TARDIS Eruditorum - An Unofficial Critical History of Doctor Who Volume 1: William Hartnell

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So this is where it starts. A mysterious Police Box, and a magical girl, and a mystery that two regular, unimportant people can’t quite get over. A mystery that brings them out on a cold London night to 76 Totters Lane to try to find out where this girl came from. There, they meet an old man. Smug, superior, and unfriendly, he does not want them there. This is his mysterious girl, and his mystery. In The Pirate Planet, Doctor Who presents one of the most confused central metaphors of its long and generally confused history. The concept is admittedly ingenious: Zanak, a hollow planet that materializes around other planets and then consumes them in their entirety. On top of that, as is gradually revealed over the course of four episodes, all of this exists to feed power to the elaborate machines keeping the tyrannical Queen Xanxia alive and with a facsimile of her youthful body. So on the one hand we have a brutal metaphor for capitalist/imperialist expansion and the way in which it leads to devastating destruction purely for the benefit of a handful of parasitic elites. Put me down as another one absolutely smitten with this episode. I've watched it every midwinter since, and it just gets deeper and richer and more hilarious and more heart-rending every time. It could very well be my favourite ever episode, if the last four years of regularly dispersed brilliance hadn't made ranking them impossible. To this effect, Eruditorum engaged with other critical scholarship concerning Doctor Who and commented on their analysis as well, as part of the ongoing story. This included About Time, The Discontinuity Guide, Doctor Who Bulletin, Running Through Corridors and Peter Haining's Doctor Who: A Celebration. Due to the nature of the project, and how it was constructed with an emphasis on how events impacted the present, there were some similarities between it and a whig history. [4]

In this first episode, the questions are obvious. Why is he running? What is he afraid of? Where has he taken Ian and Barbara, and what is going to happen to them? Already, in the first episode, Doctor Who is about its own mystery. About the question of what Doctor Who is going to be. It doesn’t know yet. It doesn’t know what it will become. Doesn’t know the history and wonder that’s coming. Perhaps it’s even scared of that history. Running from it. Carpenter does not put ‘Starring Sam Neill’ on the poster. He does not break the fourth wall directly. Within the frame of the text, the barriers between reality – the life of John Trent, the world in which Hobb’s End is a fictional town created by author Sutter Cane – and fiction – the world of Hobb’s End and the monstrosities that exist there – breaks down, and the two are shown to be essentially one and the same. But the text does not breach its own actual limits. The text does not depict the barriers between itself and us, the viewers, breaking down. The metafictional apocalypse depicted on screen does not seem to affect us, the viewers. All of these, I think, are fun essays that I actually want to write. So hopefully we’ll plow through a good chunk of stretch goals and get to fill out the book with all sorts of goodies.Is forcibly redeeming the villain by changing his past better than beating the villain in a more conventional way (albeit one which might often result in his death)? There seems to be a stark difference between the Doctor warning the villain and giving them a choice, the villain ignoring this warning and making their choice and the Doctor then defeating them somehow, when compared to the Doctor warning them and giving them a choice, the villain ignoring the warning and making their choice, and then the Doctor changing their past and thus their current character, against their wishes, to ensure that they choose the other option. Toby Haynes also deserves a lot of praise. A script this dense could have easily been muddled by the wrong hands, but Haynes is such a deft storyteller in his own right that his direction is both sympathetic to it, and also enhances it – enthusing its edges with additional moments of lyrical beauty and pathos. Previously in Last War in Albion: Alan Moore became fascinated by fractals, or at least by what he thought fractals were. There’s a documentary, originally aired on British television in 1999, called Pornography: A Secret History of Civilisation . After a couple of quite decent episodes, the series starts considering the then-present and the then-future. It’s stuffed with comment from ‘cultural critics’ and ‘social theorists’, who generalise about what ‘we’ are becoming – with ‘we’ supposedly standing for all humanity while actually implicitly referring to the middle classes in the developed world in the era of pre-general crisis neoliberalism. A little surprisingly even in 1999, the oppression of women, the objectification of female bodies, patriarchy, sexism, etc., are issues barely touched upon. (I am resolutely Sex Work positive, but there are ways of talking about the exploitative capitalist and patriarchal power relationships instantiated in the pornography business without stigmatising sex workers.) Alongside the theorists, there are words from entrepreneurs or capitalists, and yet the word or topic ‘capitalism’ is barely properly mentioned. It is silently present as the ‘civilisation’ of the title. Despite the profound thinkerizing about porn’s supposed journey into ‘the mainstream’ there is precious little time left for wondering who sets the agenda of the mainstream. Media ownership is not a topic, except for the times when a handful of porntrepreneurs (presented as pioneers and farseeing cultural trendsetters) get to spout their self-seeking spin. In the midst of much pontificating about the meaning of things from the perspective of the business owner or the consumer, there is hardly any attention paid to the perspective of the worker, of the (if you’ll pardon me) working stiffs getting screwed. Porn is, apparently, an industry with consumers but no producers. To the extent that producers do appear, the emphasis is on the employers rather than the employees. When sex workers appear, the emphasis is firmly on self-employment, on the sex worker as a petty bourgeois individualist. You might argue that this turned out to be prescient, what with the rise of OnlyFans and the sexual gig-economy. And yes, the series manages to notice that the internet will change things. (There is nothing about the inequalities of internet access, or access to media more generally, in any of the discussion of porn consumption and ‘cybersex’.) But the series has an entirely mistaken idea of the context in which such changes will play out. Its idea of the future is an artefact of its own moment. That by itself is okay. Every idea of the future is an artefact of its own moment. The interesting thing about ideas of the future is precisely what they tell us about our own moment.

What’s interesting is not simply the world being destroyed, although this is a relatively rare occurence for Doctor Who, but rather episodes five and six, in which the characters on the fascist parallel Earth spend the whole time aware that their planet is doomed and figuring out what to do with this news. This provides a sense of apocalyptic dread, yes, but what’s more interesting is simply the emotional content—the specific ways in which characters react to the impending end of the world.Let’s leave it at that and move on to actually discussing the first new episode of Doctor Who in, what, six years?

I have to agree on the point about this being a single serial. Coburn may have had to truncate his original four-part version of 100,000 B.C. to accommodate the introduction of the TARDIS crew, but he actually works it in fairly well. The introduction of Za and Hur, characters who are as far behind Ian and Barbara as they are from the Doctor and Susan sets up an interesting examination of the role of civilization in compassion versus competition. It’s only when the Doctor realizes that teaching the cavemen how to cooperate is the solution to the Kal problem that he also starts accepting Ian and Barbara as allies and friends. Despite its other flaws, I always think Serial A (not going to get into the naming semantics) is probably one of the best thought out examinations of a theme in the entire series.This was a weird era to write about, but it has some of my favorite writing in Eruditorum, especially the Eccleston season, which has multiple mad, gonzo essays, including two that are going to be glorious nightmares to try to format for print. I am thoroughly excited to clean them up and get them into an Official Version, and to finally bring the TARDIS Eruditorum books into the new series. There are two key strands of thought in Invasion of the Dinosaurs, both of which come filtered through the oddities of Malcolm Hulke’s politics. The first, as noted by Tat Wood in About Time, sees Hulke responding to The Green Death by offering his own take on the conspiracy-minded thriller within Doctor Who. Wood proceeds to suggest several antecedents for this, making a selective but nevertheless fairly broad accounting of the genre to show where Hulke might have been pulling in contrast to Sloman and Letts, whose work Wood frames primarily in terms of monster movies. At the time I wrote that, I shrugged it off since it is a frothy Xmas special with not much weight to it. But as our host points out, you can see the elements of what Moffatt wants the show to focus on here, and in retrospect this is the point I knew the Moffatt era was not going to be for me. (Which was a shame, since I had been really hopeful about Moffatt and happy to see RTD move on.) Doctor Who as Alchemy: The interchangeability of an object and the symbolic representation of the object, as well as a variety of symbols associated with this pursuit, and how these things all blend together in certain Doctor Who stories.

The Ark in Space marks the first time since The Daleks that Doctor Who has done an outright post-apocalyptic story, and the first time in which this happens on Earth, instead of on a Planet of the Convenient Metaphor People. Instead Doctor Who has entered the phase where it begins to fantasize about the end of the world. This fantasy, speaking broadly as opposed to about one specific television show, comes in two main flavors. The first is “this is awesome,” in which the spectacle of destruction is fixated upon and, often though not always, eroticized. This isn’t entirely impossible for Doctor Who to do— The Dalek Invasion of Earth is on the brink of it—but it’s ultimately unsuitable for a show in which the hero reliably saves the day.An Unearthly Child,the first episode, is usually treated as one story along with the following three episodes. Because in its first seasons Doctor Who had individually titled episodes instead of story arc titles, the name for this story is disputed. The other names all refer to the plot elements of episodes 2-4, which are, for all practical purposes, a completely different story. An Unearthly Child was rewritten by Anthony Coburn from an original script by C.E. Webber, and was reshot before transmission, both facts that I think serve to separate it in a meaningful sense from the three episodes that follow. Thus I, in a viewpoint that has essentially no credibility in mainstream fandom, opt to treat An Unearthly Child as a one-episode story preceding a three-episode story entitled 100,000 BC.) This volume focuses on Doctor Who’s intersection with psychedelic Britain and with the radical leftist counterculture of the late 1960s, exploring its connections with James Bond, social realism, dropping acid, and overthrowing the government. Along, of course, with scads of monsters, the introduction of UNIT, and the Land of Fiction itself.