The Horror at Bletchington Station

Here is a rare occurrence: a 1st Doctor story without Ian or Stephen! Squeezed between two adjacent classic stories (between Stephen’s departure and Dodo’s departure) is this short story, The Horror at Bletchington Station.

And this is a strange one. This Doctor is known to be a bit of a grump, and brusque, but not normally secretive as such. And yet, his behavior is quite conspiratorial in this one, and Dodo is rather surprised by it. They’ve arrived in 19th century England about a hundred years before Dodo’s time, where a new rail line and station is being built, and there’s some kind of monster on the loose. The Doctor vehemently doesn’t want to get involved, or at least doesn’t want Dodo involved, so of course Dodo sneaks off early in the morning to investigate.

The monster turns out to be a giant mole, grown to unnatural size like the giant rat in The Talons of Weng Chiang. And the thing that caused it was a sort of probe, sent out by the Time Lords ages ago to explore the universe. The Doctor recognizes it and wants to get rid of it quickly and safely – I was a bit surprised at how quickly he wanted to get away from it, but I suppose there isn’t much else to go on in terms of how the 1st Doctor really felt about his people, and feared being reeled back in to Gallifrey.

Any readers out there know any other stories where the 1st Doctor deals with the Time Lords (beside the Monk)? This would be a very interesting dynamic to explore further!

The War Machines

Ah, another one of my childhood favorites: The War Machines.

This is a very accessible story for viewers.  The plot is simple but interesting, the characters are clearly identifiable, the science fiction is sensible, and (even though nearly 50 years separate its setting from the present day) its technological aspect is compelling.

The Plot

The story is simple: a supercomputer called WOTAN has been built, and it starts hypnotizing people under its control, having decided that the human race ought to be run by computers instead.  Whole work crews are brought under its influence, and start building twelve War Machines throughout London to begin the machine revolution.  The Doctor is sought for assistance, but he proves resistant to WOTAN’s hypnosis.

Bit by bit, the Doctor and his soon-to-be companions work out what’s going, and with the help of the local authorities neutralize one War Machine and capture another.  He reprograms it to attack WOTAN, it does so, and the crisis is over.

The Characters

Although the Doctor has long since mellowed from his initial harshness of early season 1, he’s still rather sharp and cantankerous.  Ben Jackson makes several ironic comments about his “warm demeanor.”  Towards the end, when Polly is in danger of being collateral damage in the reprogrammed War Machine’s attack on WOTAN, Ben asks about rescuing her first, to which the Doctor replies “If we worry about one person, we shall never solve anything, shall we?”  Although a few of his later incarnations would share the 1st Doctor’s gritty pragmatism, this disregard for the life of an individual for the sake of the greater good is something will rarely show up again throughout the Doctor’s life.  Many a foe will be able to hold the Doctor’s friends’ lives hostage in order to coerce him to help them, but not on this day.

This is Dodo Chaplet’s final story.  And she leaves about as abruptly as she arrived.  She stumbled into the TARDIS at the tail end of one story, had her first adventure in the following one, and now spends one episode happy to be back in London, a second episode hypnotized by WOTAN, and entirely absent in episodes 3 and 4.  Her farewell to the Doctor is by verbal message through Polly at the end of the story.  The Doctor is about as miffed as the audience, I daresay, that she didn’t even get to say thank-you and good-bye in person.  (Unless you aren’t a fan of Dodo, in which case you may’ve been glad to see her disappear.)  To be fair to the writers, though, her seemingly-impulsive choice to remain in her own time befits her character.  She jumped into the TARDIS adventuring life very quickly, and tended to think on her feet very much of the time.

The Doctor Says Farewell To Polly and Ben – image from tardis.wikia.com

In her place, the new companions Ben and Polly are introduced.  Ben is a sailor between assignments and Polly is a secretary in the office where WOTAN was built.  They are both prominent characters throughout the story – Polly primarily in the first half as she befriends Dodo, meets Ben, and helps the Doctor connect with some key people; and Ben primarily in the second half as he assists the Doctor investigate and fight the War Machines.  Like Dodo, most of the stories featuring Ben and Polly are missing, so unless you brave your way through the reconstructions there is little opportunity to get to know them.  Thankfully we have this their introductory story, so we have this base of characterization when we go on to see them in action in the 1st Doctor’s final story, which is mostly-intact, The Tenth Planet.

The Technology

From the perspective of a late 20th-century or 21st-century viewer, this story is noteworthy in that a version of the internet is invented: the designers of WOTAN intend to link together all the major computer systems in the world into a single network of information processing.  I don’t know how speculative or realistic that idea sounded in 1968, but for us looking back it’s rather fun.  Sci-fi stories are famous for predicting the future much too optimistically, so it’s great fun to see moments like this where they do anticipate things that were soon to follow.

The Doctor’s expertise with computers has been established already, and it’s very much in the fore throughout this story.  He has no special gadgets yet, much less the sonic screwdriver, but he is able to use what is on hand to rig things up to catch and reprogram a War Machine and save the day.

This is a good story, worth watching.

The Gunfighters

For the first few years of Doctor Who’s television run, the general formula was to jump back and forth between historical-based stories and futuristic science-fiction stories.  This is the story that may have put one of the last nails in the coffin for the historicals, as it was so poorly received and rated at the time.  Depending upon whom you ask, it may not be so poorly regarded anymore, though.

The Gunfighters is the first significant Doctor Who foray into an American setting.  It’s a re-telling of the classic story of the OK Corrall, and at least in my uneducated opinion, it’s pretty funny.

image from tardis.wikia.com

The Doctor is initially confused for the legendary Doc Holliday, resulting in the complication of a family feud.  Steven’s and especially Dodo’s enthusiasm for the Wild West also entangles them in the goings-on of the town of Tombstone, making it impossible for the Doctor to gather them up and leave in the TARDIS like he keeps wanting to do throughout the story.  I kept expecting the Doctor’s accent (or Steven’s or Dodo’s once they stopped trying to sound American) to come up and reveal him as an outsider, but it didn’t.  Some might expect me, as an American, to complain about the bad imitation accents, but since I’ve always lived in Massachusetts, the Western and Southern accents are pretty foreign to me; I hardly know what they’re “supposed to” sound like, let alone call out an English impression of one.  So they’re off the hook, there 😉

As the story progresses, Steven and Dodo spend an increasing amount of time as prisoners, making the Doctor the primary agent in advancing the plot to get them free.  Despite being so caught up, Dodo manages to take serious action a couple times – once threatening Doc Holliday with a gun to take her back to Tombstone, and another time rushing into a gunfight to save his life.  For some of the story it seems like she’s in cool and in control as a strong young woman, like we saw her introduced in The Ark.  But she also has a fainting spell or two which kind of suggest a false bravado, undermining some of her character’s strength.

The body count by the end of the story also surprised me a little.  Approximately half the story’s entire cast is dead at the end!  I suppose it fits the setting and nature of the story; it just seemed unusual for this era of the show.

The Doctor makes his abhorrence for guns and disinterest in alcohol abundantly clear in this story.  Of course, his commitment to those ideals will wax and wane over the course of time, and some incarnations will be more or less violent or lush accordingly.  But this is one of the earliest placements of the Doctor’s preferences: he is not a violent man, and he does not touch alcohol.  The non-violent thing will continue to be a prominent feature of the Doctor, perhaps one of the most attractive things about the character.

The Ark

The Ark is the first of several Doctor Who stories over its 50+ years of history to feature a massive colony ship leaving a dead Earth for a new planet.  Inspired, as the title reveals, by the famous biblical story, the idea would be used again by The Ark in Space with the 4th Doctor, Dreamtime with the 7th Doctor in Big Finish, The Beast Below with the 11th Doctor, and possibly other stories I don’t know about.

Not only is it the prototype for the “new start for the human race” stories, but it’s also the first “before and after” story – a concept rarely used in Classic Who, but used perhaps most pointedly in the 9th Doctor stories The Long Game (as the before) and Bad Wolf and Parting of the Ways (as the after).  The idea is simple: the Doctor and crew have an adventure in some location and then quickly or immediately return to it some long time after in that place’s history.  Episodes 1 & 2 of The Ark take place on the Ark Ship heading for humanity’s new home planet Refusis.  The humans on board are aided by a race of one-eyed creatures with webbed feet and Beatles haircuts aptly named Monoids.

It quickly becomes apparent that these mute and shuffling creatures serve as slaves to the humans, though not much is said about it.  Episode 3 & 4 see the tables turned: the Monoids rule the Ark, using new technology to give them the power of speech, and the humans are their servants.  Generations pass between the two halves of this story, so the Doctor, Steven, and Dodo are not recognized nor remembered, enabling  either story-half to function in a self-contained manner.

The stories overall are quite simple.  The first two episodes deal with the accidental carrying of a “new” disease to the Ark – Dodo’s basic headcold, which is so ancient to them that they have no immunities to it and start dying off (especially the monoids).  The TARDIS crew is of course held responsible and put on trial and have to work against the odds to offer help against the illness.  They leave with the cold defeated and an apparent restoration of peace on the Ark.

The second two episodes deal with the later monoids’ plot to colonize the planet themselves and destroy the Ark and the humans aboard thereafter.  The arrival of the Doctor and crew, of course, throws a monkey wrench into their plans, and they eventually discover what’s going on with the monoids and who the planet’s mysterious inhabitants are.  It even has a Star-Trek-like moral lesson at the end as the humans and monoids are forced to learn to live together in peace on their destination planet by its benevolent invisible inhabitants.

Characters

The Doctor still gets to be a grandfatherly figure with the new addition of Dodo (Dorathy Chaplet) riding along in the TARDIS, and he looks after her accordingly throughout The Ark.  He essentially cures the common cold – a rare exhibition of medical prowess in the show.  He is not perturbed by the fact that they are so far in humanity’s distant future, hinting that his knowledge and experience as a time traveler is much broader than what had ever been seen on the show to date (this is in season 3).  The Doctor also proves an effective diplomat with the natives of Refusis, advocating for the humans and monoids alike.  His congeniality with them from their first entry into the story almost hints of prior familiarity.  Though for much of early Who, the Doctor was more often surprised by what he found in his travels than already knowing everything about it… that switch takes place over a long time.

Steven is separated from the Doctor and Dodo for significant portions of the story, as he is a veteran TARDIS traveler by this point and able to hold his own.  He has come a long way since his bumbling entrance in The Time Meddler, though his sense of curiosity steeped in realism continues as a stable character trait for him.

Meanwhile, this is Dodo’s first story apart from her brief introduction at the tail end of The Massacre.  Initially she’s very gung-ho, fearless, and inquisitive to explore everything.  She identifies a great many animals herself as they begin to explore the jungle region of the Ark, giving her character a strong and proactive start.  As the story progresses, she seems to drift into the background a little bit.  The stakes are raised and she understandably sticks close to the Doctor for a while as these new experiences of the dangers of time travel wash over her.  I don’t recall her actually screaming at all in this story, though, so that’s a plus for first impressions.  As far as I recall, her character’s tenure is one of the most “lost” set of early Doctor Who stories, so we have less ability to get to know to her character today.  So it’s good that we’ve at least got this, her first story.