Series 1 Episode 2: The Cave of Skulls

Serial: An Unearthly Child
Episode: 2 ("The Cave of Skulls")
Doctor: William Hartnell
Companions: Barbara, Ian, and Susan

Writer: Anthony Coburn
Director: Waris Hussein
Original Air Date: 30/11/1963 

ARE YOU READY FOR SOME PREHISTORIC (GENDER) POLITICS?

The Tardis has landed in Generic Cave(wo)man Times, and everyone looks grubby and/or beardy. There is an Old Woman (known only as Old Woman) who is the voice of the status quo and who is having none of this newfangled fire business. Which is just as well because Za, son of a great firemaker, is having no luck swizzling a phallic object between his fingers to get the spark going. Not that his ladyfriend (imaginatively named “Hur”) seems to mind. She spends most of the episode hovering at shoulders in a vaguely Lady Macbeth sort of way, communicating mostly in whispered political commentary and not batting an eyelid at the fact that she is to be given either to Za or to Kal (the interloper and Za’s rival in leadership/firemaking/woman-owning) by her father.

I must admit I quite like Hur. That a woman is seen as a man’s property is (no shit Sherlock) not cool, and obviously the fact that it’s meant to be prehistoric times doesn’t make it any less so, but it is at least realistic. And within that paradigm, she does manage to stir it quite a lot to her own advantage. I’d like one of the Tardis travellers to comment on the gender politics, though. I mean, one of the great things about, say, Life on Mars or Ashes to Ashes, is that the present-day character is always there to roll their eyes at the sexism etc., which is what prevents it all being an ode to less-PC times gone by.

Meanwhile, in the Tardis, it’s Babs waking Ian up from the floor and asking him if he’s all right, which is pleasant. And it’s Susan saying “lean on me” to Ian as he staggers out of the Tardis, clearly having had a bit of a bump on the bonce. It’s the little reversals that are so pleasing.

As far as accepting the reality of their situation goes, it’s also pleasingly non-gendered. It’s not that Ian (who initially refuses to believe that they have travelled in time) takes a rational view and that Barbara (who believes before she sets foot outside the Tardis) takes an irrational view, it’s just actual character development. Ian seems to get very bogged down in trying to understand everything and failing (sometimes at the expense of engaging fully with his environment), whereas Barbara accepts that there are elements she does not understand yet manages to engage with the situation at a level she’s comfortable with, which is often just at the level of subjective experience. (For instance, she has no problem in grasping the concept of the chameleon circuit when Susan explains it, despite not seeming particularly concerned as to how it works.) It’s more a scientist/historian distinction than a male/female one.

Oh dear, though, here comes screechy Susan. The Doctor has been nabbed by Kal following his ostentatious lighting of a pipe out in the open (how about that, the first person to be captured in Doctor Who is the Doctor himself), and his absence has brought on a fit of hysteria that is totally unnecessary. I can only half argue that her shrieking fit is channelled into action (i.e. running to find him) because at one point she appears to propel herself rather pointlessly into a sandbank. Yes you would panic if you were fifteen (how old is Susan in Time Lord years, anyway?) and your grandfather had been taken away, but surely going to pieces almost immediately is a little excessive.

Meanwhile, the AmDram/RSC Reject Cavemen are at it again. Their oratory skills seem to be terribly advanced. Kal has even mastered anaphora. Hur comes up with the first sensible suggestion we’ve heard since Kal brought the Doctor in (after asking “will my father listen to a woman?”), which is that they should just wake the Doctor up and see if he can indeed make fire. Interestingly, following the derisive conflation of old men with women in terms of irrelevance by some of the other cavemen, the Doctor plays up to the “old man” image in the hope that it will get him off the hook.

OH LOOK IT’S SUSAN TO THE RESCUE! Oh no, wait, she just ran in screeching “grandfather” and then spent the next full minute screaming at full tilt because the cavepeople managed to restrain them all. Great job, kiddo.

Za and Hur’s dad have a fairly ugg-ish spat over Hur. Za says “the woman is mine” a couple of times, and her dad says “my daughter is for the leader of the tribe”. Hur, who clearly likes the look of Za, twists her dad’s arm by telling him that if he gives her to Za, then Za will remember him in the cold and give him meat so he doesn’t starve. So again, fairly horrendous in that she doesn’t object to any of this, but pretty cool that she is the one in control of the situation. The Old Woman intones reactionary wisdom along the lines of “there were leaders before there was fire”. Can’t help feeling that the Wise Old Man trope is a lot kinder.

We finish with our heroes in the Cave of Skulls. Barbara is coughing, either because of “the stench” of which the Doctor complains or because she’s about to do that awful thing women in Sci-Fi do, which is to say to the strongman character “I’m frightened”. Which she does, as Ian leans over her prone form in a manner suggestive of ease of tonsil-tennis access. I don’t have a problem with people being frightened. I’d be frightened. Fear is not a gendered thing. But it only ever seems to be the women saying it to the men in these situations, and it does rather make me cringe.

OMG TREPANNING, HOW WILL THEY EVER ESCAPE?

*Eeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaooowwww ooo-EEE-oooooooooo-WOOOOOOOO-oooooooo*

Summary (as applicable to this episode)

Does it pass the Bechdel test? Yes.

Is/are the female companion(s) dressed “for the Dads”? No.

Does a woman fall over/twist her ankle (while running from peril)? Yes (No).

Is/are the female companion(s) captured? No.

Does the Doctor/a male companion/any other man have to rescue the female companion(s) from peril? No.
 

Is/are the female companion's/s' first/only reaction(s) to peril gratuitous screaming? Yes.

Does a female companion go into hysterics over something reasonably minor? Yes.

Is there past/future/alien sexism? Yes.

Does a "present"-day character call anybody out on past/future/alien sexism? No.

Did a woman write/direct/produce this episode? No/No/Yes.  

Verdict

A lot more sexism than the last episode, but still nowhere near as bad as I was expecting. It's only towards the end that we descend into screaming and such. Hur's character is problematic, but has not been dealt with completely thoughtlessly; it's not like the past sexism isn't being flagged up in the episode, even if it isn't always challenged. However, though she accepts the patriarchy without question, she manoeuvres freely within it to her own advantage, and does not herself seem unaware of gender bias ("will my father listen to a woman?"). It also begs the question as to whether sexism is ever held to be self-evident in TV drama - is there a convention that demands it always be acknowledged? Just an interesting thought. Also, apart from the "I'm frightened" bit, I do quite like Barbara as a character. Which is a nice thing to rediscover, seeing as I've not watched Hartnell-era Who for years. Bring on "The Forest of Fear".

Series 1 Episode 1: An Unearthly Child

Serial: An Unearthly Child
Episode: 1 ("An Unearthly Child")
Doctor: William Hartnell
Companions: Barbara, Ian, and Susan

Writer: Anthony Coburn
Director: Waris Hussein
Producer: Verity Lambert
Original Air Date: 23/11/1963

And Doctor Who's first ever Feminist Points go to the inimitable Delia Derbyshire for her iconic arrangement of Ron Grainer's theme tune which still scares the living daylights out of Yours Truly. Sod all that mucking about with orchestras and fiery time tunnels and space lightning, we want creepy kalaedoscopic fuse/flare thingies and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

But enough of that. Here are Barbara Wright and Ian Chesterton of Coal Hill School. Barbara teaches History, which is handy for a time-travelling show. Provided, that is, that they don't travel that much in space. On any other planet (or indeed on future Earth), she's not that much of an asset (and by all accounts Susan knows more about Earth history than she does anyway), so we shall observe the relationship between where the Tardis lands and Babs's usefulness with interest. Ian, on the other hand, teaches Science, which is not at all handy for a show where 20th Century scientific knowledge is basically irrelevant. He is, at the very most, only the third most qualified scientist aboard the Tardis, so chances are he's there to be the muscle. Woe and alas.

Anyway, Barbara and Ian are all but singing "how do you solve a problem like Susan Foreman", a fifteen-year old genius who is nevertheless ignorant about some of the simplest things. There are two great things about this scene;

1. Their discussion of Susan's genius/ignorance isn't gendered. She is referred to as "a fifteen-year-old-girl", but you never get the sense that they find the extent of her knowledge alarming because of her gender. 
2. She isn't The Impossible Girl TM. Yes, she is defined by her being in many ways an enigma, but not at the expense of her being a character. (Of course in later episodes and serials, she turns out to be quite a different kind of non-character, but let's not get ahead of ourselves for the moment.). She's a problem in the classroom because she knows at once too much and too little, which is obviously disruptive and perplexing, but despite finding her smartassery irritating, they also want to encourage her in her strengths. The reason they decide to follow her home (of which more anon) is that they believe she might have some kind of troubled home life, following a decline in the standard of her homework, her mention of her grandfather who wouldn't like it if Barbara gave her some extra History tuition at home, and the fact that she seems to live in a junkyard. Arguably, they are more concerned with the welfare of one of their pupils than with the gaps in her otherwise astonishing knowledge.

And so, on to the Stalking! Ahem. Yes, I don't know how to justify this, as I don't know what standard procedure was in the 1960s. Suffice to say that my own brief experience of working in secondary education has taught me that, nowadays, following one of your pupils home if you have a concern about their home life is not the way to go about things. You also don’t offer them lifts home. Then again, that Susan declines said lift by telling them, "I like walking through the dark - it's mysterious", would hardly put at rest the mind of the modern educator either. Pupil safety, chaps. U no has it.

But whatever rules and regs they might be breaking, here are Babs and Ian sitting in the car outside the junkyard at 76 Totter’s Lane. Ian speculates that Susan could be “a foreigner” (somebody call Enid Blyton!) and that Susan “is fifteen” and therefore “might be meeting a boy”, which Barbara says she would find a relief in that it would be so very “normal”. Slap-on-the-wrist for heteronormativity/assuming that this is all teenage girls think about; handshake for not immediately leaping out of the car to drag Susan away from a potential underage sex situation based on an assumption that she can’t make informed decisions about her sex life. But I digress.

Into the junkyard, and it’s Ian who falls over and loses the torch, which is a nice change from what is to come (it’s a time travel show, deal with it). His body language towards Barbara is incredibly irritating, the way he keeps steering her bodily about. If she’s in the way, just ask her if she’ll get out of the way. She won’t be offended.

And heeeeeeere’s the Doctor! Kudos to Ian and Barbara for not taking a creepy old man's word for it that he hasn't locked a teenage girl inside his Police Box. Ian has his first muscle moment, grappling with the Doctor while Barbara gets inside the Tardis, and is generally rather aggressive about the whole “bigger on the inside” thing while Babs seems to take it in her stride (she’s even managed to keep hold of her handbag through all of this – that’s skill). There is a facepalm moment when the Doctor tells Susan to “remember the Red Indian”, whose “savage mind” thought the steam train an illusion just as the two schoolteachers believe the Tardis to be an illusion. Thank goodness this isn’t a postcolonial blog. Also, the Doctor’s grandfatherly air is instantly a little stifling.

We get some nice character development from Susan. By gum is she screechy and irritating, but she isn’t entirely silenced when the Doctor becomes the main voice of exposition, and she is the mediating force between the total Time-Lord-ness of the Doctor and the total human-ness of the teachers. On the one hand, she was “born in another time, another world”, but on the other she’s been the happiest she’s ever been at Coal Hill in 20^th Century England because she’s been allowed to get settled. I just hope that (said she knowing full well what is to come, though with a blind faith that – seeing as it’s been many years since I saw Hartnell-era Who – there are good things as well as the pointless screaming) she doesn’t become a nothing-character. In this first episode, she’s a mystery, but then the mystery is solved (hurrah, she is no longer Clara) in that we meet the Doctor and get inside the Tardis. She’s an excellent scientist and historian, but the Doctor is older and presumably wiser in the scientific department, while Barbara is clearly going to be the go-to woman for Earth history. Ian, meanwhile, is clearly going to be the one who punches things. So unless they develop her character as one torn between an itinerant existence within her home culture (as represented by the Doctor and the Tardis) and stability cut off from that culture, she might end up getting shoddily served by the writers of Who Yet to Come.

But enough of this. The Tardis has taken off, and the humans have passed out, and we’ve landed in Earth’s prehistory. THE ADVENTURES HAVE BEGUN.

Aaaaaaand Doctor Who's first ever Feminist Points are hereby retracted, seeing as Delia Derbyshire doesn't get a mention in the credits. Poor show. Though Verity Lambert is at least there in all her producing glory.

Summary (as applicable to this episode)

Does it pass the Bechdel test? Yes.

Is/are the female companion(s) dressed “for the Dads”? No.

Did a woman fall over/twist her ankle? No.

Did a woman write/direct/produce this episode? No/No/Yes.

(More questions will undoubtedly reveal themselves as we go on.)

Verdict

Promising (I mean really, surprisingly promising - it puts Moff to shame and it's 1963), though at this stage a collapse into stereotypical gender roles might yet happen.