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we're trying to defeat the Daleks, not start a jumble sale!
Wednesday, 15 March 2023 21:23I think I've wandered off from my Classic Who rewatch again now, but I watched a loooooot of First Doctor stories over the last few months. Here's some things I wrote about them as I went along.
from "The Space Museum" to "The Ark"
- On rewatch I really think The Space Museum is underrated, not least because of the fact that our heroes keep having the same conversation about the same unsovable problem (will their actions cause or prevent the future they've already seen?) and somehow it works every time. Plus there's all the delightful bits we all know about already: the Doctor hiding in the dalek, Ian vs Barbara's cardigan, Vicki joining the rebellion and immediately taking over because all the rebels are REALLY BAD at rebelling.
- Vicki herself: also a delight. Such a charming self-contained weirdo, I love her.
- The first episode of "The Chase" is so good - seeing the Beatles on the spacetime visualiser was weirdly thrilling - and Ian and Barbara's leaving scene gets me every time. I don't, however, love the Marie Celeste episode - it feels like someone came up with what felt to them like a very clever idea to have the solution to the mystery be that the Daleks killed everyone on board, but then didn't think until they came to write it that actually, that's horrible to witness. And then made it worse by having most of them jump overboard themselves. It really mars what's otherwise a pretty good story.
- Basically the first thing we see Steven do is almost get himself and everyone else killed because he went back for his teddy bear: perfect, no notes, love him.
- I'm really interested in the evolution of the historical story in this period: we get two comedy historicals and one historical with speculative elements in quick succession, and although the latter works much better than the former, I don't think it's down to anything inherent to the format. The Time Meddler is just an absolutely cracking story with everyone firing on all cylinders - the only thing I don't like about it is the implied off-screen sexual assault, which to be fair is handled remarkably well, I just don't like it. (I suppose the fact that the Vikings all sound like they've been to RADA could also count as a flaw, but consider: it's hilarious.) Meanwhile The Romans is full of good things and mostly blends comedy and serious stuff very well, but to be truly great it just needed to a) tighten up what it's trying to say about Nero, comedy, power and privilege, and b) not... play attempted rape for laughs. D: And then there's The Myth Makers - the idea of doing three episodes of comedy and then devastating us with an episode of tragedy is not a bad one, but the execution, despite some nice moments is... well, maybe it would work better if we still had the pictures. (I didn't quite get to The Gunfighters, which iirc tries for a similar thing and still doesn't quite make it work, but does a better job overall.)
- To be fair to The Myth Makers, the moment where Steven drops his bickering with Vicki to urge her to get Troilus to safety, if she really cares about him, is excellent - it succeeds in microcosm at what the story as a whole doesn't really achieve.
- (I've just looked up what I said about The Myth Makers last time I watched it and apparently it really worked for me? Maybe I was just in a bad mood this time round.)
- Back to The Time Meddler for a moment, the scene where Vicki thinks she and Steven have been left behind hits so much harder in the context of her actually having been left behind in the previous story, wow.
- Also on The Time Meddler, I cannot get over what a genius idea it was to have a new companion who refuses to believe the TARDIS can travel in time in the same story as a time travelling antagonist who leaves anachronistic tech lying around all over the place. So simple in many ways, but so funny.
- Relatedly, I had fully forgotten that the Monk was in The Daleks' Master Plan. The tone shifts in that serial are absolutely wild - I'd remembered that "The Feast of Steven" (which I watched on Christmas Day like the wizard of timing I am) was a complete break from the previous episode, but not that it carried on like that!
- The Doctor and Steven are very sweet with each other at the beginning of The Massacre, which really works as a reaction to everything they went through in The Dalek's Master Plan. And the contrast between that and the ending - Steven's entirely understandable anger and the Doctor's grief - is really a lot. I really wish this serial still existed, I feel like there's some really interesting stuff going on, but even with the recon I was really struggling.
- Speaking of, I've been watching the Loose Cannon recons for episodes where there's no animated version, and I am just fascinated by them, I wish they all came with little essays on what material was available, what they supplemented it with and how and why they made all those choices.
- I don't know if it's a callback to Steven not believing that the TARDIS could travel in time, but I love that he is briefly convinced that Dodo's right and they've landed in Whipsnade at the beginning of The Ark.
- I think The Ark gets a bit lost because it's a fairly standard story in a season that's just all over the place - it's a decent story with some great moments (the twist at the end of episode two!), but it's just a lot more normal, especially in retrospect, than everything else around it. It also suffers a bit because two of its big ideas are things it's best not to think too much about because otherwise the whole show would fall apart: what if our heroes are tracking germs everywhere and accidentally causing plagues, and what if their intervention has massive unintended consequences?
- The design of the story, particularly the costumes, is gloriously, perfectly sixties, though, and I loved it.
