Series 1 Episode 5: The Dead Planet

Serial: The Daleks
Episode: 1 (The Dead Planet)
Doctor: William Hartnell
Companions: Barbara, Ian, and Susan

Writer: Terry Nation
Director: Christopher Barry
Original Air Date: 21/12/1963

GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM...IN SPAAAAAAAAAACE (and other stories)

Ahhhh, it’s good to be back. Though I feel I should warn you right off the bat that since last I blogged in this manner I have (re-)watched all Hartnell-era serials up to and including The Chase, which has led me to the realisation that my love for Barbara Wright is officially both real and enduring. 

Barbara Wright: God

All hail Babs and her impossibly voluminous barnet. I’m also considerably less anti-Ian than I was circa An Unearthly Child, but I’m going to put that down to good old-fashioned character development, and doubt that my newfound appreciation for the often-adorkable relationship between him and Bae-bara will prevent my pointing out examples of facepalm-inducing chauvinism. I will, however, make a conscious effort not to get too far ahead of myself as I work through each episode, and endeavour to comment only on the Babs I see before me. And probably the madcap antics of those other guys she hangs out with onscreen too a bit also as well.

So, to recap, the Tardis has landed safely in an unspecified and highly-irradiated location, and everyone has gone to freshen up a bit. The Tardis is saying Danger! Danger! High Voltage! and nobody has noticed, even on the way out when presumably the flashing light would’ve caught someone’s eye.

Outside the Tardis is a petrified jungle, which they work out by being all Team Science: Babs’s hypothesis about a forest fire is disproved when Ian notices the twigs aren’t moving despite there being an obvious breeze mussing up his hair. (Babs's hair, on the other hand, continues to defy the laws of physics.)

Can you paint with all the colours of the wind?

The Doctor wanders off, determined to get to the bottom of the mystery, and Susan gamely joins him. Meanwhile, there are some lovely character-building moments between Babs and Ian, which unfortunately suffer from that Really Annoying Scriptwriting Trope whereby woman, on behalf of the audience, looks to man for the answers to questions he couldn’t answer any more than she could, usually because she’s Frightened. He’s a Science teacher, Babs, not a seasoned interstellar time-traveller; why don't you ask one of the two seasoned interstellar time-travellers in your party?

*Not Actual Dialogue

Anyway, having established that the Doctor probably has no way of taking them back to 1963 even if he wanted to—and let’s all take a moment to appreciate how much more gloriously unpredictable stuff was when the Doctor was genuinely rubbish at piloting the Tardis and you actually had to get everyone back to the ship before leaving or you’d never see them again—the following exchange takes place:

IAN: I hate it as much as you. I’m just as afraid. But what can we do?

BARBARA: Well, we could at least stay near the ship.

I’m very glad Ian has decided against shaking Barbara and talking into her face whenever he thinks she’s afraid. This expression of solidarity in response to her unspoken unease is much, much nicer. And it’s great to see Babs’s humour and pragmatism coming through.

Anyway, they decide to channel their fear into making jokes about the Doctor falling down and breaking a leg, because in case it hasn’t been mentioned in previous episodes, he’s Really Really Old. Heartened by their mutual ageism, Babs has a wicked moment:

BARBARA: Don’t you ever think he deserves something to happen to him?

IAN: (laughing) Yes.

I think I’m going to give her this one, seeing as the Doctor is a bit of a dick in the first couple of serials, but still, let’s not be vindictive, Babs. That’s some dark shit.

Your face, my Ian, is as a book where men/May read strange matters.

Meanwhile, Susan has found ‘a perfect flower’ made of stone, because girls dig flowers. The Doctor pays lip-service to her find, telling her it’s ‘very pretty, very pretty’; Ian crouches down beside her and humours her; and Babs steps over both of them because she gives zero fucks about Susan’s flower, only to be confronted with some unseen horror, gasping audibly. Cut back to Ian, having picked Susan’s flower; her excitable chatter about what she’s going to do with it once she gets back to the ship is cut tragically short as a distressed-sounding Barbara calls for Ian. Then this happens:

I can’t even decide how to deal with this Freudian mess, so I’m just going to leave it there and move the fuck on.

Anyway, the nameless horror is a dead metal lizard. The Doctor refers to Ian Chesterton as some manner of sofa (‘Chesterfield’—Billy Hartnell, never change), and Barbara has decided they’re definitely not in Kansas any more. Which leads to more slightly gorgeous character development between the two humans on the show:

IAN: Try not to be too upset.

BARBARA: I’d counted so much on just going back—to things I recognise and trust. But here, there’s nothing to rely on, nothing.

IAN: Well, there’s me…

Barbara half-laughs.

IAN: Barbara…all I ask you to do is believe—really believe—we’ll go back. We will, you know.

BARBARA: I wish I was more like you. I’m afraid I’m a very unwilling adventurer.

IAN: Well I’m not exactly revelling in it myself.

It’s difficult to comment on this without making reference to future episodes, so I’m not gonna. This is what I adore about Barbara: that she is, by her own admission, ‘a very unwilling adventurer’, but she seems to take all those feelings of fear and helplessness she experiences in the first two serials and then build on them, to the extent that she really begins to come into her own by the time they leave Skaro (oh yeah, spoiler alert, this is Skaro), and the transformation by the time they all meet the Daleks again is remarkable. This is also an important Friendship moment: Babs doesn’t look up at Ian in doe-eyed appreciation when he rather lamely tells her, ‘there’s [still] me’, but rather looks down, smiling to herself; it’s a bit pathetic, and they both know it, and it’s still annoying that it’s not more explicitly a mutual ‘I’ve got your back’ moment, but I’m reluctant to dismiss this exchange out of hand. I am, of course, hugely irritated that it’s the human woman who is verbalising her emotional state, and that it’s the human man who is projecting this façade of strength in lieu of talking about his own fears, but thanks to the way this is acted, it comes across less as an exercise in toxic masculinity than a moment in which the two humans establish the extent to which they rely on one another in an unfamiliar and frightening environment. Enormous kudos to Jacqueline Hill for turning something potentially vom-inducing into something really rather beautiful. 

I got you, Bab(e).

Enter Susan; exit Ian. Barbara and Susan have a brief, Bechdel-test-passing chat about why nobody seems to be able to exercise any control over the Tardis and its navigational systems. The upshot of which is that the Doctor is enormously forgetful and likes to work alone, so the chances of the Tardis’s computer banks being fed the right sort of information that will enable it to work out where it is are very slim indeed.

Anyway, the Doctor has no clue as to what’s going on, but the planet is dead, totally dead. And OH fascinating, Ian (who alerts first Barbara, and then the Doctor) has spotted a huge city, which means that Babs has to grasp Ian’s hand.

The Doctor is determined to go down to the city and find out what has happened to the planet. Barbara, on the other hand, wants to go back to the ship, and as such is the voice of anyone who has ever shouted at the television when someone wants to do something utterly stupid—the kind of warning that, if heeded, would mean that everyone successfully avoids danger but in doing so also avoids anything that makes for interesting television. Anyway, the point is moot, because darkness is falling.

*Not Actual Dialogue

En route back to the Tardis, Susan finds another stone flower, and in doing so gets all lost in her own psycho-sexual landscape the petrified jungle. Someone is there. Reasonably gratuitous screaming ensues. A hand touches her shoulder, and then it’s Ian to the rescue. Because apparently he’s programmed to respond at lightning speed to any kind of vocalisation above a certain frequency. Susan has hysterics into Ian’s cardigan.

Back aboard the Tardis, the Doctor asks Barbara if she’ll have a word with Susan, because apparently the age gap between them makes it impossible for him to talk to her about her being convinced that someone touched her in the jungle. And I’m trying hard not to be horrified by an example of ‘young women are all hysterical fantasists and not to be believed’ in a children’s show. At least Barbara believes her story.

Meanwhile, an argument between the Doctor and Ian (‘you’ve uprooted us violently from our own lives’/’you pushed your way aboard’) leads to the introduction of the food machine aboard the Tardis. Barbara has a headache (probably THE RADIATION THAT NOBODY HAS NOTICED YET, Babs); Barbara requests bacon and eggs. Ian hopes his doesn’t taste of engine grease; Barbara wonders will she get the plates. Ian winds the Doctor up about the bacon being too salty; Barbara thinks it’s delicious. Barbara says she doesn't usually get headaches at all, just so we're certain that this is a harbinger of radiation-poisoning-related doom and not just one of those infuriating moments where a woman is rendered useless because she has a headache (and is therefore unwilling to try to escape from a situation in which, say, she is about to be led to the guillotine, presumably because beheading is the best cure for a headache...which actually happens on this show). Susan is going to bed. Someone knocks on the door; Susan is vindicated.

And now the Doctor is a shady, shady bastard because he sabotages his own Tardis, going against the express wishes of everyone else aboard so that he can go and look at the city. It transpires he's removed something called the fluid link, claiming that it needs more mercury…which, conveniently enough, can only be found in the city. 

Doctor Caligari Who

So he's quite literally manufacturing his own deus ex machina...er...ex machina. Devious old blighter.

In the morning, there’s a mysterious tin outside the Tardis. Ian, helpfully, decides to open it with a stick and gets the others to stand back, oh, a good two feet or so. Which would be enormously helpful if it were actually a bomb. Science teacher my foot. Inside are glass vials, which are probably definitely anti-radiation meds, only nobody has spotted the big flashing danger lights on the Tardis console yet. Anyway, nobody feels great. Which is unsurprising, given that they’ve been walking around an irradiated planet for the past however-many hours.

And now we’ve arrived at the city. And it’s 1960s Sci-Fi gold. Ian makes a suggestion that has anyone who knows the Laws of Telly (i.e. me) screaming NO, THAT IS A FUCKING TERRIBLE IDEA: ‘Why don’t we separate and go different ways and meet back here in, say, ten minutes?’ 

IT IS HAPPENING AGAIN.

And so we follow Barbara into some of the most fantastic corridors Doctor Who has ever made. 

The Cabinet of Doctor Who

And this is where I become enormously conflicted, because of course we’re watching a lone, frightened woman caught up in the nightmare of some kind of German Expressionist/Space Gothic architecture of the unconscious, which is obviously problematic—why is it always one of the women who is first/most gratuitously menaced by the episode's antagonists, and why is there always a latent eroticism to it?—but I can’t not appreciate how brilliantly this is shot. And I can't not appreciate how actually quite underplayed Barbara is here: she's not flailing around in indiscriminate, screaming terror, but becoming increasingly panicked as she moves through an ever-more enclosed and disorientating environment. In other words, it's believable.

Barbara through the looking-glass.

The creepy CCTV-camera IN SPAAAAACE follows Barbara’s progress; the camera tilts as door after door slides shut behind her; claustrophobia sets in even as the doors and walls begin to reflect her own image back at her; the camera actually becomes part of the wall as Barbara’s hand covers the lens in her search for an exit; we see her silhouette hammering against the other side of a closed door. 

Silhou(g)ette out of there, Barbara!

It’s really, really creative direction that makes use of some seriously limited resources and is unsettling even today for an adult viewer desensitised to any kind of televised peril in what is so obviously the same corridor set shot from different angles.

Meanwhile, the others have reconvened, oblivious to the terrified Barbara’s ordeal as she now runs through those same corridors as before, panting against her own reflection in the walls, now aware that she is being shut into every space into which she runs. 

Barbara meets her shadow self Arabrab, or some Gothic shit like that.

The gaze here is unmistakeably voyeuristic, implicating the viewer in the increasingly eroticised portrayal of fear. She gets caught in a lift, and again we see her silhouette as she lets out a rare vocalisation in what has so far been an aural nightmare of increasingly frequent footfalls against a sparing electronic score (Babs isn’t generally a screamer). And then, of course (iconic moment alert), this happens:

ERMAHGERD BARBARA IS BEING MENACED BY A PHALLIC SINK PLUNGER ATTACHED TO AN UNSEEN MENACE FROM WHOSE POINT OF VIEW I AM OBSERVING AND THEREBY IMPLICATED IN THE SCENE. WHAT COULD IT POSSIBLY BE HOW WILL SHE EVER SURVIVE WHEN DO WE GET TO SEE IAN SPLAYED AND SCREAMING AGAINST A WALL LIKE THIS WHY IS IT STILL SO EFFECTIVE.

Summary (as applicable to this episode)

Does it pass the Bechdel test? Yes.

[BUZZWORD DOUBLE-WHAMMY ALERT!!] Is the gaze problematic? YES.

Is/are the woman companion(s) dressed 'for the Dads'? No.

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

Is/are the woman companion(s) captured? Not as such, but Babs is in some serious peril.

Does the Doctor/a man companion/any other man have to rescue the woman companion(s) from peril? Not unless you count Ian poking a dead metal lizard on Barbara's behalf and/or running to Susan's aid when someone taps her on the shoulder, but as things stand Ian is about two minutes away from storming the city in search of his Bae.

Is/are the woman companion's/s' first/only reaction(s) to peril gratuitous screaming? Yes. Even though I'm giving Babs a reprieve for screaming at the first ever recorded encounter with a Dalek, Susan still goes into full shriek mode in the jungle.

Does a woman companion go into hysterics over something reasonably minor? Yes. See above. This does not, however, justify everyone deciding that Susan must be imagining things.

Does the woman companion have to be calmed down by the Doctor/a man companion/a man? Yup. Susan again.

Is a woman the first/only person to be (most gratuitously) menaced by the episode's antagonist(s)? Yes.

Is a man shamed into doing/not doing something because the alternative is a woman doing/not doing something? No.

Does a man come a cropper because of his 'manipulative' girlfriend/mother/significant woman other? No.

Does the woman companion come up with a plan? No.

Does the woman companion do something stupid/banal/weird which inspires a man to be a Man with a Plan? No.

Is the young, strong, straight, white male lead the person most often in control of the situation? I think this time probably no, insofar as the Doctor is in control most of the time, but in a seriously;underhand way.

Is there past/future/alien sexism? They don't really encounter any of the other cultures on Skaro in this episode, so no.

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

Verdict

Problematic but also a bit brilliant. Susan's usefulness/character development could probably be likened to (brace-brace) the stone flowers in the jungle, in that it is either crushed during moments in which Ian comes storming to the rescue in a whirlwind of heroic masculinity, or forgotten during moments in which she responds with gratuitous screaming to the mildest of perils. Poor Carole Ann Ford. Ian continues to be the Action Man, but his relationship with Babs is developing nicely. The Doctor is a sly, manipulative devil. Barbara gets some nice character development but is then forced to undergo a psychic nightmare in the Cabinet of Doctor Caligari IN SPAAAAAAACE for our viewing pleasure. Let's hope this experience becomes essential to her character development (and I know this is cheating but, with hindsight, I'm going to say it is) so that she has not been voyeuristically menaced in vain.