TARDIS Eruditorum - An Unofficial Critical History of Doctor Who Volume 1: William Hartnell

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As with Watchmen, Moore uses a detached, omniscient perspective. Indeed, he takes it even further than he did in Watchmen, where he could use Rorschach as a pseudo-narrator. Big Numbers has no equivalent character. The closest it comes to narration is a montage at the end of the first issue in which one of the character’s poems is contrasted with a series of single panels reviewing the various characters that the book has introduced. For the most part, however, Big Numbers is told with an impassive objectivity. It takes flights into individual subjectivities, as with the dream sequence in the opening sequence or a later sequence in which Mr. World, a psychiatric patient released into the “care of the community,” fantasizes about the viol All of these, I think, are fun essays that I actually want to write. So hopefully we’ll plow through a good chunk of stretch goals and get to fill out the book with all sorts of goodies. It is 5:16 PM, November the 23rd, 1963. Gerry and the Pacemakers’“You’ll Never Walk Alone” is the number one single. It will go on to become the anthem of Liverpool FC, at the time of writing still narrowly the most successful English football club of all time. Since 6:30 PM the previous day, the BBC has been running news coverage of the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy. Elements of Paul Cornell's comic The Heralds of Destruction were inspired by Eruditorum's coverage of alchemy. (COMMENTARY: Heralds of Destruction) The time-traveller question here is the degree to which an older version of a person ought to have authority over the choices made by a younger version. Whatever one might think in the abstract, this series has pretty reliably endorsed the younger version's authority, though that's largely driven by the paradoxical "First Doctor is the oldest" phenomenon.

An Unearthly Child,the first episode, is usually treated as one story along with the following three episodes. Because in its first seasons Doctor Who had individually titled episodes instead of story arc titles, the name for this story is disputed. The other names all refer to the plot elements of episodes 2-4, which are, for all practical purposes, a completely different story. An Unearthly Child was rewritten by Anthony Coburn from an original script by C.E. Webber, and was reshot before transmission, both facts that I think serve to separate it in a meaningful sense from the three episodes that follow. Thus I, in a viewpoint that has essentially no credibility in mainstream fandom, opt to treat An Unearthly Child as a one-episode story preceding a three-episode story entitled 100,000 BC.) The mom/dad logic might work if you asked your mom if you could save the lives of a planeload of people after your father said you couldn't. Under those circumstances, playing authority games doesn't seem so bad. TARDIS Eruditorum is a critical history of Doctor Who and, more broadly, of British history starting in the latter half of the twentieth century. Its structure mirrors that of an episode guide, though this is not to say it is one. Essays on every televised Doctor Who story are presented sequentially, interleaved with various other essays. These include Pop Between Realities essays, which look at things that are not Doctor Who, Time Can Be Rewritten essays, which look at Doctor Who stories set in a different time period from when they were written, and both Outside the Government and You Were Expecting Someone Else essays, which look at things that aren’t quite Doctor Who. It’s a surprise to me that I like this film as much as I do. Firstly, the director, William Brent Bell, is generally a purveyor of crap. Misogynistic crap, in one marked instance. Secondly, The Boy does things which I generally – and ideologically – dislike. It has a ‘twist’ ending which… the valorization of the realm of a culture’s ghosts and phantasms as a significant and rich field of social production rather than a mirage to be dispelled… *** …a Marxist genealogy fascinated with the irrational aspects of social processes, a genealogy that both investigates how the irrational pervades existing society and dreams of using it to effect social change. Gothic Marxism has often been obscured in the celebrated battles of mainstream Marxism, privileging a conceptual apparatus constructed in narrowly Enlightenment terms. The Enlightenment, however, was always already haunted by its Gothic ghosts…

But that history is here. Right here, in this first episode, with its haunting theme music and impossible knowledge of the future and obsession with a Police Box. The episode was clearly made 48 years ago. It is not timeless. But it feels, every second of the episode, like Doctor Who. It feels like it was made by people who knew what Doctor Who was. It’s impossible. The fact that a Police Box would look out of place everywhere in the universe within six years, that the theme and TARDIS console would be iconic, that Britain would go to decimal currency, none of this could have been there in 1963. But watching it, that knowledge does not feel like a secret history, but like a real history, there and unfolding in front of us. And when we stare into it, it is impossibly big. This volume focuses on Doctor Who’s intersection with psychedelic Britain and with the radical leftist counterculture of the late 1960s, exploring its connections with James Bond, social realism, dropping acid, and overthrowing the government. Along, of course, with scads of monsters, the introduction of UNIT, and the Land of Fiction itself.

I suspect that by posting this I’m on my way to a really shit day. Please consider improving it by supporting my Patreon so I can continue to create and publish work like this in a world that would much rather platform people who want me dead than me. Working with Moore was Oscar Zarate, an Argentinian artist who grew up as a devoted fan of Alex Raymond and Hugo Pratt and worked as an assistant in the Argentinian industry before migrating to advertising and, in 1971, Europe, this latter move to escape the right-wing military government of Argentina. There he sought work and ended up working for the Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, where he worked with writer Richard Appignanesi on Lenin for Beginners and Freud for Beginners, part of the collective’s iconic For Beginners series, which used comics as a medium to explain the thought of prominent philosophers and scientists. He went on to illustrating comics adaptations of Shakespeare and Marlowe before, in 1987, connecting with comedian Alexei Sayle for a graphic novel called Geoffrey the Tube Train and the Fat Comedian.… I don't mind it being about character moments so much as the balance has shifted where the plot is considered an inconvenience to those character moments. There seems to be a stark difference between the Doctor warning the villain and giving them a choice, the villain ignoring this warning and making their choice and the Doctor then defeating them somehow, when compared to the Doctor warning them and giving them a choice, the villain ignoring the warning and making their choice, and then the Doctor changing their past and thus their current character, against their wishes, to ensure that they choose the other option.Obviously, this is a 1970s sci-fi adventure story and not some Peak Television drama about people moodily staring off into the middle distance, although the confusion is understandable given how the speaking cast is basically all middle-aged white men. Regardless, the emotional content is not long on subtle depths; this is not a piece of television where much is to be gained talking about “interiority.” This isn’t about the complex psychology of the doomed, but rather about staking out a moral position about lost causes. So in a mad, daft gesture, one that doesn’t make any sense at all, he runs. It is the first moment of depth in the cantankerous grandfather. He runs. And the mysterious swirls of the credits return, and a strange wheezing, groaning noise echoes out, and the TARDIS is somewhere else. Ian and Barbara, helpless, unconscious on the ground, have fallen out of the world, dragged along by a madman with a box. And yes, I know this is magnificently late, but I got pointed to Erudatorum fairly recently and have been catching up. I figured one month out is acceptable to join the comments.)

I love this episode, it's tremendous fun and brilliantly made and I agree with most of what is said here. But I'm surprised that there was no mention in this otherwise great essay, Philip, about the worrying ethics behind the Doctor's forcible violation of this Kazran's past, memories and character, against his express wishes. But implicit within that image is the presence of some genuinely progressive instinct that is subsequently smothered under the blandness of centrist liberalism—a moment in which some sort of serious political engagement is entertained. And Hulke generally displays that as well— Colony in Space, with its setup of a bunch of working class miners oppressed by an evil corporation, is probably the clearest case, but the interest in the moral question of how legitimate the Silurians’ claim to the planet is in their eponymous story is also clear. In both cases, the end results are disappointing, but you can see the vague consideration of being interesting before the stories commit to their worst political instincts.It’s February 26th, 1972. Between now and April 1st, 125 will die in a coal sludge spill in West Virginia, 19 will die in an avalanche on Mount Fuji, and the Easter Offensive wll begin in the Vietnam War, lasting into Octoer and resulting in somewhere between fifty and a hundred thousand deaths. In addition, M.C. Escher will die in a hospital in the Netherlands, the world will inch ever closer to the eschaton, and The Sea Devils will air. Is forcibly redeeming the villain by changing his past better than beating the villain in a more conventional way (albeit one which might often result in his death)? AMY: You're the only person who can let that ship land. He was trying to turn you into a nicer person. And he was trying to do it nicely.

Within the innate conservatism of the Pertwee era, Malcolm Hulke remains one of the most interesting figures. At one point in his life, he was a member of the Communist Party, and while this membership at some point lapsed, he appears to have been a lifelong socialist and leftist. And yet the era of Doctor Who he’s associated with is one of its most resolutely conservative. More to the point, his stories are not the ones that most challenge that tendency. Three of his Pertwee stories are earth-based military action pieces that trend away from the era’s nominally progressive glam instincts. The other two are space-based stories displaying the most uncomplicated liberalism imaginable. The overall impression is of the sort of bland centrist who imagines himself to be progressive—a Buttigieg voter, to use a contemporary metaphor. It’s May 19 th, 1973. Between now and June 23 rd, forty-eight will die in a plane crash in India, six will die in a pair of IRA bombings in Coleraine, thirteen will die in Argentina when snipers open fire on protesters in the Ezeiza massacre, and six year old boy in Kingston upon Hull will die in the first fire of Peter Dinsdale’s near decade-long spree of arson. This relatively sparse major death toll masks the steady progression of the world towards the eschaton. Also, The Green Death airs. Its goal is to tell the story of Doctor Who as a cultural phenomenon. It is written for an intended audience of people who are familiar with the broad strokes of Doctor Who, but who have not necessarily seen every episode, or indeed any of the classic series. It does not contain episode summaries, and readers interested in given stories are encouraged to go seek them out, but it is no more obtuse to a reader who has not seen a given episode than an average movie review is to someone who hasn’t seen the film. It is not primarily a blog about how good a given episode is or isn’t, although such opinions may creep through. Its primary goal, however, is to tell one particular history of a half-century of British culture through the idiosyncratic but terribly useful lens of an at times ropy but always clever sci-fi program. There’s a moment, about halfway through the episode, where the Doctor observes something about a seemingly dead soldier. We don’t immediately see what, but it’s clear that it surprises the Doctor, and we watch him draw a conclusion and take on a new course of action. It’s an extremely small thing. But it’s tight, logical storytelling. And it’s followed up immediately by having the laser beams failing to affect the taxicab—a moment that’s subtly foregrounded specifically to get the audience to go “ooh, that looks a bit cheap actually” in amidst a scene that’s otherwise showing off that Disney+ money—become an actual plot point, a modern day “the man in a rubber suit is secretly a man in a rubber suit.” All of this in service of keeping the audience engaged and thinking through the premise as the episode navigates its showpiece reveal. It’s good, sharp writing, textbook both in its mastery of the basics and in how good an example it makes of what competence looks like. Of course, it gets followed up with a season that's actually not very much like it at all, but we'll come to that.The real place to look for the change, however, is in the two stories’ treatment of the left. In The Green Death, Professor Jones and the nuthutch are presented as an idyllic alternative to Global Chemicals and indeed to modernity in general. They are without fail good people who do the right thing—people into whom our trust can and should be placed. In Invasion of the Dinosaurs, meanwhile, the left are the bad guys. Brilliant visionaries with noble and respectable priorities consistently turn out to be antagonists, whether they’re plotting the wholesale slaughter of most of the world or angrily crushing all dissent and rejecting any threats to their worldview. Lip service is constantly given to the importance of environmentalism, but actual environmentalists all turn out to be the villains.