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theotherscarmanthewoman · 8 years

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Series 1 Review

Forty-three episodes later, Series 1 (Season 1?) is done and dusted. Before launching into Series 2 tomorrow with Planet of Giants, I thought it might be fun to do a little review of the story so far...

General Thoughts

Overall, I’ve been pleasantly surprised. I’d seen most of these serials as a kid, though never in the right order, and watching them from beginning to end has given me a newfound appreciation for just how much excellent character development there is in the early years of the show. I have also become a diehard Barbara fan. Obv.

From a feminist perspective, there’s been a lot to like, though there have been a few major issues for me. As far as the series regulars go, Barbara gets to do a fair amount of physically, emotionally, and verbally badass things whilst remaining a well-rounded character: she’s clever, compassionate, occasionally morbid, brave, pragmatic, imaginative, resourceful, and deeply flawed in an entirely non-gendered way *cough*AZTECS*cough*. However, she also nearly gets raped in The Snows of Terror, has men draw lots over who gets to murder her in Marco Polo (only to be victim blamed by the eponymous dickhead of the serial), and is often a victim of the well-meaning but mostly stifling paternalism of Ian Chesterton (though she does at least get to complain about it).

Susan is more problematic, as she very rarely gets a chance to shine, and suffers greatly at the hands of writers who just don’t know what to do with her. All too often, she’s reduced to a plot device, which I suppose is how she started out, after all: she was a means of getting the humans onto the Tardis and introducing us to the Doctor. And while she had genuine and gorgeous character development in Marco Polo and The Sensorites (the latter in the face of serious patriarchal bullshit from the Doctor), she ended the first series as a means of getting/keeping other characters in and out of jail whenever it was narratively convenient for her to have a mystery headache. JUSTICE FOR SUSAN! There are also way too many episodes that fail the Bechdel test for a series that has two women in the recurring cast.

Favourite Serials

I am the kind of person who panics when there are more than five options on a menu, so obviously I cannot restrict myself to a single favourite serial. With this in mind, and with the proviso that none of these are entirely unproblematic, here are my top three (in no particular order):

The Daleks I love this serial for so many reasons: Barbara getting her shit together after the whole caveman debacle/having been given a serious fright by a Dalek for the first time in Whovian history, donning a pair of hexagon trousers, and going on to display her infinite capacity for badassery (see exhibits A, B, and C); Space Corbyn; the Daleks being established as Space Nazis; the birth of Team Tardis; hexagons; Barbara and Ian fighting (which I always enjoy); the Doctor giving Barbara hope in the first of many classic chats; and of course Barbara deciding that yes she will kiss that alien, thank you very much.

The Edge of Destruction This is so ambitious and weird and wonderful, and of course contains that epic Barbara Wright verbal smackdown. The Tardis is alive and speaks in melty clocks and photographs (setting in motion a Tardis character arc without which The Doctor’s Wife would not have been possible), Susan is possessed and scissor-happy, Ian is in a ludicrously short dressing-gown, the Doctor learns to cherish his humans, the Doctor gets crazy excited talking about the birth of solar system, the humanities save the day, and everyone learns about each other and therefore about themselves. Just don’t ask me whether it makes any actual sense.

The Aztecs Problematic as all hell, but so very, very interesting. Barbara’s hubris, Susan’s continued arranged marriage issues post-Ping-Cho, the Doctor and Barbara bonding over history and time travel and ethics, Space Bro antics, badassery, ruined lives (Autloc! Cameca!), and life-long lessons learned. A meaty historical with repercussions for the whole of Doctor Who.

An honourable mention must also go to Marco Polo, which drove me absolutely crazy at times (because it’s missing, because yellowface, because Marco being the actual worst and causing me to go on my first sustained rant about rape culture in Classic Who), because in it we got a glimpse of Susan’s potential as a character. Which got shat on from a great height in The Reign of Terror.

Bring That Side Character Aboard the Tardis

Ping-Cho PRECIOUS CINNAMON GOLDFISH YOU SHOULD HAVE GONE WITH SUSAN AND YOU COULD HAVE BEEN SPACE (GIRL)FRIENDS FOREVER.

Ganatus His brother is dead, many of his friends are dead, and his planet is mostly fucked. Get that Thal aboard the Tardis so Barbara can show him just how much she doesn’t always do what Ian says; a whirlwind space romance would do them both a power of good.

Character Development

The Doctor has had quite the journey, from the selfish goblin we met in a junkyard in 1963 who was quite happy to brain a caveman with a rock (and leave Barbara to die of radiation poisoning on Skaro) to the selfish goblin we met on a road in eighteenth-century France who was quite happy to brain a man with a shovel (on his quest to save his friends from the guillotine). The quality of his selfishness has been transformed because he now cares for two humans who have grown to care about him. He’s learned some manners, he’s learned about two other people, and he’s learning about himself.

Susan. Poor, poor Susan. She had such potential to be an interesting character, but alas she was served shoddily by writers who didn’t know what to do with her. She got to talk about home and what it means to be a wanderer in Marco Polo and The Sensorites, and she even got to stretch her telepathic legs in the latter, but alas her character development has suffered throughout the series. The one consistent thread for Susan is her increasing attachment to her human Space Parents, and her ongoing issues with saying goodbye. I have so many questions about Susan, but unfortunately none of the writers could be arsed to answer them.

I worry about Ian, actually, because he seems to have become desensitised to violence in a way that surely can’t be healthy for him. He also seems increasingly unable to function when he’s not being called upon to be Action Man (or indeed welded to the side of Barbara Wright). The weirdest example of this is when he thought all his friends were dead and he was stranded in eighteenth-century France, so he decided to become a spy for the counterrevolution just for something to do. At the beginning of the series, I disliked Ian enormously for his patronising paternalism; I don’t dislike him any more, but as I say, I worry about what’s going to happen to him when he finally makes it home and he has to function on an everyday level again without the psychological crutches of ‘I must kill the bad guys’ and ‘I must find/protect Barbara’. I also worry about his change of attitude from ‘I’m not going to do this because it’s wrong’ to ‘I’m going to do whatever it takes to get everyone out of this mess alive and I’m going to decide that whatever this involves is morally right’. And I think the turning point for that might well have been on Skaro where he managed to convince himself that asking the Thals to sacrifice themselves for the greater good was morally the right thing to do if he could find a way of thinking about it as helping the Thals to help themselves. I do love his Space Bro relationship with the Doctor, though. And his ongoing leftie streak.

Oh Babs. She’s really developed over the series, and what is excellent about seeing it in order is that it becomes clear that the Barbara we met in An Unearthly Child was Barbara on a (really) bad day. And yes, she went into hysterics over a dead pig. But very soon this self-professed unwilling adventurer was getting stuck in: no sooner had she recovered from a nasty bout of radiation sickness in a Dalek cell on Skaro than she was busy making mud pies to take out those malevolent pepper pots, embracing the local fashions, flirting with the locals, and taking on Daleks with rocks and a can-do attitude. She adapts to the situation time after time, and learns about time-travel and history the hard way, bonding with the Doctor and caring for her fellow travellers; if The Edge of Destruction is the Doctor’s turning point, The Aztecs is hers. But we also see that being surrounded by death is beginning to take its toll, as well as a nihilistic sense of the absurd that comes of having truly absorbed the lesson that you can’t rewrite history. Fortunately for Babs, the Doctor is actually there for her at these times, as we’ve seen from their ongoing time-travel chats. I think the biggest surprise of the series for me has been the relationship between the Doctor and Barbara, actually; they’re teaching one another to be better time travellers.

A note on shipping

I have deliberately shied away from overtly shipping Barbara and Ian in the recaps (though I’ve been less successful elsewhere), not because I don’t believe with every fibre of my being that they absolutely ended up getting hitched when they got back to Earth, but because frankly it’s more interesting when they fight than when they’re being cute. Also I’m saving a post on the many aspects of their relationship for after The Chase, as I feel like that will help me deal with my Feelings after they leave the show.

BRING ON SERIES 2!

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