BOOK OF LISTS: TOP 6 DOCTOR WHO EPISODES - NUMBER THREE

And back we go to the countdown. Hopefully, my little break to do a review of Series 11 didn't get in the way of your enjoyment of this end-of-the-year tradition. I'm even more hopeful that you found an 85% positive review of the season to be refreshing. Perhaps, even, liberating! I imagine there are other people out there who had no real problem with this latest season and, like me, are feeling just a bit stifled by the haters. 

Anyhow, back to the countdown....


NUMBER THREE:

Once more, I find myself appreciating a specific episode because of the role it has played in the history of the show. Just like Rose, however, the importance of An Unearthly Child isn't the only factor that influences my fondness for it. It's also just a really well put-together episode.

An Unearthly Child has the same job to do as Rose. It has to build up a certain level of intrigue that will entice viewers into wanting to follow the series. It has to create a central premise that is solid enough to seem interesting. It has to lay a foundation that can sustain the show indefinitely. Both of these episodes accomplish this magnificently. An Unearthly Child is higher on this list than Rose because it ticks all these boxes at a fraction of the budget.

A policeman walking past the front gates of 76 Totter's Lane on a foggy night which then open to reveal a humming police box hits us with a stronger impact than a high-tech speed-lapse montage of a day in the life of Rose Tyler. That's no sleight against the opening scene of Rose - it's still a great sequence. But the beginning of Unearthly Child is true televisual art. It takes so little and uses it to its maximum effectiveness. That single scene drips with so much atmosphere that we can't wait to see what happens next. That's some damned good directing from Waris Hussein. We have to applaud the guy for taking the negligible resources he's been handed and making something truly magical.

That's how you can describe, pretty much, every scene in this episode. Ian and Barbara's discussion in the lab, meeting Susan for the first time, the wait outside Totter's Lane in the car with flashbacks that illustrate Susan's peculiarity, the first appearance of the Doctor and, finally, entering the TARDIS. Every single one of these sequences do an incredible job of drawing you in. You want to learn more about this set of characters and the strange ship that is transporting them away. It doesn't matter how grainy and scratchy the old black-and-white footage is, you watch this episode and you want to keep running with it. And that is the primary function of Unearthly Child. It performs that task to perfection. 

"But Rob," some of you might be saying, "we only appreciate An Unearthly Child as well as we do from a retrospective perspective. We enjoy it because we know it is the first episode of a successful TV show that has lasted 55 years. It begins a cult show that many of us have a deep love for. So we can't help but find it so good." 

That theory might almost hold water if you don't bother to go back to the accounts of people who were around when the episode first aired. Even the Great Colin Baker, himself (best Doctor ever!), recounts how he just happened to be walking past the television as it was running An Unearthly Child and had to stop and watch it. For the next 23 minutes, he stayed exactly where he was. You'll find any number of anecdotes from other people who were around when Doctor Who premiered all those years ago. It's just a very potent piece of television. Whether viewed retrospectively or in the moment.

Just for fun, I watched the unaired pilot that had been initially filmed and compared it to the episode that actually went out. The differences are subtle but do make a huge difference. Even the tiniest of "fixes" - like the boy in the hallway at Coal Hill hitting his cue and mocking the girls - improve things dramatically. There's some much better camera set-ups in the second version. Particularly in Ian's lab. That scene looks sooo much better when it was re-shot. Most importantly, the pacing works better in all the performances. Not only was Hartnell able to put in a bit more charm into his role (he laughs more jovially at the accusations of the schoolteachers in the second version rather than argue with them), but Ian and Barbara seem much more likeable, too. In the first version, they're just sort of nosey. In the re-taping, they seem much more caring. Both bring a lot more "twinkle" to their characters. I honestly have to say that if they had not been allowed to do the episode again, Doctor Who might not be around, right now. 

Probably the best fix that's done between the two versions was removing certain aspects of dialogue. Particularly the "I was born in the 49th Century" line. Keeping the Doctor and Susan's origins as mysterious as possible was the best choice the production team could make. Specific details about where or when they came from would mar that effect. The story points concerning their past that make it into the second version were all that we needed.

I also love how often key locations from Unearthly Child get revisited later in the series. And not just during anniversary specials. Both the scrapyard at 76 Totter's Lane and Coal Hill appear in less significant stories. Coal Hill even shows up in a spin-off show. This is, perhaps, the best testament to the effectiveness of the episode. Future production teams pay tribute to it over and over.

Some interesting things were done with Unearthly Child during the 50th anniversary year. Yes, it features prominently in An Adventure In Time and Space but that's not all. Someone actually produced the episode as a live play. Which showed the story is strong enough to be translated into other forms of entertainment. I only saw a few brief scenes of it but it looked really cool.

But the most interesting experiment that year was done with a classroom of young children who were shown the episode. Children who had been accustomed to TV shows and movies whose plots moved at breakneck speeds and were visualized with state-of-the-art computerized effects. Kids who, normally, wouldn't be able to sit through something shot in black-and-white. According to everyone involved in the experiment, the entire classroom stayed as riveted to the screen as good 'ole Colin Baker had when he saw it the first time. This is what impresses me the most about An Unearthly Child. No matter how old it gets, it still holds an audience's imagination.

That's some damned good television. 



And the countdown will continue shortly. We'll try to get one more entry in before 2018 ends. But I'm pretty sure we won't find out what Number One is until the new year.    



Here are the other entries: 

Number 6:
https://robtymec.blogspot.com/2018/11/book-of-lists-top-six-doctor-who.html

Number 5: 
https://robtymec.blogspot.com/2018/12/book-of-lists-top-six-doctor-who.html

Number 4: 
https://robtymec.blogspot.com/2018/12/book-of-lists-top-six-doctor-who_14.htm