#Docxtor who an unearthly child full

They force themselves past him, into the blue box, and fall out of the world and into another. This is his mysterious girl, and his mystery.Īnd then it goes wrong. Smug, superior, and unfriendly, he does not want them there. A mystery that brings them out on a cold London night to 76 Totters Lane to try to find out where this girl came from. A mysterious Police Box, and a magical girl, and a mystery that two regular, unimportant people can’t quite get over. In a moment of inadvertent brilliance that makes this episode sing nearly 50 years later, she predicts the decimalization of British currency, though the writers could not have possibly known about it. She speaks of the future – at times quite rightly. She knows things that people aren’t meant to know. Scared because she is the wrong sort of genius. Enamored because she is a genius, and they know it. Her teachers are at once enamored with her and scared of her.

The story is mostly about Susan – the eponymous child lacking earthiness. Only four characters meaningfully appear – Susan Foreman, a teenage girl, Barbara Wright and Ian Chesterton, a pair of her teachers, and The Doctor, her cranky old grandfather. Thus I, in a viewpoint that has essentially no credibility in mainstream fandom, opt to treat An Unearthly Child as a one-episode story preceding a three-episode story entitled 100,000 BC.)Īn Unearthly Child is a simple character piece.

Webber, and was reshot before transmission, both facts that I think serve to separate it in a meaningful sense from the three episodes that follow. An Unearthly Child was rewritten by Anthony Coburn from an original script by C.E. The other names all refer to the plot elements of episodes 2-4, which are, for all practical purposes, a completely different story. Because in its first seasons Doctor Who had individually titled episodes instead of story arc titles, the name for this story is disputed. (An Unearthly Child,the first episode, is usually treated as one story along with the following three episodes. Before we see a single character, before we see the Doctor, before we see a hint of science fiction, we see a Police Box. Everything tells us this Police Box is the most important thing about this show. Never mind that the shot cannot possibly be read as iconic in this original context – everything about the camerawork and the music tells us it is iconic. The answer, it seems, is right here, as mysterious, haunting theme music gives way to an iconic shot. One must ask, then, when it became Doctor Who. With 48 years of history to contend with, Doctor Who has inevitably changed. And yet the camera lingers, stressing the strangeness of this object that does not yet have strangeness.

#Docxtor who an unearthly child full

This sequence is hard to comprehend in 1963, as there is nothing particularly strange about a Police Box save for its apparent location in a junkyard, which, by virtue of being a junkyard is sort of, by definition, a place full of odd things. The credits give way, although the haunting theme music does not, as a camera moves around an old junk yard, finally coming to rest on a Police Box. The credits themselves were done by distorting footage of a pen light being moved around. Derbyshire would, in her later life, be recognized as an unsung hero – a pioneer of electronic music – but received no on-screen credit because the BBC’s policy was that members of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop would remain anonymous. The theme music, ostensibly written by Ron Grainer was, for all practical purposes, realized by Delia Derbyshire, who arranged Grainer’s score by splicing tape together and speeding/slowing a sample of a single note being plucked on a string, white noise, and some testing oscillators. The opening credits are a futuristic psychedelic blur that seems oddly quaint as the symbol of youthful revolution has just been gunned down in Texas. Kennedy.Īt twenty seconds past the minute, eighty seconds off its scheduled airtime, normal programming resumes with the first episode of a new children’s science fiction serial, Doctor Who. Since 6:30 PM the previous day, the BBC has been running news coverage of the assassination of US President John F. It will go on to become the anthem of Liverpool FC, at the time of writing still narrowly the most successful English football club of all time. Gerry and the Pacemakers’ “You’ll Never Walk Alone” is the number one single.