DW EP-BY-EP BONUS: Season One (The Story So Far)

Written by Tom

[So we’ve officially finished reviewing Doctor Who Season One in its entirety. Might as well do some overall conclusions and sketch out some final thoughts before we venture onto Doctor Who 2.0 {which, given our analysis of the show so far, should actually be Doctor Who 3.0 at least, but you get my point}.

Part One: But Wait a Minute, Is This Actually Where Season One Ends?

Before we start though, let’s do a little bit of admin that’s going to prove very useful for our analyses of the first few serials of Season Two. Firstly, let’s ask ourselves a question that feels like it should be obvious: do the Doctor Who episodes running from “An Unearthly Child” to “The Reign of Terror” actually constitute Doctor Who Season One?

There are multiple ways of defining what a season of television is. By far the most common definition is that a season of television is a single block of episodes produced under the same banner which all air in sequence one after another, usually on a weekly basis. Each season is then separated from each other by a large period where the show isn’t being broadcast. Ergo, Doctor Who Season One consists of the serials running from “An Unearthly Child” to “The Reign of Terror” because these aired in the same weekly timeslot one-after-another before stopping for a few weeks, this break in the broadcast marking the end of the season and its return marking the beginning of Season Two. Simple.

Classic Doctor Who does challenge this paradigm though. Take, for example, the Tom Baker era of Doctor Who which started airing at the end of one year and finished airing at the start of the next, taking a break in the middle so that people wouldn’t miss a few episodes during Christmas and New Years. No-one’s really going to claim that “The Brain of Morbius” and “The Seeds of Doom” actually constitute Doctor Who Season 14 purely because Christmas forced there to be a small gap between them and the rest of Season 13, surely?

We Failed (Doctor Who: The Aztecs P4: “The Day of Darkness” Review)

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:

1. Ian gets into the temple room through a tunnel and invents a rope system in order to keep the door open.
2. He saves Susan so that everyone’s together before they reopen the door.
3. The rope system fails, requiring Ian and Susan to go back through the tunnel to re-enter the room.
4. They get captured.
5. Then they escape.
6. Then the Doctor invents a pulley system.
7. 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.

Human Ability Will Suffice (Doctor Who: The Aztecs P3: “The Bride of Sacrifice” Review)

Written by Tom

Susan refuses to get married and, according to Aztec law, must be punished. Tlotoxl tricks Barbara into okaying the punishment, just to be a dick. In contrast to his granddaughter, the Doctor actually does get married. He also finds out that there might be a tunnel into the Aztec temple hidden in the garden and sends Ian down it, only for the tunnel to turn out to be a water pipe. Ixta traps Ian in the pipe as the water level begins to rise…

Two weeks ago, I critiqued the Aztec serial’s colonialist perspective. (Hoo-boy is that a sentence that’s just made a lot of people press the back button.) One week ago, I admitted that the serial was still an incredible amount of fun. This week, I get to thread the needle and discuss both things simultaneously, this episode being an extremely enjoyable watch while also doubling down on the whole “being imperialist” thing.

Let’s start with the fun stuff. The Doctor accidentally getting married is another brilliant plot which wouldn’t be as fun given to anyone else. The highlight of this is the scene where the Doctor realises what he’s done and pulls a face that feels like it’s from a Carry On film. Having Ian respond to the Doctor’s wedding with pure amusement is amusing too, speaking to how much their friendship has become, well, an actual friendship over the past few serials.

Elsewhere, we have Barbara being an absolute badass. She saves Ian from dying in a fight by straight-up threatening to slit Tlotoxl’s throat; she foils an assassination attempt on her by shouting her would-be assassins down; and her revelation that she’s lying about a being a God to Tlotoxl is a fascinating power move, taking the type of social machinations that Tlotoxl plays and spitting them back at him. Barbara’s got a backbone of steel. Despite her badassery though, she’s also walking a thin tightrope and closer to falling off than ever, often looking emotionally exhausted by what she does. In short, her and the Doctor are being fully multifaceted people here, the script being character-led in a way that’s well ahead of its time. It’s astounding material.

The Truth of My Divinity (Doctor Who: The Aztecs P2: “The Warriors of Death” Review)

Written by Tom

Barbara gives up on convincing Tlotoxl (High Priest of Sacrifice) that she’s a God and concentrates on keeping Autloc (High Priest of Knowledge) on side. Meanwhile, the Doctor arranges a meeting with the son of the man who built the temple, teaching him how to poison his contestant in a fight in return for the original temple plans. What he doesn’t know is that the son is Ixta and the person he’s fighting is Ian. Oops.

Last week, I gave this serial a bit of a scrubbing for being pretty colonialist in its attitudes, and nothing has changed this week. It must also be said that this episode is extremely fun to watch though. After the first episode quickly established a distinct want for all of its characters, episode two has immediately started them double-crossing each other on their way to get those wants, and has even started piling multiple double-crosses on top of each other. So we get things like the Doctor thinking himself very clever for helping Ixta cheat in a battle, only for Ixta to be tricking the Doctor into sabotaging Ian. Here we have the drama of Ian being betrayed mixed with the dramatic irony of the Doctor not knowing he’s being tricked, elevated by the Doctor being extremely proud of his machinations right up until he realises that he’s the one who’s been had.

You’ll have noticed that this is all just Lucarotti’s previous Marco Polo serial but set in Mexico instead of China. In both, Team TARDIS land in a foreign historical landscape and immediately lose access to the TARDIS. They meet the two figureheads of a local group, one a basically nice person who likes them and the other a moustache-twirling-villain who doesn’t. Our heroes have to convince the nice person, as well as the local populace, to help them get the TARDIS back, all while constantly having to circumvent the manipulations of the villain. And so things quickly become a series of double-crosses and backstabs as Team TARDIS and the villain fight for Team TARDIS’ reputation.

The difference is that it took us about four episodes to reach the backstabbing stage of the Marco Polo serial, and that the things we got in the first few episodes were such things as “a sandstorm no-one had any problem surviving” and “an explanation of how condensation works“. The Aztec serial has gone straight into the good stuff though, resulting in episodes as packed as those of the Marinus serial but with such things as “coherence” and “themes” thrown in the mix too.

The Good as Well as the Evil (Doctor Who: The Aztecs P1: “The Temple of Evil” Review)

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.