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?

I Shall Be Ready to Take Over (Doctor Who: The Reign of Terror P6: “Prisoners of the Conciergerie” Review)

Written by Tom

It turns out that [checks notes] Lemaitre was actually [checks notes] James Stirling all along. He gets Ian and Barbara to spy out a meeting between two French conspirators, one of whom turns out to be [checks notes] Napoleon Bonaparte. They find that there are plans afoot for Robespierre to be arrested, tried and executed. Robespierre is then arrested, tried and executed. As a thanks for spying on the meeting, the Doctor is able to get [checks notes] Susan out of prison and Team TARDIS are given passage back to the TARDIS.

Right, let’s get this over with. It’s the final episode of the French serial and all of its set pieces are getting one last airing: the Doctor tricks the jailer one last time, there’s more random French rebels talking in hushed tones about politics, we get a few more excuses for Team TARDIS to play dress up, and then we get a final scene in the TARDIS in order to wrap the series up. The compression does result in an episode where it feels like more is happening than usual, though it also does make you wonder why all of this material has been held back to the final episode. Surely you could’ve got an entire episode out of Barbara and Ian pretending to be the owners of a French tavern, particularly given that it’s a plot which comes with its own sets, costumes and supplementary characters. More than this, deciding to have Napoleon suddenly become an important character, only to feature him for one scene in your final episode, is, to put it charitably, odd.

The episode also provides one final example of Donald Cotton being unable to decide what this serial actually is. On one hand, it’s meant to be a history lesson about the French Revolution featuring a lot of French people double-crossing each other. On the other, it’s a story about Team TARDIS trying to return to the TARDIS. Here’s a major problem – these two narratives are actively competing against each other. The French Revolution material requires us to want to spend a lot of time interacting with the serial’s historical characters. The TARDIS plotline requires us to want Team TARDIS to get as far away from these characters as possible. Thanks to this, the episode finds itself incapable of figuring out what its focus is supposed to be. It needs to wrap up all of its French plotlines, but also needs to give Team TARDIS their required hero moments, and this turns out to be too much material to fit into half an hour, forcing the plot to gloss from event to event as quickly as possible. The serial continues to feel frustratingly surface level as a result.

Are You Serious? (Doctor Who: The Reign of Terror P5: “A Bargain of Necessity” Review)

Written by Tom

Ian is captured and threatened by Leon, only to be saved by *checks notes* either Jules or Jean (I cannot keep track of anyone’s names in this serial for the life of me). The Doctor manages to spring Barbara out of prison, though his attempts to spring Susan out are stopped by *checks notes* Lemaitre, who forces him to betray the revolutionaries or have Susan sent to the Guillotine (again). The Doctor chooses betrayal.

So let’s have a look behind the scenes of this blog. Even though I post these reviews weekly (yes… weekly… *shifty eyes*), I write them much more sporadically. I have rules though: I never watch a new episode until I’ve finished the review for the previous episode, I never watch more than one episode a day, and I always try to keep at least one month’s worth of posts in the bank. The result of this is that the time is takes me to work through a serial can become a good indicator of what I think about it. My posts on the Sensorite serial were all written in the same week because that’s just how much each episode made me want to write. Conversely, I wrote my review of last week’s episode a month ago and have only just now convinced myself to watch this episode. Hell, I started writing this paragraph a week ago and have only now convinced myself to finish it. That’s how uninspiring I’m finding the serial.

At least we’re continuing to head in the general direction of a tone, this episode being the point where it becomes obvious that the serial is actively trying to be a farce. You can tell this because of the two scenes: the one of Doctor and Barbara being stupid enough to loudly fill each other on their various plotlines right next to a thin door that, surprise surprise, has Lamaitre stood on the other side of it; and the other of the Doctor convincing the jailer to let Barbara go as part of some ludicrous rouse that should be incredibly easy to see through. In both cases, the plot isn’t actually being advanced via the machinations of each character but by their stupidity: the Doctor and Barbara should’ve been whispering and the jailer, whose entire personality is that he’s a bit thick, still should’ve been able to see that the Doctor’s “let the prisoner go” plan isn’t actually a good one from his perspective. This type of Idiot Plot, combined with the increased number of comedy set pieces spaced throughout the script, is enough of a standard that it feels deliberate though: we’re in a comedy of manners here.

If only this comedy of manners had, you know, some actual comedy in it. Despite the stupid decisions and atrocious comedy music that plays at the end of most scenes, the actual number of funny things which make it on-screen are… well, there’s the problem, there aren’t any.

What Can This Reign of Terror Possibly Gain? (Doctor Who: The Reign of Terror P4: “The Tyrant of France” Review)

Written by Tom

The Doctor meets Robespierre, a character whose actor is ham on cheese (appropriately enough for a Frenchman). Susan continues fulfilling her plot function of being ill enough to stop everyone around her from being able to act sensibly. Ian finds/gets found by the rebels and is given clues to the whereabouts of James Stirling, the person he’s after. Susan and Barbara get recaptured and sent back to jail (boo!), though this does result in the Doctor and Barbara being reunited (yay!). Meanwhile, Ian meets with Leon Cobert, one of the revolutionaries, only to find out that he’s actually a mole working for the bad guys.

This is the episode where I finally realised that, in contrast to the usual stories about rebels fighting against those with entrenched power, this serial actually follows a range of pro-monarchists fighting against a collection of anti-monarchists. (Well, being anti-anti-monarchist doesn’t necessarily equate to being pro-monarchist, but let’s go with it for the time being.) If I was actually more into the Reign of Terror, maybe I would have been able to figure this out earlier, though it does reveal something that’s a bit of a flaw with the script: namely that it’s still to explain what the motivations and worldviews of half of it’s characters actually are. For a serial that’s meant to be an exploration of France after the revolution, there’s very little exploring happening here.

Indeed, let’s have a closer look at the society being depicted in this episode: a grim place where dissidents are ratted out to the authorities by their fellow countrymen; a place where dissidence results in your disappearance and murder; and where all of this is maintained by a rigid hierarchical system, even if the people at the top say it’s all in the name of equality. This serial isn’t about the French at all, is it? It’s another look at what it’s like to live in Soviet Russia. It’s the Dalek city, or the city from “The Velvet Web”, or the city from “A Sentence of Death”, or the Sense-sphere. Can we make this about the Cold War? Yes we can. We always can.

Evidence Against a Traitor (Doctor Who: The Reign of Terror P3: “A Change of Identity” Review)

Written by Tom

Barbara and Susan are saved from the guillotine by some rebels. Ian manages to escape from prison thanks to a Government official who’s hoping than he’ll led him to some rebels. And the Doctor is now pretending to be the Regional Officer of the Provinces, arriving at the prison holding his companions only to be told that they’re already escaped.

The serial is at least heading towards a consistent tone now, mixing its comedic and dramatic elements more thoroughly. We have the Prison Guard who’s both a major antagonist and a bumbling fool who’s subservient to others; we have a Doctor who’s back in manipulation mode and running rings around other people; and we have the satisfying ending where the two meet, the Doctor in full fancy dress and pulling wool over the Guard’s eyes.

If there is still a problem here, it’s that the comedic elements of the script don’t actually feature much comedy. Even when the Guard is hamming his performance up and the Doctor swans into the scene in a ridiculous outfit, there’s very few jokes to solidify the tone. The most we get are a few plays with logic during the scene in the clothes shop – “If you don’t stock the coat, then of course there’s no demand for it”, etc – but there’s really nothing here to elicit more than the occasional chuckle.

Kept in This Pig Sty (Doctor Who: The Reign of Terror P2: “Guests of Madame Guillotine” Review)

Written by Tom

The Doctor is saved from the burning building by a small boy he met last episode. He starts jaunting to Paris so he can rejoin the plot, only to be temporarily forced into a chain gang. Meanwhile, Ian, Barbara and Susan have been locked in a Parisian cell and are awaiting execution. Ian’s cellmate gives him the side quest of finding a revolutionary and giving him a message. The guards find out about this and, now thinking him a useful way of getting at the revolutionaries, spare Ian the guillotine. Meanwhile Barbara and Susan try escaping their cells, only for Susan to be confronted by rats and immediately accept death.

I want to see the episode that the music department thought they were soundtracking. Every now and then, as the Doctor continues his slow walk to Paris in search of an event, the soundtrack will accompany him with some plinky-plonk music more typical of a Carry On film. The issue is that this will then immediately transfer to scenes of Susan losing her minds in a rat-infested cell and Barbara being sexually advanced on by a prison guard, assuming it’s not already coming off the Doctor being forced into a chain gang and hitting a guy over the head with a shovel. What I’m suggesting here is that the episode might have some tone issues.

I will give the episode its dues though: for the most part, it does hit its intended tone pretty reliably. The issue is that this tone is “crushing misery”, and I just don’t find it that entertaining. Of course, a lot of this series has been pretty miserable (what with its initial setup of “people who don’t naturally get along travelling through a terrifying universe where you must fight for survival”) but at least the show has typically used this setup to investigate some interesting themes. The Dalek serial might’ve had a “Team TARDIS slowly succumb to radiation poisoning” episode but it placed this within a story that rendered atomic poisoning in some interesting ways, abstracting it into an entire landscape and tying it to the political world of 1963. In comparison, I’m just struggling to figure out what this episode has to say outside of “The French Revolution sucked”. Why is Barbara being sexually advanced on other than because it’s unpleasant? What am I meant to be getting out of this other than misery?

I Am Not Master of This Craft (Doctor Who: The Reign of Terror P1: “A Land of Fear” Review)

Written by Tom

The Doctor is trying to throw Ian and Barbara out of the TARDIS; alas he’s taken them to the French Revolution instead of their home. They find a seemingly abandoned house, then find two revolutionaries. The French Army turns up, kills the revolutionaries, capture Ian/Barbara/Susan, then start burning the house with the Doctor still in it…

This is perhaps the least confident start to a serial we’ve had yet. Part of this is possibly a case of comparison – after the past few serials have put such a heavy focus on character development, it’s strange to have the Doctor suddenly revert to his earliest characterisation as a grumpy miser who’s prone to throwing people off his craft. The temptation is to note that Dennis Spooner is a new writer to the show and thus conclude that he’s drawing on an older version of the characters than Lucarotti and Nation are, but once the Doctor leaves the TARDIS, he seems to immediately forget his grumbles and starts giddily investigating his surroundings. This is much more in tune with his current characterisation, implying that the reversion to grump was purely there to get the cliffhanger to work. The constant movement from one version of the character to another puts you on uneven footing, resulting in an uneven tone.

Admittedly, the work with Barbara and Ian is much better. The scene of them playfully flattering the Doctor into leaving the TARDIS with them shows that they’re now characters who know the Doctor well enough to manage his moods. Despite being a scene in which two people manipulate another into not abandoning them, it communicates a cosy familiarity rather than hostility. This is again more in the mode of the Marco Polo serial than it is the Caveman one. But even here, the script veers backwards and forwards between one state and another. The script treats the idea of Ian and Barbara getting kicked out of the TARDIS as bad enough to be a cliffhanger, yet Ian and Barbara themselves seem largely OK with it. Then it turns out that the TARDIS has landed in the wrong place and they’re equally fine with staying with the Doctor. The actual stakes here are quite diffuse – we’re being asked by the cliffhanger to care about something that the script doesn’t treat as an actual problem.