An Unearthly Child

Doctor Who (1963), An Unearthly Child

Where to begin?

This is the very first episode of Doctor Who ever...sort of. (I'll likely go back and cover the unaired pilot version at some point, but not for a while. Maybe after I get through season 1.) It's been talked about and reviewed countless times. Heck, I've personally seen it more times than I can recall. I can probably quote its entire dialogue from just memory. I struggle to think of what I can add to the discussion about it that hasn't been said before.

So, I'm going to put off trying for a little bit and start by discussing how I'm going to approach these explorations in general. I'm looking at Classic Doctor Who episode by episode, not whole serials at a time.

Why?

To start with, that's how they were actually broadcast. The dramatic unit of Classic Doctor Who is the episode, not the serial. They were written and performed with the intention of bringing the viewer up to the end of that 20-25 minute segment and leaving them there, not to just flow right into the next section of the story without delay.

Because of this, Doctor Who feels...off to me when I watch whole serials at a time. I can do it, but it feels wrong. The pacing seems weird and the stories start to feel like they're repeating themselves...because they are. There are distinct portions of the dialogue there for the express purpose of reminding the viewers of information that was learned in previous episodes that they might have forgotten in between viewings. When I watch Classic Doctor Who an episode at a time, a lot of the stuff that seems like padding and repetition in the serial as a whole, falls away.

The second reason is that I love the cliffhanger effect. I always have. As mentioned way back in my first post on this site, "What happens next?" is one of my favorite questions ever. Cliffhangers ask that question and I love to ruminate about it a bit before going on and finding out the answer.

The great irony of it is that my love of cliffhangers likely comes from watching Classic Who itself. So, I watch Doctor Who the way I do because I love cliffhangers and I love cliffhangers because of the way I watched Doctor Who. Cyclic. Beautiful. Like a closed time loop. Timey-wimey, even. Maybe Steven Moffat came back in time and tuned my parents' old black & white television to Doctor Who in the first place. Good job, Steven.

The third reason is that not all Classic Doctor Who serials are of the same length. Because of this, devoting the same amount of time and attention to the 2 episodes of The Rescue as I do to the 12 episodes of The Daleks' Master Plan seems like it's doing the latter a disservice. I like to pick stories apart in detail and that doesn't work as well if I'm forced to take the larger serials, which arguably have more to unpack, and generalize more simply for the sake of saving space.

So, episodes it is.

An Unearthly Child. First episode of the first serial of the first season of Doctor Who. How it all began for the viewers...

Summary

In London, 1963, at the Coal Hill School, two schoolteachers, Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright are intrigued by their brilliant student, Susan Foreman. At 15, Susan appears to be absolutely brilliant at some things while astonishingly ignorant about others. Ian and Barbara meet with her, so that Barbara can lend her a book on the French Revolution and their interaction only serves to emphasize Susan’s oddness.

Using the excuse that her homework has become bad of late, the two schoolteachers decide to follow her home from school, to meet the grandfather she describes. Their investigation leads them to a scrap yard at 76 Totter's Lane, marked I.M. Foreman on its doors. Following Susan inside, they discover it empty of people, but containing a Police Box that has a strange vibration coming from inside it.

An old man arrives and discovers the teachers, but not before they hear Susan’s voice coming from inside the Police Box. An argument ensues between the teachers, who believe Susan is locked in the Police box, and the old man, who insists that they go away. Eventually the door of the Police Box opens from the inside and Ian and Barbara force their way past the old man and inside.

Once there, the schoolteachers find themselves in a futuristic console room that impossibly fits inside the smaller exterior of the Police Box. They discover that the old man is Susan’s grandfather and that they claim to be travelers from “another time, another world” in this craft, the TARDIS, short for Time and Relative Dimension in Space. Ian finds the paradox of the dimensions almost too much to take in and Susan’s grandfather makes no effort to help him, even teasing Ian about his lack of understanding.

It soon becomes apparent that the old man has no intention of opening the door to allow Ian and Barbara to leave. Indeed, the old man allows Ian to be mildly electrically shocked when he tries to find the door control on his own. Susan attempts to convince her grandfather to let the schoolteachers go but he refuses to consider it unless Susan agrees to leave England in the 20th century. When Susan insists on staying, even if she and her grandfather become separated, the old man activates the controls of the ship and it departs into time and space…

Crew Credits

Writer: Anthony Coburn

Director: Waris Hussein

Story Editor: David Whitaker

Producer: Verity Lambert

Overview

There is a certain unrepeatability to the original experience of An Unearthly Child. I'm not old enough to have seen this episode on first broadcast. Indeed, I wasn't even alive at the time of its airing. As I mentioned in my first post about Doctor Who, I started watching in the mid-Tom Baker era. It was quite a while before I got around to seeing the early days of the show and, even then, I actually missed the entire first serial during my local PBS station's broadcast, starting with the first episode of The Daleks. (Which wasn't a bad way to start the black & white era of Doctor Who, but that can wait.) I'd also managed to read the Target novelization of the first serial before seeing this episode.

So, like many others, I went into this episode with pretty much full knowledge of what all the surprises were. I knew what was inside the Police Box. I knew who Susan was and why she was alternately brilliant and ignorant. I knew the deal with her grandfather and why he was so eager to get Ian and Barbara to go away. I even knew a bunch of things that weren't established in this episode and wouldn't be for a while, like where the Doctor and Susan came from, whether the TARDIS was a unique craft or not and whether the Doctor would always look like the old man we met him as...

Given all that foreknowledge, plus the sheer amount of times I've watched it over the years, you'd think I wouldn't find An Unearthly Child particularly impactful. The truth, though, is that I still really enjoy it every time I go back and watch it.

Atmosphere

A large part of the reason for that is just the sheer sense of atmosphere that the episode creates. Indeed, that sense of atmosphere, of disquieting and eerie feeling, is one of the things that drew me to Doctor Who in the first place. (And, while I am largely neutral in the whole Classic vs. New Who debate, appreciating both of them, I will say that it's one of the few things I think the Classic series consistently does better than the modern series.) When I finally got around to seeing how it all started, I was delighted to see that this atmosphere had been around right from the beginning.

It's hard to pin down the concept of atmosphere, though, isn't it? What may seem atmospheric to one person may seem trite or cliched to someone else. Stepping outside of Doctor Who for a moment, I am a big fan of the series Sapphire and Steel, precisely because I think it has such an amazing feeling of atmosphere. Nonetheless, I can easily imagine someone else looking at S&S and simply thinking it looks "cheap." Atmosphere, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. But I can only speak for myself and I find Classic Doctor Who (and S&S) to have atmosphere in spades. (Perhaps I'll take some time to examine Sapphire and Steel here at some point in the future. That could be fun. It's a great show that deserves more exposure.)

I suppose part of what makes the idea of atmosphere hard to pin down is that not everyone necessarily means the same thing by it. It's an ethereal, somewhat nebulous concept that is arguably far more subjective than objective. Whether we feel it, or even what we mean by it, varies from person to person.

So, what do I mean by it? Generally, I mean a sort of overall sense of eeriness, the implication that what we're seeing is only the tip of a particularly terrifying iceberg. There's a feeling that there's always something lurking, just out of sight and hearing, in television's case perhaps just outside the span of what the camera is catching. It's the sense that the relatively normal world we're observing is just a veneer stretched over another world, one that is full of both wonders and terrors in equal measure...and that to know one is to know the other. A lot of what makes Doctor Who fascinating to me is watching that veneer be slowly peeled away, both on a large scale (the journey of the companions) and a smaller one (the circumstances of an individual story). And then, of course, the veneer is reapplied and must be slowly removed again (when companions switch or a new story starts.) Like one of the Great Old Ones of the Cthulhu mythos, the secrets of Doctor Who's universe can be glimpsed but never fully known. Like the companions, we can travel with the Doctor and see amazing things...but we can never know the Doctor's name. Some things are forever out of reach.

While the concept of atmosphere in a work is subjective, that doesn't mean it's accidental. I've explored enough behind-the-scenes material for both Doctor Who and other works to know that, while some small part of atmosphere might be serendipitous happenstance, for the most part it's deliberately created. Those making a work are seeking to create precisely that sense of eerie disquiet that drew me to the series in the first place. It may land better for some in the audience than others (indeed, it may not land for some at all) but it's an effect that those behind-the-scenes are trying to create on purpose.

Consider, for instance, the opening scene of An Unearthly Child. There's fog, a lone policeman on patrol, a wooden door to a scrap yard, a portentous creek as that door opens (with no explanation for what opened it, it's worth noting), a lingering shot of a Police Box and a strange humming sound coming from it that really isn't associated with a Police Box.

Everything in that scene is something relatively normal. Fog. A policeman. A door. A scrap yard. A Police Box. Yet everything is designed to tell us that something is going on beyond the normal. Something is happening in that scrap yard. Something we aren't privy to yet. Something the policeman missed when he walked by. He's the rest of the world strolling by, oblivious, seeing only the surface. But we, the audience, are the privileged, the ones who get to look deeper. The door to the scrap yard opens for us. The camera lingers on the Police Box for us, just a bit too long. A shorter shot would simply have been to establish its existence. But the longer one is there to tell us it's more important than it looks and the humming is to let us know that this Police Box is more than just what it looks like.

The scene doesn't give us answers. It doesn't tell us everything that's going on. It just tells us that there is more going on than we, or the characters within the story, know right now. And, in doing so, it subtly promises that you'll learn some of those answers if you keep watching.

That, to me, is atmosphere. And Classic Who had it down from the start. (New Who isn't terrible at it, I should note. I think Classic does it slightly better, but that doesn't mean I think New does it badly. There are also things I think New Who does slightly better.)

Heck, honestly, I think the atmosphere in An Unearthly Child begins before that first shot of the foggy night at all. I think it starts right with the first notes of the theme song. I know that, when I first started watching the show in the later, Tom Baker-era, the music was the first thing that caught me. It was odd and strange, even a little bit discordant (but not too much.) It's just that little bit "off-normal" to hint at greater strangeness beyond. While the Hartnell-era theme starts a bit slower it is, if anything, just a bit more left of musical center. It signals, right from the first notes, that this show is going to be unconventional about the things it presents to you. We don't get a happy, jaunty adventure theme (something I could easily see being applied to a show about travels in time and space) but rather a strange, foreboding soundscape. It feels exciting, but it doesn't feel safe.

The opening credits sequence itself contributes to this feeling. In it's earliest iteration, we don't get anything concrete to latch our eyes onto except the words "Doctor Who" themselves and they're surrounded by bizarre floating blobs of light, moving and twisting, never maintaining the same shape or direction for long. We're adrift, traveling without control through the sequence with only the words "Doctor Who" to use as an anchor...

We're Ian and Barbara.

The Plot

In all this talk about atmosphere, it's almost tempting, because I've seen it so many times, to avoid talking about the episode's actual plot at all. But that would be a mistake because, if the show's atmosphere is what gives the audience that promise of more behind the curtain, it's the plot that pulls the curtain aside. Wisely, it doesn't do so all at once, but rather gradually, in tantalizing glimpses.

Essentially, An Unearthly Child starts off as a detective story. Ian and Barbara have a bunch of clues that something is not right about Susan and they set off to solve that particular mystery. As is somewhat stereotypical for gender roles in media at the time, Ian believes there must be a rational explanation for the situation and Barbara seems to instinctively feel that the explanation lies outside the normal experience. This disparity would probably seem more egregious if Ian didn't turn out to be wholly wrong by the end of the episode. Indeed, in a nice reversal of the typically portrayed gender reactions, it's Ian who can't seem to cope with the fantastic nature of the truth while Barbara turns out to be the one who can adjust her worldview more readily. That's not to say Barbara's not scared (and she's right to be) but she certainly copes with having the whole paradigm of how their reality works changed better than Ian, who reacts with disbelief and denial.

Backing up a bit, it's worth noting that An Unearthly Child makes extensive use of flashbacks to illustrate the kind of oddness that Susan has exhibited to arouse her teachers' curiosity. They're not particularly complicated flashbacks, although they are from the respective POVs of Ian and Barbara, which is a bit jarring (probably deliberately.) But the mere fact they're in the story says something about how they were still figuring out how the show was going to work and how they wanted to tell their tales. To say that flashbacks would turn out to be rare in Doctor Who is a whopping understatement. In nearly 60 years of televised stories, I'm pretty sure I can count the number of flashback sequences the show presents on my fingers.

But then that's how Doctor Who works, isn't it? It’s not a massively planned and blueprinted narrative, but a wonderful jumble of ideas and techniques and experiments. It's the poster child for successful back-loaded storytelling, the triumph of trial and error. (If you want the poster child for successful front-loaded storytelling, I recommend Babylon 5, another show I might explore here at some point.)

Speaking of the flashbacks, I want to take time to express my appreciation for one of them in particular, the one where Susan mistakenly thinks that the UK's currency works on a decimal system. I've never been entirely sure when the conversation about making such a switch began in the public forum (I'm from the United States and, as the episode itself points out, we already had that kind of system for our money) but a quick look over at the Royal Mint website tells me that it had been being discussed in government since at least 1961. So there was a better-than-average chance that the possibility of decimalization was already part of the national conversation at that time. Thus, it was a "safe" prediction to have Susan make, something that hadn't happened yet but most, if not all, people suspected it would in the near future. And even if something had reversed and decimalization hadn't happened, it effectively wouldn't matter because the show's mythos could always maintain that it was something that happens at some point in the future, even if it not by the time the audience was watching, as was actually the case until 1971.

And, of course, it also emphasizes what we will later learn to be the source of Susan's alternating knowledge and ignorance. She knows the broad strokes but hasn't memorized the details. She's like a traveler who has read up on the destination she's going to but is only actually visiting in person for the first time. She's getting tripped up on all the little details that the guide books don't mention. The past is another country indeed.

The mystery plot continues as we reach the junk yard and Ian and Barbara confront the old man. It's worth noting, for those of us with advanced knowledge of what's to come, that the old man is not given the title we'll come to know him by in the episode proper at all, only being credited as "Dr. Who" as the cast list rolls at the end. As presented in the episode, he's shifty, evasive, uncooperative and just generally dodgy. And all that's before Ian and Barbara get inside the Police Box and he becomes an even more blatant adversary. No, the series titular character is not presented as a figure of comfort, but rather one of danger and fear. Further, his evasions and attempts to dissuade the two teachers from opening the Police Box contribute to precisely that sense of atmosphere I was waxing lyrical about above. The more he attempts to block us from knowing what's inside the oddly placed, vibrating box, the more we know it's more than just a normal Police Box.

And boy does that turn out to be the case, eh?

As mentioned, I (like most of today's viewers, I imagine) came into the episode knowing exactly what was inside the Police Box. Because of that, I can never truly appreciate what it must have been like to experience that moment cold, to feel the same surprise that Ian and Barbara did. In terms of special effects, it's a remarkably easy one (just a set change, really) but in terms of the plot and the atmosphere, it's a lightning strike. It's the confirmation of exactly what I've been talking about above...that there's something beyond the scope of the normal and that, if we press hard enough, we can find it.

And when we do, it's both amazing and terrifying.

It's easy, with the hindsight of decades of later stories, to think of the TARDIS, it's multi-dimensional oddness and the possibilities it presents, as purely an impressive object of wonder. But here, like its owner, it's also presented as an object of fear. Walking into the TARDIS opens the eyes of Ian and Barbara to a new world...but it's a world they can't retreat from. Once they've crossed that threshold, there's no going back, not just in terms of their awareness, but physically too. Susan's grandfather, quite literally, won't let them leave. He's not apologetic about it, either, taunting them and treating them with condescension. By entering this world, they've surrendered control of their own destinies.

And, with a few flicks of switches on the console, they're rocketed away from the last vestiges of what they knew...

Characters

I'll start with Ian and Barbara, as they are the windows through which we view the story. It's they who are curious about Susan. It's through their eyes that we view the flashbacks to Susan's odd behavior. It's they who decide to investigate, who confront the strange old man in the scrap yard and whose minds are blown by entering the TARDIS.

William Russell and Jacqueline Hill have excellent chemistry, their dialogue and body language flowing easily and naturally. This is an essential element for this first episode. Ian and Barbara have to feel as "normal" as possible, to be touchstones the audience can latch onto as the series gives us increasing levels of strangeness. Luckily the two actors are more than up to the task.

Normal they may be, but that doesn't mean they're not distinct from one another. Right from the start, when she overreacts to a little joke, we establish that Barbara is considerably more serious and even severe than the relatively easygoing Ian. Although it's interesting that Barbara also immediately apologizes for her overreaction. So, we also establish that Barbara is both aware of her severe nature and recognizes it as a fault. For his part, Ian seems to take it all in stride. You get the impression that this is hardly the first such interaction these two have had.

That said, it's also interesting to ponder, based on their conversations, just how much Ian and Barbara have actually interacted with each other in the past. The impression I have always gotten is that they're friendly work acquaintances but not the best of friends. It's their adventures going forward that will make them fire-forged friends (and a couple?) At this point, though, while they're certainly not strangers, they don't strike me as inseparable. What links them here is a mutual goal, to find out what the deal with Susan is.

That goal illustrates another difference in their approach. Ian freely acknowledges that curiosity is the real motivation behind what they're doing, that, at the end of the day, they just want to know what’s going on with Susan. Barbara, on the other hand, seems more determined to tie their actions to a greater, more altruistic goal of helping Susan. Myself, I suspect the truth lies somewhere in the middle. I've no doubt that Barbara legitimately believes that she'd "go straight home" if she thought she was just being a "busybody" but, at the same time, I suspect there's a more fundamental curiosity at the core of what she's doing. At the end of it all, Ian and Barbara are both responding to that atmosphere I described above. They've seen the hints that there's something behind the normal and they need, on a fundamental level, to know what it is.

Once they do so there is, as I mentioned above, an interesting reversal of their previous positions. Before entering the scrap yard, Ian had mentioned that he wasn't scared because he "takes things as they come" but once he's inside the impossible geometry of the TARDIS, he proves incapable of doing that. I'd suggest that Ian's initial confidence comes from his surety that the world makes sense. Like Barbara, he's searching for the answers to the mystery of Susan but what he's looking for is simply that little piece of information that makes Susan fit into the world of the normal that he's so sure of.

And, of course, she doesn't fit there at all. She falls outside of it and for someone as secure in his confidence of the normal as Ian, that's a shattering blow. The rock upon which he's built his easygoing confidence, his belief that the world is rational, crumbles the moment he walks through those TARDIS doors.

Barbara, conversely, adjusts to these revelations with considerably more ease. I wouldn't go so far as to say she "takes things as they come" but she certainly adjusts to the idea of the TARDIS interior faster than Ian does. I suspect that this is because she didn't go into the situation so confident that everything had a rational explanation. As she mentioned before they entered the scrap yard, she felt like they were about to "interfere with something best left alone." Ian may have come looking for how Susan fits into the normal world, but Barbara already seems to suspect that Susan may fall outside that normalcy. She may not know how far outside the normal Susan actually resides (note how Barbara falls back on the idea that Susan and her grandfather are playing some sort of elaborate game) but she knows that she's not just some normal girl.

Speaking of normal girls, Ian has a line before they enter the scrap yard wondering if Susan might just be meeting a boy. It's an innocuous enough line, though it stands out a bit in light of the fact that romance (especially of the teenage hormonal kind) will frequently take a back seat in Classic Doctor Who. Here, in these early steps of the show's creation, it is at least acknowledged, if not dwelled upon.

So, what of the Unearthly Child herself? As we go further into early Classic Doctor Who, I will likely end up commenting on Susan as a character that had a lot of potential, very little of it was realized. But that's a conversation for later episodes. Here Susan is fantastic, albeit less as a fully realized character than as a mystery to be solved. She's an enigma, a puzzle box. It's not her 15 year old teenagerness that's being stressed but rather how much she doesn't fit into that stereotype.

And Carole Ann Ford plays all this perfectly. From her strange hand motions while listening to John Smith and the Common Men (vestiges of dancing on her home world?) to her bizarre offhand comments, to even the fact that her speech cadence seems just a little "off," Ford creates an eerie sense that Susan is not only strange, but also hiding something. Which, of course, she is.

And then there's Susan's grandfather. He's evasive, argumentative, rude, insulting, even sadistic. With apologies to the late Terrance Dicks, he's both cruel and cowardly.

And he's just fascinating to watch.

A good 90% of that is William Hartnell's performance. I've mentioned that I discovered Doctor Who during the Tom Baker period and there is a certain sense that Tom Baker will always be MY Doctor, but nevertheless, every time I go back to watch the beginning of the show, I find Hartnell's performance to be absolutely mesmerizing. The sheer screen presence of the man is magnetic. For all intents and purposes, he is playing the character as the story's antagonist but I still can't take my eyes off him. Yes, Susan may have been the mystery that started the plot, but it's her grandfather I want to know more about.

Examining what he actually does in this story yields some interesting observations. When he first arrives in the scrap yard and discovers Ian and Barbara, there's quite a bit of back and forth as they try to get him to open up the Police Box and he tries to talk them into simply leaving. His attempts to convince them are not particularly impressive but, given the benefit of hindsight, you can already see a sort of proto-version of the character's predilection for verbal misdirection. He's not that good at it yet, but it's already his preferred method of confrontation.

Once inside the TARDIS, beyond the need for pretense, we see another trait that will be consistent going forward, namely that he knows he's the smartest person in the room and doesn't have a lot of patience for what he perceives as ignorance and stupidity. This early on, it seems like (and really is) antagonism because it's being aimed at the characters we see as "the good guys" but, if we take a step back from that, it really isn't different from how he'll treat countless other characters throughout the show's run. He doesn't suffer fools and here, in the beginning, he's putting Ian and Barbara in that category (particularly Ian, probably because he's the one who keeps arguing with him.) I imagine, to Susan's grandfather, it must feel like a child insisting the world is flat...someone else's child that was dropped off on his doorstep without permission.

Arguably the nastiest thing he does in the episode is when he allows Ian to be shocked on the controls. He clearly knows what's about to happen and allows Ian to be hurt anyway. He might even cause it. You can see Hartnell flip a separate switch on the console right before Ian touches it. It's never been entirely clear to me if he's electrifying the switch or if he's disconnecting the switch from whatever it normally does so Ian can't actually affect the TARDIS...or both.

But even this bit of nastiness is, again, a bit of a prototype version of the method we'll see the character use to deal with countless villains and enemies over the course of the series, luring them into using equipment that will backfire. Like the verbal sparring, it's going to become part of the character's standard repertoire for defeating antagonists. It's just that, here, he's the antagonist.

So the building blocks of the character he's going to be are there, they're just not yet fully formed and they're aimed in a different direction than they will be later.

Which brings us to the end of the episode and him launching the TARDIS into time and space. At first, this would seem to be another act of cruelty toward his uninvited visitors, the electrified switch taken up a notch, but there' s more to it than that.

I want to re-emphasize here, that I'm examining the broadcast version of the episode here. The Doctor's motivation for leaving in the TARDIS with Ian and Barbara on board is very different in the unaired version and the change is, to my mind, a distinct improvement, transforming the character from an out and out villain to a complex antagonist with the potential to be so much more.

So how do we arrive at the TARDIS leaving? Well, the first thing we see is Susan's reaction to Ian and Barbara and her plea with her grandfather to let them go. He refuses. It's easy to chalk this up to the same sadism that prompted shocking Ian or even to take him at his word when he says that he's trying to avoid being turned into a curiosity for the people of the time. But that's pretty obviously a lie. He could avoid that simply by letting Ian and Barbara go and then leaving in the TARDIS.

And that is, of course, precisely what he actually wants to do. He just needs to convince his granddaughter and she wants to stay. She mentions, during their discussion that "they've had all this out before." This isn't the first time they've had the "should we stay in 1963 or leave?" conversation and, apparently, for the past five months, he's relented, letting Susan have her way. But this time he has something he's never had before.

Leverage.

If he lets them go, they will, as he claims, "tell everyone about the ship" thus ruining Susan's situation. (I think it's naive hope on Susan's part that they will do otherwise, despite what she says.) If he keeps them in the ship, they'll be prisoners and Susan can't really go outside either thus ruining Susan's situation. The only viable solution that respects Ian and Barbara's freedom is to let them go and then he and Susan leave in the TARDIS. That's exactly the solution he presents to her and, not coincidentally, exactly what he's been hoping to do anyway. His wanderlust, which will keep the show going for the next several decades, is present right from the beginning. Apparently, he's been keeping it in check for his granddaughter's sake, but this situation seems to have caused it to reach a tipping point. Well, now he's got her over a barrel. They can't stay. They have to do what he wants.

Of course, he hasn't even considered the possibility that Susan might choose to leave him. That would be "sentimental and childish" as he says when he dismisses the suggestion. His devotion to Susan is absolute. He can't fathom the notion that she might not be as entirely wedded to the idea of them staying together as he is.

The irony of it is, having seen these performances so many times, I suspect he's right. I think she's actually bluffing when she says that she'd rather leave the TARDIS and him than leave England in the 20th century. But it doesn't really matter because it's a bluff he falls for. He believes she's prepared to leave him,

Well, he's not going to let that happen, no matter how upset she gets and who gets removed from their proper time and space in the process. I often see this narrative described as him "kidnapping" Ian and Barbara as if taking them was his actual goal, but I think that misses the point. He's barely thinking about them at all, and insomuch as he is, they're tools in his argument at best, annoying primitive cavemen at worst. No, what he's thinking about is that he's not going to lose his granddaughter no matter what. And so, he launches the TARDIS into time and space.

And the rest is history...some of it, as yet, unwritten.

Links to the Future

Disturbing as it can be to see the not-yet-Doctor's attitude toward Ian and Barbara if you're more used to the later, more human-friendly, versions of the Doctor, his attitude makes a lot of sense if we assume he and Susan didn't actually leave Gallifrey that long ago. (We'll learn, before too long, that they made a few stops before this one, but I've never gotten the impression it was all that many.) He's essentially looking at Ian and Barbara like lesser life forms because he's viewing them the same way his people do. (Even taking the more recent Timeless Child revelations into account, he was still raised with the values of a Time Lord.) He doesn't have the breadth of experience yet to view humans as having real value. The irony, of course, is that it's the two he's treating so badly that will effectively teach him that lesson.

There's the question of him describing himself and Susan as "exiles." That doesn't jibe particularly well with the explanation he'll later give for leaving his people in The War Games. (Although people sometimes forget that the War Games explanation itself is a bit suspect, in light of later revelations in other stories like Remembrance of the Daleks or Heaven Sent.) Sure, one can self-exile, but that doesn't really fit with his whole statement about being cut off from his own people without friends or protection. I know that the intended backstory went through several iterations (including a few that made the Doctor considerably more sinister) but, as I understand it, the basic notion was that the Doctor and Susan had fled some sort of uprising/war on their home planet because they were on the losing side. Obviously this isn't the idea they eventually went with (though it's arguably a variation on how they started New Who) but I've always liked the idea that the Doctor's background has some ambiguity to it, that there's more to it than just the simple War Games "I was bored" story. I don't doubt that was part of it, I just like the idea that it wasn't all there was to it. Perhaps that's one of the reasons that the Timeless Child backstory doesn't particularly bother me.

Also, why are they in London 1963 at all? Well, judging by the Doctor's later inability to pilot the TARDIS with any accuracy, I think it's fair to say they just happened to land there. So, more to the point, why have they stayed here this long? Was it just because Susan wanted to try staying in one time and place for an extended period and her grandfather indulged her? Honestly, given the ferocity of his desire to leave in this episode, I find that a bit hard to swallow. A few days, a week maybe, but five months? I suspect he simply would have put the TARDIS into motion while she was asleep before that much time had passed. He mentions having found a replacement for a faulty filament when he gets inside the ship, but I've long suspected that minor repairs on the TARDIS are something he's been doing because he's stuck on Earth, not the reason for the stay in the first place.

Many seasons later, in Remembrance of the Daleks, we'll learn that he left the Hand of Omega here. I suspect that, during these early trips in the TARDIS, he was always looking for an appropriate place to leave it and the very primitiveness of Earth that bothers him when talking to Ian and Barbara is what convinces him that it's the perfect place to hide it, too primitive for anyone to look for it there. Now, obviously he could have left it and immediately departed with Susan with no need for the five month stay. But it's worth noting that, in Remembrance, it becomes clear that his arrangements to completely hide the Hand (underground, in a cemetery) were not complete. He had to finish the job when he returned in that story. So what I'd suggest is that it's taken him this long to find a suitable exact spot to hide the Hand and has only recently begun the process of actually hiding it. This explanation also has the added benefit of meaning that any previous arguments between Susan and her grandfather about leaving were just theoretical, since leaving immediately wasn't actually an option anyway. It's only in this new situation with the "threat" of exposure from Ian and Barbara, that there's a need for the decision to be made right now.

The hardest thing I've always found to square with later continuity in this episode is Susan's claim that she is the one who came up with the TARDIS acronym. Indeed, it rather implies that the TARDIS is a unique craft, rather than one of a type as it will turn out to be. It even fits with that "running from a war" backstory, the pair stealing some experimental craft they barely know how to operate in a desperate attempt to escape and Susan coming up with a name for it afterwards. Reminds me a bit of UFO Robot Grendizer.

All in all, though, there isn't a whole lot in this first episode that's too hard to fit in with the things we learn later...even when those things contradict themselves.

Little Tidbits

-I'm no fashionista, but I do tend to take an interest in the Doctor's wardrobe. I like the not-yet-Doctor's astrakhan hat, enough so that I actually wish he'd wear it more later. I know that it was, most likely, just an early method of keeping Hartnell's wig on, but I still think it looks good. He's also carries off that cloak pretty well, a look he will occasionally revisit.

-Hartnell's got more fantastic acting moments in this episode than I can count but one that's always stood out for me is that moment when he mutters "insulting" to himself in response to one of Ian's comments. It's such a look of quiet infuriation that it leads me to believe it's what fuels his later taunting of Ian inside the TARDIS.

-Ian mentioning that he doesn't have any matches is a nice bit of innocuous foreshadowing for the rest of the serial.

-The little knick-knacks in the TARDIS, like the chair and clock, actually add to the weirdness of the situation, mundane objects in such a future-tech setting. If there's one thing I've always wanted for the TARDIS interior over the years it’s that it would have more clutter, objects and things the Doctor has picked up throughout his travels (although I've never been too fond of the TVM TARDIS interior and that actually had the most clutter, so what do I know?)

-As for the interior TARDIS design itself, it’s hard for me to accurately describe my reaction to it, as I have always gone into the scene expecting it ahead of time. I think the important thing is that it looks very different from the world outside it, which it certainly does. I have always found it interesting that the TARDIS console room feels more like a…well, a room, that the “bridge” of a ship. It looks futuristic (in a very ‘60s way) but less like a science fiction spaceship and more I like a prediction of what a house or dwelling interior will look like in the future (though, again, it's a very ‘60s idea of that.) I think that works well because, while the TARDIS is a vessel, it’s also a home of sorts.

-The not-yet-Doctor's has a line to Ian about the "Red Indian" that seems pretty insensitive now. Heck, it was pretty insensitive then. That said, its insensitivity actually makes it work even better in context, placing the not-yet-Doctor even more firmly in the position that the story wants him in at this point...the arrogant member of a "superior" culture who believes himself to be better than the "primitives" he's interacting with, assuming not just that they don't understand what's going on, but that they’re incapable of such understanding. It falls squarely into that category of dialogue that tells us more about the person speaking than the people they are talking about. I suspect that was always the intent of the line but it's actually even more damning of the not-yet-Doctor in later context.

-I love many things about Classic Doctor Who but its stunt choreography wasn't always the most amazing. Ian and Barbara's rather leisurely collapse as the TARDIS shakes violently on takeoff is pretty amusing, especially as they both settle into their positions in such a manner so as to obviously avoid injury. Barbara even gets a comfy seat. The shaking itself is something very rarely seen again, so I can only assuming it's the result of Susan trying tackle her grandfather away from the controls as he activates them.

-As the ship takes off, we get a wonderfully trippy sequence with London fading away to be replaced with the weird feedback blobs from the title sequence. This represents the first, but far from last, time that the show's current title sequence will double for the visual representation of traveling through the time vortex. I like it.

-And, of course, we get our first cliffhanger, an ominous shadow looming over the newly arrived TARDIS, leading to that all-important question...

What happens next?

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