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?

Raving and Ranting (Doctor Who: The Keys of Marinus P4: “The Snows of Terror” Review)

Written by Tom

Ian and Barbara end up in a icy wasteland. They are saved by Vasor, a ham-hock of a man who turns out to have trapped the rest of the cast in a cave. (A Terry Nation episode set in a cave? How novel!) Ian and Barbara go into the cave, are reunited with the others, and find the next Key of Marinus in a block of ice surrounded by four frozen knights. Using some of the copper piping that someone’s installed in the cave (?) to thaw out the key, they end up resurrecting the knights too. Running back to Vasor’s hut, Team TARDIS gets their stuff back and transport to the next episode, leaving Vasor to get shanked by the knights.

It’s a Cave Episode! Every Doctor Who serial so far has had at least one episode primarily dedicated to people moving around caves, whether that be “The Cave of Skulls“, “The Firemaker“, “The Ordeal“, “Five Hundred Eyes“, “The Wall of Lies“, or this. The only exception to this rule has been the TARDIS serial, and that’s presumably purely because that was entirely set in the TARDIS. If the TARDIS had a cave section, they would’ve used it. I assume that the cave is a dramatic location that’s easy to make a set of, while also being a pretty common type of location both in genre fiction and the real world. It’s convenient, in other words. How could we have Doctor Who without caves at this point?

More than that, we have Terry Nation repeating the plot of “The Ordeal” where the episode’s cast has to get over a large cave crevasse. “The Ordeal” is still the worst episode of Doctor Who to have aired so far, but at least Nation seems to have learnt from its mistakes. The crevasse is just one obstacle in an otherwise pretty full episode rather than something which takes up most of the show. There’s a rope bridge for some extra visual interest/jeopardy. Plus, the whole episode is just happier to be silly pulp fiction than the relatively serious Dalek serial was, giving it more leeway. You can get away an element being a bit subpar when it’s one of many elements and most of the other pieces are pulling their weight. *

If You’d Had Your Shoes On, My Boy, You Could Have Lent Her Her’s (Doctor Who: The Keys of Marinus P1: “The Sea of Death” Review)

Written by Tom

If there’s been one superlative element of Doctor Who so far, it’s been the show’s production. At its best, like the first two episodes of the Dalek serial, the production team have pumped out iconic element after iconic element in ways which have elevated the scripts to classic status. At its worst, like the final two episodes of the Dalek serial, the production team have experimented with novel ideas which helped to make up for the pure emptiness of the scripts. More than this, the show obviously knows that production is their strong point and have started to actively rely on it: when the show got extended and everyone decided to grandstand for seven weeks, it was the production standards that they decided to highlight. Doctor Who in 1963 was an incredibly well made show.

This is a fact that you have to hold onto pretty hard during “The Sea of Death” because, let’s be honest, it’s a complete fucking mess.