Written by Tom
[This is the first post in a series where we review every individual episode of classic Doctor Who. That’s right: not every serial, every individual episode. Why would we put ourselves through this blatant act of madness? Well, TV serials are not designed to be watched as long TV movies and the gaps between episodes are a fundamental part of how these things are designed. As such, by approaching classic Doctor Who as a series of half an hour episodes, we should hopefully be able to come up with some new takes on even the most popular episodes. Plus, I really liked writing my reviews of the Jodie Whitaker era and this allows me to do something similar for the classic era without requiring me to watch a two hour movie a week.]
Two teachers decide to stalk the weird kid because they have nothing better to do that night. Turns out the weird kid lives with her dickish grandfather in a box that’s actually a time machine. Arguments ensue and the grandfather kidnaps the teachers. Thus starts the most popular family programme Britain’s ever made.
The first episode of any TV programme always has a lot of questions to answer – most importantly, what is this show? As such, “An Unearthly Child” has one job: to explain what Doctor Who is. Which brings us to first major oddity of Doctor Who as a TV programme – namely the way it defines itself as “the show which defies explanation”.
Indeed, most of the episode is designed to be deliberately inaccessible. Just take the opening credits, a famously inhuman sequence produced by playing audio tapes wrongly while recording a recording of a TV screen. It’s a sequence made out of technological glitches, designed to resemble nothing more than your television breaking down.
This fades into our first shot of a junk yard. The junk yard is a place for faulty items which are no longer needed, keeping us focussed on the idea of brokenness. And layered over this is the way that the show’s intro music continues to play over the scene even though the intro has nominally finished, at times butting heads with the scene’s actual sound effects as if someone’s forgot to lower a fader switch. Immediately we get our first sense of what Doctor Who is – it’s TV gone wrong, a place where the normal rules of broadcasting have broken down and stopped working.
But all this is just set up for the bit where the camera pans to a Police Box and the music suddenly drops completely out of the mix. Up until now, the show has been a series of overlapping, moving images – kinetic spirals merging into one another before bleeding into a panning shot that moves restlessly around a set. As such, to have the show look upon this object and stop dead in its tracks is actually quite disquieting. Already, this Police Box has a totemic status within the narrative, the one thing that can make this hyperactive show stop for a bit and settle down.
At the same time though, this stillness isn’t security. The thing about Police Boxes and junk yards is that they’re incredibly commonplace – they’re not weird – yet they’re shot here as if they’re as strange as the opening credit’s formless globlets of light. Everything in the episode is communicating “These objects are strange” except for the objects themselves. And so we’re left to just stare at these commonplace images, fully aware that they’re weird without knowing why they are.
As such, we come to understand that Doctor Who isn’t just a weird programme but a programme which makes things weird. It’s a broadcast signal which denatures the things it comes into contact with, turning television into a perverted parody of itself and imbuing even the most basic images with an untouchable oddness. From its first two shots, Doctor Who is about television, strangeness and the intersections between the two. The TV becomes a portal in which weird things come out (like a TARDIS.)
And we’re only one scene and two shots in.
Scenes two and three take us to a school and introduce to our two main characters: school teachers Barbara and Ian. A school is one of the few places that pretty much everyone can be expected to have visited and teachers are the exact type of people you’d expect to be there – as such, Barbara and Ian become the show’s representatives of normality. In a show defined by inscrutable wrongness, they’re our known quantity. And they’re immediately engaging as two people torn between two poles. On one hand, they’re middle aged teachers: establishment figures who come with a certain amount of authority. On the other, they both agree to stalk one of their students because one’s obsessed by a mystery and the other has nothing better to do, showing them into quite impulsive and immature under the surface. They’re two emotionally young people bursting at the edge of the restrictive social position they’ve found themselves in. There’s a surprising amount of depth here.
(Add to this that they talk about sex – the first reason Ian can come up with for Susan being at a junk yard is that she’s hooking up with boys – and you get two characters who are immensely easy to ship.)
So by the end of scene three, we end up with two shows which have effectively been set-up at once – one a metafictional broadcast about intangible strangeness and the other a character-focused drama starring two school teachers. And the point where these shows intersect is in the character of Susan – one of the school’s students and an odd woman who comes from the junkyard.
Carol Anne Ford gives Susan a truly alien quality in her first few scenes, making her into this culmination of lost stares, cocked heads and clockwork gestures. One of the most notable things about her though is her tendency to look directly at the camera – she’s largely introduced to us through a series of flashbacks which are shot from Ian and Barbara’s perspective, all of which feature Susan staring directly at them and thus staring directly at us. Given that these shots centralise her in the shot and usually feature everyone else in the room staring at her, this gives her a real control over the frame. Much like the junkyard, Susan’s weirdness makes her a central figure and gives her control over the TV screen, turning her into the episode’s main conduit through which the weirdness of Doctor Who can bleed into and infect Ian and Barbara’s soap opera.
This in turn is what drives the episode’s main plot. As mentioned, “An Unearthly Child” is primarily about defining what this Doctor Who series is and why you’d want to watch it. It quickly sets up Susan as the character who most embodies the show and then spends the entire episode with two people investigating her as if she was a mystery. So “An Unearthly Child” is basically Ian and Barbara finding that this new thing called Doctor Who exists, going “I wonder what that is” and spending half-an-hour finding out. And whatever this show is about, it’s ultimately going to be whatever secrets rest with Susan and the Police Box in the junk yard.
It turns out this secret is the Doctor. The Doctor is an immediately arresting character. Mirroring Susan’s ticks of sticking his neck out and cocking his head to and fro, Hartnell gives the Doctor a trickster vibe, all smug chuckles and witty asides as he visibly enjoys running intellectual rings around Ian and Barbara. Despite his reputation as “the grumpy one”, Hartnell is less “angry” here and more “having an immense amount of fun being a complete dick”. He does come off as a kindred spirit of Ian and Barbara though. Much like them, he’s a character split between two separate poles. On one hand, he’s the aged wizard with the magic box who has knowledge of things no-one else knows: an authoritative archetype. On the other, he’s pretty obviously the show’s main antagonist: an aloof arsehole who steals the plot from the reasonable members of the cast, argues with everyone and effectively kidnaps Ian and Barbara as the episode’s cliffhanger. The same mix of anarchism and strictness inherent in Ian and Barbara is also there in him: a man in an authoritative position who actively rebels against the role.
Which leads us to the scene where the Doctor and Susan introduce Barbara and Ian to the TARDIS and explain what it is. With 55+ years in which to have gotten used to the shows’ core elements, it can be easy to miss just how impenetrable this scene is meant to be. It’s a fast-paced barrage of technobabble and arguments. Take, for example, the line “Well, I made up the name TARDIS from the initials ‘Time And Relative Dimension In Space'”. What the hell is “Time and Relative Dimension in Space” meant to mean? Let’s ignore the fact that it barely makes grammatical sense – what’s a “Relative Dimension”? How are you meant to situate time “in” space when it’s not a spatial concept? Even the fact that the TARDIS’ name is an acronym adds to this feeling techno-overload: it turns out that not only is this impossible machine named after a nonsense word, this nonsense word actually contains a code relating to another sentence which is also comprised entirely of nonsense. The information is meant to be alienating rather than illuminating: there’s enough technical stuff that we’re convinced there must be meaning in here somewhere but it’s so overstuffed that we’d never be able to figure out where.
Again though, this sense of overload is directly allied to the glitch aesthetic which runs underneath the entire programme. The show is consistently too much – its broadcast is overloaded to the point of glitching, the scenes are overloaded to incomprehensibility, and the characters are all fighting between multiple archetypes while providing cracked mirrors of each other, making for a programme on the verge of fragmenting, threatening to fall apart at any second.
I suppose the question about this is: how the hell is this meant to define the show and why would you want to carry on watching it? Well the thing about this set-up is that it explodes all known rules of narrative television and thus feels rich with possibility. This is an entirely new way of doing television, and thus is attention grabbing and arresting. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows though: the show is unequivocal that the complete narrative destruction that it promises can be dark and scary. In this way, the show almost invokes a sense of religious awe: this is a great thing but its greatness means that it could easily turn on and destroy us. This is why Doctor Who is so commonly linked to being scary: because the horrors and wonders in it are so thoroughly interlinked as to be identical.
The result from a dramatic point of view is just this sense of bigness. It’s commonly said that the reasons why Star Wars and Star Trek have gathered such dedicated fanbases is because they offer entire universes and mythologies to their audience, their worlds always seeming to extend beyond the screen and thus begging for further investigation. From its first episode, Doctor Who does the same thing, offering an other-worldly programme reaching at us from within our TV sets and thus implying the existence of a whole other world that we might be about to fall into – one that’s as big as TV itself.
And so when the TARDIS makes its first journey through time and space in a horrifically abstract sequence where the opening credits suddenly re-emerge with enough violence to knock Ian and Barbara out, we’re left both staring agog into an inhuman void and being taken on a thrilling ride into the dark recesses of our television sets. It’s terrifying, mesmerising, technically impressive and absorbing. It’s a perfectly tuned mess. And impossibly, despite all its contradictions and sharp points, it’s already 100% Doctor Who.
FNORD 