Written by Tom
Getting released from the Cave of Skulls by an old woman who’s scared of fire, Team TARDIS leg it through a forest (of fear) while being pursued by Za and Hur. Meanwhile, Kal finds that Team TARDIS and Za are missing, using this to unite the rest of the caveman tribe behind him and become their de-facto leader.
After two episodes of set-up, The Forest of Fear gives us an episode where the series finally settles down into being a relatively straightforward adventure serial. Two things elevate it. Firstly, the forest sets are really damn good. The murkiness that comes with slightly fuzzy, 1960s black-and-white cameras means that the bits that look more like a set all bleed away, leaving you in a dense collection of trees and foliage that is surprisingly immersive. Sure, it lacks any great visual set pieces but it does its job with aplomb.
Secondly, we have the interesting way that the episode’s plot suddenly twists come its midpoint. The first half of the episode follows on from our now established status quo: can Team TARDIS stop arguing long enough to get to the TARDIS and avoid being killed by Za? But then everything changes: Za gets attacked by a beast and is mortally wounded, requiring Team TARDIS to help them. Suddenly, the chase is over and our characters are something closer to safe. So now the narrative question moves from “How do we survive this merciless situation” to “Should we show mercy, even when in a merciless place?” In response to this, Ian and Barbara completely overrule the Doctor in order to establish that yes, we should show mercy. In doing, Ian and Barbara gain power over the cavemen, the people at the bottom rung of the serial’s ladder suddenly rising up to take over the top.
This is an important step in defining what Doctor Who is. As discussed previously, the Doctor is still the main representative of Doctor Who, this bizarre metafiction in which the entirety of TV could spectacularly implode at any minute. Meanwhile Ian and Barbara represent Coal Hill School, a more humane soap opera about two school teachers. Doctor Who is by far the more interesting series, mostly because it has spaceships and cavemen and exciting chases through forests, but it’s also an absolutely brutal show currently defined by its alien quality and extreme violence. What is missing is the human touch, and that’s what Ian and Barbara provide. Doctor Who is not just a show about teatime brutality for tots, nor is it just a show about people trying to survive impossible situations, but it’s about the mundane interacting with the impossible and discovering how it can affect it. Here, the answer to “what can we do when faced with the impossible” is “show kindness where possible”.
This does has the affect of completely steamrolling the Doctor though. Given that this is the second episode in a row which is dedicated to diminishing him and that his main role in the episode is to be on the “smash people’s heads in with a rock” side of the help/hinder debate, the result is the first episode of the series where the Doctor is straightforwardly unlikable. There’s none of the Machiavellian joy of his An Unearthly Child performance here, merely an old man who can’t understand why you shouldn’t leave people for dead and who can’t stop bickering with people. This is presumably part of the point – I don’t think it’s a coincidence that his worldview is most closely aligned to that of the cavemen in a serial about how much we need to get away from the goddamn cavemen – but it does render him as one of the least entertaining elements of his own programme.
(Also, how notable is it that Susan has nothing to do with the help/hinder debate at all? After having performed her narrative function of getting the Doctor, Ian and Barbara in the same room as each other, they’ve immediately run out of other things to do with her.)
So yes, this is the first episode of the show where it has a bit of a wobble – it’s still figuring itself out and slightly overestimates how fun it is to watch its main cast bicker for half an hour. But it’s another stepping stone towards defining Doctor Who and what it could be, filtered through a pretty effective action adventure chase with a quite interesting twist in the second act. If this is a wobbly episode of the programme, it’s not doing bad.
FNORD 