There's still a part of me that's not used to watching the classic stories as individual episodes. Channel 11 used to broadcast an edited together version of each story with the cliffhangers spliced together. When I started picking up the video tapes (and later DVDs) I'd just watch the entire story in one sitting. Sometimes I fast forward through the credits, sometimes not.
Part of the reason that I've decided to do this Who re-view is to get a fresh perspective on shows that I haven't seen in years. In some cases I'm sure that I've made snap judgements about a story that have lingered for years.
My opinion of An Unearthly Child (the first episode of the series, not the first serial if that doesn't confuse you too much) has remained unchanged since I first saw it as a teenager. It's magical. The look on Barbara's face when she finds herself in the TARDIS for the first time, the smirk on the Doctor's face when he electrifies the console, Susan dancing alone to her transistor radio and a hundred other small bits add up to one of the single best Hartnell episodes ever made.
My thoughts of the rest of the serial have varied over the years.
In An Unearthly Child two British school teachers decide to take an extra interest in an odd teenage girl named Susan Foreman, the aforementioned Unearthly Child. Barbara Wright (history teacher) convinces Ian Chesterton (science) to follow Susan after school. Barbara had done some snooping and had discovered that the address that was in Susan's paperwork, 76 Totter's Lane, turned out to be a junk yard.
Oddly enough, Susan leads the pair of nosy teachers to 76 Totter's Lane, enters the junk yard and seems to disappear by the time the pair of teachers enter.
Inside the junkyard there is a police box which quickly becomes the center of Ian and Barbara's attention. The police box hums with a faint vibration. Ian, the science teacher, touches it and declares that it's alive, an observation that viewers will eventually discover to be true.
I don't want to get into a detailed run down of what happens next. Suffice it to say that the Doctor arrives, Susan calls to him from the police box and the two teachers force their way inside the TARDIS.
The teachers try to rationalize what they see. The Doctor offers a condescending explanation that makes Eccelston's portrayal of the Doctor look like Anne of Green Gables.
And then the Doctor kidnaps them. He sets the Ship in motion, but not the way that it should. He gets pulled away while in the middle of programming the flight path and things go all wonky. The upshot of this is that Ian and Barbara are rendered unconscious and the TARDIS materializes on a barren plain complete with a menacing figure complete with stone ax.
The first cliffhanger.
We pick up the story with The Cave of Skulls an episode that I've always lumped together with the remaining two episodes of the serial.
There are a fair few people who write this and the next two episodes off as some rubbish with cavemen. Over the years I've been back and forth with this one. The caveman dialog is interesting. The writer didn't want to reduce the cavemen to grunting so they tried to create this sophisticated/primitive patois that some people really don't care for.
I like it. The actors say their lines with conviction and there are bits that almost cross the line into Viking poetry.
My favorite might be an exchange where the would-be leader of the tribe tells the others that he will go kill many bears tomorrow to get furs. An old man tells him to make fire instead "and the bears will stay warm in their own furs."
There is something that I picked up on watching this again. Ian and Barbara are as far ahead of the cavemen as the Doctor and Susan are ahead of the two teachers. It hammers home the mocking tone that the Doctor had towards Ian and Barbara since he met them, to him we're just dragging our knuckles on the ground and trying to make fire out of ash.
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