An Unearthly Child by Anthony Coburn
23 November - 14 December 1963
Episode One - An Unearthly Child
A junkyard, a foggy night in 1963.
It's impossible for someone like me, with 54 years of Who history stretching behind me, to approach this with anything like objectivity. This is the start of the myth, the story that made all the others possible. You and I and everyone who ever loved (or in the case of some, took some perverse glee in hating) Doctor Who owes the creative forces that came together to make this serial an immeasurable debt. That alone tints everything in these four episodes with a curious shade that one can't quite excise.
Of course, it helps that it's also really rather good.
Things which I'd take for granted in any other context - the otherworldly theme and the first glimpse of the police box - stand out for the fact of this being their debut. It's so hard to divorce the quintessential imagery of the series from my own experiences with it, to try and think how it must have caught the eye at the time. We quickly pass from the psychedelic opening and the hypnotic, otherworldly hum of the TARDIS (which we hear for the first time here and, incidentally, is a tremendously underrated audio effect) to the far more mundane setting of a nearby school. The bizarre next to the everyday is a juxtaposition which we'll see hundreds of times from here on out - this is just the first time we get to enjoy it.
How out of place our main characters are made to become exemplifies this theme. And make no mistake; in the title though he may be, it is not through the Doctor, but through Barbara and Ian whom we're meant to look into this story. It's the tale of two English schoolteachers who happen to become swept up in "something that is best left alone", and act as a framing device for the program's original mandate to operate in an educational capacity. The point at which the focus shifts onto the Doctor as a main character is one which I'll be watching for with interest, because I'm not convinced it has happened by this point. Perhaps it'll come with The Dalek Invasion of Earth, or perhaps it won't be until The Chase when the Doctor and his ship will become the only elements from the pilot serial that we still have. Who nose?
But enough about the narrative status of our, oh... let me coin a term here... companions? I won't belabor this wonderful first episode any more than to say that despite (occasionally) received wisdom that one should skip the cavemen bits, the central moral dilemma of the remaining three episodes of this serial is set up in the first encounter between Barbara and Ian and the Doctor at Totter's Lane. The Doctor reacts to the 20th century pair with barely tolerant amusement, hardly worth his time, and turns more acerbic once they burst their way onto the TARDIS (which, incidentally, is a fantastically framed and executed scene). He turns to Susan and blithely talks up how they are simply too primitive to understand its dimensional properties, and then talks down to the pair as if they were somehow less evolved than he. Then the TARDIS rips off toward parts unknown for the first time, to put the lie to the Doctor's superiority...
Episode Two - The Cave of Skulls
A lonely English police telephone box sits amidst drifts of snow. Er, sand. A figure in shadow looms nearby, looking on, before we snap to a very human face of surprise and confusion, covered in grime, and freeze there.
Some people like to call this segment of three episodes 100,000 BC. Fair dinkum. The ways "stories" are delineated at this formative stage in the program's histories is terribly nebulous at best. I'm sure to drone about it again once The Daleks' Master Plan comes around in a hundred years. I've taken the path of least resistance and defined stories by the way they're delineated on Wikipedia's list of all the serials and stories. Simple, no? Either way, the content of these episodes stays the same as it has for the last 54 years, and their content is firmly linked to the previous episode in a way that shouldn't be overlooked.
So, perhaps it's just a matter of me being fairly illiterate where black-and-white television is concerned, but the ambiguity over whether the TARDIS has landed in snow or sand is at the very least something I've heard other people talk about with respect to this story. Further glimpses from this episode show that it is, in fact, a dry landscape of some sort, with distinctly American saguaros rising in the distance. It's easy to poke fun at this, given that human beings didn't reach America for another 75,000 years at least (and the ones who did certainly didn't look British) but I found it more interesting to turn it around and consider that casting the setting as "generic caveman land" is something of a deliberate stroke on the writer's part. This story isn't supposed to take place anywhere in particular - it's just supposed to take place anywhere. 100,000 BC (oops, convention) is the furthest thing from a treatise on anthropology. Indeed, every piece of evidence we have indicates that our early ancestors were far more gentle and moral than you might suspect. These episodes stand as a remark upon modern humankind with a comfortably distant framework through which to view it. That's all.
So what's our first look at humanity as shown through this lens? Dirty, huddled, and superstitious, praying to a primitive sky-god that a half-remembered attempt at firemaking will save them from the ruthless forces of nature on all sides. Heavens, it's just zero to fifty with this stuff, isn't it? We're presented with a pretty bleak take on the foundations of humanity's moral character straight off, but at least a couple of humorous jabs remind us that all isn't alien here. The old woman groans about a simpler time before the invention of fire, and the power struggle between Za and Kal is transparent from the start as any old human political altercation writ at its simplest level, false campaign promises and all. With the TARDIS crew captured by this sorry lot, we're left at the midpoint of this serial with the distinct impression that the Doctor was right about our 20th century humans after all.
Episode Three - The Forest of Fear
I have comparatively less to say about this segment. When compared with the madcap exposition of the first episode and the speedy deterioration of the situation in the second, the third episode feels a little plodding by comparison, with not a whole lot of dramatically new developments occurring aside from our heroes escaping and then being captured again. (I'm told this becomes something of a theme.) Nevertheless, the quiet moment amidst all this becomes a good opportunity for the implications of what's already happened to catch up with both us and the characters.
Doctor Who has been sort of whimsical for as long as I've known it personally, so it's jarring indeed to see that the first time someone is whisked away for an adventure in the TARDIS, it's nothing so much as a kidnapping - and a traumatic one, we see, as it finally catches up to Barbara in this episode as she sobs in exhaustion at their ordeal. It's an emotionally affecting moment, for sure, one which illustrates for the first time (though not the last) the human toll which the Doctor's travels exact. Despite the terror and confusion, though, Barbara shows a wonderful moment of moral steel by turning back to aid a wounded Za, despite his pursuing her and her comrades just a moment before. "Fear makes companions of us all." A not so subtle commentary on the motley crew of protagonists itself.
Notably, even Za, hardly the most sympathetic of supporting characters, shows a capacity to grow and change in his moral character, particularly through this episode, so the bleak image of human nature on display here becomes muddled a little. Personally I find refusing to cave to total cynicism a refreshing thing. The world could use a bit more wide-eyed earnestness.
Episode Four - The Firemaker
The old woman plays an interesting role here in drastically altering the flow of the plot by freeing the TARDIS crew, and then by dint of the manner of her death, in spite of her professed desire for things to stay the same - indeed, apart from the Doctor himself and perhaps Barbara, she becomes the single greatest agent of change in this whole story. Thanks to her intrigues, Za and Kal's confrontation now hurdles towards its terrible conclusion. The real event horizon past which this can only end in violence comes when the Doctor gives us the first taste of his showman's flair in dramatically exposing Kal for the murder of the old woman. ("This knife shows what is has done.") Sealed in the Cave of Skulls again for their ability to make fire, our heroes are helpless to do anything but watch as Kal confronts Za to see this conflict out to the end.
The following sequence is actually really interesting. Forget the silly caveman wrestling; the camerawork flashes between their faces in interestingly revelatory fashions, telling us a little something about each of our main characters. The Doctor looks on, stony, distant. Ian watches with horrified fascination. Barbara can't quite keep her eyes on the fight, seeming uncomfortable. And Susan, in a prelude of what's surely to come, appears on the verge of tears. The moment when Za crushes Kal's head with an enormous rock has no business being so grim when it looks as silly as it does. But that's the magic of Doctor Who at work - here, as it turns out, in quite a grisly way.
And so, left alone in the wake of that, Susan at least gets one moment of wonderful ingenuity to bear out the promise of the child genius we saw glimpses of in the first episode, providing the party with their means to escape. One last time, they race through the forest, hounded and afraid, the Doctor stepping over a fallen Barbara on the way. By the time that they reach the TARDIS, haggard, dirty, chased like wild animals, there doesn't seem to be much of a difference between any of them and the cavemen whom they have spent the last few days dreading. The ship fades away with its unmistakable, unearthly groan, leaving the Tribe of Gum to stand, slackjawed, perhaps wondering just who they had been keeping prisoner.
Overview
On this note, then, our story ends, sans a small coda leading into the next installment. As much as the first episode stands alone in a timeless, extraordinary way, the next three set the foundations for something truly great. When we see Barbara tend to a wounded Za, we realize that the essence of humanity, something which is here equated with civilization, is compassion. Between the infamous skull-bashing scene and his seeming indifference to his human stowaways, we're led to wonder if the Doctor is really as far above Barbara and Ian in terms of civilization as he seems to believe. He certainly has a long way to go before he becomes the magical, mercurial, and above all likable character he will someday grow to be.
I look forward to it.
The Daleks is up next.
Unforgettable Dialogue
"Have you ever thought what it's like, to be wanderers in the fourth dimension?"
"Fire will kill us all in the end."
"Tomorrow, I kill many bears!"
Dialogue I wish I could forget
"Remember, Susan, the red Indian..."
(Modified from the original posted at Gallifrey Base on 23 August 2017.)
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