Stump speeches

“If you could touch the alien sand and hear the cries of strange birds, and watch them wheel in another sky, would that satisfy you?” - The Doctor

Ep. 002: The Cave of Skulls

(Production A/Story #001: "An Unearthly Child" - Part 2 of 4)
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In the opening shot, Kal sure casts a big shadow.

Actually, Za and Kal look a lot alike to me, though I guess Kal looks a little more like Ringo Starr. (Especially when you think of Ringo's Caveman experience with Barbara Bach.) When trying to make fire, I love the way Za gets frustrated with the twigs and yells at them.

Back in the TARDIS, Ian and Babara wake up after being knocked out for no real reason. The Year-O-Meter (perhaps made by Hasbro) apparently doesn’t work in negative numbers, reminding me of the Y2K problem. Susan checks the Radiation counter, foreshadowing what’s to come. The Doctor seems much happier (and far less malevolent) now that Ian and Barbara are a captive audience, and forced to accept their situation. I liked the way Barbara believes immediately that they’ve gone back in time, but Ian still can’t grasp it. Maybe it shows us the difference between the History teacher who grew up imagining herself in the past, versus the skeptical Science teacher who refuses to accept results until they’ve been tested, and the results reproduced.

Even outside the ship, Ian refuses to believe.

The producers’ choice to the make the TARDIS a police box was truly inspired. I love how even though I personally didn’t grow up with them, the police box for me is immediately an image that is safe and iconic. Sadly, for the Metropolitan Police, the police box is now synonymous with a TARDIS, whether they like it or not.

Once outside, The Doctor is disturbed that the TARDIS hasn’t changed its outward appearance. Minutes later, Susan explains that it blends into its surroundings, and on other occasions, looked like a column or a chair. I have to wonder how one enters a chair-shaped TARDIS. Do you sit in it and end up falling backward through the interior door?

The Doctor smokes a pipe (as far as I can remember, the only time he does so) and is quickly knocked out and abducted by Kal. Susan discovers him missing and starts freaking out like that girl everyone was queuing up to slap in Airplane!

We return to the tribe, to find the prehistoric children beating another child dressed up as a cheetah. They yell, “Kill! Kill!” all without the help of violent television to place the images in their heads.

Later, the Doctor takes no pause in offering superior technology (fire) to an inferior culture (the Tribe of Gum). While he might do later, at this time he takes no moment deciding whether this might pollute the timeline. Of course, Za’s late father apparently already made fire a few times, so the argument is academic. But, supposing he hadn’t, and the Doctor had been successful in teaching the tribe to make fire, would the Doctor then be responsible for just about all technology on Earth, ever?

Though his life is threatened, the Doctor quickly backpedals as he realizes his matches were left behind somewhere. It’s now obvious that the real drama is between Kal and Za’s credibility, and the Doctor is vulnerable to the outcome of their prehistoric pissing contest. I enjoyed this scene. Here, Kal and Za have possibly history’s first Presidential debate. I almost expect them to move on from fire to something more important, like health or education.

The rest TARDIS crew breaks onto the scene, nearly saving the day, but only succeeding in getting captured. It is here that the Doctor does something heroic for the first time in the series, explaining that if Ian dies, “there will be no fire!”

By the end of the episode, an elder of the tribe trades his own daughter in for meat. Luckily, the daughter is willing. She echoes Lady Macbeth, as she clearly favors Ka and pushes him in his ambition. Another character, an old woman (possibly Ka’s mother) seems to have no ambition whatsoever, and never misses an opportunity to resist progress and naysay Ka’s skills as leader. She exhibits a healthy blood lust to replace her apathy, and is very vocal in her opinion that they should have killed the strangers. She adds, “There were leaders before there was fire. Fire will kill us all in end.” She (like many Old Mothers after her) fails to see the spark of progress, maybe preferring instead to see this new fire thing as some kind of dangerous fad.

***

Encore

Derek Newark (Ka) appears later in Inferno, and Althea Charleton (Hur) appears later in The Time Meddler.

Future Echoes
Is the column the default setting for the TARDIS, and did Master forget to change it in Logopolis?

Next episode: The Forest of Fear