Doctor Who (1963), An Unearthly Child
So, our protagonists are back in prehistoric times, lost, captured and forced into a cave (doubling as a cell) that's full of skulls that have been split open.
They don't know it yet, but this is going to be a pretty typical Saturday night for them.
Summary
As the tribe sleeps, the Old Woman steals Za’s knife and heads for a secret back entrance to the Cave of Skulls. In the Cave itself, the Time Travelers are desperate to find a way to escape. Tensions are running high between them. When the Old Woman arrives, it is not to kill them but rather to set them free so they can run away and never bring fire to the tribe.
Hur has noticed the Old Woman slip away, however, and wakes Za. They arrive just after the prisoners escape and set off into the forest to catch them.
The Time Travelers’ trip through the forest is arduous, made more difficult by flaring tempers, arguments about who is in charge, Barbara’s fears, the Doctor’s exhaustion and the fact that they don’t entirely remember the way back to the ship. They take cover when Za and Hur arrive, following their trail, but when Za is attacked by a beast from the forest, Barbara insists that they help the injured caveman, prompting still more argument.
Kal, meanwhile, has discovered that the prisoners have escaped. He murders the Old Woman and blames Za for it, claiming Za set the strangers free and whips the Tribe up into a frenzy.
The Time Travelers’ meanwhile, have finally decided to take Za back to the TARDIS on a stretcher so they can help him but, just as they’re almost there, Kal and the Tribe appear…
Crew Credits
Writer: Anthony Coburn
Director: Waris Hussein
Story Editor: David Whitaker
Producer: Verity Lambert
Overview
My first overall thought about this episode is that it’s awfully grizzly for Doctor Who, or at least grizzly in comparison to what Doctor Who will be. The show has never shied away from violence, mind you. Indeed, Doctor Who, as a show, has really hefty body count. But it generally opts for a relatively “clean” depiction of that violence, without a lot of blood and obvious graphic injury. And while this episode is hardly in horror movie territory, it’s got its fair share of imagery that’s on the nasty side. There’s split open skulls, the head of a dead boar, and blood all over Za after he’s attacked. There’s also a lot of implied physical violence, with Kal raising the knife to stab the Old Woman, the offscreen sounds of Za being attacked, Za’s obvious pain after his injuries and, of course, the Doctor picking up a rock and contemplating murder. More on that last one later.
All of this makes for a fair amount of gritty, violent realism that falls a bit outside the usual pattern for Doctor Who. But then, that pattern hasn’t yet been established. This is early days yet and they’re obviously still figuring out what tone they’re looking for (and probably how much the tone can vary between serials.)
This episode is something of a straightforward escape tale. While the political dynamics of the tribe’s leadership are not forgotten in this story, we’re back to a focus more on our lead characters and their struggles. A lot of the story is devoted toward the foursome going through the painful process of figuring out how their dynamic is going to work, who’s in charge, whose suggestions are going to be followed and whose ignored. In what’s likely a startling contrast for anyone coming back to watch this after watching later eras, it’s the Doctor who ends up at the bottom rung of the authority ladder here. He’s not shy at all about saying what he feels but, at the end of things, the other three pretty much ignore his advice.
There’s also a nice rising tension to the episode’s plot. When the Time Travelers’ progress keeps getting delayed, be it by the Doctor’s fatigue, fears about creatures in the forest, Ian and the Doctor’s arguments or even just their general lack of certainty about which way to go, you feel like it’s costing them. They’re moving slowly. The cavemen are moving fast. This builds rather perfectly to the end, when they come so close to making it back to the TARDIS only to be caught again.
Characters
Starting with the cave people and working up to the regulars...
The Old Woman fears fire. As I mentioned in my post on the previous episode, she’s afraid of change, believing it will “bring trouble and death to the tribe.” She is, however, presented more sympathetically in this episode than the previous one. The episode initially sets us up to believe she’s planning on using Za’s knife to murder the prisoners but we soon learn that she’s only planning to free them. While the effect of this is to make her seems less threatening than before, I do think it’s worth noting that this is most likely a pragmatic decision on her part. When discussing the tribe’s dynamics in the last episode, I noted that power here is almost exclusively derived from physical superiority. Strength rules. The Old Woman is wholly aware of this. Indeed, she’s probably had to work around it for her entire life, always aware of how physically vulnerable she is and how easily she can be overpowered, even moreso now in her elderly state. There are four prisoners and at least three of them are younger, faster and stronger than she is. Even with the knife, her chances of overpowering and killing them all are low. But freeing them so they’ll go away? That avoids the confrontation entirely. Strength rules the fight but diplomacy avoids the fight altogether, giving everybody what they want. So I suspect it’s a decision that has little to do with compassion and much more to do with strategy. Unfortunately, the Old Woman’s gift for strategy is limited and she can’t explain away her actions to either Za or Kal later, getting her beaten up and killed respectively.
Those two reactions do illustrate some of the differences between Za and Kal. Za does get angry and shove the old woman to the ground when he sees that she’s freed the prisoners. He’s not gentle about it, either. The Old Woman is still dazed, possibly concussed, when Kal finds her later. But Za does that in a fit of frustrated temper. He’s a caveman. Who knows if that level of physical violence is even considered a taboo in their culture. (I’d suggest not much, actually. Za pushes people around throughout the serial with a casualness that implies that it’s not unusual.) But Kal…Kal straight up murders her. Like Za, he’s angry, seeing his chances for leadership of the tribe slipping away. But unlike Za, it isn’t an instantaneous loss of control. Kal clearly decides to kill her, slowly taking his knife out and stabbing. Kal’s angry, but Kal’s also deliberate.
The difference, I think, between Za and Kal, is the scope of their vision. In some ways they are similar. They are both clearly ambitious, wanting to be the leader. They're both quite prone to violence to achieve their ends (though one imagines that’s pretty common in this society.) They both want the secret of fire and, indeed, both want it to further their ambitions.
But Kal’s vision is small. It encompasses only himself. He wants to be leader because it’s good for him and that’s as far as it goes. Anything and anyone can and will be sacrificed to achieve that goal because that goal is the endgame. Because of this, Kal interprets every event in terms of his rivalry with Za for leadership. He’s not angry with the Old Woman because her actions will cost the tribe fire, but because they will cost him the leadership of the tribe. And once she’s dead, he continues his stone age political theatre, using her death as a weapon to cast Za in the villain role and seize the loyalty of the tribe. (Having watched this several times, I don’t get the impression that Kal had this ruse in mind when he actually killed the Old Woman, but rather came up with it afterword.)
Za's vision is larger. It still includes Kal’s goals, it’s worth noting. He does want to be leader of the tribe. That’s just not where his goals end. Za wants to be a good leader of the tribe. When he learns that the Old Woman has stolen his knife and snuck into the cave, he’s seeing the tribe’s future slipping away, not just his own. Indeed, his impressive feat of strength, moving the Great Stone to get into the cave is clearly motivated by his desperation to prevent the loss of the prisoners, not just anger at the Old Woman. (That comes later, when he’s too late.) Even before that, when he still thinks the Old Woman’s goal is to kill the prisoners, his thought is that if he saves them, they’ll give him fire in their gratitude, saving both his position and the tribe’s future. Perhaps the most notable difference is that Za doesn’t seem to be viewing any of this through the lens of his rivalry with Kal at all. It’s Hur who has to point out that saving (and later recapturing) the prisoners would give him an advantage over Kal, that “leaders are awake while others sleep.”
Speaking of Hur, this episode continues the previous one's trend of showing that she is smarter than the others in the tribe and is, effectively, the intelligence behind Za's leadership. She repeatedly reminds him of the things he needs to do to cement his position as leader. She works out what the Old Mother is doing, not simply noticing that she took Za's knife but ruminating on her reasons for doing so. She recognizes that recapturing the prisoners is something that will paint Za as the leader in the eyes of the tribe. She doesn't just observe. She draws conclusions from her observations, ones that the men aren't drawing themselves, even when it's as simple as noting that the prisoners leave strange tracks because "they wear skins on their feet."
And the instances when Hur doesn't understand are things that are outside the context of her worldview. When she is perplexed by the travelers' attempts to save the injured Za, it's because that kind of thing simply isn't done in the world she lives in (both because her world values strength over compassion and because they don't have the medical knowledge to help the person anyway.)
We also get more evidence that Hur's attachment to Za has a real emotional component to it, rather than just being about attaching herself to the strongest leader. If the latter were the case, she would have lost interest in Za the moment he was so gravely injured. Instead, she is clearly distraught and also remains attached enough to see Susan as a potential rival for Za's affections. Hur's smarter than the rest of the tribe, but it’s obvious that some of her decisions are made with her heart rather than her head.
Ok, that's the cavemen, but what about our regulars?
As in the previous episode, Susan doesn't get to do a whole lot in this one. She pipes in with some dialogue here and there. She is also apparently the one who remembers the way back to the TARDIS best of the four but not well enough for it to really make much difference to the plot.
Susan does, however, get a little bit of character development in this episode, in the form of some very small acts of defiance of her grandfather. When he insists they're going back to the ship, she stays to help the schoolteachers help Za. She also volunteers the fact that they have lots of antibiotics back at the ship and, perhaps most tellingly, has a line in which she tells Ian and Barbara that her grandfather is "always like this when he doesn't get his own way." (And the look on Hartnell's face when he hears that line is priceless.) So, in little bits and pieces, we're seeing that Susan is willing to stand up to her grandfather. The previous episode had shown us that she was willing to argue against him, but this more subtle undercutting of his authority is arguably an even greater sign of rebellion. It's one thing to have an argument with your parents about how late you can stay out at night. It's another to sneak out after they told you to be home.
Poor Barbara. She's not coping with all of this very well. And who can blame her, really? While we fans of the show are often tempted to judge companions on their ability to retain composure in the face of danger, it's worth noting how unrealistic such composure actually is. The things a companion is exposed to in the course of an average Doctor Who episode are, frankly, terrifying. In Barbara's particular case, she's gone from her normal life to being captured and chased by cavemen in what's probably less than 24 hours from her perspective. Of course she freaks out a bit. Further, Jacqueline Hill plays Barbara's small breakdown beautifully. She deftly portrays, not a weak-willed woman who generally can't cope, but rather a woman who's just had too much strangeness, danger and terror thrown at her in too short a time for her to be able to process it. Quite honestly, I think it's a tossup, this early into the series, as to whether Hartnell or Hill are the better thespian. I might even lean slightly towards Hill, at least in terms of realism.
Then there's Ian.
And the Doctor.
It's hard to talk about them separately in the context of this episode, as most of their interactions are with each other and centered around the question of who should be in charge. There is also a bit of a parallel to be drawn between the Doctor and Ian's struggle for leadership of the Travelers' and Za and Kal's struggle for leadership of the Tribe.
Like Za, Ian seems to be wanting to lead out of a combination of selfish and selfless motivations. On the selfish side, at this point Ian just doesn't like the Doctor, seeing the old man, not inaccurately, as arrogant, cruel and egotistical. On the selfless side, he also clearly wants a leadership style that actually works to get the four of them out of the horrible situation they're in. When he tells the Doctor "don't just lie there criticizing us, do something" he's pointing out the need for the Doctor's critiques to actually be helpful, that this isn't just a clash of egos but a struggle for their survival. Whose in charge isn't important for it's own sake, but rather for the sake of everyone else.
This is exemplified by the fact that Ian has no problem taking the Doctor's advice when it's actually practical, like using the sharper bones to cut their bonds, for instance. When Ian stands his ground it's not just because he doesn't like the Doctor but because he recognizes that the Doctor is just objecting because he wants to be in charge. When Ian insists on changing the order they're walking in, for instance, it's based on picking the best order for their survival, not just sticking it to the old man.
The Doctor, on the other hand, seems to be approaching things more like Kal. He wants to be in charge because he's bothered by the idea of someone else being in charge. Sure, he thinks Ian's not as smart as he is, but it seems more like he's bothered by that on an emotional level than a pragmatic one. The Doctor is, for all intents and purposes, offended by the idea of the party being led by someone he thinks of as an unintelligent primitive. Because of this, the Doctor is digging his heels in and being stubborn about decisions he'd likely support if he'd just been the one to suggest them first, like what order is safest for them to walk in. He's also absolutely insistent that there is no possible danger in the forest. He's wrong about that, obviously, and it highlights the fact that he's most likely insisting on it not because he's thought it through but because he simply will not concede the possibility that the "hysterical" Barbara might have a point.
The Doctor is unceasing in his belief that Ian and Barbara are unintelligent primitives but that's borne of watching them failing to grasp things earlier. They couldn't understand the TARDIS. They couldn't grasp simple things like what material to use to try and cut their bonds. They're dumb. Or at least that's what he has concluded and thus he has no desire to let them have equal say in the decision-making, let alone have one of them telling him what to do. It's less about objectively assessing the level of danger they're in and more about asserting control of the situation.
We do get another small sign that there might be more to the Doctor than we've seen thus far in this episode, though. It's attached to that classic line to Barbara from when they're captured in the beginning: "Fear makes companions of us all." Just a tiny hint that there might be some compassion underneath that grumpy exterior. It's also an interesting mix between pure pragmatism (It's certainly in the Doctor's interest that Barbara keep her head) and genuine compassion, especially when he goes on to mention "hope."
He's still a long way from the Doctor we'll know later, though. One of the ways this is demonstrated is on a purely physical level: his exhaustion when they're trying to escape. One of the more consistent traits of later incarnations of the Doctor is that they are boundless fountains of energy. When I first saw this story, I recall being shocked that the Doctor was so easily tired, effectively being "the weakest link in the party" (no matter much he insisted he wasn't.) At this point, the Doctor both looks and acts like an old man.
Another way in which the Doctor seems different from how he'll be later is something quite simple: He's wrong a lot. Now, it's hardly unheard of for the Doctor to make mistakes in later seasons, but this early version of him is proven to be wrong several times by the episode. He insists that there is no danger from animals in the forest, only for them to witness an animal attack later. He mocks the cavemen for their lack of logic and reason in an episode interspersed with cavemen working out what is going on (on a primitive level, sure, but they're doing it.) Even his blatant claim that the Old Woman is probably telling the tribe where they are "at this very moment" is answered with a cut to a scene where she's doing nothing of the sort. This episode presents the Doctor as intensely fallible, something made all the more evident by Hartnell's (wise) choice to play the Doctor as supremely confident in his judgments.
Of course, one can't really talk about the Doctor in this episode without talking about the elephant in the roo--, err, forest: The rock scene. The Doctor picks up a rock while they're caring for Za and...well, we don't quite see what he was going to do, because Ian catches him, but the fairly obvious implication is that the Doctor intended to settle the issue of whether they should carry Za back to ship by bashing the injured caveman's head in. The question of whether that was what the Doctor was planning has been debated in Who circles for decades. Some people think he was going to do kill Za. Others think it's so far outside the character we know later that he couldn't possibly mean to do that.
I...think he probably meant to bash Za's head in, yes. It's very far from what we know of the Doctor later but, as I think will become obvious as we go through the early serials, the Doctor later is a product of these early stories including both the experiences and mistakes within them.
Part of my belief in this comes from Hartnell's own acting in the scene. When he fumbles out his explanation of "I was going get him to draw our way back to the TARDIS" he's so obviously playing that as a weak lie, as a man who's been caught doing something he shouldn't, not as an innocent man defending his actions.
So, yes, I do think the Doctor intended to kill Za. However, I do think there's more to the situation than just the Doctor's initial intentions. It's one thing to contemplate murder. It's another to actually commit it and while I definitely think the Doctor picked that rock up with the intent of bringing it down on Za's head, I also question whether, if Ian hadn't caught him, he'd have been able to bring himself to actually go through with it, or if the same instinct that led him to save Ian from death in the previous episode would have kicked in and prevented him from doing it.
Little Tidbits
-Several of the cuts between scenes in this episode are very well done. For instance, we get the shot of the Old Woman breaking into the cave and menacing the prisoners, then cut away, leaving the audience with the impression that they're in imminent danger when they're actually not. There's also a nice quick cut from Barbara screaming at the sight of the dead boar to Za and Hur hearing her cry, making it clear to the audience just how close the cavemen are to them.
-The attack on Za by the beast in the jungle is, I think, very well done. Doctor Who was, as it always would be, plagued by not having the budget to adequately portray its ideas. Showing the attack from the beast's eye view and then cutting quickly over to the horrified expressions on the faces of the travelers does an excellent job of getting across how terrifying and brutal the attack is without us actually seeing it.
-I like that the Tribe catches up with the travelers really easily at the end. This is the cavemen's territory. They know it well and the travelers don't. Plus, the Doctor keeps slowing the travelers down and they're carrying Za on a stretcher. If anything, it's a bit surprising that Kal and Company don't catch up earlier.
-The camera work for the cliffhanger is great, slowly pushing in on Kal's face as he looks very...evil.
What happens next...?
Previous Post: Elasticity of Continuity
Previous Doctor Who Post: The End of the World
Previous Doctor Who (1963) Post: The Cave of Skulls
Next Post: The Unquiet Dead
Next Doctor Who (1963) Post: The Firemaker
First Doctor Who Post: Discovering the Doctor
First Post: Stories
Comments