Overheard

On my way home yesterday I passed a woman talking on her phone, and I heard her say, "My butt knows." I didn't hear any more, as badly as I wanted to. What was really interesting was her intonation: she didn't give a sassy, "My BUTT knows!" as in "Who knows? My BUTT knows!" Finger snap, audience applause. She said, "My butt KNOWS!" as in "Oh my god, my butt KNOWS! It knows about us, it knows about the diamonds, it knows everything! What the HELL are we going to do?"

Simian Fisticuffs

I would like to say to any gentlemen callers I may have, now or in the future - offering to help me move will get you far, but punching gorillas will get you farther.

This is from IDW's Popeye 2 (June 2012). Check out this series - I think it's delightful, and I'm not even much of a Popeye fan.

Hot Bear-On-Bear Action

If that title isn't good for a few hundred Google hits, I don't know what is. Ahem. Free Comic Book Day is a promotional event held the first Saturday in May. Comic book publishers provide special issues of their comics to retailers, who give them away for free in an attempt to attract new readers. The day tends to be pretty family friendly, so many of the comics provided are intended for all ages. Many, but not all. This year, Silver Dragon Books gave us a hot little tale that's definitely for adults only. So close the blinds, light some candles, and feast your naughty eyes on...

 World's Most Dangerous Animals

Oh, Animal Planet, have you no shame? There are two stories in this comic, but it's the cover story we're concerned with.

Grizzly bear! That most shameless of ursines. Beware! If you're a hot, muscular, bearded fellow bathing in a woodland river hoping for a little privacy, don't get your nude on where there be grizzlies about!

"Dear National Geographic Forum: I never thought the stories in your magazine were true, until this happened to me." The bear doesn't seem to have noticed the... I'm realizing it may be unclear which one I'm referring to when I say "the bear". The grizzly doesn't seem to have noticed the guy in the water, but he's just playing coy.

The grizzly's all, "Oh, I'm such a loner, I'm far too territorial for anyone to be interested in little old me." Beardy's not paying attention to the advice from the caption box, he's seen something he likes and he's going for it. Look, dude, bears are complicated, ok? They act all aloof but really they like to take charge. You're going to scare him off! At least offer him a drink first!

 

See! What'd I tell you? I understand why you think it's your scent, though - bears work up a mighty strong aroma wearing nothing but leather all day. One quick bath isn't enough to shake that.

Relieved, sure, keep telling yourself that. "He wasn't my type anyway. Whatever. I can have any bear here if I wanted. There's a kodiak waiting for me in the bathroom."

The grizzly wanders off just long enough to work up his nerve again (I'm not saying there's some white powdery residue on his snout, I'm not saying there isn't). "My only chance was to hope he didn't charge before I reached my gun!" Been there.

Cock tease! Make up your damn mind! Oh, he's back again.

An 800-pound mountain of muscle and fur. Hells to the yeah.

This guy is up for anything and everything that this bear might want to do to him. Children, leave the room, things are about to get good.

He is really wishing he hadn't left his poppers in the cabin right now. This comic purports to be offering useful advice in the event of a bear attack, but I'm not so sure. It's exciting to be dominated like that, I know. I've been held down by a powerful paw or two in my day, and I'm not saying you should fight, exactly, but don't just lie there. Sure, our nature-loving hero is clearly enjoying himself, but what's the bear getting out of it?

Ah, well, it was hot while it lasted. No matter how much he's into you, lie there limp and motionless long enough and any bear will lose interest. I guess this book is more of a cautionary tale - there's an important lesson here for all of us.

And that lesson is, grizzly bears want to have sex with you. Thanks, Animal Planet!

Bluewater Blues

Bluewater Comics publishes multiple lines of biographies of famous figures from politics, history and entertainment. I was excited when I saw they were publishing a graphic novel featuring actors from Doctor Who - you may not have noticed, but I'm something of a fan. Bluewater's biographical comics don't have the best reputation among comic fans, but I had yet to read one for myself and decided to keep an open mind. My verdict? Fame: The Cast of Doctor Who (unauthorized) is...strange. It is a strange, strange comic. Is it bad? Oh, yes, it's terrible. But it's terrible in such a peculiar way. Let's take a look...

We're off to a good start with a gorgeous cover by artist Joe Phillips, better known (by me, at least) as the writer and artist for a slew of erotic gay comics featuring body-hairless twinkie boys thoroughly enjoying one another's company. He's done plenty of mainstream comics work too, and I really feel like he's outdone himself here - the likenesses of Tom Baker, Paul McGann and Matt Smith are accurate without feeling stiff - most licensed comics have a hard time striking a balance between looking like their subjects while not looking too much like copied photos. William Hartnell is a little young, but that's probably Phillips' personal preferences coming through. It's an odd choice to make the TARDIS red in the logo, but that's Bluewater, not Phillips. All in all, things are looking good! I hope Phillips does the interior art too!

Oh. Ok...no. The interior art is by Jaime Martinez Rodriguez, about whom I can find little information from the internet but who - and I don't think I'm going too far out on a a limb here - can safely be described as a "photo-reference enthusiast." More on that in a page or two.

This is the very first page of this comic, and you might be thinking it's a bit odd that the first page of a biographical comic about the cast of Doctor Who consists of a picture of Jacqueline Kennedy and her children at JFK's funeral, slightly overlapping a stock photo of stars. You would be correct in your thinking. Why not the TARDIS, or a group shot of the actors in the book, or a picture of absolutely anything that is in any way connected to Doctor Who? I've no idea. This will not be the last strange choice made by...I was going to end that sentence with "the editor", but when I went to the credits page to see who that was, I saw that there isn't anyone credited with editing this book. That may answer my question right there.

Throughout the book, we'll see that the artist seems to have just chosen some random phrase from whatever's in that page's caption boxes and drawn...excuse me, I mean "drawn"...that. If it's something to do with the actor being profiled, great! If not, whatever. He's still getting paid and obsessive Who fans like me will still buy it.

Before I go any further, I need to explain another peculiarity of this comic that will result in more bizarre choices by whoever the hell was in charge. It was released in two formats - a regular comic, and a "graphic novel" edition, with a cardstock cover and an additional biography, of Peter Cushing, who played the Doctor in a pair of sixties films. For some reason, the lay-outs of the two comics are slightly different. The graphic novel seems to have a higher page count, and not just because of the added biography; it also seems to be somewhat smaller. This has apparently resulted in a couple of extra pages to kill in the graphic novel. The first page is almost identical.

(The more washed-out look is my fault - bad scan of the graphic novel on my part compared to the regular comic. That is the only thing I take responsibility for.) The pictures are the same, but the graphic novel has fewer caption boxes. The comic has this as its second page:

There's William Hartnell or a reasonable facsimile, gazing up at the night sky, dreaming of one day being a science-fiction action hero and wondering if he should be worried about how impossibly enormous the moon is. Fine. But the graphic novel has a couple of pages to kill, so it gives us this:

And this:

Two double-page splashes with the caption boxes left over from the first page. Two double-page splashes that have absolutely nothing to do with Doctor Who or William Hartnell. I guess....maybe?...you could make an argument that the first image is supposed to represent the time-space vortex, otherwise known as the TV show's opening credits, but that's a bit of a stretch and I'm not sure this comic has earned the benefit of the doubt. And the second image - just a random, vaguely science-fictiony city. Space-fillers. That's all these pictures are. It is the least possible work that whoever is responsible could do, short of just printing blank pages. Mary Kate Thorne is credited with "Production", so I'm going to go ahead and point the finger at her.

As if that weren't bad enough - lazy enough - take a look back at the first page from the regular comic, the one with all the caption boxes. Look closely. It's hard to see on my small scan, so I'll narrate a bit for you. The second caption box reads, "The premise was simple: a traveler in time and space and his magical machine stuck in the shape of a police call box that is bigger on the inside." The third box reads, "The possibilities were (and still are) endless." The fourth box reads, "The premise was simple: a traveler in time and space and his magical machine stuck in the shape of a police call box that is bigger on the inside." The fifth box reads, "The possibilities were (and still are) endless." Whoops! Ok, mistakes were made. I've seen the occasional repeated caption or misplaced word balloon in plenty of comics that don't suck. It happens.

Except...now take a look at the first page of the graphic novel format, and then the first double-page spread. You would think when Ms. Thorne, or whomever was responsible for rearranging the comic into the graphic novel, was editing these pages that the mistake would be caught. Instead, the caption boxes were rearranged on the first page to fill the space and then the mistakenly repeated caption boxes were dragged onto the next and arranged there. Somebody did that. Somebody took the effort to rearrange this page and yet didn't catch such a glaring error. You don't even have to be paying all that much attention to catch it. You just have to read. Unless, of course, they did catch it, but by that point the art was in and the writer was paid and it's been a long day so fuck it. Yeah, that seems more likely to me.

Ok! So, page two and I already feel like this comic is actually hostile towards me. The feeling is more than mutual. Let's move on!

The text of this comic is somewhat plodding - this happened, then this happened, then this happened - with the occasional bit of oddly phrased hyperbolic praise. Apparently, Harnell "brought a cantankerous grandfatherly flair to his interpretation that still to this day has influenced most if not all successors to the role." Because I always think "cantankerous grandfather" when I think of David Tennant. Or Christopher Eccleston. Or Paul McGann. Or Tom Baker. Or John Pertwee. Or Matt Smith. (Ok, maybe Matt Smith.) So yes, the writing is just as lazy as the editing. Most of the text can be found in Hartnell's Wikipedia entry, the rest from a simple Google search. His one paragraph New York Times "About This Person" entry covers a lot of the same ground.

But the art's good, right? Let's take a closer look at the art. I must admit, Rodriguez does a pretty good job of capturing likenesses.

Why, that looks just like William Hartnell! Here, I'll prove it:

See! It's almost like he just did a Google image search of William Hartnell and then traced the image - amazing!

Oh dear. Yes, almost every single drawing in this comic is clearly just copied from a picture found on Google's image search. I didn't even have to look that hard to find the originals. I'm not saying there's no skill involved here - I couldn't do it (I don't have Photoshop). But combined with the lazy writing and non-existent editing, it doesn't really make me feel like I got eight bucks worth of graphic novel.

Ok, enough snarking about the production values. For now. Let's get back to the actual content. After a few more panels of William Hartnell's Illustrated Resume, we get to the reason we're all here.

This panel tells me so much I didn't know about how William Hartnell got the part. Apparently, he gave a cold reading of a monologue on stage in a giant empty theater, while in the very back row Verity Lambert took notes in her enormous illustrated manuscript Casting D. Who. Charming! Her calligraphy is impeccable.

Some of the choices of photo-references are a bit odd. I'm not sure what relevant Google Image search terms would bring you pictures of 21st Century Brooklyn hipsters. Janeane Garofalo really wants an autograph, though.

This comic doesn't just give you insights into the men who played the Doctor. Here I learn two more important things about original producer Verity Lambert: she forgot her job title a lot and had to keep a reminder facing her on her desk, and she prepared the design for the new series Cybermen forty years before they appeared in the program and kept a poster of them in her office. She truly was a visionary!

The random vaguely science-fictiony pictures aren't employed just to fill the extra space in the graphic novel. The image above, for example, appears in both versions of the comic, and has fuck-all to do with anything. There were two panels with captions devoted to the Doctor's first regeneration, and I guess that was one too many for Rodriguez's image searching skills.

Here's the image he chose, and I guess it's fine, given the level of quality we're now conditioned to expect. By that I mean, it's supposed to suggest one man turning into another, but it came out looking like William Hartnell's head is growing out of Patrick Troughton's cheek. It's...actually kind of disturbing, but at least it's an attempt to draw photo-manipulate something related to the show.

Here's a nice image to depict Hartnell's return to the roll in the 10th anniversary story The Three Doctors. Unfortunately, it's a bit too wide for the graphic novel rearrangement - most of the panels in the comic have all the action happening in the middle of the picture, so they can be inserted into the narrower graphic novel just by trimming off the uninteresting sides and rearranging the captions. This picture wouldn't make much sense if you cut off one of the three Doctors, though, and finding a new image is clearly not going to happen. So if you got the graphic novel, you didn't get the picture above, you got this:

Thanks for spending the extra dough, sucker! And yes, this is essentially the same picture as the first double-page spread, but run through a blue filter instead of a green one.

And there we'll leave Mr. Hartnell. On now to the man who is arguably the most popular of all the original Doctors, Tom Baker. And if you think the full-page splash introducing his biography will be something exciting, interesting, and relevant, then you have clearly not been paying attention.

It's...a white corridor? Filled with light? Maybe from a space ship? With...a fire extinguisher? I would say, "They're not even trying anymore," but that would imply that they were, at some point, trying. Even more baffling is that this panel too only appears in the comic. If you got the graphic novel, you got this:

That same frigging vortex picture, but orange this time. I can't think of any reason why the panel from the comic needed to be changed. I mean, no, I can think of a thousand reasons, but none for why it should be changed to this.

Tom Baker was born on January 20, 1934, in the heart of an active volcano.

I can't find any images on-line of Tom Baker playing the bear in The Winter's Tale, but please oh please let this have been his actual costume. When they invent time travel my first stop is the audience for this production.

Oh, dear. I include this for two reasons. One is to remind you that the photo-swiping is still going strong. The other is to illustrate again how little thought is going into this comic. Yes, Tom Baker's in blackface, playing the Prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice with Laurence Olivier. It was the done thing at that time, and it's certainly an unfortunate part of Baker's history, to say the least. (The make-up, not the part. Apparently he was brilliant.) In the original comic this is one small image, filling out about a sixth of the page. In the graphic novel, they chose this panel to fill up some of the extra space, and it's about three-quarters of the page. Just this one time, you couldn't have put in that damn vortex again?

I don't know who any of the people in this picture are.

I think the artist really captured the moment of Tom Baker leaving Doctor Who after seven years with this picture of grappling hooks.

You know what no comic about the cast of Doctor Who is complete without? A picture of the cast of Remington Steele.

By the way, Rodriguez, it took me less than two minutes to find that entire episode on-line, for free. You couldn't have at least given us a picture of Tom Baker in Remington Steele? Scan through it, find a good image, freeze frame, print screen, open in Photoshop, art filter, done.

That's enough of Tom Baker. Onwards to Eighth Doctor Paul McGann!

What I like about this picture is not only the arbitrary choice of a community theater production of Camelot to represent McGann's early acting days, but also that nobody in the audience is paying the slightest bit of attention to the show. That guy in the front is even standing up to stretch his legs and check out whatever else might be going on in the auditorium. 

McGann's biography, like the others, is almost exclusively swiped from publicity stills of his projects, like this one of him and his brothers in The Hanging Gale:

Handsome fellows, aren't they? There's also another two-in-one of an irrelevant science-fictiony shot replaced in the graphic novel for no reason. The comics gets this:

A city...in space! I think. And why not? I mean, what else would you use for the only panels to talk about the making of the one and only time Paul McGann played the Doctor, the whole reason he's in this book? So anyway, the comic got that, and the graphic novel got this:

The vortex again! And the bottom of the space city. That vortex picture does not appear at all in the comic, but appears four times in the graphic novel. In fact, of the four actors' biographies from the original comic, the only one whose story doesn't get a vortex shot is Matt Smith, the one whose title credits it most closely resembles.

I don't have to much to say about Matt Smith's biography, as it's pretty short. No bizarre random science-fictiony pics, just stills from his credits with even less attempt to hide the fact that they're nothing but Photoshopped photographs.

That filter is on its lowest setting.

This picture of executive producer Steven Moffat is interesting, and not just because he looks like a Sim. He's never identified, and the caption here makes it seem as if this is a picture of Matt Smith playing the Eleventh Doctor. Excellent make-up crew on that show.

Bonus! The graphic novel contains an extra biography, of Peter Cushing, who played Doctor Who in a pair of 1960s films. This biography, finally, made me glad I bought the more expensive version of the comic. The text is still the standard list of credits, but the art is...brace yourself...actually art! DJ Burgess is credited with the bonus story, and although I can't find anything about him on the internet, I think I'm a fan.

Above is a composite shot he drew - drew! - of Cushing's various film roles. Plus some blonde lady, who may be Cushing in drag for all I know (I'm not overly familiar with his oeuvre). It's a thing of beauty, don't you think? I like his less realistic, more cartoony style. He captures Cushing's likeness without making it look like he just traced a publicity still. Cushing looks a little cadaverous throughout, but that's probably appropriate.

Here's a more relevant shot, of Cushing as Doctor Who with a pair of Daleks. The likeness of Cushing is just on the right side of caricature. I like it.

Here he is looking incredibly sad as Grand Moff Tarken in Star Wars, with some other dude. Cheer up, Pete! You got the best story in the whole comic! Admittely, the bar was not set too high, but let's see a smile!

No? Fair enough. And that's where the comic ends, on a better note than it started. I suspect my praise for the art in the Cushing segment is mostly motivated by comparison to the non-art in the rest of the book, but I do think Burgess' work is well-suited to a biography comic like this. Otherwise, well...I don't consider my commentaries on this blog to be reviews, because then I'd have to fair, and that's no fun at all. But I can't think of any way to end this post except negatively: Bluewater's Fame: The Cast of Doctor Who (unauthorized) is lazy crap. Go read some of IDW's Doctor Who comics and wash this out of your brain. They're awesome. (Hey, I ended with something postive!)

Quiet, Mel!

I've made you a video! Mel, played by Bonnie Langford, was a companion to the Sixth and Seventh Doctors, and was without a doubt the screamiest in a long line of screamers. Here are all her screams, run together in one convenient video, for no reason at all. Crank that volume!

Episodes: An Unearthly Child - An Unearthly Child

Hey, it's a new series! Not Doctor Who, that's been around for almost fifty years. No, I'm talking about this series, in my blog - I'm going to take a close look at every single episode of Doctor Who, one by one, from the very beginning. I'm calling it "Episodes", because in a fit of dullness I called my series on the companions "Companions" and now I feel obliged to continue the theme. Given how often I update my blog and how many episodes there have been, I expect none of us will live to see the finish. Let's try anyway!

One note before we begin - I never intended this blog to be a review blog. Even when I thoroughly dissect/mock/insult a comic book, I don't consider it a real review - I'm just trying to be funny, or maybe highlight something I find interesting. If you want reviews, there are plenty of places on the internet to look, most of which will do it far better than I ever could. (And - unbiased plug -  if you want some amazing analysis, particularly of the episodes commonly held to be the "worst of Doctor Who" (as if there could be such a thing), check out Philip Sandifer's marvelous Tardis Eruditorum. In fact, don't click that link, click this one, start at the beginning, and work your way forward. Go now. My stupid dirty jokes will still be here when you get back.)

All this is meant to be is a recap of the episodes paired with my response to and thoughts about them, as I watch them. I've seen them all before, I'll see them all again. And no matter how much I mock, I truly believe Doctor Who is the best show on television. Ever. If you disagree, you're wrong and something in your brain is broken. Ok, let's go!

An Unearthly Child

An Unearthly Child

I'm not sure the original arrangement of the Doctor Who theme song has ever been improved upon. It's eerie and catchy and has a driving beat and it sounds like nothing else but itself. It was composed by Ron Grainer but much of the credit really has to go to arranger Delia Derbyshire, who was responsible for the electronic ethereal sound. I enjoy the modern series' dramatic orchestral arrangements too, but given a choice, I'll stick with the original.

The titles fade to show us a policeman - the first ever actor to appear in Doctor Who, and he doesn't even appear in the credits. His name's Reg Cranfield - you're an important part of history, Reg Cranfield, and we salute you! Whoever the hell you are.

P.C. Reg is on patrol this dark and foggy night. The theme music continues to play as he checks the lock on a gate - painted on the gate is: "I. M. Foreman, Scrap Merchant, 76 Totter's Lane". All's well, and he totters off to take his place in the footnotes of sci-fi history. But the camera moves forward as the gates open, revealing a junkyard full of...well, junk. The theme music finally fades - it's really been going on for an awful long time now - as the camera pans to a police box, which I assume the kids of 1963 would have recognized. (Maybe?) Besides the incongruity of a police box in a junkyard, there's also the strange electronic hum that the music has faded into. It's pretty cool - director Waris Hussein is doing a very good job of letting us know that something very strange is going on in this junkyard, without a single word of dialogue.

In the olden days of Doctor Who, every episode had its own title, just like...just like today, actually. But for most of the show's existence, stories were divided into multiple parts with one umbrella title. Since the first few seasons had no umbrella titles for multi-part stories, there's some disagreement as to what some of those titles should be. I'm going with the ones I like best, because it's my blog. This policy will occasionally lead to me looking like my title is stuck on repeat, as with this first installment, in which I'm looking at the episode "An Unearthly Child", the first part of the serial An Unearthly Child.

The camera zooms in on the instructions posted on the door (Pull to open! Neil Gaiman will make a joke about this that doesn't quite work in about fifty years.) then dissolves to...

Coal Hill School, where football and athletics are different, I guess? Is that a British thing? Maybe the house news explains it. We hear a teacher - who we'll come to know and worship as Barbara Wright - say the very first line of dialogue ever uttered in Doctor Who - "Wait in here please, Susan. I won't be long." Say it a few times. Roll it around in your mouth. Taste the history!

But before we learn who this woman is, who Susan is, why she's waiting and what won't take long, we get a quick glimpse of some Coal Hill students, one of whom should have been nominated for a BAFTA for Best Performance by an Extra.

Two girls are walking down the corridor talking, looking at a piece of paper (presumably a graded assignment or a report card), and a boy comes up between them and pretends to join in on their conversation. He says, "Oh, yeah," in a voice dripping with mockery, and then walks away, leaving the girls shaking their heads in annoyance. It all takes about two seconds and there's seemingly no point to it. I don't know if Hussein or writer Anthony Coburn included this scene, but it's brilliant. Apart from the boy's joke being so dumb it's kind of funny, it sets up the utter normality of the Coal Hill School. It is filled with perfectly normal teenage boys and girls, worrying about their grades and teasing/flirting with each other. The show has established a normal world, with a normal school and normal teenagers, which sets the viewers up for the stark contrast with normality that's coming up. (In this episode, and for the next fifty years.)

Meanwhile, Barbara has ducked into another classroom to talk with her colleague, science teacher Ian Chesterton. Barbara teaches history, and is having a problem with one of her students, fifteen-year-old Susan Foreman. Both teachers have noticed that Susan is brilliant - Ian thinks she's holding back on revealing just how much she knows so as not to embarrass him. Barbara suggested that Susan specialize, and offered to work with her at home - Susan said that would be impossible, as her grandfather disliked strangers. (We will soon discover this to be a massive understatement.) Barbara, suspicious, got Susan's home address from the school, but when she arrived, all she found was a junkyard. Barbara suggests a stakeout - they'll drive to the junkyard, hide, and when Susan arrives they'll see where she goes and follow her. Ian agrees, because that doesn't sound as insane and possibly criminal to him as it did to you when you just read that. 

Meanwhile, back in Barbara's classroom, Susan is listening to some groovy rock and roll on her transistor radio and anachronistically dancing the hand choreography from Spring Awakening. The two teachers enter, and Ian offers Susan a ride home. Susan declines, dismissing Barbara's warning about fog and saying she likes to walk through the dark because "it's mysterious". Perhaps she doesn't know Hot Topic hasn't been established yet and she's hoping to get some shopping in on the way home.

As the teachers leave, Susan flips through the book on the French Revolution that Barbara has lent her, muttering, "That's not right!" The book has no text or pictures on the front or back covers besides the magnificently generic title, The French Revolution. I'm not sure if Susan has found a mistake, or she's just dismayed at the quality of textbook the Coal Hill School is providing for its students. (Maybe Barbara self-published?)

With Susan's book bit having given them enough time to run over to the next set (the show was filmed "as live" in those days), Ian and Barbara pull up in front of the junkyard at 76 Totter's Lane. Although Barbara insists they're there for Susan's own good, Ian suggests it's more because they're both just curious. They have a little flashback sequence, reminiscing about the various ways Susan has freaked them the hell out.

The first takes place in Barbara's history class, and it's my favorite of these three sequences because it shows Barbara not even making a token attempt to stop the students from openly mocking Susan for being different. She is seated dead center in the room while all the students laugh at her and Barbara scolds her angrily for not knowing that Britain isn't on a decimal system of currency. That open cruelty and lack of sympathy is thoroughly unlike Barbara, but I suppose it's understandable that she'd have a hard time keeping control of her class while reading in her lines off-screen from the junkyard set.

The second sequence is in Ian's class, as she argues with him that the experiment he's having them do is pointless and obvious. I only bring it up because Carol Ann Ford, who plays Susan, is marvelous in this scene, as she is throughout most of these early episodes. It's a shame how much the writers will let her down in a few stories' time - but I'm getting ahead of myself...

The teachers finish reminiscing. I kept waiting for one of them to say, "That child...she's so...unearthly," but they didn't, because Anthony Coburn is a better writer than I am. Susan arrives and enters the junkyard gate, sneaking a glance over her shoulder in a completely non-suspicious manner. Ian suggests that maybe she's just meeting a boy, and Barbara hopes she is, because "it would be so wonderfully normal." I'm wondering what kind of adolescence Barbara had, that she considers meeting a date in an abandoned junkyard normal.

The teachers follow Susan in, but there's no sign of her. After calling out for her with no response, Barbara stumbles upon the police box from the start of the episode.

They hear that same electronic hum, and Ian puts his hand on the box, feeling a vibration. (That's what she said.) They suddenly hear a loud deep cough coming from outside. It's clearly coming from a man, but Barbara still asks, "Is that her?" She gets smarter, I swear. The duo hide, and the gate opens, giving us - nearly twelve minutes into the episode - our first look at the Doctor.

He moves towards the police box and begins to open it, when Susan calls out to him from inside. Barbara calls out, "It's Susan!" and the Doctor spots them. The teachers come forward, and explain that they're looking for Susan Foreman. 

The Doctor is completely dismissive of them, and the pair quickly become convinced that something criminal is afoot, that the old man has Susan locked up in the tiny police box. William Hartnell, as the Doctor, is wonderfully sinister in this scene - in retrospect, we can see that he's trying to get rid of the teachers so he can slip into the TARDIS and get away, but watching this for the first time it's perfectly plausible that this creepy old man has a teenage girl locked up in a box.

Just look at him - madman with a box, indeed! Just as Ian is about to go and fetch a policeman, the police box door opens slightly and Susan calls out again from inside. Ian holds the Doctor off while Barbara runs through the doors.

Here's another first in an episode that is, quite naturally, full of them - the first reaction to the inside of the TARDIS, and the most believable. She doesn't say a word, she doesn't blurt out anything about it being bigger on the inside. She's completely silent, staring in incomprehension while her mind tries to take in the impossibility of what she's seeing.

Ian charges in after, and doesn't do any better. The Doctor - who is finally introduced as Susan's grandfather - spends a few minutes trying to answer the teachers' questions about where exactly they are, but nothing he says makes any sense to them.

Susan explains that they're in her grandfather's ship, called the TARDIS - a name she coined from the initials Time And Relative Dimension In Space - and that in it they can go anywhere in time and space. Barbara and Ian still don't get it, and Susan's perplexed by their lack of comprehension. The Doctor, who's been hilariously and dickishly condescending throughout this entire scene, offers a metaphor to Susan as an example: "Now, now, don't get exasperated, Susan. Remember the Red Indian. When he saw the first steam train, his savage mind thought it an illusion too." Oh 1963, you lovable old racist!

Susan and her grandfather reveal that they are from another time and another world, and that they are exiled, "wanderers in the fourth dimension", unable to return home. Barbara and Ian don't believe a word of it. Susan tries to convince the increasingly sinister Doctor that the teachers are no threat to them, but he's made up his mind - he can't let them leave.

The teachers run for the doors, but they won't open. The Doctor laughs mockingly as Ian scrambles around the control panel, trying to find the one that will open the doors.

The old man goads Ian into trying a switch, which promptly electrocutes him. The Doctor's a bad guy in this episode - have you picked up on that yet? Ian and Barbara are the stars of this show; our demi-title character is their antagonist.

Susan begs the Doctor to let the teachers go, but he insists that if they do, the Doctor and Susan will have to leave as well to avoid being hounded by the authorities when Ian and Barbara tell the world. Susan declares she won't leave the twentieth century, that she's never been happier, and that she'll stay behind if the Doctor leaves. Surprisingly, her grandfather quickly agrees, and moves to the console to open the doors. Of course, he's lying, and instead he sets the ship in flight.

The Doctor's decision to kidnap the school teachers has come in for a lot of criticism as irrational - why not just let them go, and take off with Susan? But Susan has just insisted she'll stay behind if he leaves - if he opens the doors to let the teachers go, she'll run out right behind them and he may never see her again. What I find more interesting are the choices he offered Susan before she gave her ultimatum - he lets them go and he and Susan leave Earth, or he doesn't let them go and he and Susan stay. But suppose Susan had agreed to this, and wanted to stay? Did he plan on keeping Ian and Barbara prisoner in the TARDIS forever? Throughout this scene Susan seems absolutely terrified on behalf of these teachers she's grown so fond of, but the idea that her grandfather would kidnap them doesn't occur to her, so...what's she afraid of? Is the Doctor willing to murder Ian and Barbara to keep his granddaughter safe? Given how much of a threat the show is painting the Doctor as, I think that seems likely. It's only when he sees that Susan is willing to leave him forever to stay with them that he chooses what he sees as the only remaining option - take them all away.

Susan tries to wrestle him away from the console, but he fights her off. The take-off is presented far more dramatically than it will be in later episodes - Ian and Barbara pass out, London recedes on the monitor, and that weird camera effect from the opening credits superimposes itself over everybody's faces. I suppose it would have gotten pretty tiresome to do this every time the TARDIS takes off for the next fifty years, but it certainly does establish the ship's flight as a very big deal.

In the quiet moment after their landing, we see, just for a second, a look on the Doctor's face that might possibly be regret. William Hartnell is a good actor. Forget about the fluffed lines that he becomes unfairly known for. He's very good, and that's all I'll say about that. (Not that I'm not going to make fun of the fluffed lines once they start happening.)

Outside, we see that the ship has landed on a barren landscape, and a sinister shadow appears, watching. Next Episode - The Cave of Skulls!

Sneak preview - it is not nearly as exciting as it sounds.