The real problem with the giant phone props is how easily you can see the human operators.

It’s October 31, 1964. Sandie Shaw has the number one single with “(There’s) Always Something There To Remind Me,” and will hold it for two more weeks before yielding to Roy Orbison.

Since Doctor Who was last on the air, Martin Luther King has won the Nobel Peace Prize, and thirteen years of Conservative rule in Great Britain has come to an end, with Harold Wilson becoming Prime Minister, a position he will hold until 1970. Wilson’s term will be dominated by two trends – significant economic problems (that will eventually result in his being voted out of office) and the rise of British counterculture – a tendency started by the Beatles, who Wilson would ensure received an MBE strategically close to his 1966 re-election.

The wound caused by the Kennedy Assassination is festering. The world is not a stable place. The collapse of the British empire continues, with Rhodesia becoming Zambia. It is easy, in 1964, to be afraid. The year is closer to World War II than it is to Nintendo. It is in no way clear that the defeat of the Nazis was anything other than a postponement of the end of the world.

And now Doctor Who is back. Planet of Giants, along with the next story, are odd holdovers – filmed in the first production block and held back a few months, they are the transition from the first season of Doctor Who to the second. These will be the nine most important episodes of Doctor Who since the Daleks and Edge of Destruction.

Planet of Giants, on the face of it, may seem like a relatively insignificant episode. Its concept – the TARDIS crew gets shrunk – is one that was attempted twice in the first season, and was actually just about the only idea Sydney Newman, who created Doctor Who, actually had for the series. Now, in its third go-around, this somewhat puzzling idea is actually implemented. The constraints this leaves on the story are significant. Although there is a supporting cast, the TARDIS crew never interacts with them directly, making it an odd juxtaposition of a chamber piece in the Daleks-episode-one tradition and, basically, an episode of The Avengers (a TV show we’ll deal with in time, as, although it exists now, it will not reach its iconic and most influential form for a year yet).

But there are three vitally important things that happen in this story – three things that make this bit of strange fluff an extremely vital turning point in the series.

First of all, this is the first time that Doctor Who has been set in contemporary England since Ian and Barbara fell out of the world. Eventually, contemporary England will become vital to Doctor Who, most obviously in 1970, but Hartnell actually only has two stories set in it, and this is one of them. Still, the return to the present is a key opening of a door that, although it will sit relatively unappreciated for the next few years, will eventually become very important.…

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Susan further frustrates Barbara’s plans for escape with an ill-timed nap.

It’s August 8, 1964. The Beatles are about to yield the #1 single to Manfred Mann’s “Do Wah Diddy Diddy.” It is not that Do Wah Diddy Diddy is a bad song – it’s not. But it is tough not to feel as though, musically, it’s a step backwards.

This regression is mirrored, unfortunately, on television, as Doctor Who airs The Reign of Terror. I generally try to be sympathetic to episodes of Doctor Who. But there are some episodes that make that hard, and let’s face it, this is one of them. Plain and simple, this story is wretched.

(Technical details of interest to purists: The fourth and fifth episodes of this story are among the lost episodes of Doctor Who. I used fan reconstructions for Marco Polo, but this time opted for the VHS release, which covers the two missing episodes via narration provided by Carole Ann Ford.)

I have already noted the awkwardness of the cliffhanger at the end of The Sensorites, in which the Doctor, for no discernible reason, decides to throw Ian and Barbara off the ship at the next stop. This complete collapse of all characterization on the Doctor is bad enough, but it is followed, at the start of The Reign of Terror, with a partial recantation. Now the Doctor believes that he can get Ian and Barbara home to their own time again.

It is worth briefly commenting on the way in which the initial premise of the series has been simply discarded by now. Originally, the reason that the Doctor couldn’t get Ian and Barbara home is that he needed precise readings on where he was departing from. This premise is shot through in both of the stories following its establishment – the TARDIS’s fast return switch could have brought them back immediately, and the Doctor knew exactly where he was at the end of Marco Polo. If one is to try to impose continuity on Doctor Who – never a safe bet – then one has to read his explanation of why he can’t bring Ian and Barbara home as a lie, presumably cooked up because he wants Ian and Barbara to keep traveling with him. But that can’t be easily reconciled with the start of this episode, where he wants to chuck them off the TARDIS.

In other words, even on the limited amount of information we have about the Doctor, the premise of this episode doesn’t make sense. Much of this is down to the fact that the Doctor is not yet a hero character. Every story thus far has hinged on the TARDIS being inaccessible or inoperable. Not once has the Doctor shown up in a situation and wanted to fix it for its own sake. This is not merely an early stage of Doctor Who – we’ve already seen repeated evidence that the Doctor wants to be a good guy who shows up and fixes things.…

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The Doctor expresses grave concern over the appearance of a bizarre alien life form with plaid pants.

It is June 20th, 1964. The music charts are about to do some very odd things – Cilla Black still holds the number one, but between now and August 1st, Roy Orbison, The Animals, The Rolling Stones, and the Beatles will all reach number one, with the Rolling Stones getting their first #1 hit.

This generative tumult – a seven week period in which five artists, four of them solidly major, reach number one – is reflected this time in Doctor Who, which airs The Sensorites. While it is unclear that The Sensorities is the best Doctor Who story to date (although it is a contender) it is without doubt the most complex and interesting.

I do not wish to bang the post-colonial gong too many times in a row, but it is worth commenting that this story is cited by Lindy Orthia as one of six stories that are explicitly anti-colonial, especially given that it comes immediately after one of the three stories she cites as being pro-colonial. To some extent, this speaks to a fundamental issue of Doctor Who – its lack of long-term coherence. The Aztecs was written by John Lucarotti, who would contribute three historical stories to Doctor Who in the sixties, as well as an uncredited initial script for The Ark in Space in 1975. The Sensorites was written by Peter R. Newman, for whom it would be his last writing credit. Little effort was made to provide an overarching vision for the show – mentions to past adventures might be dropped in, and a token effort is made to provide a cliffhanger stretching from story to story, but the fact of the matter is that continuity from The Aztecs to The Sensorites exists entirely because of the core concept of Doctor Who, not because of any active effort by Lucarotti and Newman to write complimentary pieces.

As a result, The Sensorites offers one of the most radical ideas to date in Doctor Who – good aliens. And not good aliens in the creepy Aryan way of The Daleks. No – the Sensorites look scary. In fact, the first episode ends with their monstrous visage appearing in the window of the space ship, using their monstrosity (which has, after only two uses, already become a usable trope in Doctor Who) as a red herring for the fact that, for most of the adventure, the Doctor is going to be helping the Sensorites.

The Sensorites, generally speaking, are fabulous. First of all, their costumes are great. Different characters get different masks, which are distinct enough to demonstrate difference, but still similar enough to make them feel alien. The masks are fascinating – stark and alienating, with cat-like hair in odd places. Below the neck the costumes get dodgier – the spandex suits that are apparently supposed to be skin are a bit dodgy, and the round feet, though a cool idea, never quite work.…

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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.…

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