Written by Tom
The TARDIS lands in an Aztec temple on the wrong side of a one-way door. Left to her own devices for ten minutes, Barbara gets mistaken for a God and decides to go along with it. The Doctor and Ian go into the Aztec town with the intention of finding out how to open the door, only for the Doctor to start outrageously flirting with the first woman he sees and Ian to get challenged to a fight to the death. When Barbara finds out that the town uses human sacrifice, she decides to make them not do that. This pisses off the Doctor because it amounts to rewriting history, and pisses off the town’s High Priest of Sacrifice for reasons that are obvious.
And so we continue through this strange mini-era where Doctor Who exclusively alternates between Terry Nation and John Lucarotti serials. What observations can we get out of this mini-era? The most obvious one to make is that Terry Nation and John Lucarotti are very different writers. Nation writes the sci-fi episodes, carrying himself with a pulp sensibility that cares more for caves than coherence. In contrast, Lucarotti writes the historical ones, focussing on more patient examinations of how the characters relate to their environments, incident be damned. This isn’t a writing partnership of two people working on one show but two very disconnected writers taking it in turns to write two very different programmes.
On one hand, it shows Doctor Who keeping to the breadth of its original remit where it was to be a thoughtful show teaching kids science and history lessons in the form of exciting adventures. On the other, the fact that each serial has to fit into the action-adventure mould does flatten things slightly. When every serial features Team TARDIS walking out, getting in an awkward relationship with some of the locals, and having to work with them while figuring out the easiest way of getting out of the situation (as almost every episode of the show has been so far), what originally seems like diversity can start to look like window dressing. The show has established a good baseline for itself, but it’s still beginning to feel like there’s further it can be pushed. Maybe something this flexible needs more than the same two people working on it.
The second thing we can note is how much the past few episodes have really started trying to push the show’s characters. Earlier serials such as the Dalek and Marco Polo ones write Team TARDIS as a collection of archetypes trying to survive various hostile locations. The scripts’ events aren’t particularly built around the individual neuroses of each character, they’re just unpleasant situations to put people in and thus interesting things to see their reactions to. But over the past few episodes, there has been a shift towards plotlines which have been tailored to the characters within them. “The Screaming Jungle” puts a lot of effort into creating an setup where it can purely focus on Ian and Barbara’s relationship. “The Sentence of Death” making the Doctor a defence lawyer takes advantage of his dual position as an authority and a rebel. This then leads us to this week’s episode in which everyone in the cast gets their own specialist plotline that’s specifically tailored to them.
“Barbara becomes a God” is the episode’s main plot and it’s brilliant. Barbara is perhaps the most competent character of the main cast and is the only person capable of really working in multiple registers, being able to relate to people on an emotional level while also holding her own in action sequences and being good at deductions. Unfortunately for her, she’s also a woman in an action-adventure show from the 1960s, meaning that she spends a lot of her time getting kidnapped and threatened. Because of this, there’s always been the sense that Barbara is a better character than her genre will allow her to be. As such, her becoming a God is satisfying because it’s finally a good position that she feels like she deserves.
At the same time though, Barbara seems uniquely disqualified to be a God. She can be quite a rash figure who runs into situations and gets over her head. “An Unearthly Child” has her stalking a pupil because she doesn’t really have much better to do. The plot of “The Screaming Jungle” only really gets started when she grabs a fake Marinus key and gets caught in a trap. The backend of the Dalek serial has her swap trousers with a Thal. So even though she does deserve to be given a position of power, she is also the person most likely to either abuse it or get into trouble. This gives the plot a tension that you wouldn’t get from anyone else. The Doctor and Ian couldn’t be a God because they’d acquit themselves too well to the role, while Susan couldn’t be a God because she’d be too much of a disaster. Meanwhile Barbara has it in her to be a good God but also a bad one. The question of whether she’ll be able to successfully fill the role or not is more open-ended than it would be for anyone else, thus providing the juiciest narrative hook.
Built onto this is the beginning of a debate about whether Barbara is right to want to change Aztec society by outlawing human sacrifice. From Barbara’s view, her position is a more enlightened one which features less suffering and death. From the Doctor’s view, time is sacrosanct whether you have issues with it or not. And while the episode itself seems quite resolute on the idea that the Aztec’s use of human sacrifice definitely isn’t good (I mean, the episode’s literally called “The Temple of Evil”), it does take care to point out that this debate is actually happening within the society itself, placing Tlotoxl the High Priest of Sacrifice on one side of the debate and Autloc the High Priest of Knowledge on the other.
This makes the script into a discussion of colonialism. Barbara’s “my culture is more enlightened and I have the right to change other cultures to fit it” is colonialism in a nutshell, and the fact that this worldview gets directly challenged in this script is to be commended. That said, how well it tackles the theme is up for debate. It’s notable, for example, that the Doctor’s argument in favour of allowing the Aztecs to remain themselves isn’t actually based on them being their own people and on respecting their way of living but is instead all abstract pragmatics about keeping the timestreams stable and learning how to open a door. Elsewhere, Team TARDIS are openly critical of the Aztecs civilisation’s use of sacrifice and never really get contradicted, meaning that the view of Aztec society as a relatively backwards society which is 90% violent bullshit never actually gets challenged. In short, the debate isn’t actually about whether Barbara is right to dislike Aztec society but whether she is right to act on that dislike, particularly when keeping quiet would be more strategically advantageous.
Put another way, the debate here isn’t really about the relative worth of different societies but about whether one should act according to your principles or according to pragmatics. Is it acceptable to act against your beliefs for the greater good or should you stand up for your beliefs, even if doing so would be self-defeating and cause resistance? The temptation here is to do our usual thing and relate this to post-WWII/Cold War anxieties. The last time Barbara could see something blatantly wrong with a society but proved powerless to affect it was “The Velvet Web“, an episode we read as capturing what it’s like to be a political dissident. While the Aztec serial lacks any of the references to collectivism that would be needed to hang a proper Cold War reading on, the fact that both of Doctor Who‘s writers arrived at the same plotline a month apart shows how prevalent these ideas were at the time.
And Cold War subtexts or not, the principal/pragmatist reading is a good one in that it allows us to understand what’s happening in Ian’s part of the plotline. Over the course of the plot, Ian keeps making decisions he doesn’t agree with because they might help him to open the temple door. Such decisions include “agreeing to a fight to the death” and “accompanying a man to his sacrifice”. If Barbara’s plot represents the principle side of the debate and all the issues that comes with this, then Ian represents the pragmatic side.
What of the Doctor and Susan then? The Doctor is an interesting figure in that he largely keeps shifting position based on what the plot needs him to do. For the most part, he’s the main figure left alone to actually investigate the Aztec society. In doing so, he becomes pretty much our only window into a view of the Aztecs as something other than a series of blood-thirsty warriors. It’s perhaps not much given how much the script focuses on the Aztecs being 90% blood-thirsty warriors, but at least it’s something.
At the end of the episode though, the Doctor also becomes the person who argues with Barbara about the merits of trying to change history, allowing Lucarroti to take the themes of his serial and write them into the actual text. Taken alongside his Aztec society investigating, this makes the Doctor into the person who guides our focus around the varying parts of the plot, giving us ways of looking at various parts of the episode such that we can best contextualise what’s going on in it. He’s our grounding element, his priorities becoming ours. This also makes him show’s mouthpiece, hence why his opinions carry so much weight. This in turn reflects back upon Barbara’s plotline. When the Doctor says that time can’t be changed and she tries anyway, Barbara is in many ways fighting against the show itself when she does, adding extra weight and a certain tragic dimension to her actions. If Barbara and Ian are the two sides of a moral debate, then the Doctor is whatever he needs to be in order to ensure that this moral debate remains linked to an actual plot.
This leaves Susan who, as per usual, gets lost in the mix without a plot of her own. She does have a plot by the end of the episode, essentially getting shoved into a school after getting in the way during the final scene, but this is firmly established as a narrative I.O.U., setting up what she’ll be doing next week rather than giving her much to do today. Once again, a four person TARDIS crew turns out to be more than the average half-hour can handle.
Then again, this is a dense half-hour. A series of plots have been wrapped around our characters and turned into a moral conundrum. Over this has been laid the aesthetics and touch points of a historical culture, using the Aztecs as a veneer through which to understand a more personal debate about private responsibility. This does result in the serial taking a distinctly colonialist view of the Aztecs, something it maintains at all times. It also shows how sophisticated the series’ characters are becoming though. Like you’d expect from a colonialist text, the British characters find themselves centralised in a world of problematically represented Others.
FNORD 