Doctor Who: The Aztecs

Since I'm enjoying the Doctor Who that I've watched over the most recent season, I decided that I would try to watch some of the earliest episodes. As it turns out, I managed to find a website (or websites) that have stored the complete Season One of Doctor Who. This is the 1963-64 season, with William Hartnell and Carole Ann Ford.

As of now, I'm 2/3 of the way through. Last night I finished "The Aztecs"; I'll need to get through twelve 25-minuteish episodes of "The Sensorites" and "The Reign of Terror" and I'll have a complete season of Doctor Who under my belt. "The Aztecs" exists in four black-and-white episodes and if you watch them back to back you can probably finish in an hour and thirty minutes.

The ride has been slightly bumpy. One problem with the Doctor Who of the 1960s is that the BBC did not have a policy of archiving all of its broadcasted material. The sad result is that Doctor Who episodes of the 1960s were treated the way a video cassette was treated in the 1980s - if you ran out of space and didn't have another cassette you just shoved the cassette back in the machine and taped over what you had previously recorded. There are several episodes of Doctor Who which are "lost episodes" - although the hope still remains that some of these episodes can be recovered. Some were recovered when it was learned that the BBC sent an episode overseas for broadcast and the episodes were relocated in the vaults of some other country's television archives. In all cases, devoted science fiction fans would record the episodes on their tape recorders - a very primitive way of saving the episodes, but the audio exists or has been recovered for every single episode.

For episodes whose video was not recovered, a handful of promotional clips might survive. For episodes that don't even have that much, some episodes had a lot of promotional photos taken. I also suspect that these photos exist for continuity reasons - if a glass is on the right side of the table in one scene, it should not move to the left side of the table during the next day's shooting. Photos help keep track of what's going on.

Luckily for Season One only one sequence of episodes is lost: "Marco Polo". The seven episodes that comprise "Marco Polo" are all missing. However, there were a crapload of photographs taken and I watched these episodes in a recreated form with audio backing. It was like watching one of those old slide shows for those old enough to remember the classroom experience of the 1970s.

In order to set up "The Aztecs" I should explain Doctor Who for those unfamiliar with it. In the first season, a pair of schoolteachers - Ian and Barbara - find themselves trapped in a time-traveling device piloted by a crotchety old man known as The Doctor and his granddaughter Susan. The device can not only travel through time, but through space as well, allowing a variety of adventures.

Here's a thought exercise: suppose it's 1963 and you're writing a first season episode of Doctor Who. The first question that would come to my mind would be "if the travelers get in trouble, why don't they just jump in their magic time machine and fly away?" All episodes would naturally fall into two categories:

a) they would fly away, but they can't get to the machine (or it doesn't work)
b) they could fly away, but they don't want to fail at our objective and flying away would be an admission of defeat.

It seems that just about every Season One writer jumped at "a" above as a tension-building device.

"One Hundred Thousand Years B. C. ?" Can't get to the ship. Cavemen.
"The Daleks": Ship's broken.
"Inside the Spaceship": Takes place inside the ship. Ship's sort of broken, anyway.
"Marco Polo": Can't get to the ship. Marco Polo.
"The Keys of Marinus": Can't get to the ship. Force field.

After "The Keys of Marinus" I would have never left the ship. Normally, one would assume "well, there must have been some cases where they left the ship, fooled around somewhere, and nothing bad happened" but the episodes are put together in a way that implies that each episode directly follows the preceding one - an amazing string of bad luck for the TARDIS inhabitants.

There might have been a break between "The Keys of Marinus" and "The Aztecs" which convinced the crew that, "no, if I leave the ship I won't be attacked by some interplanetary monster". Bad bet. As "The Aztecs" starts the TARDIS materializes in an Aztec tomb which contains a skeleton dressed up like Lady Gaga. Barbara helps herself to a bracelet and the crew decide to explore the tomb. They find a secret trigger which pivots one of the tomb walls out, and go foolishly exploring beyond the tomb as the triggered wall does not return to its former position right away. Unfortunately, the wall closes back and the TARDIS is now trapped behind several inches of stone with the crew on the opposite side of the wall.

The Aztec priests then arrive to figure out what's all the noise. When they notice Barbara's bracelet, they assume that she is the reincarnation of Yetaxa, the high priest buried in the tomb and begin to treat her with God-like honors. In order to fete her, they invite her to an Aztec ritual sacrifice. Barbara, a history teacher, specialized in Aztec history and has always believed that if ritual sacrifice wasn't a part of Aztec belief then the Spanish invaders might have let up a little on the Aztecs. She therefore calls a halt to the sacrifice - which upsets the man being sacrificed as to be a sacrifice was one of the highest honors an Aztec could earn, and he hurls himself from the pyramid.

Barbara's desire to end ritual sacrifice throws Aztec society into a tizzy. (There's a famous speech by the Doctor, who warns Barbara that she cannot change history - "not one word!") The chief sacrificer believes she's a false god almost immediately, but the Head Smart Guy still thinks that she's a god - but is somewhat confused.

The tension comes from the TARDIS crew having to keep these pretense up while trying to find a way to get back to their ship - they can't ask the Aztecs to do it because a) knowledge to the entry is lost, and b) wouldn't Yetaxa already know the way to get in to his/her own tomb? In the meantime, the chief sacrificer has a strong motive to prove that Barbara is a false god. It then becomes half-race, half-conspiracy episode as the crew hopes to find a way back inside the temple and locate their trapped TARDIS before things blow up in their faces.

I learned a few interesting facts about the episode. The author of the episode had studied Aztec life and culture before writing the script, having lived in Mexico. One problem with the portrayal of the Aztecs/Mayans/Incas is that since people write TV/movie scripts without caring about the particulars of a culture, all three cultures are sometimes mashed together, an "Indiana Jones" version of Central/South American history. Many details are mentioned - particularly regarding the intricacies of Aztec mythology - that give the script authority. For the most part, the writer doesn't mix in any detail more properly associated with either the Mayans or the Incas.

The costumes are surprisingly good - I can only dream of how they must have looked in full color. This is typical of Season One Doctor Who, where it appears that they spent a lot more on the budget than late 1980s-Doctor Who, a victim of the rubber mask syndrome well known in science fiction. As I watched the episode, the costuming was almost movie quality, and the sets looked pretty realistic for the 1960s. Some fans thought that the Aztecs were covered up because prudes at the BBC demanded that the Aztecs wear more clothing - but apparently, it can get cold in Mexico and the Aztecs did not dress like Tarzan when not wearing their elaborate headdresses and ceremonial gear.

It's not merely noteworthy that, "oh, they spent more per episode on Doctor Who in its first season". The scripts of Season One were high quality, and "The Aztecs" is no exception. Doctor Who has been on television in one form or another for at least 30 years, but no one really thinks about why the show has lasted so long. A lot of Doctor Who from the 1980s and beyond is negligible, and even some of the Tenth Doctor episodes are a little ridiculous. Clearly, in order for the show to have lasted for so long it had to have a solid foundation. Episodes like "The Aztecs" show that the present writers of Doctor Who clearly stand on the shoulders of giants.

Think about Star Trek, the very example of a successful series. (*) Most of Star Trek's tropes are now laugh-worthy, but you have to remember exactly how ground breaking that Star Trek really was, a dramatic science-fiction series that at least tried (not always successfully) to ground their episodes in hard science. The original series was only on television for three years, and yet the quality of the writing over those three years was generally good enough to spark four sequels, several full-fledged movies and a reboot attempt. I suspect that most of Doctor Who's success depends on its first season. The Daleks - even though they're very different from what a modern Who fan would think of as Daleks - were so popular as bad guys that they created a sort of Dalekmania in the UK. And "The Daleks", in my opinion, is one of their weaker serials!

All of the other serials in Season One have been great so far. Even "The Keys of Marinus" and "Inside the Spaceship" - pretty much written as throwaways - are exciting, interesting, and well-acted. William Hartnell is great as the grouchy and mysterious First Doctor. I'm surprised at how great Carole Ann Ford, Jacqueline Hill and William Russell were. During Season One, the acting is clearly that of an ensemble cast - with the slight exception of Carole Ann Ford, each actor is given interesting things to do and an interesting piece of the script. (As opposed to later incarnations, where they was one Doctor - clearly the star - and one second banana whose only job was to get tied up or end up in peril.) The same was true in Star Trek, with William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and (to a lesser degree) DeForest Kelley carrying significant shares of the load.

I've got about twelve episodes more to go. I've always felt a little inferior to Doctor Who fans who have seen more episodes than I have, even if they episodes they've seen are all "New Who" episodes that are the 21st-century incarnation of the Snogging Doctor. But now, I can smile and say, "Oh really? Well, I was there when it all began...."

____

(*) Before 1980, "successful series" mean "one whose acting or writing quality stands the test of time". After 1980 it means "one where we can make a shitload of merchandising money". Star Trek has been very successful in both cases.