mavic_chen

An Unearthly Child is of course where it all begins. The first episode, where the teachers Ian and Barbara follow the mysterious pupil Susan home and discover that her grandfather's police box has an unexpectedly large interior, is still electrifying to watch after almost half a century. The Doctor doesn't even appear until almost halfway through, which gives him an air of authority and mystery. The great lines - "Have you ever thought what it's like to be wanderers in the fourth dimension? Have you?" - are all there.

The remaining three episodes, where the Tardis crew are captured by and escape from a Stone Age tribe who have lost the secret of fire, are OK. The second episode, with Susan's surprise that the Tardis has not changed shape, and Ian and Barbara trying to work out what to call the Doctor, is the most interesting.

<  The Masters of Luxor | The Underwater Menace >

(novelisation)

Great fun. I had of course read David Whitaker's novelisation, roughtly 25 years ago. A few things that sprang to mind:

1) the settings were very convincing - the Dalek city (OK, we know with the eye of hindsight that it was a model shot), the sense that this was a big landscape with forest, swamp and caves.

2) Barbara's romance with Ganatus - there is surely some fanfic dealing with that somewhere?

3) The devious Doctor, sabotaging the TARDIS deliberately to get a chance to explore the city.

4) The time travellers, despite Barbara's relations with Ganatus, are all set to just bugger off and leave the Thals to their doom at the end of episode 4.

5) The end of episode 6 is indeed a literal cliff-hanger - with a brutal resolution

6) Terry Nation's attack on pacifism. A lot more ideological than I remembered from the book.

7) The Daleks at the end talking about the total extermination of the Thals practically raise their plungers in Nazi salutes - sounds silly when I describe it but actually very effective.

8) the one bit that really didn't work - the fight at the end; the time-travellers and Thals win too easily.

Anyhow, well worth it. I watched with the closed caption commentary, which to be honest was more annoying than helpful on the whole. Though it was interesting that the very day of the filming of the Doctor's first encounter with the Daleks was 22 November 1963, the day before the first Doctor Who (recorded over a month before) was to be broadcast, and also the day of John F Kennedy's assassination. (And of the deaths of C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley; but who remembers that?) 

< The Idiot's Lantern | Doctor Who and the State of Decay > 

(novelisation)

This is a two-parter, from immediately after the first Dalek story, featuring only the four members of the Tardis crew - the first Doctor, his grand-daughter Susan, and the teachers Ian and Barbara. There is a fifth character, not played by an actor, but I'll get to that.

This was very very brave. The production team had run out of money, and had to do an entire story with no guest actors and no sets beyond what had already been made. The two episodes had two different directors, one of whom had never directed a television drama before. It could have been a disaster.

In fact it is very good. I would even have said excellent, were it not for the bathos of the minor technical problem with the Tardis which turns out to be at the core of the plot. But apart from that - and one or two minor slips from Hartnell, though he keeps it together for the big set-piece speeches - I was surprised by just how good it is.

I also watched the DVD documentary, which is entertaining and enlightening, and also actually slightly longer than either of the episodes. Meta-text, isn't that the concept I'm looking for? 

< Timewyrm: Genesys | Mission to the Unknown >

 (novelisation)

This is the fourth ever Doctor Who story, broadcast in 1964, and the earliest one to be lost conpletely from the archives. It was also the first purely historical Doctor Who story, telling simply of an encounter between the time travellers and Marco Polo (and eventually Kublai Khan) in the late thirteenth century.

I bought the soundtrack with linking narration from William Russell, who played Ian Chesterton in the original series. It's generally pretty good though the fifth episode sound quality is rather lousy. I was also misled by one of the hidden extras - the first of the three CDs includes also all seven episodes as MP3s without narration, and since this is nowhere stated I ended up loading them by mistake.

Took me a while - first started this the week before last, and took a break from it while I was travelling. But it is in fact very good. Seven episodes is about right for a leisurely plot, with Susan bonding with the maiden Ping-Cho, and the others dealing with the treacherous warlord Tegana and with Marco Polo himself, who decides to seize the Tardis and offer it to the Khan as his ticket home to Venice. (Or, as Croatian lore would have it, Korcula.)

It builds to a satisfying conclusion with the Doctor playing the Great Khan at backgammon, with the Tardis as the stake. Marco Polo himself, weighing in the balance his honour, his liking and respect for Ian and the others, and his desire to get home, is an interesting character study.

A shame, but I guess understandable, that they stopped making stories like this one after a while. 

< The Lazarus Experiment | The Sword of Orion >

(novelisation)

Rather an interesting quest story from early Doctor Who - the show's first real sf narrative apart from the original Daleks story, and like the original Daleks story written by Terry Nation. With a certain foreshadowing of the Key to Time season, thirteen years and three Doctors later, our heroes are sent across five different environments on the planet Marinus (which, unlike so many sf planets, actually has different climates depending on where you happen to be) to retrieve the five keys which will operate the Magical Machine.

The first four episodes (out of six) are standard sfnal fare - indeed, perhaps Doctor Who's closest early approach to the monster-of-the-week concept (bottled brains, mutant plants, giant wolves) - but I think it lifts itself into something rather superior in the last two episodes, a courtroom drama where the Doctor is defending Ian against a charge of murder, with only circumstantial evidence against him, but collusion between key officials and the real culprits. (A helpful official asks Ian, "Who is he?" "Who?" replies Ian, rhetorically agreeing.) Though the trial judges do bear a disturbing resemblance to the High Priests in the 1973 film of Jesus Christ Superstar.

The climax really does take us back to the future, as the First Doctor, having assembled all of the Keys of Marinus, makes the same decision as the Fourth Doctor at the end of The Armageddon Factor; though with more explosive consequences. One of the heavily costumed bad guys nearly trips over his own shoes as he tries to bring our heroes to their doom, but recovers from it quickly; and that's part of the charm, really.

Is this final snippet of information for real?

Amongst later changes made to Nation's scripts was the removal of a TARDIS sequence from episode one, The Sea Of Death. Here it was revealed that the reason the Doctor and Susan had been on Earth in 1963 was because the Doctor had visited the British Broadcasting Corporation to get help repairing the colour scanner in the TARDIS, which was showing only monochrome images. He had been in such a bad mood upon his return to the TARDIS because the BBC had been “infernally secretive”!

I have my doubts.

< The Stealers of Dreams | The Curse of Peladon >

 (novelisation)

I think you have to allow for the fact that it is mid-1960s drama to take into account the rather slow pacing. I liked it all the same; a real attempt to get into the spirit of the historical period, with some difficult dilemmas for the time-travellers - Barbara determined to abolish human sacrifice, but ultimately fails; and the Doctor has someone fall in love with him for the first time (but not, of course the last) in his on-screen adventures. Cameca's helping them to escape in the end, even though she knows she will never see them again, was as touching as Barbara's acceptance of her inability to change history. A minor gem, I would say.

(novelisation) 

< Timewyrm: Exodus| The Tenth Planet >

This is, frankly, the least impressive of any Hartnell series I have seen so far. (Though at this stage I am down to the least famous and least accessible stories - Galaxy 4, The Space Museum, Planet of Giants and The Web Planet.) The Sensorites themselves are pretty dire (early relatives of the Ood, I understand); so are most of the cast, with Maitland being the worst. It's just ludicrous to have aliens who had never thought of the concept of disguise until our heroes introduce the idea to them.

And the basic point of the plot turns out to be the aliens' concerns about the Earth people extracting their minerals. If this were a Jon Pertwee story, we would know just what it was all about. But instead we have numerous episodes of peculiar personality-based bickering amongst the aliens, which would be OK if we actually liked or sympathised with any of them, but we don't.

There are some redeeming features. I actually liked the fleshing out of Susan's character and her relationship with the Doctor; shame that this wasn't taken much further in her three remaining stories. I thought that John, the human who is deranged and then cured, was good too but it was difficult to understand what he saw in Carol. And the actual plot that develops in the last episode, that there are insane astronauts hiding under the city contaminating the water supply, certainly does grab your attention.

But as for the Sensorites themselves? Poison the lot and take their molybdenum, I say.

< The Stones of Venice | 42 >

(novelisation)

This ended the first ever season of Doctor Who, back in 1964. It is a very straightforward historical story, with crew landing in 1794 and meeting up with Robespierre just before he is overthrown and guillotined (and in the last episode with a pre-imperial Napoleon Bonaparte). It's six episodes, which is perhaps a bit long (too long for Carole Anne Ford as Susan, who spends a lot of time whining and a significant chunk of it off-screen), but it's competently done. Hartnell is particularly good, doing the business of stepping in and taking charge - he looks fantastic in costume as the District Commissioner, and also escapes from the work gang with aplomb. The plot is of course nicked straight from Baroness Orczy (apart from the jailer who is the Porter from Macbeth) but as with Ian Marter's novelisation, there is a very real sense of menace and terror in the air. And the music is generally pretty good, apart from the occasional annoying bit of comic xylophone.

This meshes nicely with the shifting relationship between the Doctor on one hand and Ian and Barbara on the other, plus Barbara's romantic spark with the locals. At the start of the story he is throwing them out of the TARDIS (I haven't seen The Sensorites, the immediately preceding story, so not sure what has led to this). But by the end they have all bonded again, and the final exchange between the Doctor and Ian is a treat, as the screen dissolves from the TARDIS crew changing out of their 1790s costumes into a receding field of stars:

Ian: And what are we going to see and learn next, Doctor?
Doctor: Well, unlike the old adage, my boy, our destiny is in the stars, so let's go and search for it!

(novelisation)

< Survival | The Time Meddler >

Planet of Giants was the first story of the second season, back in October/November 1964. The original Tardis crew arrive in a contemporary Earth (for the first time since An Unearthly Child) but find themselves miniaturised through some kind of dimensional glitch. It has a bit of a duff reputation among fans but I rather enjoyed it. There are two plot threads, the time travellers trying to extricate themselves from their predicament and the nefarious dealings of an insecticide manufacturer with whom they have unwittingly become entangled. It all worked for me, particularly because the sets are fantastically well designed and convincing.

Am I right in thinking that this was the only ever three-part story?

< 42 | The Time Warrior > 

(novelisation)

Excellent value - six Hartnell epsiodes of classic story, plus various mini-documentaries, including a short silent film shot by Carole Ann Ford on her last day as Susan (featuring William Hartnell with no wig and looking ten years younger).

The Dalek Invasion of Earth is good - in fact, the first three episodes are excellent, with the Dalek coming out of the river at the end of episode one, and episode three a real high point, with the scenes of the Daleks in London, wandering past Westminster, congregating in Trafalgar Square, and patrolling the Albert Memorial (having obviously somehow got up the steps) particularly effective. That is also the episode where Susan tells David of her feeling of dislocation: "I never felt that there was any time or place that I belonged to. I’ve never had any real identity." And the incidental music is great - I hadn't heard of the composer Francis Chagrin before but he was apparently a well known film composer; shall look out for his other work. There is a real feeling of occupied Europe resisting the Nazis (and I write this in a village which experienced that directly rather than just in the cinema).

It is a bit let down by episode four, with no Doctor in sight and the rather rubber-suited Slyther, and the Daleks' actual plan when revealed stretches our suspension of disbelief. But the pace is kept up (especially by Jacqueline Hill as Barbara).

And finally the departure of Susan. Beautifully done, the first time that a member of the regular cast had left the show. "Just go forward in all your beliefs, and prove to me that I am not mistaken in mine," says the Doctor, promising to return, but we know he never will.

< Managra | The Sirens of Time > 

(novelisation)

The Rescue is pretty light stuff, but fortunately survives in its entirety on video (if rather poor quality). The Tardis crew find a crashed spaceship on the planet Dido with only two survivors, apparently menaced by two peculiar monsters, neither of which turns out to be quite what it seems. One of the survivors is killed off, the other becomes the new companion, Vicki. What I liked about it most was the Doctor's knowledge of the planet as it had been on a previous visit - and then he finds that it's all changed as the natives have been (almost) wiped out. Also, of course, the travellers' adapting to Susan's absence at the beginning, and the confrontation scene between the Doctor and the main villain at the end. The monsters, I'm afraid, were a bit silly, and there were a couple of implausibilities in the plot.

< The Tenth Planet | The Power of the Daleks > 

(novelisation) 

The Romans has a considerable, and surprisingly effective, comedy element, carried almost entirely by Hartnell's Doctor. On a whim, he decides to leave their holiday villa and go to Rome (taking Vicki with him) pretending to be a murdered musician, and succeeds in fending off Nero's jealous attempots to have him killed. There is a much less funny sub-plot involving Ian and Barbara, kidnapped by slavers, who also end up in Rome - Ian as a gladiator, Barbara as palace slave, pursued by the lustful Emperor - before making their escape. (Somewhere there must be a definitive list of the characters who have lusted after Barbara: Ganatus in a very gentlemanly way in The Daleks, the much nastier Vasor in The Keys of Marinus, the equally nasty El Akir in The Crusade, and now Nero.) The Ian/Barbara chemistry is very sweet - they have a nice joke between them about looking in the fridge. The script rather neatly resists bringing the travellers together, so that neither the Doctor and Vicki nor Ian and Barbara ever discovers what the other pair of characters is up to in Rome. Hartnell is simply superb, utterly watchable, imperious, funny, devious. It's a shame that Maureen O'Brien can't quite rise to the challenge of being his straight man, but this was only her second story, so I suppose one must make allowances.

< The Web of Fear / Downtime | The Space Pirates >

(novelisation)

I got the DVD of The Web Planet, a First Doctor story from 1965 with Ian, Barbara and Vicki, back in January; and then, after I had read Wood and Miles' excoriating description of it, the disc was in my laptop when it got stolen. But I caught up with this one over the weekend as well.

Oh dear.

It's very brave to try and produce an entire six-part story with no humanoid characters other than the regular cast, and the production teeters on the edge of greatness but, ultimately, falls off and hurtles to its doom. I mean, the Zarbi, with their unearthly whistling, are actually pretty good, so good that you can nearly forget that they are blokes in giant ant costumes. And the disembodied Animus is pretty sinister. But the Venom Grubs are, frankly, pathetic. And the Menoptra, with their bizarre dance movements, and their pitiful Optera relatives, are just ludicrous. I can't quite believe that this is the only story from the original Season Two (apart from the glorious Dalek Invasion of Earth) available on DVD. Almost any other would make more sense and be a better advertisement for Who as a whole. (I have reservations about The Chase, though it does at least have Daleks and a variety of settings, and I've only seen the first episode of The Space Museum so can't speak to the whole of it, though I must say it really grabbed me.)

Maureen O'Brien is good as Vicki though, perhaps the best I remember her in any of her stories. The others are fine too, especially (as ever) Hartnell.

 < Frontier in Space | The Space Museum >
 
(novelisation)

Sadly only episodes 1 and 3 survive in full, but we have the audio of episodes 2 and 4 with reconstruction via photographs etc. It is rather enjoyable.

In particular, there are three strong guest stars - Julian Glover as Richard the Lionheart, Jean Marsh (ex-wife of future Doctor Who Jon Pertwee) as his sister Joanna, and Walter Randall as the fictional villain el-Akir (Randall's career seems to have been otherwise not awfully memorable bit parts but he did this pretty well, I thought). I'll put in a word also for Viviane Sorrell as Fatima, who (according to IMDB) never played another role on-screen. And the regular cast are good (though Vicki not given much to do).

The plot is a fairly basic "time-travellers get caught up in real historical events and spent most of the story untangling themselves" one but done effectively, with a real sense of different places as between Crusader-controlled Jaffa and Saracen-controlled Lydda. (Though the thicket in which the Tardis lands does not look in the least Palestinian.) Of course, because the Doctor and Barbara know their history, this gives rise to the usual potential for time paradoxes, though with a certain air of wistfulness:

VICKI: Doctor, will he really see Jerusalem?

THE DOCTOR: Only from afar. He won't be able to capture it. Even now his armies are marching on a campaign that he can never win.

VICKI: That's terrible.

THE DOCTOR: Hmm!

VICKI: Can't we tell him?

THE DOCTOR: I'm afraid not, my dear. No. History must take its course.

A particularly striking aspect is the use of rhythm in the script. I found one website claiming that parts of it were actually written in iambic pentamenter, and, well, it's nearly true; see what you think.

RICHARD: We think our words were plain enough.

THE DOCTOR: It is
a good scheme, sire, if the princess agrees.

RICHARD: (quietly) Joanna knows nothing of this matter.

THE DOCTOR: Will she agree?

RICHARD: (firmly) You should rather ask
how can she refuse? To stem the blood,
bind up the wounds and give a host of men
lives and futures? Oh, now there's a marriage
contract to put sacrifice to shame
and make a saint of any woman.

LEICESTER: Sire,
with all the strength at my command I urge you,
sire, to abandon this pretence of peace!

THE DOCTOR: (angrily) Pretence, sir? Here's the opportunity
to save the lives of many men and you
do nought but turn it down! Without any
kind of thought. What do you think you are doing?

LEICESTER: I speak as a soldier. Why are we here
in this foreign land if not to fight?
The Devil's horde, Saracen and Turk,
possess Jerusalem and we will not
wrest it from them with harried words.

THE DOCTOR: With swords, I suppose?

LEICESTER: Aye, with swords and lances, or the axe.

THE DOCTOR: You stupid butcher! Can you think
of nothing else but killing, hmm?

LEICESTER: You're a man for talk, I can see that.
You like a table and a ring of men.
A parley here, arrangements there, but when
you men of eloquence have stunned each other
with your words, we, we the soldiers
have to face it out. On some half-started
morning while you speakers lie abed,
armies settle everything, giving sweat
sinewed bodies ironed life itself.

THE DOCTOR: I admire bravery and loyalty, sir.
You have both of these. But, unfortunately you haven't any brain at all. I hate fools!

LEICESTER: A fool can match a coward any day.

(Leicester pulls out his sword and faces the Doctor.)

RICHARD: Enough of this! (to Leicester)
You dare to flourish arms before your King?

(Leicester reluctantly sheaths his sword.)

< Genesis of the Daleks | School Reunion > 

(novelisation)

I bumped this up my "to watch" list after reading jekesta 's review, and really enjoyed the first episode last weekend. bibliophile1887 warned me that it rather falls apart after a good start, and having now watched the following three episodes I tend more towards her viewpoint than jekesta 's - not so much the wobbly plot as the wobbly acting, to be honest, and the director's penchant for keeping our regular cast together in what feel very awkwardly posed camera shots - but I think as a whole it is still better than almost any Sixth Doctor story (granted, not a high bar to surmount), and the first episode is one of the best single episodes from any era of Who: our heroes find themselves on exhibit in a museum, but can't interact with the locals in any way, rather like Willow in the Season 7 Buffy episode "Same Time, Same Place". The Doctor realises that they have jumped a time-track, and we have the set up for the rest of the story. Which, as mentioned, has its weaknesses but also some glorious moments - the Doctor, being interrogated by a baddie using a "mental imaging device", is asked how he arrived on the planet Xeros, and the screen shows a penny-farthing bicycle! 

< The Web Planet | SJ Audios series 1 / Project: Twilight >

Bought this 1965 Doctor Who series on video at Worldcon, along with Remembrance of the Daleks. My hopes were not especially high, as I knew that the Empire State Building, the Mary Celeste and Dracula's castle are settings for parts of the story. But I didn't really know quite what to expect - the only other William Hartnell series I've seen is An Unearthly Child, way back in 1983 when it was repeated for the 20th anniversary. It's also the first time I've watched any entire series of the "old" Doctor Who since the new one started.

Before I put the lengthy comments behind the cut tag, let us just all agree that it is a real shame that Brian Epstein vetoed the idea of the Beatles appearing as themselves but much older, playing at a fiftieth anniversary concert set in, I suppose, 2013. Apparently the Fab Four were on for it but their manager was not impressed, so at least we get a rare studio clip of them playing "Ticket to Ride". This also gives us a couple of good lines, as the Doctor complains when the machine is switched off that "You've squashed my favourite Beatles", and Vicki tells us that she has "been to their memorial theatre in Liverpool… but I didn't know they played classical music!" (But how does Ian know the words to "Ticket to Ride"? After all, he left Earth the day after President Kennedy was assassinated...)

Well, to my surprise there were some more tolerably good bits. The Mechanoid city was great. The Dalek/Mechanoid battles were fun. The rapidly rotating planet Aridius was well done. The Dalek's emergence from the sand dune at the end of the first episode is pretty good. To my surprise, I even quite liked the Mary Celeste bit, though my wife and mother-in-law snorted with giggles, and the final shots of the deserted ship with the last view of the name plate was quite effective. And there was a real feeling of time passing for the characters, not just the rapid rotation of Aridius but also the meals, the Doctor and companions sleeping, things we don't often see happening.

Other good bits: The location scenes on the planet Aridius (though it also appears to be the setting for the Gettysburg Address). the scene where the other three think they've lost Vicki, and her attempts to contact them from the Daleks' time machine. Peter Purves' performance as Steven Taylor, stranded rocket pilot and Ben Gunn lookalike. Indeed all three companions are on form throughout, even Barbara playing machine guns with the Doctor's Dalek-killing device. Hartnell, when he's awake, is good, but he fluffs a number of lines and was perhaps personally upset at the departure of William Russell and Jacqueline Hill, leaving him the sole survivor of the original cast. And their departure is a rather moving moment as well.

My one complaint of Vicki/Maureen O'Brien isn't really her fault, but has to do with the crapness of three of the monsters. On four occasions she is attacked - by a Mire Beast, an Aridian, and two Fungoids - and more or less has to walk into them - I think she actually has to wind the Mire Beast's tentacle around her own neck. She pulls it off well, but the only monsters that are any good in this story are the Mechanoids, and that's not saying a lot.

Oh yeah, and the Daleks. Can't count, fall off boats, can't kill Frankenstein's monster or Dracula, easily confused by Barbara's cardigan. But this is because they are being funny, which is sort of OK but you don't want it every time. The robot Doctor I didn't mind too much, but he fluffed the crucial line which was supposed to let the companions know he was the fake - the script says he addresses Vicki as "Susan", but I missed it.

The first two episodes, on Aridius, have good settings and filming - had Dune already been published before this story was written? In magazine form, surely, but maybe not yet as a novel. But the Aridians and Mire Beasts are ludicrous. The Empire State Building scene was simply pointless. The Mary Celeste, as I said earlier, I rather liked.

The Hammer House of Horrors sequence worked rather better if the Doctor's theory was right - "we were lodged for a period in an area of human thought" - rather than it being a festival sideshow in a 1996 where the Chinese rule Ghana. But maybe that, too, is but an area of human thought. (At the very beginning Ian is reading a book called "Monsters from Outer Space - Science Fiction". The ISFDB doesn't seem to have heard of this one, so presumably it has yet to be published in Our Time Line, or else is imported from the one where the Chinese rule Ghana.)

I really hated a) the jazzy intro music, b) the time vortex shots and c) the Shakespeare meets Elizabeth I scene.

Sorry this is a bit disjointed. Lots more in-depth analysis of The Chase by Alan Stevens and Fiona Moore here, by Paul Clarke here, by Cameron Mason here, and by numerous reviewers here.

< The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances | Remembrance of the Daleks >

This story ended the second season of Doctor Who in 1965. (I've done quite well on season-end stories, actually; see also The War Machines, The Evil of the Daleks, The War Games, Inferno, The Green Death, Survival and, stretching a point, The Five Doctors and Shada). It is another historical adventure, also written by Dennis Spooner, but of a very different kind. For the first time ever, we meet another member of the Doctor's own race, the Monk, who is determined to change the course of history by giving Harold atomic bazookas to win the Battle of Hastings. Interestingly, although the Doctor mutters about this breaking the Golden Rule of time travel, he seems much more upset that the monk's plans are in bad taste - a "disgusting exhibition"!

Locals and Vikings clash in a not especially original but at least not utterly stupid way. But Peter Butterworth as the Monk is very watchable, and his exchanges with the Doctor are great fun. The script is in general pretty good - I didn't even notice that Hartnell was off-screen for the whole of episode 2. We also have Steven, who sneaked onto the TARDIS at the end of The Chase, being the first new companion to boggle at it in disbelief since Ian and Barbara right back at the beginning (Vicki takes it very much in her stride at the end of The Rescue). But then we all boggle in disbelief and shock when he and Vicki enter the Monk's sarcophagus and find that inside, it is the same as the Doctor's. Our hero is Not Alone.

No snappy dialogue to finish the story this time, but a nice set of arty film shots of Steven, Vicki and the Doctor's faces over a star field, before the music starts. 

< The Reign of Terror | The Celestial Toymaker >

Galaxy Four was the opening story for the original third season of Doctor Who back in September 1965. No new or departing companions, just the First Doctor, Steven and Vicki landing on a doomed planet and finding themselves forced to decide whether to help the beautiful but militaristic Drahvins or the repulsive Rills with their robotic Chumbly servants. I thought it was rather good, and I say this as one who doesn't normally like reconstructions (I will probably get hold of the narrated audio as well to compare).

There is great violence done to astrophysics in the set-up - as so often, there seems a basic confusion between the concepts of "galaxy" and "solar system", and I can't quite believe the idea of a planet in orbit around several suns simultaneously, which is about to be destroyed by the gravitational stresses, and nonetheless is habitable with a breathable atmosphere. But hey, this is a story where a police box with an impossibly large interior travels through time and space, so we shouldn't complain too much.

(novelisation) 

< Terror of the Autons | Blink >

Mission to the Unknown has to be considered as part of the Dalek Master Plan arc. It is probably the closest Doctor Who has ever come to pure space opera - in that the Doctor himself does not appear and is not even mentioned. The idea of the three astronauts fighting against both the Daleks and the "most hostile planet in the universe" is well done, and I hope it looked as good as it sounded. 

< The Edge of Destruction | The Daleks' Master Plan >

The Myth Makers was the four-part story between the single-episode, Doctor-less Mission to the Unknown and the twelve-part epic The Daleks' Master Plan, bringing the First Doctor, Steven and Vicki to ancient Troy. Vicki here becomes the second regular to be written out after developing a love interest; the Doctor is mistaken for Zeus and helps Odysseus construct the wooden horse, though is somewhat obsessed with its fetlocks "no safety margin at all... if only you would have allowed me another day to fit shock absorbers!"

I liked the creative reinterpretation of the characters from the Greek legend. Priam takes a shine to Vicki, renames her Cressida and won't hear a word against her. Both Paris and Menelaus are incompetent, the former a coward and the latter drunk, making one wonder what Helen ever saw in either of them. (Menelaus: "I was heartily glad to see the back of her!" Paris: "I think this whole business has been carried just a little bit too far. I mean, that Helen thing was just a misunderstanding.") Helen herself never appears in person, the BBC beauty budget presumably not reaching that far. The interpretation of the story that will always remain with me, I think, is Roger Lancelyn Green's The Luck of Troy, but this will do as an sfnal version.

As with all the "lost" stories, one never knows what one missed, though I can make a couple of guesses - Frances White (Julia in I CLAVDIVS) as Cassandra, or Vicki in her dress. But Peter Purves' narration is, as ever, great, even though of the three regular characters his has the least to do. We end with a real acceleration of pace towards the next story; Vicki and the Doctor say their goodbyes off-screen, while Cassandra's handmaiden Katarina accompanies a wounded Steven aboard the Tardis as a new (but very short-lived) companion. 

< The Enemy of the World | The Massacre >

This was the longest single plot arc ever in Doctor Who, a twelve-episode story with a one-episode teaser broacast a month before, over the winter of 1965-1966. Like any serious fan of classic Who, I knew the following basic points about this story:

Two companions are killed off; the Doctor scandalously addresses the viewers directly at the end of episode 7; it marks the first appearance of Nicholas Courtney, later to play the Brigadier with most later Doctors.

So I have been listening to the BBC tapes of the sound track, with linking narrative description by Peter Purves (later of Blue Peter, but who plays the Doctor's companion Steven in the story), on my commutes to and from work for the last few days; and have also watched the three surviving episodes (#2, #5 and #10). And it is very good.

First off, the plot hangs together pretty well (apart from episode seven and the cricket scene of episode eight, which I'll get to in a moment). The various settings - the planets Kembel, Earth-in-the future, Desperus, Mira, and the various past and present scenes on Earth - all feel entirely distinct from each other (though one wonders a bit about how firmly the writers conceptualised the terms "solar system", "galaxy" and "universe"). The ancient Egypt scenes in episode 10 look glorious.

The script, despite being by two different hands (Terry Nation wrote 1-5 and 7, Dennis Spooner 6 and 8-12) is a cracker. There is some great one-upmanship in temporal snobbery among the characters, as in episode 3:

DOCTOR: (holding some circuits) Hmm, it's the worse of these out-of-date and primitive spaceships. One little bump and they all fall to bits.
VYON: Doctor, what are you talking about? This is a SPAR - the most technically perfect craft in the history of space travel.
DOCTOR: Oh yes, quite so. That's why we are stranded on this pimple of a planet, whilst you fool with the fuse box!

and in episode 5 where poor Steven is sneered at by both the Doctor and Sara Kingdom:

STEVEN: We could use the Gravity-force from the ship's power centre. (He points to a control bank.) I mean there's an outlet, here.
SARA: (laughing scornfully) What?
STEVEN: (belligerently) What's wrong with that?
DOCTOR: Too primitive, my boy, too primitive and far too dangerous. (He walks off into the lab as a grinning Sara turns to Steven.)
SARA: Gravity-force as a source of energy was abandoned, centuries ago.
STEVEN: We were still using it!
SARA: Oh yes, and the Romans used treadmills.

Also the Doctor himself is jolly impressive. No feeble old man, he sneaks into the Daleks' council chamber to steal the taranium core for the Time Destructor, and manhandles a Dalek into a passage in ancient Egypt (also, probably, mugging the Monk). He also has several great lines, of which the best is "I am a citizen of the universe and a gentleman to boot!" Hartnell being Hartnell, there are a few fluffs - "Magic Chen" for "Mavic Chen" at one point, he is very hoarse at the beginning of episode 9 and disappears for most of episode 11 - but in general he seems on top form.

Killing off not one but two companions (indeed, three if we are allowed to count Courtney's Bret Vyon) gave the story a real darkness. Katarina, the Trojan handmaiden rescued from burning Troy at the end of the previous story, only has a brief time to make an impression but her death comes as a real tragedy - an innocent caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is something of a relief to learn that her death scene was actually the first filmed by Adrienne Hill in her brief time playing the character. Again, Hartnell gets good lines and delivers them well:

She didn't understand.  She couldn't understand.  She wanted to save our lives.  And perhaps the lives of all the other beings of the Solar System.  I hope she's found her Perfection.
Oh, how I shall always remember her as one of the Daughters of the Gods. Yes, As one of the Daughters of the Gods.

Episode 4 is particularly bleak, with Katarina killed near the beginning and Bret Vyon shot down by new companion Sara Kingdom, who as it turns out is his own sister, at the end. Sara herself, having developed from loyal servant of the Earth government to loyal companion of the Doctor, then herself dies because she disobeys a direct order from the Doctor to stay away from him while he is stealing the Time Destructor. (Mission to the Unknown, the one-episode preview, also ended brutally, with all three human characters dead; more on that below.) At least Steven manages to survive, having saved the day on a couple of occasions despite his relative technological primitivism. The companions do display a distressing tendency to wander off and get into trouble.

The other great character is Mavic Chen, Guardian of the Solar System. One gets the impression that while he is a charismatic and popular leader, he is not a very democratic one; indeed, there are elements of him, especially his reliance on a scientific elite who are in some respects a state within a state, which resurface in Nation's later creation, Davros. He is obviously a villain of the first order, but you can't help but cheer for him as he outwits the Daleks and the other aliens. Afer all, he is the same species as us viewers. (Well, most of us.) I did wonder if there were any particular historical or contemporary examples of a "good", democratic leader turning to the Dark Side that Nation might have had in mind as a type for Chen - I've seen plenty in the Balkans in the last ten years, but perhaps there were 1960s parallels in post-colonial Africa, or maybe the South Vietnamese, or even Castro in Cuba.

The Daleks are also on top form here. They continually refer to the humans as "aliens" and "creatures", which gives them a cerain integrity - of course, we are as horrendous to them as they are to us. In the end, like Davros in Genesis of the Daleks, they are destroyed by their own creation, the Time Destructor. (Alan Stevens and Fiona Moore have a lot more to say about the Daleks in their superb, long analysis of the story.) Contrast this story with The Chase, played simply for laughs. I should say also that the Daleks' appearance in ancient Egypt reminded me rather of the Carthaginian golems in Mary Gentle's superb novel Ash.

Slightly less impressed by the other aliens - basically people in rubber suits and funny voices, which rather reinforces just how innovative the Daleks were. Also somewhat unimpressed by the Meddling Monk, who seems rather uncertain as to what he is doing in the story, yet somehow manages to break the Tardis lock; the Doctor is able to open it in the end, leading to this peculiar exchange between him and Steven:

STEVEN:  Yes, all right, but first you tell us something.  How did you break that lock?
THE DOCTOR:  Oh, that's all very simple, dear boy. You see the sun in that particular galaxy has very unusual powers.  I merely reflected its powers through that ring.
SARA:  Is there something special about it?
THE DOCTOR:  Yes, it has certain properties.  The combined forces of that sun together with the stone in that ring was sufficient enough to correct the Monk's interference.
STEVEN:  Yes, but what properties has it?
THE DOCTOR:  Now, I don't want to discuss this anymore.  About turn, and do as you're told. Go along.

No analysis of this story can be complete without addressing the vexed question of episode 7, The Feast of Steven, broadcast on Christmas Day, 1965. Here there are no Daleks (they are only mentioned once); the Tardis crew land near a police station in northern England in the 1960s, then escape arrest to materialise on a 1920s Hollywood film set. The Doctor gives career advice to a young Bing Crosby, and as he and his companions depart, they fill their glasses in seasonal celebration, with the Doctor turning to camera to wish "a Happy Christmas to all of you at home!" The odd thing is that it works, or at least it worked for me. (Thanks to Wikipedia for the picture on the left.) The story so far has been so bleak and at the same time so dislocated that the weird environments of episode 6 - we are told that the northern England setting is horrendously polluted, and the Tardis crew leave Hollywood with neither Steven nor Sara having the faintest notion of where they were - seem not too out of place, and the celebration at the end of the episode is a welcome note of happiness rather than humour. (The two humorous scenes of the next episode - the Tardis materialising at Lord's, later ripped off by Douglas Adams, and the Trafalgar Square scene, both work rather less well.) As for the Doctor's breach of the Fourth Wall, Wikipedia points out that "Tom Baker would sometimes give his lines while looking directly at the camera. In The Caves of Androzani, the character Morgus makes private comments as a theatrical aside to the camera, whilst Colin Baker delivers one of his first lines as the Doctor directly to the camera as well."

Some day, someone will write an analytical comparison of The Feast of Steven with The Christmas Invasion, broadcast exactly forty years later.

This was the first classic Doctor Who story I have listened to entirely on audio, and I must say I enjoyed it a lot. I may try and get hold of the audio version of the story that followed, The Massacre - I tried watching a fan "reconstruction" and didn't get much out of it, but now I'm comfortable with the format - and, perhaps more important, have a better understanding of where the story fits in the timeline.

By the way, isn't it just utterly bizarre that episodes 5 and 10, having been lost by the BBC, were eventually located in a Mormon temple in Clapham? 

< Mission to the Unknown | Army of Ghosts / Doomsday >

I was intrigued by this story after the positive write-up given it by Cornell, Day and Topping in The Discontinuity Guide. Although the film of this Hartnell story is lost, I managed to get hold of a fan "reproduction", with black and white pictures of scenes from the programme montaged against the original sound-track. I watched it late last night, and was not wildly impressed. But this may have been due to just being too tired to take it in properly - I went back to a couple of key scenes this morning to check points for this review and suddenly found myself being drawn into it much more.

Is this the only Doctor Who story featuring just the Doctor and a single, male, companion? Indeed the Doctor himself features only in one and a half episodes out of four, with William Hartnell credited as the Abbot of Amboise in the middle two episodes, though of course Steven (and the audience) are unsure about whether he is really the Doctor in disguise. Peter Purves really has to carry the entire story until half way through the last episode, and is just about up to it.

In some ways it's actually the basic Doctor Who plot - Tardis arrives in the midst of fiendish political plotting, our heroes make friends with one of the locals and have to sort out the goodies from the baddies. The interesting wrinkles are that the setting is not an alien planet but an obscure corner of French history, the 1572 massacre of the Huguenots, and that the baddies win. Looking at its place in the original broadcast sequence, it came immediately after The Dalek Master Plan in which not one but two companions were killed off, so fitted into a bleak rather than comic phase.

But it really does come alive in the fourth and final episode, when the Doctor reappears without deigning to explain where he has been. He and Steven actually leave Paris with ten minutes of story yet to go, leaving time for them to have a row, Steven to walk out of the Tardis in disgust, Dodo Chaplet to walk into it by mistake, and then Steven to return. In his brief moment on his own, the Doctor delivers a soliloquy which sounds much much better than it looks in script:

Steven:	I tell you this much, Doctor, wherever this machine of yours lands next I'm getting off. If your researches have so little regard for human life then I want no part.
Doctor:	We've landed. Your mind is made up?
(The TARDIS doors open.)
Steven:	Goodbye.
Doctor:	My dear Steven, history sometimes gives us a terrible shock, and that is because we don't quite fully understand. Why should we? After all, we're all too small to realise its final pattern. Therefore, don't try and judge it from where you stand. I was right to do as I did. Yes, that I firmly believe.
(Steven walks out of the Tardis.)
Doctor:	Even after all this time, he cannot understand. I dare not change the course of history. Well, at least I taught him to take some precautions. He did remember to look at the scanner before he opened the doors. Now they're all gone. All gone. None of them could understand. Not even my little Susan, or Vicki. Yes. And there's Barbara and Chatterton... Chesterton! They were all too impatient to get back to their own time. And now Steven. Perhaps I should go home, back to my own planet. But I can't. I can't.

< Goth Opera | Managra > 

---

The audio version, with Peter Purves narrating, is, I think the single best Doctor Who audio I have heard. I very strongly recommend it - apparently it is also available as a pack of three with The Myth Makers and The Highlanders, which seems to me very good value. Tat Wood and Laurence Miles comment that since director Paddy Russell's specialty was people creeping around silently, probably the best bits were the bits we will never see.

It helps, of course, that Steven rather than the Doctor is the central character here, so Purves is telling his own character's story. Freshly arrived in Paris from the end of the Daleks' Master Plan, having lost three fellow companions in the recent past (Vicki through romance, Katarina and Sara Kingdom through horrible death), the Doctor now abandons Steven who has to make his way through a hostile and confusing environment. No wonder he walks out at the end, giving the First Doctor, alone at last, a great soliloquy.

As a future Englishman, Steven is C of E without ever having really thought about it, but now finds himself in a setting where "Catholic" and "Protestant" are terms which can cost you your life - a cognitive dissonance I've seen often enough, and I suppose experienced myself in reverse. While the program tends to side with the Protestants, who after all were the massacrees rather than the massacrers in this case, they are very definitely not completely innocent in their suffering.

The story is very neatly structured, with each of the first three episodes lasting from dawn to dusk. Tat Wood and Laurence Miles have some intriguing speculation as to what was happening after dusk, but you should buy their book to find out more. Unlike me, they can't forgive the end for the way in which new companion Dodo is introduced; I think Steven is a bit out of character (despite this being otherwise his best story) but I can roll with it.

(novelisation) 

< The Myth Makers | The Five Doctors >

Fan lore generally is pretty negative about this story; perhaps this shows that I wasn't concentrating sufficiently, but I really rather enjoyed it.

In particular, I very much enjoyed the one thing that those who dislike this story universally single out for criticism, Jackie Lane's acting as the newly arrived companion Dodo Chaplet (who walked into the TARDIS at the end of the previous story). I thought it was great to have an assertive young companion - the first really since Barbara's departure (apart from the brief appearance of Sara Kingdom) - and for my money she rose to the challenge. Hartnell is on top form, and even his fluffs seem much more in character with the Doctor than with the actor. Peter Purves as Stephen has some great lines and even a mild love interest.

The other feature of this story universally mocked by the critics, the Monoids, actually seemed not too bad to me, for 1966 anyway. Certainly far far better than the forest creatures at the end of The Chase. They reminded me a bit of the Ood from The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit. Their transformation from silent servitors to sinister overlords is creepy but compelling. And they supply the great punchline to episode two, when the TARDIS crew discover that the statue the Ark's human crews were building has been complete, but with a Monoid head.

I even liked the look of it. The gradual revelation that the forest has (as we are warned in the title of the first episode) a steel sky is well done. The Roman-style costumes of the human Guardians deliberately make us think of the Monoids as slaves. The surface of the planet Refusis, and its invisble inhabitants, are well done. The scenes of planets and suns in space are, at least, not too embarrassing.

(novelisation)

< The Moonbase | The Gunfighters >

Dodo, the Doctor and Steven are captured by the eponymous Toymaker, brilliantly played by Michael Gough, who wants to play games with them for eternity. The companions are challenged to a series of sinister games against the Toymaker's minions; the Doctor has to play the Tri-Logic game (which is just a ten-piece set of The Tower of Hanoi) to its conclusion, and is made invisible (and at one point mute as well) by their fiendish host.

I had been very much looking forward to this one on the basis of fan lore and the fourth episode (which is on the Lost In Time collection), and was taken aback by just how negative Tat Wood and Lawrence Miles are about it in their book. In the end I come somewhere in between. The Toymaker's means and motivation seem to me too arbitrary, not sufficiently rooted in their own reality let alone the reality of the established lore of the series. On the other hand the cast (and, four decades later, Peter Purves' narration) give it all they can, and I felt swept along by the action.

There are some striking parallels with the penultimate Ninth Doctor episode, Bad Wolf. The TARDIS is invaded by an external force, its occupants (the Doctor, a male companion and a female companion) are made to participate in games in which their lives are at stake. The 2005 version is better in two ways (though I would make the same criticism about the means and motivation of the bad guys not being sufficiently clear). First, of course, the vastly greater resources available - it makes episode four of The Celestial Toymaker look like a cheap studio-bound set of recordings, as indeed it is.

The second point of comparison is perhaps less obvious. In Bad Wolf, the other participants in the games are fellow humans, thus subject to the evil gamesmasters in the same way as the Doctor and friends, and indeed people we can empathise with - be it the Big Brother participant who throws her lot in with the Doctor, or the Weakest Link participant who gets Rose zapped. In The Celestial Toymaker, it's not entirely clear what the status of the Toymaker's minions is. Steven thinks they should be treated as mindless, soulless enemies and simply fought with. Dodo is inclined to show them compassion as if they too are being manipulated. Is Dodo being weak, or is she in some basic sense right to recognise them as having their own potential for personhood too? The question is not satisfactorily resolved (and indeed not even very satisfactorily framed). 

(novelisation)
< The Time Meddler | The Ribos Operation >

"The Gunfighters" is just a silly story of time-travellers landing in Tombstone just before the gunfight at the OK Corral. Hartnell has some great lines; trying to pass off the Tardis crew as entertainers, he introduces himself as "your humble servant, Doctor, er, Caligari." "Doctor Who?" asks the bewildered local. "Yes, quite right!" comes the response. I still think Jackie Lane is good as Dodo as well, and of course so is Peter Purves as Stephen.

< The Ark | The Movie >

---

Audio only: The Gunfighters both gains and loses. On audio, it is much more difficult to remain unaware of the dodgy accents which are the story's biggest problem. But this is after all a story done partly for laughs, and told twice over even in the original version, with the Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon recapitulating the action. Here we have a further layer of narrative thanks to Peter Purves' linking narrative, and I found it helped me to follow and appreciate it. The Gunfighters is one of my guilty pleasures.
< The Tenth Planet | The Dominators >

(novelisation)

Right, that's it decided: I very much prefer the audios with linking narration to the fan reconstructions of "lost" Doctor Who episodes. Especially (though not only) if Peter Purves is doing them. The Savages is a real little gem of a story, even if it does have one of the most amusing lines in the whole of Doctor Who. The incidental music is particularly impressive (which of course makes more of a difference for a story that's on audio only); it is by Raymond Jones, who also wrote the music for The Romans, and very little else (Wodehouse Playhouse, according to imdb).

The story itself is a clean and simple classic Who plot: the Doctor arrives in an apparent paradise, discovers the evil going on behind the scenes, and fixes it. No aliens, no monsters apart from the human beings and their misuse of their own powers, and indeed nobody dies; several important ethical themes are addressed (as explored by Fiona Moore in one of her excellent essays); and we have the first case of someone other than Hartnell playing the Doctor, or at least part of him, for the first time. Steven gets a decent farewell scene, rather unlike Dodo who lasted only two episodes into the next story.

Anyway, the audio CDs are strongly recommended. 

(novelisation)

< The Mutants | Doctor Who - The Massacre > 

The War Machines, the last story in Doctor Who's third season, was remarkable at the time for being the first full-length story in which the Doctor and his companions are in a normal, contemporary environment; even more remarkable when you reflect that roughly half of the Ninth and Tenth Doctor stories have been set in or close to the present day. I love the opening and closing scenes of the TARDIS materialising on Fitzroy Square.

The story has some remarkable concepts for its time - the idea of a computer network covering the entire world, which could be taken over by a rogue artificial intelligence, is a cliché now that we have the internet, but was surely fairly cutting-edge in 1966. One character has to explain to another what "software" is; it's impossible to imagine such a scene being written now. Of course, the execution is a bit raw; in particular, the War Machines themselves are just cut-price Daleks, the white heat of mid-60s technology being no match for Skaro's finest. The evil computer WOTAN can speak but needs to have questions typed into it. Hartnell, as ever, makes it all very believable.

It's also interesting to see the Doctor just fitting in to Britain's establishment circles, and roping in Sir Charles Summer of the Royal Scientific Society as his automatic ally. Some purists have objected that the Doctor must be an outsider, but in fact we've seen him slip in and out of establishment roles right up to the present - the Ninth Doctor is still on the books as a major expert on aliens when the Slitheen arrive, after all. Purists, however, are right to object to WOTAN's scandalous naming of our hero as "Doctor Who".

I was sorry to see Dodo go. I realise I have now seen or listened to all of her series except The Celestial Toymaker, and I think Jackie Lane is excellent. She is particularly good here, taken over by the evil computer intelligence at an early stage, completely hoodwinking the Doctor. He is really very angry when he discovers that she is not coming with him at the end of the story. Polly burbles, "She says she's feeling much better, and she'd like to stay here in london, and she sends you her love." "Her love!!!" snarls the Doctor, "There's gratitude for you! Take her all the way round the world, through space and time -" and then Ben interrupts him to ask what he is talking about, and what was looking like an excellent First Doctor rant is cut off. It must be admitted that Ben and Polly slip very comfortably into their roles as the Doctor's new friends.

It's fun; you have to make allowances, but it is fun. 

(novelisation)

< The Robots of Death | The Eight Doctors >

The Smugglers was the last full story in which William Hartnell appeared as the Doctor. (He missed episode 3 of The Tenth Planet due to ill health.) It was the first story of Doctor Who's fourth season, broadcast in 1966. The story picks up straight from the end of The War Machines, which closed the third season, with new companions Ben and Polly doing the gosh-it's-bigger-on-the-inside-than-the-outside routine. "This is a vessel for travelling through Time and Space! Why did you follow me?" rages the Doctor, followed by some startling admissions: when Polly asks, "When are we going to land?" the Doctor admits, "I don't know; and that's the cause of half my troubles through my journeys. I never know... I have no control over where I land, neither can I choose the period which I land in." And as Ben and Polly venture through the doors ahead of him, he mutters wistfully to himself, "...and I really thought I was going to be alone again..." It seems to me to be an interesting set of re-statements of what the character is all about, at the start of a new season of stories which would see the lead role change literally beyond all recognition.

We're then in the second last of the great historical Doctor Who stories, and lots of fun yo-ho-hoing between piratical smugglers, crooked local gentry, the King's revenue men, etc etc. Almost nobody is what they first seem to be and the plot kept my mind off the train journey to and from my first day in my new job. There were a couple more surprises for me though: first, the fairly nonchalant way in which both the Doctor and his companions resort to pretending to practice occult rituals in order to impress the natives, which you couldn't imagine from later Doctors who would have been falling over themselves to debunk these primitive beliefs; second, and much more significantly, when Ben suggests buggering off in the TARDIS and leaving the locals to sort themselves out, the Doctor tells him and Polly, almost with embarrassment - "I know it's really difficult for both you to understand, but I'm under moral obligation" - that they must stay to try and prevent the pirates from destroying the village. It's a far cry from the rather amoral and even sinister figure of the first season, who was happy to bugger off from Skaro and leave the Thals to be slaughtered by the Daleks. It's also an interesting contrast with the argument in The Aztecs that you can't change history; this had seemed to be a rule that applied only to Earth rather than to other planets, but now it is weakened even for England. 

< The Eight Doctors | The Highlanders >

This is much better than I had been told. Lots of things to really love about this story. The special title sequence, with a cybernetic theme. The role given to an actual black actor, playing the more sensible of the two doomed astronauts (this was Earl Cameron, who more recently played President Zuwanie opposite Nicole Kidman in The Interpreter). The "base under siege" story, which later became such a cliche of the series, but I think this was in fact the very first Doctor Who with this theme (and anyway it still works well, as we saw this year with The Satan Pit). The sinister appearance - for the first time! - of the Cybermen - who still have human hands; whose voices are a painful electronic lilt, much closer in some ways to their 2006 relatives than some of their intervening representations. Sure, the costumes aren't great, but they are a significant improvement on the standard man-in-rubber-suit monster. The horrible difference between Cybermen, with their disregard for human life and emotion, and Ben, who regrets having to kill them.

There are problems with it too. The science of the plot - parallel Earth? which nobody can recognise through a telescope?? (Except Polly???) Energy drains???? just doesn't work on any serious level of analysis. While Pedler and Davies get good marks for internationalism (the stereotyped Italian apart) the only two female characters are Polly (who makes the coffee) and the unnamed secretary to the blok in Switzerland. And the Cybermen are strangely vulnerable to bright lights and uranium rods.

But the Doctor, as so often, is central to this. For the first two episodes Hartnell is doing great - grumbling and sniping at the militarists of the base; pulling out essential pieces of knowledge at - or before- the right moment. Then he disappears, ill, for the third episode; for the fourth, judging from the reconstruction, he seems to be mostly back on form. And as he and his companions stagger out of the Cybermen's spaceship where he and Polly have been prisoners, past their disintegrated captors, he seems abstracted:

Ben: Hey, come on Doctor, wakey wakey!  It's all over now.
Doctor: What did you say, my boy?  "It's all over."  "It's all over."  That's what you said.  No... but it isn't all over. It's far from being all over. [at this point, one of the few surviving video clips, he appears to be addressing the audience through the camera]
Ben: What are you talking about?
Doctor: I must get back to the TARDIS immediately!
Polly: All right, Doctor.
Doctor: Yes...  I must go now.
Ben: Aren't we going to go back to say good-bye or anything?
Doctor: No!  No, I must go at once.
Ben: Oh well, you better have this. [offering a scarf] We don't want you catching your death of cold.
Doctor: Ah, yes! Thank you. It's good. [almost inaudibly] Keep warm.

And with that odd echo of his exchange with Polly in the first episode (Polly: "Are you sure you're going to be warm enough?" Doctor: "Oh, like toast, my dear.") the Doctor staggers wordlessly back to the Tardis and Ben and Polly are briefly shut out; when they get in, the Doctor collapses, the Tardis engines start, and the Doctor's face begins to glow; and, shockingly, when the glow fades, it is someone else's face.

OK, we have been through this eight times since (though of course with only six real regeneration scenes), and it's a scene that we are now used to (see various regenerations here - though having said that, the very first regeneration is technically the best apart from the most recent two). But having watched various First Doctor series over the last while, I found it easier to get into the mind-set of the 1966 viewer for whom there had only been one Doctor, and suddenly we were in a whole new situation - a feeling of both bereavement and renewal. Those who got into the show for the first time in 2005 must have had much the same feelings when watching The Parting of the Ways. 

< The Aztecs | The Rescue > 

---

Audio version: With the original version, there a unity-of-form issue: because the fourth episode is missing from the archives (am I right in thinking that this is the only story with precisely one missing episode?), the video reconstruction available with episodes 1-3 is, with the best will in the world, jarring. If you have audio only, with the dulcet tones of Anneke Wills providing linking narration, you do get a sense of Hartnell giving it his all, right to the end.

< Attack of the Graske | The Gunfighters >