Of course, if you have seen stuff from Season One, it might feel a bit odd to think of it that way. Certainly, fans of the New Series might wonder how The Reign of Terror (1.8) could be a "season finale" if it doesn't have an army of CGI Daleks in it. Fans of Buffy or Babylon 5 might look in vain for an over-arching plot, theme, or monster. And fans of Lost or Battlestar Galactica will might be puzzled by the lack of cliffhanger revelations in the final episode to get everyone excited about Season 2. It just goes to show how different TV is now. Each episode of Doctor Who was made in a week, and one was made every week, so what is in retrospect seen as a break between seasons was in fact just a well-earned rest for the cast and crew over the summer. The production team and viewers thought in story arcs (the serials) between 2 and 7 episodes long, and it won't be until Season Five that we start seeing any evidence of thought into how those story arcs might fit together. About Time says that, from a production perspective, An Unearthly Child (1.1) through The Dalek Invasion of Earth (2.2) could be considered one season, and The Rescue (2.3) though "Mission to the Unknown" (3.2) another. This actually resembles a little more a "season" as we've come to understand it. That way "Season One" ends with the return of the series' first and most popular monsters, and the departure of the "Unearthly Child" who got Ian and Barbara mixed up in this business in the first place.
But never mind that now. In the summer of 1964, viewers had six weeks to contemplate the initial run of Doctor Who, from An Unearthly Child to The Reign of Terror. You can read in more detail about the stories here, but very briefly they were:
1.1: An Unearthly Child. The Doctor kidnaps two of his granddaughter's schoolteachers, and they have a run-in with a Stone Age tribe with poor decision-making skills.
1.2: The Daleks. On post-nuclear Skaro, the travellers must convince the pacifist Thals (nice blond people who live in the petrified jungle) to fight the city-bound, insane Daleks.
1.3: The Edge of Destruction. Has something invaded the TARDIS? No, they're just crazy. The Doctor becomes less of a bastard.
1.4: Marco Polo. The great Venetian traveller nicks the TARDIS.
1.5: The Keys of Marinus. A quest! The protagonists have many adventures while searching for the (you guessed it) five Keys of Marinus.
1.6: The Aztecs. Barbara is mistaken for the reincarnation of a high priest, and tries to convince the Aztecs to abandon human sacrifice.
1.7: The Sensorites. On the planet Sense-Sphere, the native Sensorites are terrorising some humans but being rather nice about it. Also, there's a plague. And a monster? If any of story was made up as it went along, it was this one.
1.8: The Reign of Terror. All the hi-jinks of revolutionary France.
And for those of you keeping score at home, that breaks down as:
3 Earth history stories (Marco Polo, The Aztecs, and The Reign of Terror)
3 "space" stories (The Daleks, The Keys of Marinus, and The Sensorites)
2 other stories (An Unearthly Child and The Edge of Destruction) which are a lot more about the protagonists than the setting
Keep an eye on these figures, because they will change very quickly as we get further into the series. Note that the two "other" stories are very early in the run - they not attempts to break the mould, they are attempts to figure out what Doctor Who does. Once the series gets into the swing of things, settings alternate between Earth history and futuristic other planets. Any desire to do "sideways" (read: "timey-wimey") stories seems to disappear after The Edge of Destruction. For now, at least. Compare this to Doctor Who's other first season (2005), which kept dropping hints about the Time War and almost immediately began seeing what it could do with the Doctor and Rose's relationship as well as the "time machine" concept ("Father's Day" (N1.8)).
Which is not to say that there isn't character development in the 1963/4 season. Our four protagonists (and they are four protagonists - not until Ian and Barbara leave will it become a series about the Doctor and his companions) have all changed as the result of their adventures and being trapped in a police box together. Most notable is the Doctor's change from selfish old bastard to a much more grandfatherly figure. Ian and Barbara immediately display their latent action-hero potential, but they go from "I hate it as much as you, Barbara" (The Daleks) to not being that sad when the Doctor misses 1963 by a couple of centuries (The Reign of Terror). And Susan...well, Susan's story arc basically consists of someone occasionally reminding the Doctor that "she's not a child anymore," and The Dalek Invasion of Earth (2.2). Carole Ann Ford, the actress, would soon leave the series for precisely this reason. Given the youth of several members of the production team, and especially given the rise of the teenager in the '50s and '60s, it seems strange to me how little the writers understand how a sixteen-year-old girl would behave. But in the moments when the story requires "unearthly child" to mean "intelligent beyond her years" rather than "hysterical", even Susan follows the trend of the TARDIS crew, which is that they're all being turned into heroes.
About Time makes a big deal about the moment in The Sensorites when the Doctor goes to investigate the tunnels, risking his life to maybe save the Sensorites. Because it's the right thing to do. In most of Season One, the travellers are a force for good, but usually accidentally. When the TARDIS drops them in a place, their goal is just to get out alive. Each story has them separated from the TARDIS, because otherwise they would actually just get in and leave. None of this "we can't leave until we've saved history from the Pyroviles" nonsense ("The Fires of Pompeii" (N4.2)). The one exception is in The Aztecs, in which Barbara wants to "save" the Aztecs by convincing them to abandon human sacrifice, and this is portrayed as arrogant and foolish. But the more the series positions the Doctor, Ian, and Barbara as heroes, the more it can become a show about righting wrongs than just survival. A criticism I've often heard of the new series is that the stakes are never that high. Despite the fact that the fate of the universe (i.e., the human race) invariably hangs in the balance, you're always too sure (as is the Doctor) that the Doctor will save the day. I believe that part of this is that there's never any sense of real danger to the Doctor and his companions. It would be nice to see an old-style story, where all the protagonists have to do is get out alive. Though based on the trailer for "Amy's Choice" (31.7), I may get my wish.
By the end of Season One, Doctor Who has established what it is. It's an adventure show that takes its quasi-family of heroic travellers to Earth's past and to other planets, where they right wrongs, but mostly just get out alive. And by the time the first season of Doctor Who was over, the Sixties were also starting to figure out what they were going to be like. Season One began with the Kennedy assassination and ended with LBJ's re-election, Khrushchev's removal, and of course the end of 13 years of Conservative government in Britain. It (Doctor Who) started just after From Russia With Love, and ended soon after Goldfinger, and the latter film is credited with establishing the Bond films as fun adventures filled with large-scale action, gadgets, and the romancing of celebrities, moving away from the briefcases-on-trains of From Russia With Love and the books. And, of course, music. With the Beatles was released the day before "An Unearthly Child" aired, and the Beatles' dominance of Britain was assured, but by the end of 1964 they had conquered the world. In 1963 it still seemed to many that rock 'n' roll was just a passing fad that would be over within a year (notice in the YouTube clip that the interviewer asks Mick Jagger this in 1965). Now it seemed that "beat music", with its newfound British flavour, would be the soundtrack of the Sixties. So now that everything is established and identified, it can all change again. Ready? On to 1965!
Its fine for the audience to know that the Doctor will save the day, but for him to know that too just makes him seem smug. Smugness was the problem with David Tennant's character.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, Katie Manning didn't play the most annoying companion - Mel was by far the worst. Although Manning set back the Dalek cause for centuries thanks to "that" photo!