Written by Tom
Ian finally gets to the TARDIS and, after a lot of captures and escapes, Team TARDIS finally leg it. When I say “a lot of escapes and captures”, I mean it too: Ian escapes the tunnel, Ian helps Susan escape the Aztec guards, Ian and Susan get captured by the Aztecs guards, Cameca helps Ian and Susan escape the Aztec guards…
The result feels both strangely easy and overly complicated at the same time. I mean, let’s have a look at a more detailed summary of the episode:
- Ian gets into the temple room through a tunnel and invents a rope system in order to keep the door open.
- He saves Susan so that everyone’s together before they reopen the door.
- The rope system fails, requiring Ian and Susan to go back through the tunnel to re-enter the room.
- They get captured.
- Then they escape.
- Then the Doctor invents a pulley system.
- Everyone uses the rope system to get into the room.
You’ll have noticed that you can jump immediately from point 2 to point 7 without losing anything. Sure, you wouldn’t have Autloc losing his faith; that said, the guy disappears during Act Three anyway and there’s no reason why you couldn’t write that material in during the Aztec’s preparations for the eclipse. You’d also not have Cameca helping Team TARDIS in point 5, though you could just as easily work her into point 2. (Hell, point 2 and point 5 are the same beat, just one with Cameca and one not.) It feels like an inelegant structure to end the serial with.
That’s not really the problem though. The big issue is that the above list just doesn’t feel like the story that the previous episodes promised. The previous parts had successfully made quite a bit out of Susan being punished during the upcoming eclipse. From a narrative perspective, having everything culminate in a ceremony surrounding an eclipse is excellent – it extends naturally out of the serial’s setup, is something that would cause all of the serial’s main characters to come together at the same place and time, and the darkness of eclipse would give you a dramatic visual which would elevate everything into a more mythic register. Yet the entire plot gets resolved before the ceremony happens. Given how much it’s been built up, you’d have expected Team TARDIS to interact with it in some way.
Luzarotti has good reasons for not doing this though. The end of the serial is very staunch that Team TARDIS have failed at pretty much everything they tried to do: Barbara couldn’t convince the Aztecs to renounce human sacrifice, Ian couldn’t topple Ixta as the town’s main warrior, the Doctor had his marriage fall apart despite genuinely liking his fiancé, Susan spent every scene making things worse for herself, Toxtotl has complete control of his village now, and Autloc’s a mad hermit wandering around the deserts. The presence of Team TARDIS has been useless at best and actively harmful at worst. Read in the colonialist context that we’ve been using for much of this serial, the end conclusion is that Team TARDIS were wrong to walk into Aztec society and try changing things. As such, this desire to have Team TARDIS interact with the eclipse ceremony is actually us missing the point. To have them interact with the ceremony would be to pretend that they can positively affect it, something we now know they can’t, and so Team TARDIS and the ceremony are instead kept separate, the script figuring this to be best for all.
The script isn’t using Team TARDIS’ failings to chastise the Team though but instead to morally condemn the Aztecs, its implication being that Aztec society could’ve been saved if only they’d listened to their (European, more advanced) betters. This is what all the eclipse imagery is about. It has been repeatedly specified to us that this story takes place during the end of the Aztec reign, just before the Spaniards are due to turn up and wipe the civilisation off the map. This has been tied to a sense that Aztec society is morally rotten, both because it practices human sacrifice and because most of the people in it appear to be Toxtotl-style brutes. The eclipse is thus a literalisation of this perceived darkness within Aztec society, Team TARDIS’ exit coinciding with the historical moment just before things get inescapably bleak for them. They had one last chance but chased them out of town; now all that’s left is darkness.
It’s at this point that we should note how much this element of the script is morally abhorrent (or, to use the buzzword again, colonialist). There are ways you could be able to squint and make it a bit more palatable. As we often note in these posts, 60s Britain (and post-war Britain in general) was a time of massive social upheaval. Conversely, the faults of both the Aztecs and Barbara in this serial come from their unwillingness to change and compromise. So we have a show which is consciously pro-change in an age of mass-upheaval judging those who reject it. Suddenly, we can see where its message that a society will die once its lost its ability to buck tradition might’ve come from. [It’s also not going to be the last time that this sci-fi show sides with knowledge over faith and suspicion.]
And taking things away from politics for a bit, the episode’s theme of failure is pretty interesting when taken within the context of Doctor Who overall. In previous posts, we’ve had a lot about how Doctor Who historicals tend to be intensely metafictional stories where Team TARDIS land in a place with alien narrative structures to them and have to fight to keep their show functioning as Doctor Who. This has historically been used by the programme as a way of commenting on itself: the caveman serial ultimately showed that what Doctor Who brought to its alien world was the spark of humanity, while the Marco Polo serial argued that Doctor Who actually had a lot to learn from its interactions with Marco Polo. The Aztecs serial is unique though in that it’s the first time when Team TARDIS has been completely written out of their own programme. There is nothing to be learnt from here and the best thing the characters can do is get out. It turns out that Doctor Who has limits. This will significantly up the stakes for the show going forwards now that we know that Team TARDIS can actually fail.
Of course, there is still one more wrinkle within this whole thing. This is the serial in which the Doctor famously makes a lot out of not changing history. It’s also one where he laments how the Aztecs haven’t invented wheels before carving one out of wood and using it in his pulley system. The thing is, the Doctor leaves his pulley system behind when he escapes in the TARDIS, meaning that the Aztecs now have access to something which shouldn’t exist at this point of the timeline. Team TARDIS’ presence has changed history after all: the Aztecs have the wheel.
This is one of those details which is easy to make too much of. Certainly the episode itself doesn’t focus on it, else it would’ve had a shot of an Aztec picking the wheel up or something. On the other hand, the pulley system is almost entirely a concern during points 3 to 6 of the above list – i.e. the sections of the plot which are nominally unneeded. Put another way, it would have been easier and simpler to write a version of this story which didn’t feature the wheel than it would’ve been to construct the version that did. We also got a lot of scenes this week which featured the Doctor making the wheel, including one in which Cameca looked at it and wondered it was. It’s a thread the episode has laid, despite seeming uninterested in pulling it.
And maybe that’s the episode in a nutshell. After three episodes of Doctor Who being made to absolutely sing (despite exhibiting some questionable ethics), we get a concluding episode in which things suddenly become markedly imprecise. It doesn’t matter too much in this instance – ultimately after three of the best Doctor Who episodes yet, you’ve earned the benefit of the doubt when the final one goes a bit iffy. That said, it is notable how Doctor Who is still to have a serial that really sticks its landing. Doctor Who is a show with staunch limits.
FNORD 