1.17: The Time Meddler
In which for the second story running Doctor Who isn’t the only one who can time travel, the ship becomes a, not the, TARDIS, and everything starts getting a bit meta.
Broadcast: July 1965
Watched: July 2019
1. The Watcher
“Up there is the scanner, those are the doors, that is a chair with a panda on it. Sheer poetry, dear boy. Now please stop bothering me.”
The first Doctor Who story set in the north. There must be another between here and Woman Who Fell but I can’t immediately think of one. [I’m an idiot, there are loads: The King’s Demons, The Mark of the Rani, The Curse of Fenric, The Crimson Horror, etc.]
It’s kind of meta-fictional, this one, isn’’t it? By introducing anachronisms it inevitably means acknowledging the unreality of Doctor Who: the singing monks are created through an LP available played on technology available in 1965, etc.
Steven is much more of a twat here than in the last one. You’d think he’d be pleased he’d been rescued. Why did they decide to effectively replace Ian and not Barbara?
[There seem to be two answers to that:
a) as the show moved away from the extremely stage-y production of season one, you no longer needed to guarantee you could always cut to a different pair of characters on the other side of the studio, so could make do with three regulars, not four; and
b) Doctor Who now knows everything, so you don’t need history and science teachers cluttering the place up.
Thanks to James Cooray-Smith and Mark Clapham respectively for that interlude. Onwards:]
2. The Meddling Monk
There’s something that feels very modern about this. The companions are both smart but in different, sometimes conflicting ways. When a minor character dies her husband mourns. The Vikings have little character touches, they’re not just a faceless hoard. It just feels a lot more sophisticated than the stagey, more didactic season 1 stuff.
3. A Battle of Wits
“There must be a secret passage!” Vicki now knows she’s in a Doctor Who story too. Steven seems remarkably unbothered by the loss of the TARDIS, presumably because he’s been a prisoner for two years.
I think I’ve worked out why it feels quite modern/sophisticated – it has a big cast, but nobody’s a cipher. Everyone has clear motivations and a sense that they exist off screen, they’re not just there to play a part in a Doctor Who story. There haven’t been many stories like that so far – maybe The Aztecs? Marco has too small a cast, Romans is playing with comedy archetypes.
The cliffhanger with the Monk’s TARDIS is great. Interesting that the first inversion of the Doctor we get isn’t “evil” but “chaos”: the version of the character who would have helped save the Aztecs etc.
Oh wait Edith wasn’t killed, we’re meant to infer she’s been raped. Early Doctor Who is, er, very rapey, isn’t it?
4. Checkmate
The thought occurs that this is the first fully developed version of a new type of story. For most of the early years the engine of the stories is “regulars in peril” – this is the first one, except possibly The Rescue, that is instead focusing on a mystery to solve, where we get all the answers at the end.
This one is also basically a story about someone trying to break the rules of Doctor Who isn’t it? Odd in some ways that it only happens once there are no contemporary identification figures in the TARDIS.
The Monk’s to-do list in massive writing is hilarious. The way the Doctor breaks the Monk’s TARDIS, by making it too small to enter, is even funnier. Also, I like the way you can see the edge of the sarcophagus outside the Monk’s TARDIS’ doors.
The glowing faces effect at the end is a bit odd – presumably it’s by way of a “Doctor Who will return” caption? [This story marks the end of season 2, and was followed by a six week break.]