Written by Tom
The Doctor has kidnapped two school teachers and taken them to the Stone Age. There, a local tribe is having a power dispute after losing the ability to make fire. Team TARDIS’ attempts to not get beaten up by the cavemen largely result in them getting beat up by the cavemen before being thrown into the eponymous Cave of Skulls (which is a cave, with skulls).
One of the main roles of a story’s Act Two is to take the tensions invoked by Act One and continuously heighten them, bringing them closer to their breaking points. Initially, it doesn’t seem like “The Cave of Skulls” is really an Act Two to “An Unearthly Child“, what with it’s aggressive change in setting which looks to all intents and purposes like a brand new start. Despite this though, “The Cave of Skulls” absolutely is “An Unearthly Child” with the volume turned up, though perhaps not in the ways you might expect.
Last time, we discussed how “An Unearthly Child” is basically about one show (a soap opera about a secondary school – let’s call it Coal Hill School) being denatured by its interactions with another (a metafiction about a man in a Police Box – let’s call it Doctor Who). With Doctor Who kidnapping Coal Hill School‘s characters and taking them out of their own setting, the narrative question left at the end of “An Unearthly Child” was thus whether Coal Hill School could survive its meeting with Doctor Who or if it’d end up being permanently damaged by the much stranger show. This got literalised on screen by the division between Ian/Barbara and the Doctor himself, Susan acting as the connecting point between the two groups and thus the person their conflict revolved around.
Of course, there is a big narrative issue with this setup: namely that the show itself is called Doctor Who, thus implying that the long-term winner of the fight between it and Coal Hill School will always be the former. The thing is, Doctor Who is currently the more spiky and unlikable villain in a story about Ian and Barbara. So how do you bridge the gap between the two programmes while continuing to explore and expand upon the idea of Doctor Who as a programme in which different shows collide?
Simple: you add another show – this time a grimdark stage play about two caveman battling each other for control of their tribe. Of course, the parallels between the plot of the Caveman show (let’s call it The Cave of Skulls) and “An Unearthly Child” have been made quite a bit: both involve two groups of people fighting for control with a woman at the centre of the tussle. The issue is that most people treat the caveman plotline as a 1:1 parallel for the Doctor and Ian’s own power struggle. It doesn’t quite work like that – instead The Cave of Skulls is meant to be to Doctor Who what Doctor Who was to Coal Hill School.
The Doctor in “An Unearthly Child”, representing Doctor Who, was an all-encompassing character who had a hefty off-screen backstory behind him, knowledge beyond the audience or the other characters, and the power to run rings around both. He’s allowed to dominate Coal Hill School, supplanting their narrative rules with his.
“The Cave of Skulls”, meanwhile, is about the cavemen supplanting the Doctor’s narrative rules. The TARDIS lands in “The Cave of Skulls” and immediately starts glitching, getting itself stuck in a Police Box shape, much like the presence of the TARDIS caused the broadcast to become glitchy in “An Unearthly Child”. The episode itself starts with three minutes of setting up the caveman plotline before rejoining Team TARDIS, making it so that the Doctor is joining someone else’s story that’s already in progress rather than starting one of his own. And the Doctor’s plotline is him getting immediately knocked out and becoming a pawn in the power games between Za and Hur. This makes him the pivot point around which their conflict revolves, thus functionally reducing the Doctor to this episode’s equivalent of Susan, a companion in his own story. In “An Unearthly Child”, it turned out there was this whole expansive universe which the Doctor was in the middle of. In “The Cave of Skulls”, it turns out that there are other universes which the Doctor isn’t a part of, and that those universes can render him as powerless as he can render Ian and Barbara.
This has the ultimate effect of putting the Doctor and Ian/Barbara in the same boat – by the end of the episode, they’re all at the mercy of untrustworthy antagonists who have more control over the episode than they do*. And this changes the nature of the story we’re watching quite significantly – the question is no longer whether Coal Hill School can defeat Doctor Who but whether the two shows can reconcile their differences in time to avoid both being cancelled by The Cave of Skulls.
Well, can they?
* Though one of the most immediate issues with this is that, no longer needing an external pivot for the conflict between the Doctor and Ian/Barbara, Susan has become immediately superfluous to the rest of the show and is reduced to little more than screaming at everything.
FNORD 