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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.…

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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.…

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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.…

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