman politics interesting. Ian and Barbara were immediately likeable though as protagonists, and the Doctor... was a whiny selfish lunatic who kidnapped them and nearly killed a helpless man to aid his escape. I liked his trick to get the murderer to reveal his bloody knife though; the guy might not be all that heroic at this point but he's still clever. Plus it was interesting that their first trip through time and space brought them to a place where neither the Time Lords nor the school teachers had an advantage in knowledge, as it's not exactly a well-documented part of our history and they all might as well have been spacemen compared to the cavemen. | |||
| 002 | The Daleks | 7 parts | 4 |
In the first story the Doctor kidnapped two nosy schoolteachers and now here he sabotaged his Tardis to strand them on a post-apocalyptic planet with lethal radiation because he wanted to have a look around! In his defence, he was in too much of a hurry to properly check the radiation meter (and he lost his handheld detector in the last story, nice foreshadowing and continuity that). Fortunately, there were friendly aliens on the planet willing to give them radiation medicine for free. The trouble with this story is that it's seven episodes long, which gave it plenty of room to stray all over the place and lose my attention along the way. But hey at least they found themselves in a more interesting cave this time and the Thals were more fun to hang out with than cavemen. They were also generous, friendly and entirely peaceful... though Ian soon sorted that out with a speech about how violence is good. I can't say I expected to see a Doctor Who story with an anti-pacifism message, but then I guess the series has always argued that evil must be fought. | |||
| 003 | The Edge of Destruction | 2 parts | 3 |
| This was basically two episodes of the crew flipping out and acting crazy with barely an explanation afterwards. Sure they revealed that the spring had gone in a switch and the Tardis was trying to warn them about their imminent demise, but I don't get how this led to Susan freaking out with a pair of scissors or all the other weird things that happened. It's a strange creepy story, but not really what I'm into. Though it is notable for being the story that revealed that the Tardis is alive, and one of only two proper stories I can think of that takes place entirely within the ship (I won't spoil the other one). Also, no one was captured and they didn't visit a single cave! | |||
| 004 | Marco Polo | 7 parts | - |
| [MISSING, DIDN'T WATCH] | |||
| 005 | The Keys of Marinus | 6 parts | 4 |
 Though I liked that they started out still dressed in their costumes from the last serial (that doesn't exist anymore), as it's a level of continuity I didn't expect from a series from the 60s. I assumed it was going to be more like original Star Trek, where the characters forget the last story entirely as soon as they're onto the next one. Plus the Tardis crew had some great interaction going on now they've bonded a little, like in the scene on the razor-sharp glass beach where Susan lost her shoes in the sea of acid she was about to paddle in. The Doctor laying into Ian for coming out barefoot and not having shoes to lend to Susan when the only reason he was shoeless was that he'd already given them to her was great. Mostly because I couldn't tell if he was deliberately trolling him. I wasn't particularly gripped by the serial overall, but it definitely had its moments. Like the discovery of the invader who'd been dissolved in his own wetsuit, the Doctor being stunned by the technology of an old mug in his imaginary laboratory, Barbara (almost) smashing the evil brains, Ian taking on the ice guards to buy the others time to escape, and detective Barbara saving Ian and Susan. Also, Susan must have done something interesting or useful at some point. Plus I'm glad that after six episodes the Doctor finally realised that mind controlling the population with a computer might not actually be a good idea. | |||
| 006 | The Aztecs | 4 parts | 4 |
| It's the second story in a row where Ian was framed for clubbing someone over the back of the head! This one was very different though as instead of being an adventure serial, it was about the crew hanging out with the Aztecs for a while, learning about their culture, and potentially having the opportunity to rewrite history. The Doctor's been a bit morally shaky at times, but here he got to be the one who made a stand and it was nice to see a hint of who he'd later become. Even if he was repeatedly tricked into putting Ian in danger like an idiot. Though it didn't seem like the Doctor was arguing that changing history was wrong, more that it was impossible, and he seemed to be speaking from experience. Maybe that's why he didn't even consider taking Cameca with him even though he clearly liked her, because he expected something would stop him removing her from the timeline. I have to admit, this story didn't hold my attention either, but any serial where Ian beats an Aztec warrior with his thumb and later throws him off a pyramid to his death while dressed as a chicken isn't all bad. I've no idea why a science teacher can take on Aztec warriors in combat, though I guess he's the right age to have fought in World War II. Plus I loved the sneaky bastard high priest who shamelessly hammed it up while everyone else was trying to play it straight. It's interesting that he's one of the few villains that actually wins at the end, as Barbara finally left him alone to get back to sacrificing folks. | |||
| 007 | The Sensorites | 6 parts | 4 |
| I can kind of see why this story lives down at the bottom of people's episode rankings, it starts slow and it's not a particularly gripping tale, but I think it's probably my favourite serial so far. The Sensorites themselves started out as a mysterious threat who'd been creeping around a spaceship, tormenting the astronauts, freezing them in stasis and driving them mad. They were even powerful enough to steal the Tardis' lock! But then the Doctor suddenly became the Doctor for a bit and had them cowering in a dark hallway as he yelled them into submission! Then the serial went to their homeworld for the second half where it was revealed the Sensorites are actually comically rubbish, and not just because they have giant feet and their rubber alien masks are hanging off around the seams. (To be fair it the series' first attempt at an alien with prosthetics.) So instead of finding a way to kill the scary alien monsters, the Doctor instead had to cure their plague and investigate the tampering to their water supply, while also dealing with the xenophobic City Administrator's schemes to kill them all. He was the most dangerous of the Sensorites because he realised that from a distance they're all basically identical besides from their sashes they wear that indicate their job, so he could just steal his boss's sash and take over (while continually threatening his 'family group' whenever he refused to cooperate). You can tell how much this story amused me, because I can actually remember things that happened in it. Like the City Administrator preventing the Doctor's antidote being given to Ian because he was convinced that he was faking his illness and the drug was actually poison. Not because he wanted to save Ian's life, but because he thought he'd fake not dying from it as well? Plus it seems like this is the serial that established that Time Lords can have some degree of telepathy (though they weren't called Time Lords yet), as Susan got a temporary psychic boost from the planet that made her temporarily useful! | |||
| 008 | The Reign of Terror | 6 parts | 6 |
| Hang on, something's gone wrong with my rating system. According to that chart I made back at the top of the article a '6' is supposed to be a fairly good score, yet I've given it to a six-parter from the first season which has two missing episodes and is about the characters achieving absolutely nothing and then leaving. Okay, I've given it some thought and it seems like there are three possible causes for this obvious error:
 It turned out that the Tardis crew had landed near Paris during the French Revolution, just in time The paranoia was definitely justified though, as almost every character in the story either turned on someone or tricked them, with even Robespierre getting taken down by celebrity guest characters Napoléon Bonepart and Paul Barras. The Tardis crew seemed entirely inconspicuous and harmless, but they couldn't go anywhere without someone selling them out for something. It even got me paranoid as I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop with Jules Renan, who ultimately turned out to just be a really nice bloke. Though I guess I wasn't quite paranoid enough, as I didn't suspect either of the two spies, despite the dwindling number of candidates. I'm glad I didn't watch this one episode a week or else I would've had time to figure out who Jim Sterling was and I'd have ruined the last cliffhanger for myself. It was a really good opportunity for one of the companions to be clever and figure it out, but they were all fairly unimpressive in this story. They had their moments, like when Ian did what every time traveller wishes they could do and told the honest truth about who he was, and Barbara immediately digging an escape tunnel to the sewers was awesome, but they were ultimately rescued by others and spent half the story hanging out in someone's living room. Ian had a good excuse, as his actor took a week off, but Susan was nothing but a liability for the whole story. Plus it seems like the writer had forgotten that she's an alien, or at least forgot to have someone mention it when they were talking about getting her to a doctor. Though to be fair their trip to the doctor ended with him recommending leeches, so it seems that they were so stressed out they'd forgotten what time they were in as well. Overall it was a pretty good story I thought and it held my attention better than any serial up to this point. Even the padding was entertaining, with the Doctor getting forced into a chain gang, though I could've done with less of the scenes of him walking to Paris. They finally did some actual location filming for this serial but it was just dull shots of a William Hartnell impersonator out on a stroll. Also, the animation in the missing episodes told the story alright, but man the constant quick cuts were distracting. There's one other thing that bothered me as well: the characters have been talking to Aztecs, aliens and cavemen just fine, but something about Barbara having to reveal that she was English to a Frenchman made me feel the series was really overdue for an explanation of what happened to the language barrier. | |||
| 1964-65 - Series 2 | |||
| 009 | Planet of Giants | 3 parts | 5 |
 I've finally reached one of the two Hartnell serials I'd already seen before! Sometimes I can watch a story twice and be entirely enthralled second time around, other times I find I'm only half paying attention because I already know what's going to happen; this turned out to be category B for me, sadly. Plus it was edited down from four parts to three and I still thought it was a little slow.I loved the actors playing around with the giant-sized props though, and making the crew tiny was a clever way to finally bring them back to the present day (more or less) without Ian and Barbara just walking off home and leaving the series. Plus I like how the characters were allowed to make a difference again, with the crew sticking around to stop the insecticide even though nothing was stopping them from going back to the Tardis for once. Though I was less keen on the way Barbara kept her poisoning secret for so long and the way they saved her is just weird. The Tardis and everything inside it grew in size, except for the seed they brought in and the poison in her bloodstream for some reason. I suppose they could've explained it by saying that the Tardis didn't increase their size at the end, it undid an effect that had made them small... but they didn't say that so I'm still bothered by it. | |||
| 010 | The Dalek Invasion of Earth | 6 parts | 5 |
| You wouldn't realise it watching them, but I think the Doctor has been getting a little closer to getting Ian and Barbara home every time for these last three stories. In Reign of Terror he got the right continent but landed a couple of centuries in the past, in Planet of Giants he got the right country and time period but the wrong size, and here he managed to get the right city and just overshot by a few decades. This was the other First Doctor serial I'd already seen by the way, so every Hartnell story after this was all new to me. This one's a full six-parter though and really felt like it, but I suppose you have to go epic when the Earth gets invaded by the series' first returning villain. They didn't rewrite time and undo it at the end either, the world really gets screwed over by the Daleks in the not so distant future and the best our heroes managed to do was get rid of them before they could blow up the Earth's core and turn the planet into a spaceship for... reasons. The serial did a good job of seeming properly bleak and post-apocalyptic without becoming too serious and way the last pockets of resistance made their way through a ruined city reminded me a bit of that ancient retro game Half-Life 2 at times. It helps that it actually seemed like they spent a bit of money on it as it had a ton of characters, location filming, and Barbara even drove a bus through some Daleks! Plus this was apparently the very first serial in Doctor Who history to film at a quarry, in this case standing in for... a quarry, pretty much. Any serial where Ian got to be James Bond and save the world while Barbara tricked the Daleks with her history skills and then gave fake orders over the radio in a Dalek voice should be a classic, and this is, but it was still a bit slow for my taste. Also, it doesn't help that a ramp collapsed during filming, temporarily paralysing William Hartnell and forcing them to quickly write him out of an episode so he could recover. The serial's also notable for being Carole Ann Ford's final story, making her the first cast member to leave the show, as her character stayed behind to marry someone. And by 'stayed behind' I mean 'she got locked out and abandoned on a post-apocalyptic world', as the Doctor decided to spare her from having to choose between looking after him and settling down with the man she's barely met. Plus the speech the Doctor gave to her is one of the most memorable parts of Hartnell's entire run, but I didn't realise that he said it right after running off with her shoes. I don't just mean the one he took to fix as a ploy to get inside the Tardis and lock the door, I mean all of her shoes, clothes and everything she owns was in that Tardis and he just 'vroop vroop'd off with it all! She owns exactly one shoe now. Plus his speech was all about how 'I shall come back' and then he never did. The git. | |||
| 011 | The Rescue | 2 parts | 4 |
| The crazy thing about The Rescue is that it was the first story of Doctor Who's second production block, as Planet of Giants and The Dalek Invasion of Earth had been filmed with the first season stories. That means they'd been filming an episode a week for an entire year straight. It also explains why Susan left when she did, as that'd be when the actors' original contracts ended. In retrospect, this was obviously a short introduction to the new companion Vicki, but to be honest it didn't even occur to me that the character would be joining the crew because she was a bit... loopy after living in a wrecked ship basically on her own for so long. She kept raising her voice while explaining that they needed to be quiet, and Barbara murdering her pet with a flare gun didn't help her state of mind much.  Overall I liked this two-parter a lot more than Edge of Destruction, but despite the brief bit of Indiana Jones action in the middle it was still a bit of a let down for me after the first two stories this season. Which is a shame, because I'm very much into the idea of getting a story over and done before I get bored with it. | |||
| 012 | The Romans | 4 parts | 5 |
| I think this one gets better in my mind the longer it's been since I watched it. It's a really great idea for a story, with everyone on separate adventures that intertwined without the characters ever being aware of it, and the more distance I get from it the less I remember of the bad parts. Though I can still recall that I wasn't at all keen on the 'funny' scenes of Nero chasing Barbara around his mansion like he was Pepé le Pew. Most of the other comedy worked for me though, like how Ian and Barbara both tricked each other to go get something from the fridge, the scene where Vicki casually revealed she might have poisoned Nero, and the way the Doctor continually managed to impersonate a famous lyre player without actually being able to play, by instead demonstrating his talent at playing the liar. Oh, plus he set Nero's desk on fire while James Bond trolling him with hints that he already knew about his secret plan to throw him to the lions... which then inspired the guy to burn Rome down! I guess Planet of Giants already established that The Doctor liked a good fire. In fact, the Doctor was so mischievous this story he was almost out of character, but he was fun to watch and his clever dialogue reminded me of The Reign of Terror so I didn't care. I wasn't surprised at all to learn that the stories were both by the same writer (Dennis Spooner), even though this was more of a comedy. It seemed to have more going on as well, despite only being a four-parter, as there were multiple plots to assassinate Nero, Ian ended up manning the oars on a slave ship and fighting in a gladiator arena, Barbara became a servant in the emperor's mansion... it's like they spent so long relaxing on holiday at the start that they were hit by several serials' worth of drama at once. Also, Vicki was great in this story, bringing something new to the Tardis crew: enthusiasm. She was hyped to see ancient Rome, which made the Doctor eager to show it to her, and the two of them were actually happy all story! It's funny how I didn't miss Susan's screaming at all. | |||
| 013 | The Web Planet | 6 parts | 1 |
| I'd heard that this one was bad, but then I'd heard that about a lot of stories (like The Sensorites) so I went into this with an open mind. And the first episode was actually pretty decent I thought! Sure it was really obvious they only had a tiny set by the way they put the actors close enough to the backdrop for me to see the seams, and they reused the acid water idea from Keys of Marius, but I liked them having to wear spacesuits for a change and the conversation between Vicki and Barbara about how her era's medicine seemed archaic to her was great. But then the giant ants and the moth people turned up and it went downhill fast. I eventually skipped a couple of episodes because it was just too embarrassing to watch, and by the time I checked on it again hopping bug monsters with fabric arms had turned up as well. It seemed like they couldn't turn their heads or walk in those costumes, so every time they turned to face someone they had to hop around! In fact, everyone in this story moved like a dancer trying to put on a performance and it all ended with them jumping around together having a bug party! With a filter over the lens!  | |||
| 014 | The Crusade | 4 parts | - |
| [MISSING, DIDN'T WATCH] | |||
| 015 | The Space Museum | 4 parts | 5 |
| Speaking of bad, here's a serial that was voted by Doctor Who Magazine readers as being even worse than The Web Planet. It was actually the lowest ranked of all the First Doctor serials in their 50th anniversary poll! I have no idea what they were thinking, as this was probably my favourite story of the entire second series. It had Ian being James Bond again, the Doctor having fun in a Dalek shell and trolling his interrogator, Barbara on a stealth mission, and Vicki gleefully leading a revolution. Though it was a bit strange how the first episode had them walking around like ghosts in their own future, seeing would happen if they got the bad end. The Doctor sure didn't have any issues with them screwing around with that particular bit of history. In fact, I think this was the first story that confirmed that time can be rewritten, and the Doctor was actually wrong in The Aztecs and The Reign of Terror. There's probably a lot of bad in the story too, but it's been three months since I watched it so I've happily forgotten all of it. Even the part where they had to leave a trail of thread from Barbara's cardigan because the museum didn't have adequate signage. | |||
| 016 | The Chase | 6 parts | 4 |
| This one had highs and lows and lows and lows, as it went from Daleks in the sand, to genuine Alabama idiot Morton Dill, to the Mary Celeste, to Frankenstein, to giant killer mushrooms, but it was novel and weird enough to be interesting. Plus there was an evil identical robot duplicate of the Doctor who looked nothing like him! It wasn't a good story for robots in general really, as the Dalek-killing haunted house animatronics were daft (and very unsafe), the model effects in the Mechonoid city looked terrible and the Mechonoids voices were somehow even worse. I hadn't been that keen on the Daleks either up to this point, but by this story they'd been beaten by an old man, two teachers from the 60s, and Susan twice now and it seemed to have driven them a bit mad. The Daleks in earlier stories talked painfully slowly, but these guys were really hyped all of the time. They just wanted to exterminate something right now and they were so eager that they yelled it over and over. The story turned them into a bit of a joke, which isn't typically what you want, but at this point I'm considering it an improvement. Also despite Vicki trying to get herself written out early on by yelling "I AM REDUNDANT, I AM A USELESS PERSON!" and actually getting left behind at one point, it was Ian and Barbara who left the series here.  Overall I'm glad I watched this story to see the departure of two legends and the introduction of Steven, and now I'm happy to never watch it again. The episode with Morton Dill in it specifically... man, I still can't believe the Daleks didn't exterminate him. | |||
| 017 | The Time Meddler | 4 parts | 5 |
| It's another story I liked, mostly! I skipped The Crusades so I haven't seen the whole of season two, but it seems that The Web Planet was just a horrible misstep in an otherwise solid run of episodes. I guess this means that Dennis Spooner's my favourite writer so far, as this was his third serial (written right after his short run as script editor). I'd say it was closer to The Romans than The Reign of Terror in tone as it was fun rather than bleak, though instead of an epic adventure involving assassins coming after the Doctor, Ian escaping a slave ship and Vicki nearly poisoning Nero, it featured a lot of walking to and from a monastery. Also Vikings. But it was also the first pseudo-historical story, putting the Doctor against a sci-fi villain in the past that he was actually allowed to stop! The Space Museum revealed that it's possible to change time and The Chase brought the Daleks into the past to scare everyone off the Mary Celeste, but this was the first story where Earth's history was at risk and the Doctor got to do his Time Lord thing to stop it. Plus it even introduced another Time Lord with his own Tardis for the very first time! Though the series hadn't revealed that they're called Time Lords yet. The Doctor had been a mystery for two years by this point, so seeing another one of his kind was an event worthy of a season finale. Plus the Monk was a surprisingly good villain and I don't just mean that he was a match for the Doctor, I mean that he was a pretty nice guy. Not a particularly great monk mind you, but when someone needed medical help he sorted them out, and his plan was supposed to change the future for the better. I actually thought it was kind of cruel that the Doctor stranded him in the past in the end by shrinking his Tardis interior to match the exterior dimensions (clever though and well foreshadowed with the conversation at the start). Also, how is it a good idea to trap a time meddler in the time period he's meddling with? Surely the meddling would continue. The Doctor should've swapped Tardises and let the Monk deal with ending up in an unpredictable destination he couldn't plan for every trip while he got a fully working time machine to play with. This was also Steven's first story on the crew, meaning that for the first and only time in the series all the companions were humans from the distant future! Though we never got to see where they were from really, so they were really just present day humans who knew a bit about space travel. But they brought a different feel and a new life to the series, showing that Doctor Who couldn't just survive regeneration but actually required it to stay fresh. Having one less companion should've also theoretically given the Doctor more screentime, but it didn't quite work out like that sadly. In fact, he sat an entire episode out, leaving Vicki and Steven to carry the story for 25 minutes by wandering around and wondering where he'd gone. It's still my fifth favourite Hartnell serial, but it could've been higher if he was in it more. | |||
| 1965-66 - Series 3 | |||
| 018 | Galaxy 4 | 4 parts | - |
| [MISSING, DIDN'T WATCH] | |||
| 019 | Mission to the Unknown | 1 part | - |
| [MISSING, DIDN'T WATCH] | |||
| 020 | The Myth Makers | 4 parts | - |
| [MISSING, DIDN'T WATCH] | |||
| 021 | The Daleks' Master Plan | 12 parts | - |
| [MISSING, DIDN'T WATCH] | |||
| 022 | The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve | 4 parts | - |
| [MISSING, DIDN'T WATCH] | |||
| 023 | The Ark | 4 parts | 3 |
| I hope all those missing stories Twitch skipped were better than this one otherwise this was a pretty crap season. The Ark is actually a secret pair of two-parters, with the second half of the story jumping ahead to show the consequences of the first visit, which is a cool idea and something they should do again sometime. It's a shame though that I found neither half all that interesting and my attention checked out entirely at around the point the super-strong invisible aliens appeared. Sadly Vicki left in one of the missing stories and someone called Dodo turned up in her place, so the Vicki and Steven team was over before it began for me. Plus I apparently missed two other companions entirely, Katarina and Sara Kingdom, which is a bloody shame. I can't say Dodo left much of an impression on me during this story, but she definitely made an impression on the ship she infected, with at least one person dying after catching her cold. Not a good start for a companion really. Dodo's cold opens up a massive can of worms as up to this point I assumed that the Tardis made sure they couldn't carry diseases onboard, like the biofilter in Star Trek's transporter. But if that's not the case it seems kind of irresponsible for them to be jumping around spreading plagues across time and space like this. Plus Refusis is a terrible name for a planet (it's so bad that if I'd said it was a 'rubbish' planet it would've sounded like a pun). | |||
| 024 | The Celestial Toymaker | 4 parts | - |
| [MISSING, DIDN'T WATCH] | |||
| 025 | The Gunfighters | 4 parts | 3 |
 with the Doctor handed guns, while Steven was forced to sing again 'cause the Clantons found it fun. But the song he had to sing was the narrator's favourite tune, which means yet again I had to hear The Last Chance Saloon. The story lost my interest as it carried on from there, plus they got the history wrong and got the accents even worse. It was like a comedy episode from some western or cartoon, except all throughout, they played the song The Last Chance Saloon. | |||
| 026 | The Savages | 4 parts | - |
| [MISSING, DIDN'T WATCH] | |||
| 027 | The War Machines | 4 parts | 5 |
| As far as I'm aware, the First Doctor only visited present day Earth five times during his entire run and this is the only time he stuck around long enough (at the correct size) to actually go places and talk to people. In fact, he was in London, working with soldiers, fighting an enemy that couldn't be hurt with guns... it was like a Pertwee story four years early! Except with a certain Brigadier absent. The story featured a sinister computer trying to build a robot army to take over the world, but John Connor wouldn't be born for another 20 years, so the Doctor had to handle it this time. Hartnell hasn't always played a very 'save the day' kind of Doctor, but here he was definitely on the road to becoming the guy I'm familiar with from the modern series. Though him defiantly standing his ground in front of a robot on a killing spree while everyone else ran seems a bit dumb in retrospect seeing as he had no plan and only survived because it ran out of instructions. Speaking of dumb, the serial almost featured the departure of Dodo, but then she ended up leaving off screen instead. She didn't even tell the Doctor she was leaving in person, she sent Ben and Polly to tell him in her place, inadvertently causing them to become his new companions. It's lucky really that they didn't hold a grudge over his plan to send a reprogrammed robot into the BT Tower to destroy WOTAN without doing a damn thing to get the hypnotised Polly out of the line of fire. | |||
| 1966-67 - Series 4 | |||
| 028 | The Smugglers | 4 parts | - |
| [MISSING, DIDN'T WATCH] | |||
| 029 | The Tenth Planet | 4 parts | 3 |
| The Smugglers was the first Doctor Who serial to air during the original Star Trek's run, but it's hard to compare the two due to every episode being missing. I can tell you that The Man Trap looks far better than The Tenth Planet though, mostly thanks to their decision to shoot on film and then keep that film preserved. Star Trek wouldn't look very good either if it'd had as many missing episodes as Doctor Who has, as there'd be less than zero of them left to watch. The Tenth Planet was Hartnell's final episode and bookends the First Doctor era surprisingly well, as An Unearthly Child had a good first episode followed by three tedious episodes about caveman drama, while this had a good final episode preceded by three tedious episodes about spaceman drama. The Doctor was too tired to do much of anything this serial and spent a lot of it asleep, so it was mostly a tale about astronauts in trouble and a space command commander trying to defeat aliens in a way that didn't get his son killed, which turned out to be the wrong way. I was expecting him to be a good man torn between duty to his son and duty to his planet, but he was so eager to screw everything up that it got to the point where the Cybermen actually had to save the Doctor from him!  But the story did pick up for me in the final part (the animated one), as it started with Ben stepping up to become the protagonist and saving the day, and then ended with the Doctor's first regeneration. There was no hint about what was going to happen, he just said that his old body might be "wearing a bit thin" and that it was "far from being all over", raced back to the Tardis, lay down and became Patrick Troughton. This was definitely a simpler time, when the Doctor could regenerate inside the Tardis without blowing the entire console room set up (because they couldn't afford to build a new one). It was also the last time one of the original cast members appeared as a regular, with Hartnell lasting pretty much three whole years in the role. The serial never really pinned down exactly what triggered the Doctor's first regeneration, but he said it was either an outside influence or his body was wearing a bit thin, so I'm going to put it down as "Old age or maybe the energy drain from the planet Mondas". Personally, I prefer to think that despite facing Daleks four times, Cybermen, Robespierre, Roman assassins, Vikings, the Clantons and the Zarbi, nothing could bring the First Doctor down but time itself. Well, except for that dude from The Space Museum who turned him into an exhibit in an alternate timeline, obviously. | |||
CONCLUSION
The First Doctor's era is... interesting. You can tell they had a lot of the fundamental concepts there from the start, like building sets, pointing the camera at actors and recording the lines they were saying, but these were definitely early days for British television production. Doctor Who started just three years before the original Star Trek, with the two series coexisting after the third season opener The Smugglers, but these first few seasons feel like they come from another decade. The limitations of the budget meant that they were filming the episodes on video instead of film, and the limitations of technology and time meant that they were shooting them almost live with long takes, using multiple cameras at once so they could cut between angles during taping. The end result makes early Star Trek look practically cinematic by comparison, with these stories looking more like fuzzy camcorder footage of a play. Plus all of Star Trek is in colour, so that's a big difference right there, but the black and white video actually worked to Doctor Who's advantage, as it covered up the cheapness of the sets (even if it couldn't cover up the terrible effects).
The black and white footage also gave the first two Doctors a distinctive look to their eras, which I'm considering to be a good thing. I like that I can tell an episode from Matt Smith's run from one of David Tennant's episodes at a glance just from the shift to HD. Though it does make it harder on the production crew every time they want to include footage from an older story. Would it have really killed them to shoot an extra version of every iconic scene on colour film and stick the reels in a box marked 'For future use in scenes where we see quick clips of every Doctor'?
Also distinct about this era is that they had proper historical stories without any science fiction or fantasy! Though half of them were taped over and never recovered, and half of what survived wasn't so great. I liked The Reign of Terror and The Romans, but after watching An Unearthly Child and The Gunfighters I can see why the historicals were phased out in the Troughton era. Plus watching The Web Planet helped me understand why they never brought the Zarbi or Menoptra back and Edge of Destruction showed me why serials about the crew going crazy in the Tardis never took off.
Even the better Hartnell stories were a bit of a struggle for me to be honest, though that's partly because of how I watched them. One thing I've learned from this marathon is that these classic serials are best watched split up over a few days, or with other people watching it too. Even with the Twitch chat giving me a constant feed of "LONDON 1965" and "believe him, he knows!", I found it much easier to get through the episodes when my friend was watching the stream and we could chat about them. It also gave me a helpful source of notes to help me write my reviews!
I'm not saying I went full Mystery Science Theatre on it though, and we definitely weren't mocking the characters. Well okay, sometimes Susan... but I was generally pretty impressed by the acting, especially considering how adverse the producers were to editing and shooting multiple takes at this point. These episodes were almost live performances so the occasional flub didn't bother me, especially as half the time it seemed like Hartnell was doing it deliberately (like whenever he said Chesterton's name).
The First Doctor is the prototypical version of a great enduring science-fiction icon, and that icon is Yoda. Well okay, he started off a bit more like Doctor Smith from Lost in Space, a selfish mischevious misanthrope more concerned with his own safety than doing any good in the universe, but he soon softened into a warmer and more playful character. I liked how this era had a Tardis family for a while, with Ian and Barbara as the parents, Susan as the panicky child who liked to wander off like an idiot and scream at her own shadow, and the Doctor as the cranky old granddad/mad scientist, all coming to rely on each other as their serials linked together as one long odyssey. I'm used to the modern companions joining the Doctor for a quick adventure every weekend, but with the Tardis' steering broken these guys were in it for the long haul and really had to pull together as a team to survive. I always assumed that it was Ian and Barbara's heroic influence during this trip that inspired the Doctor to become the ass-kicking saviour of the universe he'd be in later incarnations, but it didn't really turn out to be that simple. He definitely grew to appreciate having them around though, and when he acquired new crew members he was happy to take their place as the responsible adult on the ship, becoming more like the person he wanted his companions to see him as.
And man he had a lot of companions, going through ten of them in just three years! That's a record unbeaten to this day unless you start bringing the books and audios into it. A quarter of all companions ever travelled with the First Doctor during his short run, but fortunately I don't have to think of something to write about all of them because Twitch skipped two of them entirely:
Ian and Barbara: I can't write about these two separately because I always think of them as a pair. They made an immediate impression on me as the actual protagonists of the series, mostly because of how damn likeable and sensible they were. Then Ian started doing things like leading a squad through caves to invade a Dalek city and throwing Aztecs off a pyramid, while Barbara (almost) smashed evil brains and ran Daleks over with a bus, and I realised that they were two of the best companions the series ever had. The actors tended to play their roles more naturally than a lot of later companions I thought, they came across as very normal people a lot of the time, but stick the characters in a cell and they'd start digging their way out.In a way I think they had to leave for the series to grow and survive, because while they were around the Doctor could never step up to become the main character.
Susan: She may not have been the most useful companion, and she liked to freak out over everything, but when it came to getting back to the Tardis she always knew the way.I didn't dislike Susan at all really, but she was a huge waste of potential. The writers didn't know what to do with her, except put her in trouble so that the others would have to rescue her. Half the time they seemed to forget she wasn't human. It's no wonder Carole Ann Ford wanted out after one year.
Vicki: The writers were apparently very keen on their original format, as once Susan left they immediately replaced her with another teenage girl played by another actress in her twenties. They were even thinking about having her hair cut and dyed to look the same! But Vicki turned out to be a very different character, as she had enthusiasm, screamed less, and the writers occasionally gave her something to do. It's a shame I got to see so little of her because she was great.
Steven and Dodo: Most of their episodes are lost so I got to see even less of them than I did of Vicki, but they seemed alright. It's just a shame that Dodo nearly wiped out the human race with a plague. Not many companions get to kill someone in their very first episode.Also whenever I think about them from now on I'm going to remember Steven singing The Last Chance Saloon while Dodo mimed playing the piano, and I don't really want to remember The Last Chance Saloon.
Katarina and Sara Kingdom: Their serials have both been lost so I didn't see any of them.And there's also Ben and Polly, but they stuck around with the Second Doctor so I'll write something about them next time.
My top three First Doctor serials:
- The Reign of Terror (6)
- The Space Museum (5)
- The Dalek Invasion of Earth (5)
Bottom three First Doctor serials:
- The Web Planet (1)
- The Edge of Destruction (3)
- An Unearthly Child (3)
COMING SOON
Please leave me a comment if you've got any opinions of your own about the First Doctor's stories or what I'm doing with these reviews. Nothing you say is going to talk me out of posting reviews in this format for the whole classic series, but feedback is always appreciated.
It's a shame really that I can't write my Babylon 5 and Deep Space Nine reviews like this, or else I could get through each of them in seven articles instead of seven years.
I watched "The Tenth Planet" in Novemebr(ish) in preparation for the Chrimble special; I'm not sure it added much, although it was nice to have a bit of context going in.
ReplyDeleteI haven't seen many other First Doctor adventures, although I seem to remember quite liking "The Time Meddler" and "The Aztecs" when I saw them years and years ago.
(I also have to admit that while I haven't seen "The Web Planet" I do love the bee monster costumes.)
Have you seen An Adventure in Space and Time? Despite the appalling miscasting of Reece Shearsmith as Patrick Troughton -- it's like he was the only one available on the day or something -- it's quite a good look at Hartnell's era, albeit with heaps of dramatic licence.
I think that Reece Shearsmith as Troughton was just the writer Mark Gatiss giving his mate a cameo. In fact, I've seen a photo of Shearsmith in costume standing with Gatiss as Jon Pertwee, competing to see which could look the most miscast.
DeleteI haven't yet seen the actual film though, mostly because I keep forgetting to.
You can tell they had a lot of the fundamental concepts there from the start, like building sets, pointing the camera at actors and recording the lines they were saying
ReplyDeleteReading the production notes at shannonsullivan.com, I was struck at how much the showrunners had "a play" in their minds when recording these early episodes, particularly with the static shots and the way they recorded episodes in script order, which seems incredibly inefficient.
I was also surprised by how often episodes had to be written around vacations and the like. The production schedule back then was grueling, presumably because nobody had invented the rerun yet.
Yeah it blew my mind when I realised that Ian and Barbara's flashbacks to Susan's classroom weirdness may have been shot from first person view because the actors were still sitting in the car! Instead of recording all week like a show shooting on film, they'd rehearse during the week and get it all filmed in a single evening. It's such an alien way of making television... well except for sitcoms like Red Dwarf.
DeleteAlso Unearthly Child was rerun almost immediately, because no one watched the first episode due to a power blackout and the JFK assassination. I think it was actually the contracts that meant they couldn't re-air them too many times, because it would put the actors out of work if they weren't necessary for every repeat performance! That's why all the tapes were wiped.