In stark contrast to the fast-paced Season 4 opener Partners in Crime, I ended up watching some of “The Beginning” DVD boxset over the weekend.

While I’d seen An Unearthly Child before, I’d never actually watched the other three episodes in the story (of course, while they’re often lumped together, its really a 1 episode pilot, followed by 3 episodes with cavemen shouting “FIRE!!!” a lot). I followed it up with the Edge of Destruction DVD from the set, as I’ve already seen the Daleks a good few times.

I’m not normally a big fan of the Hartnell stuff. While I do enjoy some of his stories, I do think they’ve probably dated the worst of the classic Who’s, largely down to the differences in programme-making between then and now. Of course, another aspect is that these days we’re invariably trying to sit down and watch a while story in one go. These programmes were episodic in nature, so are probably best enjoyed with a break between episodes.

Anyway, I really enjoyed these stories. An Unearthly Child is a lot better than I previous remembered. Carole Ann Ford really brings the right level of alien-ness to Susan in the initial scenes, which helps you get why Ian and Barbara are so curious as to what her background is. The Doctor is well introduced as an untrustworthy figure, someone to be feared more than anything else, as he is reluctant to let Ian and Barbara go once they’ve seen the TARDIS (and sets the ship in flight, thus stranding them together - something Ian and Barbara let him off with a bit too easily). The contrast in the Doctor’s character in these early episodes, versus the character we’re more used to now is marked. Its only as the years went on that he became the Earth-loving, defender of the innocent we’re used to.

The Caveman 3-parter is fun although seems a very sharp change of pace to the alien wierdness of the first episode.

Edge of Destruction sees the 4 travellers come together as a proper team, as they are forced to face their distrust of one another and work together. I love TARDIS-based bottle episodes (which are very rare), and its always nice to see the TARDIS itself spotlighted. I’d love to see something similar to this or say, the first two episodes of Castrovalva, in the new show.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 7th, 2008 at 12:58 and is filed under Doctor Who, Television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.