An Unearthly Child: Personal Thoughts and Observations
THE DOCTOR
Before Time Lords, before Gallifrey, before regeneration there was just an old man wandering in the fourth and fifth dimensions of time and space.
IAN: He's a doctor, isn't he?
Watching this first serial on it's own, I would guess that he isn't even "the Doctor" yet, and that Susan simply invented an occupation for her unseen grandfather.
IAN: Just open the doors, Doctor Foreman.
DOCTOR: Eh? Doctor who? What's he talking about?
I would also guess that Susan Foreman's name is one she chose for herself upon arriving in England in the twentieth century; the surname probably taken from the writing painted on the wooden doors of the junk yard. Even her clothes reflect a desire to blend in with her surroundings.
Her grandfather's attitude is entirely different. He is content to walk the streets of London in anachronistic clothing. As he freely admits, he tolerates the twentieth century, but he does not enjoy it.
BARBARA: Oh, look, I don't understand it any more than you do. The inside of the ship, suddenly finding ourselves here. Even some of the things Doctor Foreman says -
IAN: That's not his name. Who is he? Doctor who? Perhaps if we knew his name we might have a clue to all this.
From this point onwards the two school teachers address the old man as “Doctor” or refer to him in the third-person as “the Doctor” and he seems to accept their use of the title. It is interesting to note that throughout his tenure the First Doctor almost never introduces himself as such.
IAN: You're a doctor, do something.
DOCTOR: I'm not a doctor of medicine.
Clearly he holds a doctorate of some sort, but in whatever subject that may be (like his real name) is a complete mystery.
William Hartnell said that the Doctor was a wizard, not a scientist. When he makes his first appearance dressed in a dust-covered cloak and coughing he really does look like an old travelling wizard fresh from the road.
In this first serial the Doctor is presented as a collector. I loved seeing him carrying around his bag and taking samples. Even the TARDIS console room is littered with items collected from different periods in Earth's history.
Contrary to the later Doctors' promise to never be cruel nor cowardly, here the Doctor displays both cruelty and cowardice. We can never know for sure if he was reaching for that stone to kill the injured Za, or if he really did want want him to draw a map so that they could get back to the TARDIS. He was at least willingly to leave Za behind to die. He may be a doctor, but he is not yet the Doctor. I would say that it is through his interactions with Ian and Barbara (and later humanity as a whole) that he becomes the Doctor - the hero, the explorer, the adventurer, and defender of the Earth. Contrast the Doctor in this first serial with Jon Pertwee's depiction of the Doctor that followed only a few years later.
SUSAN
Considering how little Susan is mentioned in later serials and stories, it is interesting to see how integral she is to this first serial. She is the eponymous unearthly child.
I would guess that Susan has been travelling with her grandfather for a very long time and remembers very little of her own planet. Already, Susan wants to settle down in one place and in one time (retroactively) foreshadowing her eventual departure from the TARDIS in The Dalek Invasion of London.
As far as this serial is concerned, Susan is clearly the Doctor's actual granddaughter. Originally her character was conceived as being an alien princess completely unrelated to the Doctor, but it was considered inappropriate for an older man to be travelling alone with a teenage girl, so she was changed into his granddaughter. There were attempts by later producers and script-editors, as well as spin-off writers, to change Susan's back story so that she was not the Doctor's biological granddaughter at all, but rather a child he adopted and treated like a granddaughter. Thankfully, the modern series has established that the Doctor was once a father and grandfather.
I like the idea of Susan. She brings out a softer side to the prickly Doctor. However, I do not feel the character was used very well in the stories. Even in this first serial there are moments where her hysteria grates.
THE TARDIS
IAN: It's alive!
I wish the TARDIS exterior still hummed in the modern show. Especially now it has been made explicit that the TARDIS is a living entity.
Fifty-four years later the TARDIS interior still appears ethereal and alien. No other TARDIS interior quite measures up. Last January I got to visit the replica set at the Doctor Who Experience in Cardiff. I love the console - dials, levers, and all!
During the early serials the TARDIS was quite often referred to as simply "the ship". In later serials we hear other Time Lords refer to TARDISes all the time, but in this first serial Susan states that she herself came up with the name TARDIS. This does not necessarily mean that Susan was present for the ship's creation, or even that the Doctor was it's creator.
When Susan remarked that the TARDIS had once looked like an ionic column it reminded me of the Master's TARDIS when it appeared in Logopolis and Castrovalva.
IAN AND BARBARA
Ian and Barbara's excuse for following Susan home is quite flimsy, but if I really wanted realism I would be watching a different show.
Through the two school teachers we are slowly introduced to the concepts of the series. Watching them trying to rationalise the fantastical elements they encounter is brilliant.
The original TARDIS team compliment each other very well. Visually they resemble a family: Susan (child), Ian (father), Barbara (mother), and Doctor (grandfather).
The four travellers are not companions or adventurers yet. They are individuals thrown together by circumstance. They are not in 100,000 BC to have fun. Their only instinct is to survive and get back to the ship. They are filthy, sweating, and breathless.
DOCTOR: Fear makes companions of all of us.
Towards the end of the serial they start to work together as a unit. They are not yet the TARDIS dream team which forms the template for all future multiple companion TARDIS teams, but they are learning to trust one another.
THE TRIBE OF GUM
I do not mind nor care that the tribe speak English. This is a play for television and should never be treated as reality. The End of the World gives a good enough explanation for why everyone in Doctor Who appears to speak English, not that it really matters.
The clothing worn by the tribe must have been extremely smelly and itchy. I found myself wanting to scratch my scalp during the scene of them all sleeping together.
Za and Kal look so alike I found it difficult to tell the two characters apart. The only two members of the tribe that really stood out to me were Hur and Old Mother.
The scene of the children pretending to hunt a leopard using real spears could never be done in the modern series of Doctor Who.
The tribe live in a more primitive age than the one Ian and Barbara hail from. This recalls the Doctor's earlier comparison between the school teachers' first sight of the TARDIS interior to the Native American's first sight of the locomotive steam train.
Throughout the whole serial runs a thread about technological progress. From the tribe's use of fire in 100,000 BC, to Ian's car that runs on an internal-combustion engine and Susan's electronic transistor radio in AD 1963, through to the futuristic and unfathomable TARDIS.
THE SETTING
I have a strange love for the studio-bound exteriors in classic Doctor Who. It is an aspect of the show that really endeared me to it when I was a child. The bleak and forbidding landscape in this serial was very effective.
I love a good Doctor Who cave.
It is very possible that the TARDIS only moved through time and that it materialised on the very same spot that 76 Totter's Lane was later built.
OTHER THOUGHTS
When the four travellers are running through the trees back to the TARDIS it is quite obvious that they are running up and down on the spot. Forty-one years later the same technique would be used in the pilot episode of Lost. Ha-ha!
There is some ambiguity over the Doctor and Susan's status as exiles. Did they leave they leave their planet willingly, or were they exiled by their own society? Has there been a civil war or perhaps the planet has been occupied by some alien enemy? Did they escape? Why does the Doctor believe that one day they will go back? Later serials will render these questions moot, but the possibilities raised by this first serial are fascinating to consider.
Before Time Lords, before Gallifrey, before regeneration there was just an old man wandering in the fourth and fifth dimensions of time and space.
IAN: He's a doctor, isn't he?
Watching this first serial on it's own, I would guess that he isn't even "the Doctor" yet, and that Susan simply invented an occupation for her unseen grandfather.
IAN: Just open the doors, Doctor Foreman.
DOCTOR: Eh? Doctor who? What's he talking about?
I would also guess that Susan Foreman's name is one she chose for herself upon arriving in England in the twentieth century; the surname probably taken from the writing painted on the wooden doors of the junk yard. Even her clothes reflect a desire to blend in with her surroundings.
Her grandfather's attitude is entirely different. He is content to walk the streets of London in anachronistic clothing. As he freely admits, he tolerates the twentieth century, but he does not enjoy it.
BARBARA: Oh, look, I don't understand it any more than you do. The inside of the ship, suddenly finding ourselves here. Even some of the things Doctor Foreman says -
IAN: That's not his name. Who is he? Doctor who? Perhaps if we knew his name we might have a clue to all this.
From this point onwards the two school teachers address the old man as “Doctor” or refer to him in the third-person as “the Doctor” and he seems to accept their use of the title. It is interesting to note that throughout his tenure the First Doctor almost never introduces himself as such.
IAN: You're a doctor, do something.
DOCTOR: I'm not a doctor of medicine.
Clearly he holds a doctorate of some sort, but in whatever subject that may be (like his real name) is a complete mystery.
William Hartnell said that the Doctor was a wizard, not a scientist. When he makes his first appearance dressed in a dust-covered cloak and coughing he really does look like an old travelling wizard fresh from the road.
In this first serial the Doctor is presented as a collector. I loved seeing him carrying around his bag and taking samples. Even the TARDIS console room is littered with items collected from different periods in Earth's history.
Contrary to the later Doctors' promise to never be cruel nor cowardly, here the Doctor displays both cruelty and cowardice. We can never know for sure if he was reaching for that stone to kill the injured Za, or if he really did want want him to draw a map so that they could get back to the TARDIS. He was at least willingly to leave Za behind to die. He may be a doctor, but he is not yet the Doctor. I would say that it is through his interactions with Ian and Barbara (and later humanity as a whole) that he becomes the Doctor - the hero, the explorer, the adventurer, and defender of the Earth. Contrast the Doctor in this first serial with Jon Pertwee's depiction of the Doctor that followed only a few years later.
SUSAN
Considering how little Susan is mentioned in later serials and stories, it is interesting to see how integral she is to this first serial. She is the eponymous unearthly child.
I would guess that Susan has been travelling with her grandfather for a very long time and remembers very little of her own planet. Already, Susan wants to settle down in one place and in one time (retroactively) foreshadowing her eventual departure from the TARDIS in The Dalek Invasion of London.
As far as this serial is concerned, Susan is clearly the Doctor's actual granddaughter. Originally her character was conceived as being an alien princess completely unrelated to the Doctor, but it was considered inappropriate for an older man to be travelling alone with a teenage girl, so she was changed into his granddaughter. There were attempts by later producers and script-editors, as well as spin-off writers, to change Susan's back story so that she was not the Doctor's biological granddaughter at all, but rather a child he adopted and treated like a granddaughter. Thankfully, the modern series has established that the Doctor was once a father and grandfather.
I like the idea of Susan. She brings out a softer side to the prickly Doctor. However, I do not feel the character was used very well in the stories. Even in this first serial there are moments where her hysteria grates.
THE TARDIS
IAN: It's alive!
I wish the TARDIS exterior still hummed in the modern show. Especially now it has been made explicit that the TARDIS is a living entity.
Fifty-four years later the TARDIS interior still appears ethereal and alien. No other TARDIS interior quite measures up. Last January I got to visit the replica set at the Doctor Who Experience in Cardiff. I love the console - dials, levers, and all!
During the early serials the TARDIS was quite often referred to as simply "the ship". In later serials we hear other Time Lords refer to TARDISes all the time, but in this first serial Susan states that she herself came up with the name TARDIS. This does not necessarily mean that Susan was present for the ship's creation, or even that the Doctor was it's creator.
When Susan remarked that the TARDIS had once looked like an ionic column it reminded me of the Master's TARDIS when it appeared in Logopolis and Castrovalva.
IAN AND BARBARA
Ian and Barbara's excuse for following Susan home is quite flimsy, but if I really wanted realism I would be watching a different show.
Through the two school teachers we are slowly introduced to the concepts of the series. Watching them trying to rationalise the fantastical elements they encounter is brilliant.
The original TARDIS team compliment each other very well. Visually they resemble a family: Susan (child), Ian (father), Barbara (mother), and Doctor (grandfather).
The four travellers are not companions or adventurers yet. They are individuals thrown together by circumstance. They are not in 100,000 BC to have fun. Their only instinct is to survive and get back to the ship. They are filthy, sweating, and breathless.
DOCTOR: Fear makes companions of all of us.
Towards the end of the serial they start to work together as a unit. They are not yet the TARDIS dream team which forms the template for all future multiple companion TARDIS teams, but they are learning to trust one another.
THE TRIBE OF GUM
I do not mind nor care that the tribe speak English. This is a play for television and should never be treated as reality. The End of the World gives a good enough explanation for why everyone in Doctor Who appears to speak English, not that it really matters.
The clothing worn by the tribe must have been extremely smelly and itchy. I found myself wanting to scratch my scalp during the scene of them all sleeping together.
Za and Kal look so alike I found it difficult to tell the two characters apart. The only two members of the tribe that really stood out to me were Hur and Old Mother.
The scene of the children pretending to hunt a leopard using real spears could never be done in the modern series of Doctor Who.
The tribe live in a more primitive age than the one Ian and Barbara hail from. This recalls the Doctor's earlier comparison between the school teachers' first sight of the TARDIS interior to the Native American's first sight of the locomotive steam train.
Throughout the whole serial runs a thread about technological progress. From the tribe's use of fire in 100,000 BC, to Ian's car that runs on an internal-combustion engine and Susan's electronic transistor radio in AD 1963, through to the futuristic and unfathomable TARDIS.
THE SETTING
I have a strange love for the studio-bound exteriors in classic Doctor Who. It is an aspect of the show that really endeared me to it when I was a child. The bleak and forbidding landscape in this serial was very effective.
I love a good Doctor Who cave.
It is very possible that the TARDIS only moved through time and that it materialised on the very same spot that 76 Totter's Lane was later built.
OTHER THOUGHTS
When the four travellers are running through the trees back to the TARDIS it is quite obvious that they are running up and down on the spot. Forty-one years later the same technique would be used in the pilot episode of Lost. Ha-ha!
There is some ambiguity over the Doctor and Susan's status as exiles. Did they leave they leave their planet willingly, or were they exiled by their own society? Has there been a civil war or perhaps the planet has been occupied by some alien enemy? Did they escape? Why does the Doctor believe that one day they will go back? Later serials will render these questions moot, but the possibilities raised by this first serial are fascinating to consider.