We watched two classic serials this week: The Wheel in Space and Day of the Daleks.

The Wheel in Space is a base-under-siege story featuring the Second Doctor and Jamie, and introducing Zoe Heriot. It also includes a couple of traditional villains: Cybermen, and incompetent leadership.

Not to mention cringey racial stereotypes.

A few notable items:

• The bond of friendship between the Doctor and Jamie. When things get weird, each thinks first of the other’s safety.
• Jamie’s resourcefulness. He stymies a robot attack with a blanket, and figures out how to signal the nearby Wheel while the Doctor lies unconscious.
• The Wheel’s doctor fails to note the Doctor’s second heartbeat. The Doylist reason is that it wasn’t established until the Third Doctor’s era; the Watsonian explanation is that injury may temporarily leave the Doctor with only one heartbeat – for example, in The Christmas Invasion.
• “Logic, my dear Zoe, merely enables one to be wrong with authority.” Except that in this case she’s right.

Day of the Daleks features the Third Doctor, Jo, and UNIT, as well as time travelers who cause the very incident they’re attempting to prevent. Oh, and Daleks. It’s not as smartly paced as some Third Doctor stories we’ve seen lately, but it’s good fun. The Doctor prepares for a stakeout with wine and cheese; the Brig gets frustrated with his superiors; Jo repeatedly escapes capture; and together they stop World War III.

Also, as mentioned previously, Benton calls the Doctor “Doc.” It’s the first incidence I’ve noticed outside of the Thirteenth Doctor’s era; I wonder how prevalent it actually is.

At the end of the serial, we were very surprised to see Nicholas Briggs in the credits. Briggs joined televised DW in 2005 as the voice of the Dalek, and has continued to provide monster voices throughout the modern era. (The story is, he got the job because he had his own voice modulator, a home-made version of the device used in the original series, which could no longer be found.) But Day of the Daleks is from 1972, when Briggs was 12 years old. How did that come about?

It turns out that Britbox carries the special edition of the story, made for DVD release in 2011. Apparently the original Dalek voices were unusually terrible, so producers had Briggs replace them. Other changes were made as well – new visual effects, even reshoots – and I’m curious now what the original looked and sounded like. On the other hand, the Cybermen in The Wheel In Space were excruciating to listen to. Maybe I don’t need to know.

I feel like I’ve done my time in classic Who for a bit; next time, it’s back to the modern era (and probably, The Tsuranga Conundrum.)

I haven’t finished The Wheel in Space yet, but I had a Thought.

In episode 2, looking for a means to sabotage a laser cannon, Jamie picks up a bottle labeled quick setting plastic and puts it to work. Instantly I wondered: Is it plausible that Jamie can read?

I’m far too lazy for proper research but it does seem like education was spotty in the 18th century Highlands. Moreover, many Highlanders still only spoke Scots Gaelic, raising a further question: Does Jamie even speak English?

Of course as a TARDIS traveler it doesn’t matter. The translation circuit would allow the Doctor, Ben, and Polly to communicate with him as soon as they meet him; once he joins the crew, it would enable him to speak to anyone and be understood.

But would it allow him to suddenly read? Written language is translated along with spoken, but if a person can’t read in the first place, would that work? and if it did, wouldn’t he notice? An illiterate young man who can suddenly recognize words on a page would certainly comment on it, wouldn’t he?

Yep. This is my brain on Doctor Who.

All these Sea Devils promo pics of Yaz with a sword remind me of the only other primary companion of the same gender as the Doctor:

Jamie McCrimmon joined the TARDIS crew as something of a third wheel alongside Ben and Polly. On their departure, however, he became the Second Doctor’s first friend, by his side until the end.

Yaz too began as the spare, with Ryan and Graham taking up most of the story time, and became something more. Like Jamie, she is brave, doesn’t mind not understanding, and would rather die than be separated from the Doctor. Like Jamie, she will travel with her Doctor for her entire existence, and – we believe – exit alongside her.

Similarly, Yaz’s Doctor shares a key trait with Jamie’s: an emotional honesty most incarnations try to avoid.

VICTORIA: You probably can’t remember your family.
DOCTOR: Oh yes, I can when I want to. And that’s the point, really. I have to really want to, to bring them back in front of my eyes. The rest of the time they sleep in my mind, and I forget. And so will you. Oh yes, you will. You’ll find there’s so much else to think about. So remember, our lives are different to anybody else’s. That’s the exciting thing. There’s nobody in the universe can do what we’re doing.

Tomb of the Cybermen

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YASMIN: Have you got family?
DOCTOR: No. Lost them a long time ago.
RYAN: How do you cope with that?
DOCTOR: I carry them with me. What they would’ve thought and said and done. I make them a part of who I am. So even though they’re gone from the world, they’re never gone from me.

The Woman Who Fell to Earth

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Each of them was also a groundbreaker:

• Jodie, obviously, is the first woman in the role, paving the way for Ruth and a whole new world of casting options.
• Patrick was the first “new” Doctor, the first regeneration. Replacing the lead on a successful show was a crazy idea, but Patrick Troughton made it work – making all other Doctors possible.

Jamie’s travels with the Doctor came to an end with The War Games. Unable to repair the mess left by the War Lord, the Doctor calls on Gallifrey for help. The Time Lords punish the War Lord and return the stolen soldiers to their own eras; however, they’re not about to overlook the Doctor’s crimes.

As punishment for the Doctor’s interference, his friends are sent home with their travels in the TARDIS erased from their memories. Jamie is returned to the Battle of Culloden as his fellow Highlanders are routed and slaughtered following their defeat. Not the most auspicious of endings.

What is in store for Yaz?

Talking about Donna of course always reminds me of Jamie.

Pictured with Zoe and aptly named White Robots

Jamie was the Second Doctor’s companion, from his second-ever adventure to the end of his incarnation. For three seasons and 116 episodes – more than any other companion – Jamie was the Doctor’s best friend, his foil, his staunch and loyal defender. He stayed on while Ben and Polly and then Victoria departed. He was never the smartest person in the room, but frequently the most fearless, and he never let the masses of things he didn’t understand slow him down.

Jamie finally left the Doctor’s side when the Time Lords took his memories and plopped him back in the Battle of Culloden as if he’d never been away. They didn’t violate his mind to save his life; they did it to punish him for befriending the Doctor, and to punish the Doctor for his “interference.” While Donna and Zoe were returned to safe and comfortable – if ordinary – circumstances, he was left in a war zone, in a time when young men’s lives were cheap. After all he’d been through at the Doctor’s side, he was left with nothing: no family, no defense mechanism, and no memory of the greatest adventure of his life.

The Doctor never forgot Jamie. The Fifth Doctor briefly mistook Adric for him. The Tenth Doctor used his name while traveling in Scotland. But like Donna, Jamie can never remember.

Or can he?

 

This is one of two stories that were ‘found’ late last year and made available for streaming and on DVD early this year. Any fan knows how most of Doctor Who‘s early episodes went missing after video tapes were reused and films destroyed, standard practice for the BBC at the time. Many of them have now been recovered. This one and ‘Enemy of the World’ were found at a Nigerian television station, which had failed to return the films to the BBC for destruction as they were required to do.

Yay for disobeying contract terms.

Since they were released last winter, I’ve been wanting to see them, and lately having been hooked up with a friend’s Hulu Plus, we finally got our chance. We picked ‘Web of Fear’ first, because it features the introduction of one of our favorite characters of all time, then-Colonel Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart.

‘The Web of Fear’ holds up brilliantly. It’s scary and exciting, and maintains its quick pacing over all 6 episodes, in spite of the back-and-forth corridor action so common to the classic era. The Second Doctor is wonderfully iconic: compassionate and caring toward his friends, brilliant, inclusive, self-deprecating, expressive, and warm. His influence on Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor is clear. Companion Jamie McCrimmon is a joy to watch: courageous, stout-hearted, always ready to jump in, disdainful of cowards, protective of his friends. Victoria is a little hard to stomach, being one of the more screamy and useless companions of all time, but it’s all forgivable: she’s just a kid, she’s sweet, and she does try. Like many classic companions, she didn’t ask to be there, but joined the TARDIS crew after Daleks killed her family. And she’s the one who recognizes Travers first. Still, I suspect few other incarnations of the Doctor would have had much patience for her.

This serial features one of my favorite feminist moments of classic DW: a soldier, attempting to flirt with Anne Travers, succeeding at being monumentally creepy and disgusting and unsurprisingly failing to turn her head, asks her what a girl like her is doing in a ‘job like this.’ Her response is one for the ages:

“When I was a little girl, I thought I’d like to be a scientist, and so I became a scientist.”

1968, boys and girls.

‘Web of Fear’ is also known for creating trouble with the London Underground. The production team asked permission to film in Underground tunnels and stations. They were denied, and so they built sets. The sets were so good that they were accused of breaking into the Underground and filming without permission. The sets really are very good; unlike so much of classic Who, they are quite difficult to distinguish from reality. Tracks and platforms, cabling, maps, tiles, even advertisements all blend seamlessly into the background, calling no more attention to themselves than a backdrop of trees in an outdoor shoot. Nothing about them gives away the sound stage.

Episode 3 of the serial is still missing, and was reconstructed using the soundtrack and an ever-changing set of stills from the shoot. It’s very easy to follow and the imagination quickly fills in any gaps. Unfortunately the Brigadier’s – that is, Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart’s – first appearance is also missing. Unless you count his boot, late in Episode 2, which is actually someone else’s.

Actor Nicholas Courtney, now much-beloved for his characterization of the Brig, was originally supposed to play someone else: Captain Knight, who dies before the end of the serial. Instead, the actor cast as the Colonel backed out and Courtney was offered the role. A moment of history almost didn’t happen. Fans give credit to Courtney for the character’s recurrence; a lesser performance might not have captured writers’ imaginations as he did. As it is, even in 2014, with the actor long dead, the character keeps making his influence known.

‘Web of Fear’ contains some great continuity stuff. The Yeti and the Great Intelligence appeared previously in 1967’s ‘The Abominable Snowmen.’ Professor Travers, also appearing in that episode, is played by Jack Watling, father of Deborah Watling who plays Victoria. The Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe seek out Travers and his daughter Anne again in ‘The Invasion,’ also from 1968, but end up with Anne’s friend Isobel Watkins and her uncle instead. The Doctor’s failure to destroy the Great Intelligence, due to Jamie’s overzealous rescue attempt, paves the way for its return in ‘The Snowmen’ in 2012 and ‘The Bells of St. John’ in 2013.

All in all, great fun television that holds up well even after 45 years, great historical moments, and the Second Doctor at his brilliant, bumbling best.