Can't say I feel like doing an album review tonight. Besides, music today... eh, I'll save that for another day.
Anyway, Doctor Who is this obscure British sci-fi show about a guy with a time machine that's bigger on the inside. It only ran for 26 years (from the day after JFK was assassinated through late 1989). It was recently brought back (in 2005) and has been enjoying more than modest sucess since then.
Its formula for sucess is the fact that nobody on the show is irreplacable (expect a forthcoming post on why any show that does not undergo a major change should have a strict five-year lifespan). When the original Doctor, 58-year-old William Hartnell, got too sick to work and/or remember his lines, they "gently eased him out" (interpret that how you will) and replaced him with a younger (by their standards) actor - then-47-year-old Patrick Troughton. This was a good three years before On Her Majesty's Secret Service, the first (and if I'd had anything to say about it, last) Bond film without Sean Connery.
And unlike 007, they actually explained it in the show.
They had balls back in those days. They'd already changed producers at least twice, and all the other regulars who'd started with Hartnell had already left, along with their characters. Imagine Star Trek trying a stunt like this - actually replacing key Enterprise personnel every year or so. Yeah, they wouldn't do that.
Anyway, tonight I'll be reviewing The Time Meddler, a Doctor Who serial from 1965, from the end of the show's second season. It was the last Who serial produced by the late Verity Lambert, the show's original producer, and in all probability also the last one that she recorded a DVD commentary for. But more on that later.
The story itself is a bit confusing, and the fact that a new character - Steven - has just been introduced doesn't help much. The TARDIS has landed on the Northumbrian coast in the year 1066. Steven, who doesn't believe that the TARDIS is capable of time-travel (but oddly enough has no qualms about accepting the fact that it's bigger on the inside), finds what he thinks is evidence that this is all a big hoax - namely, a wristwatch. They later find a gramaphone and a toaster. Vikings and Saxons run around, there's almost certainly an offscreen rape (this is a children's show in 1965 - seriously), the Doctor is captured and then escapes, and the plot generaly bumbles along for the first three episodes.
Then comes the Episode Three cliffhanger, which basically changes the entirety of the Doctor Who mythos up until that point (look it up on Wikipedia; I'm not going to spoil it here). And then Episode Four almost makes up for three episodes of general confusion.
The simple facts of the story: there's technology that shouldn't exist in 1066. We know this midway through the first episode. The problem is that the plot then basically stalls there for an episode and a half.
It's a landmark serial, to be sure. Guest star Peter Butterworth is absolutely magical, and his scenes with Hartnell contain some of the best banter ever heard - Butterworth very playful and childish, Hartnell very much the stern figure fans know the First Doctor to be. I understand the BBC's reasons for setting this story in the past - as Tom Baker would remark more than a decade afterward, "the BBC is very good at period drama and not so good at giant rats." Unfortunately, the pacing of the plot is atrocious, even for 1965 standards - in the second episode, Steven does some investigating and there's a poorly staged fight scene as well as the aforementioned offscreen rape, and that's about it. Pieces are moved, but no relevant information is revealed until the end of the third episode. Fans watching these once a week would indeed be quite lost by the time that revelation came around.
But here's the thing - for all its flaws, we're still in a stage where this show isn't quite sure what it's supposed to be. Remember, this is the first serial that doesn't have Ian or Barbara in it, and those two were the real protagonists for the first two seasons. Hartnell's vacation from Episode 2 is even more of a bold move, forcing Butterworth, Maureen O'Brien (as Vicki) and Peter Purves (Steven) to carry all the action. And it works. In a way, Hartnell was never the star of his own show; by the time Ian and Barbara left, we were getting Butterworth's take on being a time-traveler, followed shortly by Peter Cushing's big-screen version. So it's ironic that as soon as the generic male lead is removed, and Hartnell gets a chance to move into the star role, other people start doing the exact same thing. I certainly am not the first reviewer to note that Butterworth is a warm-up for Hartnell's sucessor, Patrick Troughton.
Bottom line: Despite all its flaws, I do recommend this, as it is one of the most important serials of the Hartnell era, just after the very first episode and The Dalek Invasion of Earth (which is basically a 50s b-movie shown in six parts). The DVD commentary is, like all the commentaries where the actor who played the doctor is not present (Hartnell died in 1975), fairly light on jokes and high on insight into the behind-the-scenes process. A title card has been inserted at the end of the Episode Four credits, dedicating the DVD to the memory of Verity Lambert, who becomes, I believe, the second person (after Anthony Ainley) to have a commentary on the DVD dedicated to their memory.
Best to watch it all in one go - considering that it was written by the show's outgoing script editor, you'd think the plot would be more coherent...
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