Spearhead From Space I (1970)

Spearhead from Space is the first episode with Jon Pertwee as the Doctor, as well as the first episode in color. We also deal with UNIT again for the first time since 1968.

We start in a UNIT lab, where a scientist is telling his superior about something odd that's entering earth's atmosphere.  They assume them to be meteors, but  he says they seem to be in formation of some kind. The pair send a team out to check it out anyway and retreive any information they can.
Conviently, the Doctor's TARDIS lands in the same area. he opens the door and passes out in the field.

UNIT hires an attractive young scientist, Elizabeth Shore, to check out the meteorite fragments they bring back. She meets with Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, who we met in a previous episode, Web Of Fear. He explains to her what UNIT does. She's a very serious, very logical and intelligent young woman, and as such, she doesn't believe in aliens, at least not that they've visited earth before. When the Brigadier tells her where the meteorites landed, she tells him that's not possible. 6 months ago, smaller meteorites landed in the exact spot, odds that she calls "impossible."

Miss Shaw here is going to experience a lot of 'impossible' things soon.

While explaining to Miss Shaw that the Earth has twice been threatened by extraterrestrials and both times a genius calling himself the Doctor has helped them, the Brigadier is interrupted by a call from an associate, regarding an "unconscious civvie" found lying beside a police box at the site. In disbelief, he tells his associate to place armed guards around the police box and that he'll be at the hospital soon to see the man.
This is going to get a little confusing at the hospital as we have our Doctor and an actual medical doctor taking care of him, so bear with me here.

In the Doctor's hospital room, a nurse and doctor are looking at his chest x-rays. The doctor thinks it must be some kind of joke from the x-ray department, because, as he points out to the stunningly oblivious nurse, the x-ray shows that he has two hearts.  Furious, he calls them to tell them it's not at all funny when they accuse him of making jokes as well. The sample of blood he gave them (to the x-ray department? Maybe English hospitals in the 70s were different, I can't say for sure...) was not human blood.

The doctor must have been so furious that he just used the nearest phone available, instead of going somewhere private to discuss a patient, because he's using a hallway phone. This allows the porter to hear everything we hear about this odd patient, and he immediately goes to call a newspaper about the story, hoping to make a quick buck. 

This is why you need to pay your employees a decent wage.

Anyway, in the field where the meteorites fell, we meet a man with a red scarf and driving cap digging up one of these, clearly very alien, meteorites and putting it in a sack. There is a team of UNIT soldiers ambling around another part of the field nearby, but they don't see him. Who exactly trains these UNIT guys?

Trees: UNIT's greatest enemy.

Back in the hospital room, it seems the Doctor is coming to. He sticks his feet out of the blanket, wiggles them, and, in his barely conscious state, keeps leaning off the bed to look for his shoes, much to the dismay of his nurse.

Thanks to the porter's tip, the hospital's lobby is now crawling with reporters. Lethbridge-Stewart has made his way down with Miss Shaw and the reporters ask why he's there and if there's really an alien in there. he says he's there for a training exercise, which doesn't really make any sense, and goes to see the Doctor. one reporter speculates that the man in the hospital might know where the meteors landed and won't tell them.

When Lethbridge-Stewart talks to the doctor treating...the Doctor, he tells them that the Doctor's cardiovascular system is completely different. Lethbridge-Stewart goes over to the bed to look at the Doctor, expecting to recognize him. He's confused and disappointed when he doesn't, but then the Doctor wakes up and  says his name, and how nice it is to see him again. Lethbridge-Stewart asks how he knows him, and it dawns on the Doctor that he's regenerated and borrows a mirror from Elizabeth to see.  "that's not me at all! no wonder you didn't recognize me!"

The Doctor then pretends to go unconscious again, and Lethbridge-Stewart tells his associate that he wants him brought to UNIT HQ as soon as possible. He slips out a back exit, trying to avoid the media frenzy.


Out in the lobby,  the reporters notice the Brigadier's car driving away and talk amongst themselves. They've noticed an odd gentleman who's been hanging out in the phone booth for a long time. nobody recognizes him, and when one reporter asks when he'll be finished, he says nothing and rushes off.


Back in the field where the TARDIS is being guarded, our man in the red scarf and cap approaches a UNIT guard. They ask how he got into a secure area, which doesn't seem like it would have been hard at all. He tells them that he saw the UNIT soldiers, but they didn't see him, and then asks him if he'd like to buy a rabbit, pulling out a dead one from his sack. The UNIT soldier accuses him of being a poacher and, I assume, think that he's lying when he suggests he knows where the other meteorite fell, because they tell him to leave instead of taking him in for questioning or anything like that.


At the hospital, the medical doctor asks the nurse how he's doing. She tells him that his pulse has slowed down.... to 10 a minute. The doctor shrugs and says that the trouble with him is that they just don't know what his normal is. The medical staff all seem to be handling this really well, nobody's going "ALIENS ON EARTH. DO YOU KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS?!"


The medical doctor decides to check on our Doctor. He asks how he's feeling. 

"Shoes," he replies. The doctor wonders aloud if there was brain damage after all. When the doctor gives him his shoes, he snatches them and pretends to pass out again. As soon as the nurse and doctor leave, he tips a key out of one of his shoes.

Suddenly (this really does feel very sudden), the Doctor is abducted! a couple of guys and the man who was in the phone booth earlier have taped up his mouth and put him in a wheelchair. The Doctor cooperates with them until they're loading him into an ambulance, when he takes control of the wheelchair and rolls away as fast as he can. The abductor drives the ambulance after him, while the apparently useless UNIT guards try to shoot at the tires. Try being the key word. Some guards they are, their charge gets abducted and they can't even stop the culprit? How did THAT happen?

...drat.

The UNIT guards are, however, able to find the Doctor's wheelchair, empty and turned over near the wooded area where the TARDIS is being guarded and follow him into the woods, but the group guarding the TARDIS see him first...and shoot him.
Now why didn't they shoot the poacher like that? Nice to see that they've seriously gotten their shit together since the 1970s.

Congratulations!

I'm sure most Doctor Who fans have heard this by now, but David Tennant and his fiance, Georgia Moffett (who is the daughter of Peter Davidson, the 5th Doctor) are expecting a baby later this year.

A source said to UK newspaper The Sun: 'David is thrilled, though slightly worried having a baby with Georgia will break the space time continuum because of their Doctor Who connections.' -http://www.monstersandcritics.com

personally, I'm hoping the kid becomes a Doctor himself. I think that would really be just the best possible outcome.

"Life depends on change."

The first episode with the second Doctor, indeed, the whole story arc- The Power of the Daleks, is lost to time. But those wonderfully ridiculous hardcore Whovians dug up whatever they could find on it, and reconstructed it the best they could.


The reconstructed episode begins in the TARDIS, after the Doctor had run inside and regenerated on the floor. His current companions, Ben and Polly, are with him at this point, wondering what's just happened and if that's really the doctor or not.
He sort of freaks out for a bit, and when he finally comes to his senses, he just chuckles sinisterly and says, "it's over!"


Ben and Polly are understandably confused and scared. Ben tried to get his attention but the Doctor doesn't seem to be very aware of them. Polly is convinced it's him, but Ben points out that he looks different and doesn't even act like him.

The doctor has some odd problems recognizing that he himself is the Doctor, denying that he's the same person. Ben tries to prove it by making him try on a coat that the first Doctor always wore, reasoning that it ought to fit if he's the same person. The Doctor replies by saying that's like trying to make a butterfly fit back into its chrysalis after its spread its wings. Polly starts to realize she was right, that he did change, but they don't seem to quite believe it yet.


As the Doctor goes to look for the 1st Doctor's journal, he finds a recorder instead. the 2nd Doctor adopts this as his quirk for the rest of his tenure.


Just as suddenly as he changed, he decides that now is the time to go for a walk and check out where they've landed. What happens after this gets a little unclear to me. The Doctor wanders around testing something (maybe it was the sonic screwdriver!), and then a man appears and shouts to him, "Hello! Hello, is there anyone there? Hello? Hello! Why don't they come?" and then he says, as if he's seen someone now, "ah, so you've come at last. I'm from Earth. I'm the examiner-"
 and then he cuts off. There's a sound sort of like a gunshot and he's silent. The reconstruction shows the Doctor pointing something at the man, and then standing over him. And...then and odd, cryptic and uncomfortably long photo of a guy's butt. it stays on the screen for 18 seconds (I counted) with the quiet bubbling sounds of whatever planet he's on still playing in the background.

 

 

 

 

this is what I hate about reconstructions.

The Doctor then investigates the man's body apparently- it's still unclear if the Doctor has shot him- and assumes his identity as the Earth investigator by taking what seems like a piece of paper granting this Earth investigator access to everything. We only know that there's some kind of paper because the Doctor reads it aloud.

Meanwhile, the Doctor has totally abandoned Ben and Polly. They're wandering around in some area full of bubbling quicksilver pools. Polly starts coughing and then Ben panics and calls out for the Doctor, which wasn't working at all before but he tries it again anyway.

Then the images change from a still of Ben and Polly to some guys in what looks like hazmat suits. they've found the Doctor passed out and discuss their astonishment as to why people don't use the kits they send them, and that Ben and Polly's sickness was due to "a bad dose of fumes" that one claims she'll recover from just fine. This is where we learn that the planet they're on is called Vulcan, and they're surprised that Earth has just now decided to send an inspector because one wasn't due for another 2 years.


They take the three back to their station, and we're introduced to a woman telling a scientist that they've arrived. it's clear he's working on some kind of space capsule, and that's what the Earth inspector is there to look at. He's very focused on it. it seems they didn't make it, they found it. He says it was buried in a mercury swamp for 200 years and he's fascinated by the fact that it's not corroded at all.


Considering the title of the episode, we can probably guess what its origin is.


We're then rejoined with the Doctor, Ben and Polly all reunited and recovered nicely, the Doctor fiddling around on his recorder while Ben processes that "the man that was murdered" was the real examiner. We're not exactly sure how he knows about the murdered man because he wasn't anywhere near the Doctor at the time. We can only guess that the Doctor had just briefed them on every detail of his experiences since they parted (conveniently leaving out the part where, I'm convinced, the Doctor shot the inspector). Polly asks if he's going to let them think he's the real examiner but he just keeps playing that damn recorder. Ben gets as irritated as I would and yells at him to communicate properly and admit to being the Doctor.


They're then introduced to the governor of the colony, who barges in asking why they're there. The Doctor replies simply that they're here to examine, and he intends to start at once. The Vulcan governor seems offended that they're meddling in his business, but then fills the Doctor in on the ancient capsule anyway. They're all led to the science lab where the capsule is, and they show the doctor a piece of the capsule that fell off during transport. The scientist seems eager to open it, explaining that the incredible resilience of the metal could revolutionize space travel. They decide that the Doctor is the best man for the job of opening the thing, and when he does, the Doctor and the scientist step through. The Doctor suggests that the area they're in is some kind of entry bay, and the Doctor tells him it's definitely not from this planet.


After it seems that everyone has gone back to their quarters for the night, Polly sees the Doctor in the corridor, headed for the lab with the capsule. They follow him into it this time, and the Doctor seems to have been able to open another door inside it, a door hiding a couple of web and dust covered Daleks.

"Come meet the Daleks," he says, as if they were a newlywed couple at a party. As they're wandering around looking at them, Ben is startled by the sight of a dalek outside of the shell we're used to seeing. Then the episode ends, leaving you hanging and wondering just what is that thing?




The 2nd Doctor is kind of hard for me to evaluate as a whole. I feel like he did a great job as the Doctor, but he just was too like the 1st Doctor. you can't really blame Patrick Troughton, what else did he have to go on? But I feel like his Doctor was a little lacking, and it also feels like he had a shorter run than William Hartnell. Nothing really sticks out as exceptional to me about the 2nd Doctor. Maybe all the lost episodes would have given me a better sense of who he was, but we'll never really know for sure.

"Have you ever thought what it's like to be wanderers in the fourth dimension?"

I recently re-watched the first episode, "An Unearthly Child," on a whim, and only then did I really notice just how much William Hartnell had gone downhill during his time as the Doctor. Mr. Hartnell had atherosclerosis, which, during the course of the series, effected his memory. in later episodes it's really sad to watch him stutter on his lines, not quite remembering what he was supposed to say, and even what seemed like him completely missing a line in one later episode. But it was because of William Hartnell's disease that one of the most basic tenants of Doctor Who was created - his regeneration.


In the first episode, we're introduced to the Doctor's first set of companions, Barbara Wright and Ian Chesterton, both teachers at the Coal Hill School. Barbara is a history teacher, and Ian teaches science. They meet the Doctor by way of his granddaughter, Susan Foreman, who is a fairly new and very strange student of theirs.
While they both acknowledge she's a genius, they've noticed her homework quality has decreased lately. Barbara tried to go talk to Susan's guardian, her grandfather, but the address in Susan's records leads her to a vacant lot.
So one day after classes are over, they basically decide to stalk her and wait outside of 76 Totters Lane, the address on Susan's record, for her to arrive home. While they wait in the car they discuss her strangeness, such as not knowing how many shillings are in a pound but then being completely disinterested in a science experiment because it seems so pointless and juvenile to her.
When they follow her inside, the area is full of odds and ends. A junkyard. Then they stumble across something extremely odd- a Police box, in a completely unexpected and unusual spot. They're even more startled when they realize it's humming. Something leads Ian to speculate that it's "alive," although I don't know what would make him come to that conclusion rather than something more normal, like a machine's running inside it instead...
They're just about to go find a cop when they hear coughing. The Doctor totters out of the dark and heads to the Police box. They approach him when they think they hear Susan's voice coming from the Police box and inquire about Susan. The Doctor tries to dodge their questions by asking why they were following her in the first place, and then suddenly becoming very interested in an old painting sitting on the floor.

The teachers want to check inside the Police box to make sure Susan's not in there, but of course, the Doctor isn't about to let them. This just makes them more and more suspicious until Susan sticks her head out of the Police box, asking what her grandfather is up to out there. Ian and Barbara rush inside and, naturally, are stunned by the massive interior. It's the first time any of us see the inside of the TARDIS.

The Doctor is concerned that if he lets them go, they'll blab all about it. Ian and Barbara rejected any understanding of the TARDIS when Susan tried to explain, and she begs her grandfather to let them go, but he's still worried about letting out their secret.

So against their will, Barbara and Ian become the first companions of the Doctor. Over time, they see his sense of humor come to light and that his grumpiness and gruffness is pretty much just a cover for how much of a big softie he is. The 1st Doctor pouts every time he loses companions and never seems to really adjust when they do leave.

I think my favorite story arc from the 1st Doctor is the second one, beginning with the episode called "The Dead Planet."
The TARDIS lands on Skaro and we meet the Daleks for the first time, as well as a tribe of humanoids called the Thals. This story arc explains how a long war with an opposing tribe, the Kaleds, eventually made the latter tribe mutate into what we know as Daleks. This is an especially interesting story arc for anyone who just wants to get their feet wet in the classic series and to learn more about the origins of one of the most famous and enduring Doctor Who villains.

First things first, but not necessarily in that order.

The first time I heard of Doctor Who was when a friend of mine on a forum told me I looked like Romana II. When I told him I didn't know who that was, he sent me a link to a photo of Lalla Ward in a boat holding a book, with a great big smile on her face. personally I think the smile is really the only thing we have in common lookswise, but I did some research on Doctor Who after that. It looked like my kind of show; time travel was always a favorite sci-fi topic of mine, even though I'm convinced it's not possible to do in reality. unfortunately, my google-fu could only take me so far at that point, and I never got to actually watching any.

Fast forward a year or two to when I met my boyfriend Joe. He's the king of all things nerdy, and I wanted to soak up everything I could get my hands on. When he learned I'd never seen Doctor Who, he decided we had to remedy this at once. To be honest, I don't remember which episode we watched first, or even if it was the 9th or 10th doctor, but we did watch all of the first season of the 10th doctor's, and I guess I just never stopped watching.

Until 2010. I had kept up with downloading and watching the 11th Doctor as religiously as I had ever watched a show before. and then the season finale happened...and there was a void. I'd seen all of the new series. What now?

I bought a bunch of books from various classic doctor's times, DEVOURED each within a day or two. I acquired a DVD with a story arc from the 6th Doctor's series, Revelation of The Daleks. That only made me want more, of course.

So I went torrent-hunting. I'd always wanted to watch the famous 4th Doctor, but I felt like I couldn't just start from the middle and go from there. if I was going to watch it, I was going to watch it all.

All 770 episodes.

I found my dream torrent one day during the summer, with every episode from the 1st Doctor to the 10th, including reconstructed episodes of the missing ones, the 108 that the BBC saw fit to wipe in the 1960s long before they realized what a treasured classic they had on hand!

While I'm eternally grateful and amazed by the insanity and dedication of these fans that scrounged up every last remnant and scrap of each missing episode they could find, watching them was one of the more tedious and, well...boring part of watching the classic Doctor Who.


I really loved the first doctor. I list William Hartnell among my favorites of the doctors I've seen so far. I'll post my impressions and experiences watching both the first and the second doctor in later posts, but since those two were plagued by the tedious reconstruction episodes I've decided to start this blog to coincide with the start of the 3rd Doctor, the first one where we have all the episodes in some form or another, and, conveniently where I've just begun.

Allons-y.