Ep. 4 The Firemaker

As a countdown to the 50^th anniversary of Doctor Who I and my wife will be watching an episode a day until we are caught up to whatever the Beeb has planned. This is a record of my initial reaction to each day's episode published with minimal editing and crappy synopsis.

"I will speak with them.  I must hear more things to remember.  The Leader would have things to remember."

   The Doctor and crew get dragged back to the cave where Za and Kal start pounding their chests and accusing the other of killing the Old Woman.  The Doctor channels cave-Perry Mason and gets Kal to reveal the murder weapon and then confess.
   Admittedly he outwitted a caveman, but he did it in style.  If the Doctor and company were a D&D party than this story is the equivalent of fighting off the goblin bandits.  It's a much more seasoned Doctor who will one day face off with Davros, The Black Guardian, The Great Intelligence et al.
   At this point Doctor Who was filmed at Studio D.  From what I understand Studio D was the size of a middle school gym.  They had ridiculously little space to film a TV series like Doctor Who.  If I understand the way they filmed back then they pretty much filmed the episode in scene order.  That meant that they had to have all or most of the sets up at the same time.
   As a result there are a few moments when the production crew had to get creative to show what they wanted.
   The first was a big fight scene between Kal and Za in the Cave of Skulls.  The TARDIS crew and the two cavemen are in the cave, but they didn't have enough room to have all of the cast on set and still have a safety margin.
   The solution was to film the fight with just the combatants in the cave.  The camera cut-away to get reactions from the time travelers and try to establish that they were still in the cave even though we didn't see them.
   This worked OK.  The fight scene was enough to make up for it though.
   To start with, it was filmed.  If you're watching classic Doctor Who (or other British shows from that era) you might notice a sudden change in the quality of the picture from one scene to the next.  Usually there is a change in location that accompanies this.  That means that the production team switched from video tape to film cameras or vice versa.  There are technical reasons for why this was done that I won't bore you with, the long and the short of it is film causes an almost Pavlovian response in me when watching old Who.
   Then there's the lighting.  By this time Ian has put his national service training to good use and actually made a fire which is the only illumination for this cavethrowdown.
   The actors have good fight choreography.  This is the sort of thing that you expect from the Pertwee era.
   At the end of the fight Za grabs Kal's leg and drags the corpse across the cave floor.  It's MUCH more primitive than I would have expected the Beeb to allow back then.  It actually reminded me of primate behavior I saw in a documentary I saw years ago.
   Here's an example of what I mean about the difference between video and film.  It starts up around about the 2 and a half minute mark.

   The other moment of space-induced creativity was during the escape.  The time travelers have to run through the forest to get to the desert where the TARDIS is waiting.   The forest set was 15 feet square tops.  Hard to run though that over and over again.
   They decided to have the actors run in place in front of a black background while stage hands hit them with palm leaves.
   Let us never speak of this again.
   This marks the end of the first serial.  All-in-all I enjoyed watching it again and feel that it benefited from being watched in separate installments.
   The writer of this story never worked for Doctor Who again.  Anthony Coburn wrote two stories for the series.  This one was produced, while The Masters of Luxor his tale SF morality tale was passed over in favor of some tin-plated pepper pots.
  Next up: The Dead Planet