Hey everyone! How were your weekends? Mine was surprisingly busy. Especially Saturday. It was a good kind of busy though, something I haven't experienced in over a year and a half. Today I'm actually going to be covering two classic Doctor Who stories. Sort of. "Marco Polo" is a lost episode but the DVD of Story #3 "The Edge of Destruction" includes a 30 minute distilled version of "Marco Polo" with the original audio, which had been kept, as well as select photographic stills from the episode called Telesnaps, which are basically pictures taken of an episode of a TV show while it airs. Usually these images are taken with a camera that's pointed at the TV while you watch the show. In the case of Doctor Who Telesnaps were only taken of the first five years of the show. So let's get right into it.
Of the three classic Who stories I've seen, "The Edge of Destruction" is probably my favourite. The reason that is is because there's actually some character progression. TV in the '60s were almost completely devoid of character development because networks wanted standalone episodes that people could still watch even if they'd missed the previous episode and so characters had to return to whatever status quo they were in at the beginning of an episode. Which meant in most cases characters did not change very much between the beginning of a series and the end of a series. Using Star Trek as an example, at the end of an episode Kirk, Spock, and McCoy had to still be who they were at the start of the episode. So these two episodes of Doctor Who are unique in that the characters progressed as did the relationships between them. For the first two stories, basically the first 11 episodes of the series, the Doctor had been antagonistic towards Ian and Barbara. And Ian in particular was antagonistic towards the Doctor though there were a few moments in both "An Unearthly Child" and "The Daleks" where Barbara was also antagonistic towards the Doctor. But here there's a visible shift in the relationships between Ian and the Doctor as well as the relationship between Barbara and Doctor.
It's because of this shift that an element that has been an integral part of Doctor Who ever since was born. The concept of the Companion. People who willingly travel with the Doctor on the TARDIS on his or her adventures through space and time. There's never been more than three of them on the TARDIS at one time, but the Companions are both the eyes in for the audience and a tether for the Doctor so he (or she in the case of Jodi Whittaker's 13th Doctor, and Jo Martin's incarnation) doesn't go off the deep end and do something stupid like wipe out the Daleks and Time Lords like the War Doctor nearly did during the Time War. But that's getting quite a bit ahead of myself as we won't find any of that out until much later in modern Doctor Who.
"The Edge of Destruction" was a budget and time saving measure for Doctor Who the way the two part episode "The Menagerie" was for Star Trek in 1966. "The Daleks" and the story after this, "Marco Polo" were expensive endeavours for Doctor Who and they were both seven part stories without much time to prepare "Marco Polo" once production on "The Daleks" had wrapped. So rather than lose two weeks of airtime so they could have extra time to produce "Marco Polo" the show's story editor, David Whitaker, wrote "The Edge of Destruction" as a bridge between "The Daleks" and "Marco Polo" which also ended the show's original committment of thirteen episodes. The intention was to cancel the series and part two of "The Edge of Destruction", "The Brink of Disaster" meant to be the final episode of the series. But BBC executive, Donald Baverstock, changed his mind at the last minute and the show got renewed but continued to face cancellation in the succeeding decades until it was finally cancelled in 1989. Much like Star Trek, which faced cancellation during all three seasons that TOS was on the air for.
Unfortunately, because this is a lost episode, and the audio/Telesnap reconstruction of 31 minutes of material, I don't have a whole lot to say about the story itself. It is the first time a fictional depiction of a historical figure made an appearance on Doctor Who. I may have to get my hands on the BBC Radio Collection soundtrack version of this story just so I can at least hear the complete audio of the story. What I heard of it on the DVD for "The Edge of Destruction" was pretty good though.
The more I get into Doctor Who the more I can see similarities between it and DC's Legends of Tomorrow. While the cast is much larger on Legends than it is on Who, they both travel in a timeship, there are Time Lords, Arthur Darvill is on both shows, fictional depictions of historical figures appear on both shows, and both Rip Hunter and the Doctor are fugitives from their homes and steal their respective timeships, the Waverider for Rip and the TARDIS for the Doctor. They can also be pretty goofy and ridiculous at times too.
Overall these were pretty great stories with "The Edge of Destruction" being my favourite of the three classic stories I've seen at this point. It's great to return to the beginning of a series to see where it all began, especially if it started before I was even born. By the end of "The Edge of Destruction" the series is closer to the way I know it from the few modern era episodes I've seen over the years, though there's still two more incarnations of the Doctor to go before he himself becomes the character I know him to be from the modern era. I definitely recommend checking out these first thirteen episodes of Doctor Who if you're a fan of the show and have never seen them before.
That's it for me for today. It's also the end of my journey into the classic era of Doctor Who as these are the only stories that I have access to. Though a bunch of classic stories are available on iTunes so I might go back to classic Doctor Who at some point and review more stories from the series. I also won't be covering the 1996 movie starring Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor, as I don't have access to that either. So starting in two weeks, once I wrap up my review of the Star Trek movie trilogy from the '80s with Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (I'm reviewing Star Trek III this week), and going forward, I'll be reviewing the modern era of Doctor Who only. I'll be back on Wednesday for my review of Superman & Lois season 1. So until then have a great evening and I will talk to you all later. Take care.
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