TARDIS Eruditorum

An homage to the serial’s original title, Doctor Who and the Fatal Drop Off a Soundstage With Shoddy Rear Projection.

It is May 23rd, 1964. The number one single is Juliet by the unremarkable “The Four Pennies,” who will peak at #1 for a week before yielding to Cilla Black, another star from the increasingly vital Liverpool.

The crucial thing to understand about Liverpool’s dominance of the musical scene – a dominance that will not see serious challenge in import until Manchester’s centrality some years later – is that Liverpool was a declining industrial city. The rise of the Merseybeat scene is specifically a rise of an economically depressed youth population.

I highlight this because Doctor Who is unmistakably a product of privilege. An academic and some schoolteachers traveling freely is not something that stems from the working class. In fact, its relationship to the working class is positively problematic. Susan, in the first episode, demonstrates that she is capable of living life without even understanding what money is or how it works. The Doctor, by definition, has no use for money. This tension will not be adequately addressed until December 25, 2009. Today, 45 years earlier and change, we have one of several colossally inadequate attempts at addressing it.

As I said back with Marco Polo, one interesting facet of the subgenre of Doctor Who known as the historical is that the first three were centered non-European cultures, and then no more ever were. This is the third and final of these, and is furthermore (I believe) the first Doctor Who story set entirely in the New World for over 40 years. Set in the 14th century, at least a century before Cortes came along, the shadow of European colonialism and its attendant socio-economic issues hangs explicitly over this story.

In her excellent article “Sociopathic Abscess or Yawning Chasm? The Absent Postcolonial Transition in Doctor Who,” Lindy Orthia explicitly calls out The Aztecs as one of the explicitly pro-colonial stories of Doctor Who, and thus as one of its most problematic stories. The story features Barbara explicitly trying to change Aztec culture to abandon human sacrifice in the belief that doing so will allow the Aztecs to survive Spanish colonization. This trope may be more familiar to a contemporary reader as the underlying assumption of Mel Gibson’s spectacular racist epic Apocalypto – that the fundamental problem with Pre-Columbian America is human sacrifice, and that this constitutes a sort of original sin that dooms the culture. (That Gibson took such care to depict the culture accurately and with native actors while simultaneously arguing that its extermination at the hands of the Spanish was a sort of inherent justice makes his movie all the more shocking. At least Doctor Who has the decency to obliviously cast white British actors who ham their way through the parts, thus giving the racism that smiling liberal face of willful ignorance that continues to protect discrimination so well.)

In terms of the issues of class and social justice, then, The Aztecs marks not so much a turning point as an institutional collapse in which the tensions and ambiguities of the first stories give way to unadulterated European colonialism, based, as always, not on overt racism but on the far creepier image of the White Man’s Burden.…

Continue Reading

Susan is understandably upset at being grabbed by a man in a skintight rubber suit.

It is April 11, 1964. The Beatles have the number one single with “Can’t Buy Me Love.” In the next six weeks, we will discover why the Beatles are unable to buy love – namely that, as Peter & Gordon observe, this is “A World Without Love,” making the Searchers’ admonition “Don’t Throw Your Love Away” sound practice.

While Marco Polo was airing we seem to have drifted away from the news. It is perhaps worth going back and noting that, since late February, Jimmy Hoffa has been convicted, Muhammed Ali has become heavyweight champion of the world, Kitty Genovese was murdered, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor married, Jeopardy debuted, and Britain continued to lose control of Yemen as its empire continued to collapse. In the next six weeks, the Rolling Stones will release their first album and the first BASIC program will be compiled and run.

This last fact is perhaps the most interesting, occurring as it does at the midpoint of “The Keys of Marinus,” a serial with what can, in hindsight, be identified as video game plotting. The Keys of Marinus went into production in part because a smattering of other serials. Three separate serials imploded – one about a miniaturized TARDIS crew, one entitled The Masters of Luxor by 100,000 BC writer Anthony Coburn, and one entitled The Hidden Planet by Malcolm Hulke, who would go on to write several genuinely classic episodes of the series. As a result, Terry Nation, who had just written The Daleks, was drafted to bang out a script in a hurry.

Due to the compressed time-frame, he opted for an extremely episodic structure in which the serial would go through, essentially, a different adventure each week. The extremely bare plot structure – the Doctor and his companions must rescue the five microkeys that will power up a machine that can subdue the evil monsters, the Voord. The keys are scattered across the planet Marinus, and the TARDIS crew is given teleporters so they can get from key to key.

The result is a Doctor Who plot that feels like a video game – collect the MacGuffin from each level and move on to the next one before finally confronting the Voord. Except, of course, that Spacewar! had only been developed three years prior, and there was nothing resembling a video game industry yet. It was, in fact, the development of BASIC would be integral in the nascent hacking movement of the 1970s that would eventually translate into the video game industry and, in 1975, would finally provide Adventure, which would begin to codify the video game plot.

There are several things to conclude here. First is that video game plotting is not integral to video games, but in fact stems from the highly serialized form of old-time radio and early film. But The Keys of Marinus, quite honestly, feels more like a video game than radio or film serials do.…

Continue Reading

It is February 22, 1964, and the number one single is The Bachelors with “Diane.” Over the next six weeks, Cilla Black and Billy J Kramer and the Dakotas will both also make it to number one before The Beatles regain the spot on April 2nd. This feels something like a restoration of order, which, to be fair, is also true of the end of Marco Polo, the fourth Doctor Who serial which airs its final installment on April 4th. 


Somewhere between April of 1964 and the present day – specifically between March 9, 1967, and late 1974, however, due to space-saving measures at the BBC, who inadequately anticipated the eventual demand for home video versions of television shows (in part spurred on by Equity, the actors union, which feared that home video and repeats would eventually render the making of new television obsolete), the master recordings of numerous Doctor Who episodes, including all seven episodes of Marco Polo, were junked. As a result, no recording of Marco Polo is currently known to exist.


Doctor Who is, as I have said, eternally unfinished. Another way of putting it – as Paul Magrs in fact has – is that it is incomplete. In the case of the missing episodes, this is literally true. Parts of Doctor Who’s history are missing. Important parts. Some unimportant parts too – there’s not a lot of people hugely bent out of shape over The Space Pirates going missing. But there are at a minimum a half dozen stories that are both highly historically important and have missing episodes, and Marco Polo is clearly among them.


A fundamental premise of this blog is that there is such a thing as a story of Doctor Who. But it’s the story of a time-traveler, and that shows. It is a story that goes back and revises itself, so that early episodes are at times best read in terms of later developments – as evidenced in the incongruous opening shot of the TARDIS in An Unearthly Child. Impossibly, the future of Doctor Who causes its past.


There is a sense in which this is only possible because of the missing episodes. Because the past of Doctor Who is incomplete, it is possible – indeed necessary – to rewrite it. As it happens, reasonable reconstructions exist. The audio for every Doctor Who story is preserved, as, for most, are a good number of still images. As a result, fan-made reconstructions that wed the audio to the still images exist, which is how I watched Marco Polo. But even still, there is always a sense that one is reconstructing – trying to uncover a past that is lost.


This is doubly true for this episode, as it is a purely historical piece. This is not the first historical we’ve seen – 100,000 BC has no sci-fi conceits beyond the TARDIS. But that story shares space with the story of what the TARDIS is in the first place, something Marco Polo does not.…

Continue Reading

It is February 8th, 1964. In the UK, the number one single is “Needles and Pins” by the Searchers, a Liverpool band. The songwriter, however, is American Sonny Bono, future Republican Congressman who will go on to author a massive copyright extension act that is itself a compromise over his own loathsome view that copyright should be perpetual. He will then ski into a tree and die. Speaking of  America, however, the number one single over there is fellow Liverpool band the Beatles, who have just touched down yesterday at JFK to a throb of fans, offering both a strange juxtaposition with Byron de la Beckwith getting away (for at least the next 30 years) with the murder of Medgar Evers and something of a significant colonization attempt, although for our purposes, the more intriguing product would not make its way to the US until 1972.

In the alarmingly more intelligent context of Doctor Who, the series third adventure, a two part serial hastily cobbled together in order to get the series to fill out its 13-episode initial order without requiring the use of any additional sets or characters. As a result, both episodes feature only the core cast – something that has, admittedly, happened twice previously in the series, but that will not happen again for more than a decade (I don’t think, at least)

The rush nature of the story is all too clear at points. The opening ten minutes or so are horrendously awkward, with Ian and Barbara alternately acting like children and dementia patients, often changing over mid-word. At which point the episode improbably picks up with an absolutely insane and thoroughly chilling scene in which Susan deliriously stabs a whole lot of things with scissors.

The thing about early Doctor Who, though, is that even the rush jobs are massively significant. Doctor Who’s canon is wholly additive, with new things just sort of being grafted on to the knobby bits as time goes on. Basically, it’s a giant narrative Katamari. Nothing is ever contradicted or removed. In the event of a contradiction, basically, you’ve just created a new knobby bit. The only thing likely to happen to a bit of Doctor Who continuity is that it will be smoothed down until it’s actually a good story, which, to be fair, it has not always been to start.

But in early Doctor Who, it was all knobby bits. So in these first episodes, a lot of things get established. We have the Doctor already. We have monsters. This story gives us two more things – companions and the TARDIS.

We have the TARDIS already, of course. It’s where the show started, its incongruous and brilliant central premise. But this is where we are finally allowed to have a look at her. The pronoun, by the way, is not merely an homage to naval tradition. The pronoun is because this story has five characters in it, even if we don’t see one of them until the very end.…

Continue Reading

It is December 21, 1963. The Beatles continue to hold the #1 chart position with “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”

Doctor Who continues apace with another claustrophobic episode featuring the four main characters and nothing else. The show is still feeling its way around, uncertain of what it is. But as with the first episode, it is already clear that it is something. Most notably with Ian’s line describing the Doctor as having “a knack for getting himself in trouble,” a character trait that will sustain 48 years and counting of stories.

But in other ways, the show seems lost, following the trends of futuristic design laid out by classic movies like Forbidden Planet instead of breaking new ground. The dead world of Skaro is a monument to retro-futurism. The TARDIS is not yet a magical box, with excessive effort being made to actually explain how the thing works. The fact that the change of the Doctor and Susan to aliens instead of futuristic humans was a last-second production decision is still clear, with both acting as though the TARDIS is just future technology that any species would acquire given time.

And on top of that, the Doctor is still openly cruel. When his companions – including Susan – beg to leave the planet, he betrays them all, deliberately breaking the TARDIS so that they have to go to the futuristic city and explore. Here we have our first inkling of why the Doctor does what he does – his burning need to explore and see new things. But it is not yet wedded to any sense of kindness. He is not a hero. Not yet.

The show also presents its first aliens. Initially they find a metal creature in the forest, and the Doctor chastises Ian for failing to adequately imagine how much the universe can differ from his experience. Then, in the episode’s iconic cliffhanger, Barbara, at this point a character mostly used so that everyone else has someone to rescue, is menaced by an unseen monster with a bizarre arm.

And for the third time in a month, everything changes.

Five days later, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” is released in the US, changing the Beatles from the most popular band in England to the most popular band in history, sparking so-called Beatlemania, which will itself inspire the name of the eventual Dalekmania. Two days after that, the Daleks are named.

But what, exactly, are they? For the second episode, at least, this is held in check. They are devious, and we are certainly not inclined to trust them, but they do not seem the malevolent evil that we will someday know them to be. The Doctor is not a help here – he does not recognize them, and they do not recognize him. This is their true first meeting, and it is a wary one in which each of them tries to feel out and understand the other. The Daleks seem to warn of a greater threat, the hideously mutated Thals living out in the wilderness.…

Continue Reading

It is 100,000 BC. There is no number one single. There is no music industry. Indeed, there is no industry period. There’s not even really a humanity, period, with the great leap forward of behavioral modernity still lurking 50,000 years in the future. The peak of the ice age currently being enjoyed is about 80,000 years in the future. On a hillside, a blue box appears with a strange wheezing, groaning sound.

More usefully, it is the 30th of November, 1963. The Beatles recapture #1 with “She Loves You,” the biggest selling single of the 1960s, which is charting for the second time. It will hold that chart position for two weeks, before giving way in the final weeks of the year to “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” The Kennedy assassination has long since turned to farce with Lee Harvey Oswald himself being murdered two days later. Now the world waits uncomfortably, aware that the progress of history has been diverted, but not knowing where, or towards what.

In later episodes, the disparity between the internal and external sizes of the TARDIS will be explained in terms of the interior being a different dimension. But last week, in the first episode, it was instead explained by analogy, with the Doctor referring to the way in which television allows a much larger world to be contained in a smaller space. It is an odd analogy, in no small part because, in the context of a fictional TV show, it appears to suggest that the interior of the TARDIS is fictional even within Doctor Who. Still, it is an explanation of sorts. We were invited to leave our world via the television. Who can blame us for doing so?

Escape is treated by the captives as an end in itself. It is not until you escape that you quite realize that escapes are not merely exits but entries. When last we left them, Ian and Barbara have fallen out of the world. Now we come to see where they have landed, and it is terrifying. Almost immediately, everything goes wrong. The Doctor is kidnapped by cavemen, sending Susan into a panic such that Ian and Barbara, skeptical and afraid as they are, go to help him.

The rescue is a complete disaster, and the four of them quickly find themselves tied up in the Cave of Skulls, named for its primary decorative feature, a large number of skulls that have been split open by an axe. From here the story is a fairly staid and at times repetitive sequence of escapes and recaptures. But over time, the reality of all of this sinks in. The three episodes’ most striking feature, in many ways, is Barbara’s nervous breakdown as the four leads wander through a forest (having escaped from the Cave of Skulls).

The breakdown is stunning in its realism. Eventually the show will get to the standard of people being absolutely thrilled by the adventure and excitement that traveling with the Doctor entails.…

Continue Reading

It is 5:16 PM, November the 23rd, 1963. Gerry and the Pacemakers’ “You’ll Never Walk Alone” is the number one single. It will go on to become the anthem of Liverpool FC, at the time of writing still narrowly the most successful English football club of all time. Since 6:30 PM the previous day, the BBC has been running news coverage of the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy.

At twenty seconds past the minute, eighty seconds off its scheduled airtime, normal programming resumes with the first episode of a new children’s science fiction serial, Doctor Who. The opening credits are a futuristic psychedelic blur that seems oddly quaint as the symbol of youthful revolution has just been gunned down in Texas. The theme music, ostensibly written by Ron Grainer was, for all practical purposes, realized by Delia Derbyshire, who arranged Grainer’s score by splicing tape together and speeding/slowing a sample of a single note being plucked on a string, white noise, and some testing oscillators. Derbyshire would, in her later life, be recognized as an unsung hero – a pioneer of electronic music – but received no on-screen credit because the BBC’s policy was that members of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop would remain anonymous. The credits themselves were done by distorting footage of a pen light being moved around.

The effect is mysterious and chilling. The credits give way, although the haunting theme music does not, as a camera moves around an old junk yard, finally coming to rest on a Police Box. This sequence is hard to comprehend in 1963, as there is nothing particularly strange about a Police Box save for its apparent location in a junkyard, which, by virtue of being a junkyard is sort of, by definition, a place full of odd things. And yet the camera lingers, stressing the strangeness of this object that does not yet have strangeness.

With 48 years of history to contend with, Doctor Who has inevitably changed. One must ask, then, when it became Doctor Who. The answer, it seems, is right here, as mysterious, haunting theme music gives way to an iconic shot. Never mind that the shot cannot possibly be read as iconic in this original context – everything about the camerawork and the music tells us it is iconic. Everything tells us this Police Box is the most important thing about this show. Before we see a single character, before we see the Doctor, before we see a hint of science fiction, we see a Police Box.

(An Unearthly Child,the first episode, is usually treated as one story along with the following three episodes. Because in its first seasons Doctor Who had individually titled episodes instead of story arc titles, the name for this story is disputed. The other names all refer to the plot elements of episodes 2-4, which are, for all practical purposes, a completely different story. An Unearthly Child was rewritten by Anthony Coburn from an original script by C.E. Webber, and was reshot before transmission, both facts that I think serve to separate it in a meaningful sense from the three episodes that follow.…

Continue Reading