When Rusty met Verity

[altariel]

In the post on Hartnell's first season, we commented: "We weren't expecting a show with such a modern feel, and one that has so many direct connections with the first season of Rusty's Reincarnation." kradical asked for a bit more. Here are some thrown-down thorts, not ordered into any particularly coherent argument.

First of all, the Doctor isn't really the lead: the story belongs to Rose, not just as a POV character, but as the focus of the ongoing narrative. It's the same with Ian and Barbara. That's the primary similarity. (It'll be interesting to compare and contrast how they manage Ian and Barbara's departure with Rose's, but I haven't seen 'The Chase' in years and it's some time before we get there!)

They're also both making a real effort to explain the format: IIRC, I think Rusty assumed that viewers would have no (useful) prior knowledge of the show. So a Londoner(s) meets a mysterious and even slightly threatening man who embroils them in an extraordinary adventure (in space and time!).

Within the first three or four stories of both, we're taken into a familiar "TV historical" past, shown a future vision, and introduced to some aliens. These are the basic building blocks of Doctor Who storytelling. They're not the only stories you could tell, but they're the ones to which the format chooses on the whole to restrict itself. (Interestingly, the first journey with Hartnell takes us to humanity's start; the first journey with Eccleston fastforwards to post-humanity.)

Watching these Hartnells one episode at a time really brings home how often they're discrete episodes - a story with a beginning, middle, and end within the 25 minutes (particularly marked in 'The Keys of Marinus', although you also have the location of the week in 'Marco Polo', and the weekly capture-and-escape of 'The Reign of Terror'). Also, there's a continuous narrative that bridges the individual production blocks. It's not quite the same structure as the present-day single 45 minute episode with a season-long story arc, but they owe more to each other than they do to the format that we think of as representatively Who: i.e. the four-part Tom Baker adventure.

I also get a very strong sense of the production crew learning-as-they-go what stories they can tell, and how to tell them (perhaps 'relearning' in the case of the new show). I commented in the other post how watching 'The Sensorites' is like watching the production crew learning how to do science fiction on television. 'The End of the World' is a bit like this too: "Gosh! Aliens!" It's worth remembering how long it had been since SF was produced for mainstream and primetime British TV (at least a generation of programme-makers.)

What else? They both stretch the budget as far as it could possibly go. And they were both given more of a chance to succeed than perhaps early evidence warranted! Then it became massive, everyone was watching, and we're all buying kak because it has a Dalek on it.

Comments

[katlinel.livejournal.com]

I have vastly enjoyed your thorts! I hadn't thought about each episode being self-contained but thinking back on the stories we've watched, yes, particularly 'An Unearthly Child' (and I wished they'd carried Susan on in that way, instead of making her scream and be hysterical about lots of things and then having had to have what a spring does explained to her in 'The Edge of Destruction').

[altariel.livejournal.com]

I wish they'd carried on that way with Susan too. We've spent episodes yelling at her to stop shouting. We're up to her departure story now. If you're going to have a screaming companion, they should be screaming their rage, like Donna.