The Cave of Skulls

Doctor Who (1963), An Unearthly Child

And we’re off! We spent

the initial episode looking into mystery of Susan and eventually her grandfather and their Police Box. Now we’re going to see just how far down that rabbit hole goes.

We’ll see if we ever reach the end of it.

Summary

The Police Box has arrived in a desert area of sand and rock. It is observed by a caveman named Kal.

At a nearby cave live a tribe of…well, cavemen. Their leader, Za, is desperately trying to figure out how to make fire, holding his hands to dry sticks in hopes of doing so. He is encouraged by his mate, Hur, and her father, Horg, who is unsure Za should be leader, thinking that perhaps the newcomer, Kal, should take over. An Old Woman, however, thinks that the tribe would be better off without fire, that it brings death, as it did to Za’s father, the Great Firemaker.

Ian and Barbara wake up in the TARDIS. At first, Ian refuses to believe the ship has moved but, when the doors are opened, he has no choice but to believe Susan’s grandfather, whom they now begin to refer to as the Doctor.

As they leave the ship and begin to look around, Ian and Barbara trying to get their bearings, the Doctor wanders off to explore. He pauses to light his pipe and is attacked by Kal. When the others reach the site of the attack, he is gone.

Kal brings the Doctor back to the tribe’s cave, where he makes a play for the leadership of the tribe, claiming that the Doctor can “make fire come from his fingers” and will teach Kal to do so. Za objects and the Doctor, who dropped his matches when he was attacked, cannot back up the claim.

Ian, Barbara and Susan arrive but, in trying to rescue the Doctor, they end up captives themselves. The four of them are bound and placed in the Cave of Skulls, noting grimly that the skulls which are scattered about the place are all the same. They’ve been split open…

Crew Credits

Writer: Anthony Coburn

Director: Waris Hussein

Story Editor: David Whitaker

Producer: Verity Lambert

Overview

The conventional wisdom amongst Doctor Who fans is that this first serial has an amazing first episode and then the remaining three are pretty bad. I won’t go so far as to say I think they are on a par with An Unearthly Child but I do think there are interesting things to be found in the later episodes of the serial, particularly in terms of character and theme.

To start with, there’s the various levels of intelligence that each group of characters possesses. At the top of it all, there’s the Doctor (and, to a lesser extent, Susan) possessing intelligence and knowledge far and above that of anyone else in the story. At the bottom end of things, there are the cavemen, full of misinformed notions about very basic things like how fire works. What’s interesting here is that, in contrast to much of the show’s later approach, intelligence doesn’t immediately win out. Indeed, what we’re presented with here is a world in which brute force and power are the defining traits of advantage, rather then intellect. We’ll have to keep a watch on that to see if it continues throughout the serial or if there’s a shift.

Characters

The introduction of the cavemen in this episode gives us a whole new host of characters. I find it interesting that it’s actually these characters that the episode chooses to focus on at the beginning. One might expect the story to pick right up with the people inside the TARDIS, jumping right to their reactions, given the impressive cliffhanger we were left on at the end of the previous installment.

Instead, we open with Kal’s face as he observes the TARDIS in obvious confusion, and then shift immediately off to the cave where the tribe resides so as to introduce the serial cast. I’m often fascinated, actually, by which method a serial chooses to introduce the world into which the TARDIS crew are being inserted. Some stories choose, at first, to limit the perspective to what the Doctor and companions encounter as they go. This first one, however, establishes the characters and dynamics of the cavemen independently.

And, for a bunch of cavemen, there are quite a few dynamics at play.

Let’s start with Za, the leader of the tribe, son of the Great Firemaker. He is, as we meet him, about as typical a caveman as you can get. He’s strong, but not too bright. His leadership seems to be based on a combination of heredity and physical power. Basically, he took over after his dad died and no one has tried to challenge that for fear that Za will kill them (not an unreasonable fear.) His hold on that leadership is getting tenuous, though. Horg, an older man whom there’s little doubt Za could kill easily, has reached the point where he feels he can criticize Za openly, even implying that it may be time for a change (though being the father of Za’s lover probably helps Horg’s courage a bit.) Za’s ability to reason is fairly simplistic. He saw his father hold dry sticks and thus believes that fire was somehow inside his father and was transferred into the wood, so he keeps trying to do the same thing.

It’s worth noting that I don’t think Za is stupid, per se, just that his reasoning is on a simplistic level. His method for trying to make fire, mentioned above, is based purely on what little he saw of his father doing it, without allowing for the idea there might have been something more to the process. When Horg mentions that the people of the tribe are cold, Za says he will go kill some animals so that they all have warm skins to wear, but this doesn’t occur to him until the problem has been pointed out. He’s trying to problem solve on a logical, but very basic level.

Given the way Za thinks, it’s a good thing Hur’s there then. It would be easy to chalk Hur up as existing just to be Za’s love interest or, perhaps even more basically, just being there so that Za has another character to talk to, but I am very much of the opinion that Hur is the smartest person in the tribe. Unlike Za, Hur thinks “out of the box.” She recognizes that the tribe can’t be bought off with warm skins, that it’s fire they want and equate with leadership. She’s the one who notes that the mood of the tribe has turned against Za. She’s the one who recognizes that Kal is a threat to Za’s leadership. It’s interesting to note that Za clearly thinks he can just kill Kal at any time without reprisals. Hur seems to be the one who realizes that allowing Kal to live this long means that the tribe can’t be swayed with mere bloodletting. They have to show Kal is wrong before they can kill him, because the tribe is increasingly on Kal’s side. And while it’s true that Hur doesn’t know how to make fire any more than Za does, that isn’t a lack of intelligence on her part so much as just a lack of information.

Hur is also smart enough to realize that she lives in the world I mentioned above, one where strength and power trump intellect. It’s a sexist world, probably because of that fact. The guys are in charge because they can physically enforce their will upon the women, not because they’re smarter. It’s world where you get what you want and need by being the most powerful.

Or by attaching yourself to the most powerful. And that’s what Hur has done. She’s latched herself onto Za as his mate. Is it because he’s the leader? Is it because he’s strong? Is it love? Is it a combination of all those things? It’s a bit hard to tell, really, but I do think it’s worth noting that she seems pretty revulsed at the idea of her father “giving” her to Kal. If Hur was all about simply being with the strongest, most powerful guy, she’d probably be abandoning Za for Kal the same way the rest of the tribe is leaning. There is an exchange they have that I’ve always found interesting. Za mentions that Kal came to them from another tribe, all of whom had died, and that Za chose to let him stay with their tribe rather than kill him. That adds a small wrinkle to Za’s personality and perhaps to why Hur is with him. Za is, at least in the context in which they live, compassionate. He’s not above killing his enemies (he has a wonderfully delivered line about how he will have to “spill some blood to make people bow to” him) but he’s not a wantonly cruel man. In this world, one where power and strength rule the day, that’s likely a rare commodity and one that someone as intelligent, but weak, as Hur might prize.

The two compliment each other nicely, Hur advising Za gently to help keep him in charge while that position and power helps to keep her safe. Indeed, it’s her prompting and pushing that allows Za to retake the support of the tribe at the end of the episode.

We also meet Hur’s father, Horg. I wouldn’t go so far as to day that Horg doesn’t have a personality, but he does largely serve the purpose of being the spokesperson for the tribe’s mood in the story. He’s there to be the mouthpiece for everyone else who doesn’t speak. He’s also an example of the theme of power I’ve been talking about. Horg mentions that he was once a leader of many men, but Za points out that they died when the cold came. Leadership in this story is about power. When you lose that power, you immediately lose position. Horg has gone from being a leader to being dependent on Za’s charity. Note how he is swayed to ascent to Za taking Hur by Za’s promise to remember and always give him meat. Za is in danger of having the same thing happen to him. (Though one suspects that Kal might not let him survive the experience.)

And then we get the Old Woman. She’s called Old Mother in the credits and the novelization states that she’s Za’s actual mother. That’s possible, of course, though the onscreen narrative itself leaves it all a bit ambiguous. In any case, she represents a position that should be very familiar to fans of Doctor Who or any other long-running property: It was all better in the old days! She doesn’t want any of this new-fangled fire business. That was what led to the death of Za’s father, after all. (It’s awfully unclear what actually happened there. She says “they killed him for it” but I have a hard time believing it was the tribe who did that, since it’s unlikely they’d kill the father but then let the son lead. However, he died, though, the Old Woman blames fire for it.) It’s particularly amusing in that she’s fixated on the idea that fire will bring death even though the opposite (death by cold) is the most likely outcome if they don’t rediscover fire.

If anything, the Old Woman is the mental opposite of Hur. She doesn’t just think inside the box, she barely thinks at all. She acts on instinct and fear, rather than any sort of logic. Even right at the end of the episode, when she tells Kal to kill Barbara, I suspect that’s about the fact that Barbara is new and different.

And what of Kal?

Kal is clearly smart, ambitious and opportunistic. We see him make a play for power in this episode but the dialogue between the others makes it clear that he’s been building up to doing so for a while. Seeing the Doctor “make fire come from his fingers” has just presented him with an irresistible opportunity to move forward his timetable.

Let’s look at that opportunity for a moment. Kal is pretty squarely defined as the antagonist in the story. He’s the threat to Za’s power. He attacks the Doctor. He tries to seize power. He threatens to kill the Doctor when things don’t work out for him. But it’s worth noting that, despite being labelled as a liar at the end of the episode, Kal is not actually trying to trick the tribe. He did actually see the Doctor make fire. He wants to use that fact, but a fact it is. It’s not his fault that he doesn’t understand how matches and fire work.

We also see that Kal is, quite possibly, the world’s first populist politician. Once he’s got a gimmick, his “creature” that can make fire, he really works the crowd, using it as leverage to try and usurp Za’s position. If the Doctor still had any matches, Kal’s plan would likely have worked because, this early on, the Doctor clearly doesn’t care whether the leader of these people is compassionate or not. He’s just trying not to get killed. So, really, Kal only fails because of lack of knowledge and bad luck.

That said, Za jumps on the “playing to the crowd” bandwagon pretty quickly, even jumping up on a stone to talk to them, like some prehistoric soapbox. This demonstrates a trait of Za’s that’s going to become more obvious in the next couple episodes: Za may think simplistically, but he learns.

Well, that’s an awful lot of text devoted to the cavemen, but what about the stars of this story.

Susan, the Unearthly Child, the great mystery of the previous episode, gets a rapid downshift in focus. As fascinating as her mystery was, it was really just a stepping stone to other mysteries and the narrative has quickly moved on. There is a decent argument, really, that Susan will never be as interesting again as she was in the first episode.

Here she serves as a bit of a source of exposition for Ian and Barbara, who are still trying to cope with their new situation. She explains to them a bit about how the TARDIS works (or at least how it’s supposed to work) and even a tiny bit about her grandfather. She also serves as an emotional catalyst for driving the party’s search for him. Unfortunately, this also leads to one of the traits I find most grating in Susan, her tendency to go into hysterics. It’s not too bad in this serial (especially if we go with the idea that she and her grandfather haven’t been traveling that long, so she’s not used to the constant danger yet) but it will eventually reach kind of ridiculous levels, in my opinion.

Ian is definitely the one who has the most trouble coping with the new situation. Before they leave the TARDIS, he’s still operating from the same position he did in the previous episode, that what he’s being told is impossible and thus not true. It’s not until the doors open and he walks out into the sand that he’s forced to accept it. Even then, he has a single line afterwards where he says it’s all “impossible to accept.” (In a nice bit of facial acting, Jacqueline Hill plays Barbara as looking a bit annoyed at the line, as if she’s gotten a bit tired of Ian clinging to a worldview that is clearly not the case.)

That said, once Ian brings himself to accept the fantastic situation, he into a more practical mode of thinking, one he’ll remain in for most of his time on the show.

Barbara, as mentioned, seems to take it all a bit more in stride for largely the reasons discussed in my post on the first episode. She doesn’t get a whole lot to do in this episode, largely prompting Susan for exposition, but Hill’s assured performance still makes her a welcome presence in the episode.

And then, of course, there’s the Doctor.

I can call him that now, rather than “the Old Man” or “Susan’s Grandfather” or even “Doctor Foreman.” The “Doctor Who?” line has been used as a joke so many times over the show’s history that it’s easy to forget that when it’s used (twice) in this episode it’s not a humorous meta-quip, but rather an acknowledgment, first by the character himself and later by Ian, of just how little we actually know about the series’ title character. As Ian says “Doctor Who? That’s not his name. Perhaps if we knew his name, we’d have a clue to all this.” it’s an early signpost that the show is not about explication or known quantities. It doesn’t present a world where a little bit of digging gives you all the answers but rather one where there are always more mysteries to explore, perhaps even some that can never be known.

His name aside, the Doctor’s personality in this episode is pretty much exactly what you’d expect, given what we saw of him in the previous one. As mentioned, when I looked at An Unearthly Child, the Doctor’s motivation for taking Ian and Barbara with him had very little to do with them and almost everything to do with keeping his granddaughter with him. This is backed up by just how little attention the Doctor pays to his new human passengers in this episode. He gets a bit smug with Ian in the beginning, but that’s just because he needs to be the smartest person in the room. After that, he’s off to explore.

Once off on his own, the Doctor proves, for all his smug superiority, to be pretty vulnerable. As mentioned, this is a world where strength, not intelligence, is the source of power and on that score the Doctor comes up quite short. Once captured, you can practically see the Doctor’s brain working furiously to try and come up with a way out of the situation. His first idea is actually pretty straightforward. He’ll just give Kal what he wants, make the caveman some fire and then be on his way. That, of course, proves impossible when he realizes he’s dropped his matches and the growing fear on Hartnell’s face as he realizes just how bad his predicament has become is very well played, culminating in a look of absolute terror when Kal threatens to actually kill him. William Hartnell really is just a master of his craft.

The Doctor doesn’t get killed, of course. The others show up to rescue him…well, try to rescue him. It just amounts to them getting captured too, but it does save the Doctor’s life.

Speaking of saving lives, I can’t talk about the Doctor in this episode without exploring the fact that he saves Ian’s life. This is the first unselfish, even heroic, act we’ve seen the character take since the series began and it’s quite telling. We’ve seen the Doctor be selfish, smug and, yes, both cruel and cowardly up until now, but shouting to save Ian is none of those things. Sure, we could rationalize it away as the Doctor recognizing that Ian is the strongest of them and that his strength may be needed but, honestly, he does it so quickly and intuitively (as opposed to his desperate, sputtering attempts to save himself a few minutes earlier) that it seems clear to me that the Doctor here is acting on a more instinctual level. Deep down, under that nasty exterior we’ve seen up until now, there’s a level to the Doctor’s personality that is more noble, that sees something bad about to happen and feels compelled to prevent it.

He also does it quite cleverly. He doesn’t try to appeal to Za’s compassion or the sanctity of life, both approaches that I suspect would fail. No, he uses the potential of fire as a bargaining chip. Of course, it helps that Hartnell’s delivery of “If he dies, there will be no fire!” is very well done.

Links to the Past

We learn surprisingly little about the Doctor and Susan’s past in this episode, given how much of the previous one’s time was devoted to setting up their mystery. Really the most we get is Susan mentioning that, up until now, the TARDIS has changed appearances in different locations, having been “an ionic column and a sedan chair” presumably among other forms. Still, it establishes, firmly, that Totter’s Lane was not the first place the Doctor and Susan went after leaving their home. I still suspect they haven’t made that many trips yet, though.

It also makes clear that. for all its futuristic interior appearance, the TARDIS is a craft capable of (perhaps even prone to) malfunction. There are actually a few things to reinforce that in this episode. The “Year-O-Meter” in the TARDIS is apparently not calculating properly and the Doctor chooses to take his Geiger counter with him despite the reading on the TARDIS radiation meter, implying that the latter hasn’t always been reliable.

This all makes the situation seem a bit more dire for Ian and Barbara, if even the TARDIS, their one potential link to the world they came from, isn’t entirely reliable. (It’s worth noting that we have not yet established that the TARDIS is resistant to outside physical harm yet, too.)

Little Tidbits

-The cliffhanger from the previous episode is left, err, hanging for quite a while, much longer than will usually be the case in the future.

-The cavemen in the story have an interesting pattern of speech. It’s actually quite wordy, but usually in the fashion that they use many words to describe concepts that their language hasn’t yet reduced to easy descriptions or for new things the characters encounter that they find hard to describe. Things like the TARDIS being described as “a strange tree” or when Kal explains his attack on the Doctor as “We fought like the tiger and the bear. My strength was too much for him. He lay down to sleep.” make their dialogue unique. Even if part of that latter description is just Kal trying to make knocking an old man out seem epic, the descriptions themselves are interesting, reflecting the very limited understanding and worldview that these people possess, yet still coming across as a functional language. Winter/snow is “the Great Cold.” The Sun is “Orb.” (That one clearly doubles as a deity too.) Even their descriptions of fire as being inside hands/fingers and then coming out of them shows the audience precisely why these people haven’t figured out how to make fire yet…they’re making all the wrong assumptions about how it works. In any case, it’s a far more interesting approach than if they’d gone with the obvious third person monosyllabic grunting that a lot of stories do for cavemen.

-Hur. Her. Hehe.

-We get some subtle foreshadowing in this episode. Ian, noticing how cold the ground is, reinforces the notion that the need for the tribe to discover fire is immediate, not distant. Clearly winter is approaching and if they don’t rediscover fire before “the Great Cold” then they’re all going to die. We also establish, as mentioned above, that the radiation meter in the TARDIS isn’t always reliable. Then we wreck the Doctor’s portable Geiger counter. All of this sets the stage for events during their next trip…

-There are a few more casualties of Kal’s attack on the Doctor, besides the Geiger counter. First, there’s the Doctor’s astrakhan hat, alas. I guess they discovered how to make Hartnell’s wig stay on more firmly, so there wasn’t any need for it. Next, it leads to the finding of the Doctor’s notebook/journal. Susan mentions that it contains his notes about the places they’ve visited and, perhaps more tellingly, the key codes for the controls in the ship. This strikes me as more early evidence that the Doctor stole the TARDIS, rather than built it himself, as I suspect he’d be more readily familiar with its workings if he’d done the latter. I tend to picture him jotting things down as he tries them in his early pre-Unearthly Child journeys, working to discover what does what.

-But arguably the biggest casualty of Kal’s attack is the Doctor’s pipe and, it seems, the Doctor’s entire smoking habit. This is (unless I’ve forgotten something or it comes up in a book/audio/comic I’m unfamiliar with) the one and only time we see the Doctor try to smoke tobacco in the entire series. On a meta level, that’s a good thing. The public attitude toward smoking has changed a lot over the years and I suspect that, if the Doctor had continued to be a character who smoked going forward, the early stories would be looked on very differently. From an in-story perspective, one must conclude that he wasn’t that attached to the habit anyway considering we never see him do it again. One wonders if he didn’t pick up the pipe and tobacco while in 1963 London as a possible method of alleviating his boredom and was only trying it out for the first time in this episode. In any case, there strikes me as a good chance that the Doctor now subconsciously associates smoking with getting struck on the head, so it’s small wonder that he doesn’t keep lighting up.

-I mentioned Za’s compassion above. It also extends to the idea that he seems to actually care what happens to the tribe. While he didn’t think of the fact that the tribe hasn’t enough warm skins on his own, his immediate thought is to remedy that when it’s brought to his attention. That, I think, is really the primary distinction between Kal and Za, two characters otherwise similar in their ambition and tendency towards violence. Za cares about the tribe. Kal cares about himself.

-Age really isn’t respected in the tribe. The Old Woman is barely tolerated and Horg seems to have fallen from power as he got older. It’s not really surprising, given this world where authority flows from strength and power, rather than intelligence and experience, but it is notable. Alas, I wish I could say that the western world has much more respect for the elderly now, but…well, one of my old jobs was in a nursing home and there are things I saw there that still haunt me.

-Right before the end of the episode, the Doctor has a line where he apologizes to everyone for having gotten them into their current predicament. It’s not a reaction to being blamed by anyone else, but rather he spontaneously says that it’s all his fault and that he’s “desperately sorry.” Like when he saved Ian before, I think this is an early glimpse into the core of the Doctor’s being. Yes, he wants everyone to acknowledge that he’s the smartest person in the room all the time, but he also wants that status to be legitimate. There will be many times in the show’s future where the Doctor will bluff and bluster and pretend but here, early on and under stress, we see that the Doctor is not without a sense of his own responsibility.

But will that be enough to help them escape from the Cave of Skulls…?

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