1.8: The Reign of Terror
- Doctor: William Hartnell
- Companions: Susan, Ian Chesterton, Barbara Wright
- Creators: Verity Lambert (Producer), Dennis Spooner (Writer)
- Season 1
What's the rating?
Worth Watching.
What's interesting about it?
The last story of the first season, this is a callback to the book on the French Revolution that Susan commented on in the first story, An Unearthly Child. It takes place during what is The Doctor's inexplicable "favorite period in the history of Earth". The first three episodes are as filmed, two are lost and reconstructed as animation using the original soundtrack, and the last episode is back to film. The animation, primitive as it is, is a good way to present missing episodes; much preferable to the "show a new snapshot every few seconds" approach taken for Marco Polo.
The story is admirable for not sugar-coating the events or the time. Even the first episode contains unexpected and dark brutality (again making it strange how this was ever considered a "kid's show"), and throughout the story it's clear this is a time and place where no particular value is placed on human life.
It's not science fiction -- it's strictly historical and seems reasonably accurate -- but it might as well be science fiction, given the insane and unbelievable events that occurred at this point in history. This story is the perfect expression of the producers' intent for every other story to be an educational historical. It admirably jumps into the events of the time without spurious commentary, and from there one thing happens after another, which is how the best stories work.
I feel for Carole Anne Ford as Susan, who, having joined Doctor Who to play an independent intelligent alien teenager of the future, is forced here to actually get up on a bed and scream pathetically about how there are rats in her prison cell. Were the producers intentionally prodding her with a stick? Regardless, she would leave the series not long from now, never happy with how her character had developed.
The story prompted me to do some reading on Wikipedia, and perhaps the most interesting sentence ever written is this about Robespierre, who plays an important part in the story:
"His reputation has gone through cycles...In recent decades his reputation has suffered from his association with radical purification of politics by killing his enemies."
Check out my summary of Season 1, in which I don't kill any enemies, but I do leave a few stories behind to their own fate.
What are others saying?
- Wife in Space (score: 4/10)
- The Writer's Room podcast #4 (Dennis Spooner)
- Tin Dog podcast #293