Our First Adventure Through Time and Space

I’m a big Doctor WhoThe longest running sci-fi franchise (at least in terms of sheer seasons), Doctor Who has seen cancelations, relaunches, and reboots, but the core of the series remains the same: a madman in a box traveling through time and space. fan, but I do have to admit that it’s mostly New Who that I am a fan of. Like many of my generation (and younger), my jumping on point was not with Classic Who. While I did watch the 1996 Doctor Who movie, which I am still a fan of to this day, I really got into the series with the 2005 relaunch, starting with the Ninth Doctor, Christopher Eccleston era. I have seen a few episodes of the older series, largely from the Fourth and Seventh Doctor runs, but I wouldn’t really say I was well versed in Classic Who. It’s a large gap in my fandom.

I want to rectify that. The series has been going (on and off) for over 60 years now, and it’s a cultural touchstone for a lot of sci-fi fans. Classic and New Who both have their place, and my lack of knowledge of, functionally, an entire era of the franchise really is a blind spot. So we’re starting here, at the very beginning, with the First Doctor, William Hartnell, and his very first adventures inside the time travelling (black and white) Blue Box, the Tardis. And naturally that starts with the very beginning, in a DVD set titled “The Beginning”, with “The Unearthly Child”.

This serial (as all classic Doctor Who stories are actually multi-episode serials that) starts with “The Unearthly Child”, an episode that is all setup for the rest of the series to come. It’s then followed by the three-part story frequently referred to as “100,000 BC”, although in box sets they are all put together as one long adventure. And everything that you expect from a Doctor Who story is here, already set. The Tardis, the time-traveling, the Doctor and his companions. Even the theme song and the way the titles look, which has been carried on to this day. It’s honestly impressive how much of the classic format is nailed here in this first serial despite the creators effectively making it all up as they went along.

Unfortunately, “100,000 BC” isn’t really a great first showcase for Doctor Who. The initial episode, “The Unearthly Child”, is pretty solid. It features two teachers, Ian Chesterton (William Russell) and Barbara Wright (Jacqueline Hill), discussing the very strange student they have, Susan Foreman (Carole Ann Ford). Susan is, at times, a brilliant student, but there are times where she has odd ideas, or comes up with weird solutions, that simply don’t make sense based on the lessons being taught. The two teachers decide to follow Susan back to her listed home, which turns out to be an abandoned scarp yard. But what they find in that scarp yard is a Police Box where it shouldn’t be, and a crotchety old man who ends up kidnapping them on an adventure through space and time.

“The Unearthly Child”, this first episode of the larger serial, is a solid bit of storytelling. It introduces us to the characters in an interesting way, setting up a problem for them to solve – “what is wrong with Susan?” – while also building a lot of mystery around her. When we finally get the resolution – that she and her grandfather, William Hartnell's “The Doctor”, are time travelers – we’re already built up for a wild and strange adventure. The story led us there, with a solid hook that gets us interested from moment one, and then it pushes through the doors of the Tardis onto that grand adventure. It’s really excellently done.

I do wish the rest of the serial were as good. Once we’ve traveled through time, we end up on a desolate stretch of desert and rock. We’re now into the “100,000 BC” stretch of the serial, and things quickly go downhill. As we learn, the instruments in the Tardis sometimes have to be calibrated, such as in this case with the chronometer simply spits out “0” instead of saying when the quartet have landed. The Doctor needs to take samples to figure it out, so they all set out from the ship to have a look around. And almost immediately The Doctor is kidnapped.

It seems that the group landed in prehistoric times, and they are stuck in the political dynamics of a warring tribe. Za (Derek Newark) is the son of the former leader of the tribe, and his father had the secret of making fire, a secret he took with him. The tribe wants Za to make fire, but Za doesn’t know how. Meanwhile, newcomer Kal (Jeremy Young) is strong and tough and he wants to be the leader. He says that if Za can’t make fire then Za shouldn’t be leader. But the arrival of The Doctor and his companions throws everything for a loop since The Doctor can make fire. The tribe just has to decide what to do with him, and how this will affect who will take over the tribe?

The “100,000 BC” stretch feels like a pilot serial. Where “The Unearthly Child” had basically all of its elements locked in and it knew what it was doing, “100,000 BC” is slow, tedious, and it feels like it’s reaching for something but never really getting there. The story is simple. Too simple, in fact, for a three episode arc that takes place, functionally, in a single location. More stuff needs to happen in the serial, or the story needs to be shorter, for the story to actually work.

Take the battle between Za and Kal. This is the main drama of the story, but the episodes never actually give us a reason to like either Za or Kal. They’re both mean and cruel warriors battling over a tribe of callow weaklings. For all we can tell, neither Za nor Kal are better suited to lead the tribe as they’re both bloodthirsty morons who prize power above all else. We spend a lot of time watching Za as he tries (and fails) to make fire and then tries (and fails) to lead his tribe, and it’s hard to say anything really comes of it.

It takes three episodes and all that really happens is the Tardis crew stumbles on the cave men, they run from the cave men, they then get captured again by the cave men, they make fire (but they don’t teach the cavemen how to do it), and then they run away again to escape in the Tardis. And this takes an hour to tell. All of this could have happened in a single episode, two at max, and it would have kept the action moving and the story zipping. Instead, across three episodes, this story becomes an utter slog. Actually getting through the last episode of the set was a chore because I desperately wanted everyone involved to get hit by a meteor and die.

I wouldn’t even say that the main characters, our heroes, were any better than the cavemen. The Doctor is utterly useless in this story, barely helping, never saying anything useful, and generally acting like a doddering old man. The two ladies, Barbara and Susan, also don’t add much. They get captured and scream a lot, but otherwise barely do anything to advance the plot. In fact, in the one time Barbara and Susan do speak up, it’s to help an injured Za who was just mauled by a predator. And all this does is get them captured again so that we reset the story back where we were a few minutes earlier. It’s terribly annoying.

Despite this, though, there are elements I like. The concept itself is cool, and seeing the main characters wander around and explore a new time period is neat. The Tardis itself is well designed and interesting, and I love how well the show settles into the kind of adventures it’s going to tell with this Blue Box. Conceptually the show is neat, it’s just that past the first part of the four-part story, I don’t think the creatives had a really solid handle on how to make a good adventure. Certainly a story watching cavemen argue amongst themselves is not a good use of the characters’ time, or ours. It’s just boring.

But it was just a pilot serial. The show had to grow, it had to find its feet. We’re at the very first step of a long adventure to come, and I’m sure we’ll quickly find an adventure that really shows off how good Doctor Who could get. Maybe even in the second serial, which introduces the most iconic characters, and the biggest threat, in the Doctor Who universe: “The Daleks”.