#classicdw

Doctor Who’s third trip to the past has a very simple premise: The crew get separated from the TARDIS by a stone wall and have to hang around with some Aztecs until they work out how to get it open again. There’s not even any need for them to win over the locals, as Barbara gets mistaken for a goddess and is immediately ingratiated into their society. There’s no epic journey, no monsters, and on the face of it the jeopardy is very small.

But The Aztecs isn’t trying to be an epic; it’s a character piece, one which places the Doctor and his companions into an unfamiliar society and shows them trying to survive. This came about partly due to a letter from William Russell’s agent, who was (entirely rightly) complaining that his client had had naff all to do during Marco Polo - and he wasn’t the only one. Everyone has something to do in The Aztecs (bar Susan, thanks to Carol Ann Ford’s holiday), and not everyone comes out of it unchanged.

Take the Doctor, for instance. After five stories with the Doctor as a serious, often cranky old man, William Hartnell suddenly gets given a love story. Cameca is the first person the Doctor’s met (with the possible exception of Kublai Khan) who he regards as an equal, and he’s clearly smitten with her from the moment he lays eyes on her. It’s a whole new side to the Doctor, and he’s clearly upset at having to leave her at the story’s end - a real eye-opener for me, as I hadn’t expected that kind of emotional depth from these early tales.

Ian, meanwhile, gets to go full alpha male as he plays soldier for a bit. He gets himself into several difficult situations as a result of the Doctor’s meddling, leading to one of the big frustrations I had with this story - several of the problems the TARDIS crew have could have been solved if only they’d asked for a bit more clarification on the things they were being asked to do. Perhaps we’re meant to assume that the Doctor was just too lovestruck to think straight.

The other frustration I have with The Aztecs is that the TARDIS crew are… kind of dicks. They spend the whole story giving Tlotoxl the runaround, insisting he’s wrong about them and generally making him look stupid, but… He’s entirely right. It may be an understandable act of self-preservation on the part of the Doctor and chums, but they’re also pretty selfish.

And of course Tlotoxl is cast as the villain due in part to his role in the human sacrifices of the Aztecs, which brings us round to the most interesting part of the story: Barbara’s attempts to change history, and her failure to do so. It’s this that raises The Aztecs above being just a knockabout historical romp; the question of whether the regulars can affect the past is a natural one to ask, and I don’t know if it’s ever handled quite so well again - certainly not in ‘classic’ Who.

It’s hard to judge Terry Nation’s follow-up to The Daleks as a single story, really, because it certainly isn’t written as one. In a noble attempt to break up the six-part tale, The Keys of Marinus is really four one-part stories and a concluding two-parter. The first episode is your now-standard exploring-an-alien-planet bit, and if nothing else it’s notable for being the first time Ian and Barbara get stuck into the adventure without referencing home in some way; they’ve resigned themselves to their fate. Tegan Jovanka could really learn something from these two. Many things, really.

They run into Arbitan, who I was surprised to learn is played by a well-known actor of the time; perhaps he was having an off day here, as his performance is just dreadful. He’s trying to protect the planet Marinus from the Voord. The Voord are the first of Doctor Who’s attempts to replicate the success of the Daleks, and… they fail miserably. It’s not that there’s anything inherently wrong with the Voord - their design has a certain sixties flair to it, even if they clearly are just regular blokes in rubber fetish gear - but they’re given sod all to do, popping by for ten minutes at the start and another ten at the end to wrap things up.

Why couldn’t it have been the Voord who manipulated the crew in episode two? Why couldn’t the Voord have been chasing them through the ice caves in episode four? They don’t have to appear in every episode, but if they’d popped up at least somewhere in the middle of the story it would have gone a long way towards cementing their reputation in the minds of the viewers.

It’s The Crystal Maze in space, basically, as they travel through the four time zones and pick up microcircuits to return to Arbitan at the Crystal Dome. The first location is a basic ‘be careful what you wish for’ morality tale, which refreshingly sets Barbara up as the protagonist while her friends lounge around eating worms, or whatever it is they did. The split between the real and illusory worlds is an interesting and well-realised conceit, but it’s a shame that there couldn’t have been a more cerebral solution than Babs knocking some jars on the floor.

I can’t tell if the next two episodes suffer because of William Hartnell’s absence or are just a bit rubbish in their own right. There’s very little to say about the third episode, which sees Ian and Barbara fannying around in a greenhouse solving rudimentary puzzles for quarter of an hour. It fills the allotted time, but it doesn’t do much else with it. Episode four sees everyone running away from an attempted rapist, so that’s fun. It’s not a bad episode as such, but it’s not especially memorable either, and the ice caves themselves are pretty poorly realised.

The thing is, it doesn’t really matter that these episodes aren’t among Doctor Who’s finest, because each of them is over and done with in twenty minutes or so and it’s onto the next locale. It’s a slightly artificial way of increasing the pace of the serial, but it works. The final segment of the Key to Tim is spread over two episodes, but the serial is on much more solid ground - not only is William Hartnell back from his holidays but he’s plunged into a fairly standard courtroom drama, as Ian is put on trial for suspected murder. It may not be especially suspenseful - we know Ian won’t be executed, and it’s made obvious who the killer is quite early on - but it’s suitably dramatic, and Hartnell has some meaty material to sink his teeth into playing the role of Ian’s defence lawyer.

This is a first for this ‘rewatch’: not only is it the first reconstructed story I’m watching (I’m going for the black-and-white Loose Cannon recon, if anyone cares), but it’s also the first story I’ve never watched before in full. I’ve previously only seen the half-hour version on the Edge of Destruction DVD – and this is a seven-parter, so that version had to cut one or two things out.

Having given us seven weeks of hard science fiction and a two-act character play, we’ve circled back round to Doctor Who’s educational remit for a purely historical tale based around the real-life figure of Marco Polo. We do learn a bit about Polo, his relationships and his journey, but mostly he’s there as a friendly antagonist for the TARDIS crew to play against. Mark Eden does a sterling job as the charismatic Polo, who is charming enough that you can almost accept how readily the regulars accept their situation for much of the story.

Polo is widely regarded as one of Doctor Who’s great lost epics, and in some ways it’s easy to see why; in terrestrial terms the story covers a vast distance, and we’re periodically reminded of the amount of ground being traversed with the help of Indiana Jones-style maps and excerpts from Polo’s diaries. The existing photos suggest that this was a lavish production, with sets and costumes befitting the delay in this serial’s production. The BBC has always been good at producing period dramas, and this serial plays to those strengths.

The flip side of this is that not an awful lot actually happens in the story, and by the midpoint it starts to feel quite formulaic - arrive somewhere, have the TARDIS crew bicker with Marco and fail to get their key back, show Tegana looking a bit shifty and move to the next location. And it’s another anticlimax of an ending, as Marco eventually just shrugs and gives the Doctor his key back.

But what Marco Polo lacks in plot, it makes up for in character. The regulars may not have much to do in the story, but we get to spend a lot of time with them, and Susan in particular benefits as she befriends young servant Ping Cho - after the running with scissors incident in the last story, it’s a welcome change to see her just being a teenager for a while. Marco Polo may not quite live up to its reputation, but it’s a solid tale whose absence from the archives is a great shame.

Memorable Moments:

Ian and Barbara’s joy at being back on Earth at the start of the story is a nice moment after some pretty unrelenting misery for the unwitting travellers. The script spends just enough time touching on this arc before launching the pair into inquisitive adventure mode.

The Doctor’s absence from all but a single scene of episode two sticks out like a sore thumb, with the explanation that the old man is simply in his room having a sulk for the whole episode struggling to ring true. Certainly if any Doctor is going to have a sulk it’s Hartnell, but for him not to emerge during the raging sandstorm - especially when they learn his granddaughter is caught up in it - just feels wrong.

Speaking of the sandstorm, it’s a pretty horrible experience - both for the characters, in an already oppressive episode, and for the viewer; I have no idea what a sandstorm sounds like, but here the Radiophonic Workshop somehow manage to tap into the sound of hell.

The scenes between Tegana and Marco, particularly in episode two, are among the story’s most engaging; two charismatic antagonists trading double-edged barbs under the guise of civility, with a lot more being said between the two than it first appears.

Ping-Cho’s story in Part Three may bring proceedings to a grinding halt (Almost as much as when she decides to stop and look at some pretty fishies in Part Five), but it does inspire the first - and presumably the only - mention of hashish in Doctor Who. Purely medicinal, I’m sure.

A scene that doesn’t get served well by the reconstruction is the end of Part 3, in which Susan enters the cave which she’s been told contains hundreds of stone masks - and screams because she sees a stone mask. The recon contains a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of human eyes behind the mask - but I blinked, I missed it, and the whole thing seemed pretty ridiculous until the start of the next episode, in which we’re reliably informed that the mask moved. Yeah, if you say so.

Either the sixties were a different time or the Doctor Who production team were massive racists, because Part Four introduces us to several ‘comedy characters’ with names like Ling Tau and Wang Lo - all played by Caucasian men in yellowface. It might be one of the few times that Doctor Who has actually made me want to hide behind the sofa.

On the plus side, Ian Chesterton pretending to be drunk is probably one of the greatest moments from Doctor Who’s history that are missing from the archives. If only we could see him staggering around while listening to him slur his words, I think the world would be a better place.

Something I’m glad we don’t have to see is William Hartnell exaggerating his aches and pains in Kublai Khan’s court - just listening to him over-egging it is bad enough. But I really like that they gave the Doctor a friend to bond over being past it with; it makes me wish Marco’s caravan had one fewer stop along the way and arrived at Khan’s palace much sooner.

And lastly, having spent two whole episodes building it up, Ping Cho’s arranged marriage subplot is waved away with a comment that her intended has died off screen. Granted, it was one of the less important storylines that needed wrapping up, but you have to wonder why they bothered to introduce it at all if they were going to throw it away in such an offhand manner.

Lingering Questions:

I’m sure many of us have been guilty of letting people take advantage of our good nature at some point in our lives, but it’s hard not to wonder about Marco Polo here. He extends the hand of friendship to the Doctor and friends, and in return they spend seven episodes bickering with him and then plotting and scheming behind his back. They’re also a considerable drain on Polo’s already stretched resources, and yet Marco remains kind to them throughout, through some sort of misplaced code of ethics. Why, particularly after the Doctor calls him a ‘poor, pathetic, stupid savage’, doesn’t Marco just leave these idiots in the desert to rot?

This question might be a bit of a cheat, given that we now know plenty of things about the TARDIS that neither the viewers nor writers were aware of back in 1964, but exactly how had the TARDIS, whose dimensions are practically infinite, run out of water? Had the Doctor drained the swimming pool? Had Ian gone in and swiped the last of the orange juice from the cricket pavilion? Were the TARDIS gardens experiencing a particularly dry winter?

One that seems less forgiveable is the notion of condensation gathering in the TARDIS because of the temperature differential. Though we’ve not seen it put to the test in any extreme way, the interior and exterior dimensions of the ship are clearly separate; it’s a central conceit of the series. You can heat the exterior up as much as you like, but the interior shouldn’t be affected - certainly not by such a piffling difference. Doctor Who should have ended with the Doctor and friends dying a slow and painful death in the desert, and I will fight anyone who says otherwise.

The Dead Planet

In so many ways, this is Doctor Who. Landing on an alien planet, exploring and getting into trouble… This is why the show is still going today. No time has passed for the travellers since last week’s escapade, but the tension between the Doctor and his travelling companions is already down to much more bearable levels - Of course Ian and Barbara are still scared and want to get home, but we also see Ian getting curious about the petrified forest, and touching scenes in the TARDIS as Barbara has a bonding moment with Susan (and, to an extent, the Doctor).

In fact, it’s surprising, particularly when compared to the last three episodes, just how much business The Dead Planet gets through in its 25-minute runtime. The TARDIS crew explore the forest, hang around in the ship and get to grips with the city, and not once does it feel rushed. If I hadn’t already known what the cliffhanger was (Ah, that cliffhanger. Not sure how effective it really is, but god bless Jacqueline Hill for the way she puts her all into overselling the floor manager waving a sink plunger around), I’d have been wondering if I’d missed the end of Episode 1 by mistake.

But the biggest positive about this episode is that the TARDIS crew - all four of them - are front and centre, driving the plot rather than reacting to it from the sidelines. This is what episode two of story one needed to be. Daleks or no Daleks, it’s a change without which the series wouldn’t have seen out the year, let alone the century.

The Survivors

The Daleks, then. They had to turn up sometime, especially on a DVD called The Daleks. I have a complete and total unashamed love for Skaro’s finest, and they’re on fine form from the beginning - the fact they’re so quick to paralyse Ian and threaten him with death just shows, in case there was any doubt, that they don’t mess around. There’s still one or two kinks to be worked out, though - not least the fact that giving them long scenes where they’re chatting amongst themselves is a pretty dreadful idea. Everything. Takes. So. Long!

As for the TARDIS crew, once again they find themselves incarcerated - Doctor Who isn’t Doctor Who without a prison cell. But unlike when they were dumped unceremoniously into the Cave of Skulls, there’s a sense of peril and urgency here as they realise that their radiation sickness is killing them and that the Daleks aren’t likely to help. But they do send Susan off into the forest to pick up the Thal drugs - and it’s a wonderfully atmospheric bit of television, with lighting, sound and various film techniques combining to make it genuinely scary.

The Escape

Something they’ve got right about the Daleks from the beginning (and that gets a bit lost at times as the series goes on) is that they’re cunning. Sure, the offer to the Thals may not be the cleverest evil scheme ever committed to film, but there are several points in this episode - such as allowing Susan to keep the other set of drugs - where they’re a lot more than just “Exterminate!”. And it’s not too hard to side with the Daleks a little bit - Alydon aside, the Thals come across here as a group of boorish lads and their token woman, who happily joins in with their banter and casual sexism. Would their loss really be the worst thing in the universe? No. No, it would not.

The rest of the episode is devoted to a spot - or rather, a long and grimy streak - of good old-fashioned working things out. It’s like a scene from a point-and-click adventure game (scrape mud off shoe, use mud on camera, examine metal floor, talk to Doctor Who), but the protagonists are about as bad at it as I usually am, and it takes sodding forever. Still, for the slow build it’s a satisfying conclusion, and it’s pleasing to watch our heroes escape using nothing but their brains, a cloak and some mud.

And the episode ends with the partial reveal of a Dalek, which is exactly how it should be - the Kaled mutant (or at this point, the ‘Dal’) is a thing of mystery, an unimaginable horror represented by a single grasping claw. Brilliant.

The Ambush

This is the one that should probably be called The Escape, as the majority of it deals with the TARDIS team’s attempts to leave the Dalek city rather than the titular ambush. And how they don’t get killed as they bumble through the corridors is an absolute mystery - for the Daleks not to see through their ruse suggests a serious lack of intellect on the part of the Doctor’s oldest foes. There’s a neat bit of false jeopardy with Ian not being able to escape from the Dalek, though; the scene in which the viewer is left for a moment to wonder if he’s been exterminated is a fun example of a well-worn trope.  

Not that there was ever much danger of Ian being killed off even at this early stage, as once again it’s his show. It’s still rather distressing to see the Doctor trying so hard to ignore the plight of the Thals and run away, because it’s so out of keeping with the intergalactic do-gooder he’ll eventually become. Fortunately, his companions have more scruples than the old man and Ian goes back to warn the Thals - or does he? It’s hard to understand why he waits for so long on the sidelines before actually warning them, like an actor waiting in the wings. Perhaps he didn’t know he was being filmed? Whatever the case, you have to wonder if more of the Thals (laaaaads) could have been saved if he’d emerged from his hiding place sooner. Naughty Ian.

The Expedition

Wow. I take back everything I said about the Doctor’s companions having scruples - what an utterly selfish bunch! They start the episode by standing around talking about how they must make the Thals fight and die so that they can get their fluid link back and leave this godforsaken planet - and it takes far, far, far too long for the time travellers to decide that actually this probably isn’t a very nice thing to do. They still get the Thals to fight, of course, but not before justifying it to themselves with the idea that the Thals should fight in order to not die. Or something. The travellers aren’t aware of any immediate threat to the Thals at this point, so it still all feels rather self-serving. At least it’s Ian, not the Doctor, who manages to goad the Thals into violence - it’s difficult enough to rationalise the Doctor’s behaviour in some of these early episodes as it is, without putting that one on his shoulders.

Of course, Daleks being Daleks, the Thals are in immediate danger, but it’s for good reason; we’re used to the Daleks wanting to exterminate and subjugate for the hell of it, but this episode brings them as close as they’ll ever get to a tragic twist with the revelation that they can’t exist without radiation (We’ll gloss over that one later, along with the whole static electricity thing). Sure, they plan on nuking the planet’s surface, but it’s only so they can go outside and play in the forest.

Ian and Barbara reach the swamp of death, and once again the production team have done a surprisingly good job of realising its horrors. It’s not as atmospheric as the forest in the second episode, but it’s still pretty tense stuff.

The Ordeal

Never a truer word spoken… With most of the pieces already in place for the final episode, the ‘action’ slows right down and we’re treated to the lacklustre adventures of Barbara and Ganatus. It’s hard to pinpoint whether the actors playing the Thals are at fault or whether Terry Nation simply wasn’t interested in his Aryan creations (It’s probably a bit of both), but the story certainly doesn’t make it that easy to care about the plight of any individual Thals. The subplot that falls especially flat is that of Antodus, the cowardly Thal who pops up only to suggest turning back and then kills himself at the start of the next episode. RIP Antodus. You’re not missed.

The stuff with Susan and the Doctor is good, though; the grandfather-granddaughter dynamic has got a bit lost in the mix since the first episode, so it’s nice to check in and see that they still care about one another. I also like that the Daleks make a point of bringing up the lift that the Doctor and friends destroyed during their escape from the city; there’s just not enough alien species willing to present the Doctor with an invoice for damages as the series goes on.

The Rescue

This episode is fascinating, because deliberately or otherwise there seems to be a single concrete moment where the Doctor goes from being the man who ran away from Gallifrey to the defender of the underdog. William Hartnell reacts with such horror and anger to the Daleks’ plans to irradiate the surface of Skaro and render it uninhabitable that it feels like his “no more” moment, the one in which he goes from being a passive observer to a meddling hero. Perhaps I’m overselling it - after all, the Doctor’s role in the story’s resolution is still fairly light, aside from his refusal to help the Daleks as they beg for mercy - but the Doctor is not the same man at the end of the story; he’s in no rush to replace the fluid link and get away anymore - though that’s an easy position to be in once the Daleks are dead…

The story’s climax itself feels weirdly slight. It has all the makings of something big - a lengthy countdown to a massive explosion, a ragtag army of Thals in hotpants… But the Daleks’ defeat ends up being rather low key - though the bit where Ian gives a Dalek a kick is fun.

Final Thoughts

The Edge of Destruction

So things finally come to a head after the previous eleven episodes, as budget concerns and the next story not being ready for production yet force the TARDIS crew to spend an hour together without cavemen, Daleks or Aryan playboys to distract them. And the result is… More than a bit weird. Suddenly the gleaming TARDIS is dark and strange, and the regulars’ characters are (deliberately) all over the place. There’s a lot of harkening back to the first episode, with a confused Ian behaving like he’s back at Coal Hill and Susan being at her most strange and alien since leaving 1963.

It’s an utterly disorientating 25 minutes, but it’s great to spend more than a couple of minutes in the TARDIS, and it all sets up a strange and compelling mystery to be resolved in Part 2…

The Brink of Disaster

The big problem with the Doctor drugging his companions (and granddaughter) and threatening to throw them off the ship is that we don’t yet know him nearly well enough to be sure that this is abnormal behaviour for him. After all, this is pretty much how he was acting in An Unearthly Child, and the TARDIS wasn’t trying to warn him of anything then.

Speaking of which… There’s a delightful scene in the 1966 Batman movie in which the Caped Crusader and chums try to work out who they’re up against, with such gems as “This all happened at sea… C for Catwoman!”. And though this episode pre-dates that series by a couple of years, the TARDIS is absolutely a 60s Batman villain, trying to warn our heroes using the most convoluted set of ‘clues’ possible. They stand up to absolutely zero scrutiny, and I love it.

This is the episode which puts William Hartnell back at the forefront of the show, and at times that’s unfortunate. Hartnell has a reputation for fluffing his lines, and the cracks definitely begin to appear here. But it’s all made up for in the final 5-10 minutes; the Doctor’s big monologue is underwhelming and confusing, but Hartnell sells the hell out of it. And as… old fashioned as it is to see the Doctor and Ian send the ladies out of the room in their final moments, it’s sweet to see the Doctor wanting Chesterton to face the end with him. Lastly, there’s the Doctor’s apology to Barbara, which feels like a warming palate-cleanser between this adventure and the next.

Final Thoughts