Doctor Who A-Z #06: The Aztecs (1964)

There’s a notorious moment in Timewyrm: Genesis, the first of Virgin Books’s New Adventures – stories marketed as “too broad and too deep for the small screen”, remember – where the Doctor scolds Ace for not wanting to be sexually assaulted by a paedophile. “Ace, these trips of ours are supposed to broaden your mind”, he says when she rejects King Gilgamesh. “Stop thinking in twentieth-century terms for a while”. Aside from neatly explaining why I’ve always been skeptical of the New Adventures’s claim to be offering “mature” Doctor Who, it feels catastrophically out of character for the Seventh Doctor, a man who reliably delivers moral judgment on everything from hired assassins to burnt toast, to be telling his companion not to stand up to a rapist. It is, however, strikingly similar to what the First Doctor tells Barbara, right at the start of his hero’s journey from indifferent tourist to scourge of the unjust, in John Lucarotti’s script for The Aztecs. 

For once, Barbara isn’t going to be molested here – that’s Susan’s subplot, resisting an arranged marriage in a manner pleasingly consistent with her portrayal in Lucarotti’s last story Marco Polo. If anything, Barbara is in less danger than anyone else this week, thanks to her being mistaken for an incarnation of the goddess Yetaxa. As soon as this mistake is made, Barbara immediately decides to abuse her unearned authority to improve human rights in the Aztec empire, thereby becoming perhaps the only person to actually deserve Moe Szyslak’s judgement of having gone “mad with power, like that Albert Schweitzer guy”. 

This subplot is mainly remembered for the Doctor’s claim that “you can’t rewrite history – not one line!”, a neat summation of the story’s central dilemma that is also hard to square with the Doctor’s later characterisation. This isn’t a problem – as noted above, the First Doctor’s run works surprisingly well as a character arc, and what he believes in Season One may well contradict what he’s thinking by the start of Season Four. What is interesting, though, is how the Doctor attempts to persuade Barbara to let the human sacrifices continue. Despite having previously dismissed the High Priest Tlotoxl as “the local butcher”, the Doctor reminds Barbara that these people have a completely different worldview to them; to the ceremonial Victims, being sacrificed is not an injustice but an honour that gives their lives meaning and purpose. The First Doctor, who is too often read as an extension of William Hartnell’s real-life conservative attitudes, is here coming awfully close to moral relativism, the ultimate nightmare of modern conservatives (well, that and drag).

It’s a fascinating moment, one which complicates the view – put forward by Lindy Orthia, among others – of The Aztecs as one of Doctor Who‘s most colonialist shows. Barbara justifies her decision to interfere so dramatically in Aztec society by saying that, if they end the practice of human sacrifice, the Spanish colonists who eventually invade their land might spare them. This is, obviously, a ridiculous idea; colonizers traditionally saw any spiritual practice that wasn’t their own as evidence of barbarism, and there are precious few historical examples of an imperial army deciding to let a vanquished territory maintain their own culture. To modern eyes, it almost works as a critique of British imperialism to have a 1960s teacher – a history teacher, no less – be completely ignorant of this.

And yet, while the Doctor doesn’t explicitly correct her, the arc of the story is ultimately about Barbara being wrong. It is true that the Spanish invaders used human sacrifice as a pretext to eliminating the Aztecs completely, just as modern colonialists will use an issue of human rights (women’s liberty in the middle east, the presence of a far-right fringe in Ukraine) to justify bringing a whole nation under their heel. It is also true that The Aztecs doesn’t exactly correct the record by making human sacrifice the entire crux of the drama. And yet, compared with Tegana in Marco Polo or El Akir in The Crusade, there isn’t really a villain here. John Ringham is certainly playing Tlotoxl as a scowling, Shakespearian villain, hunched over and growling like Olivier in Richard III. Yet his motivation is ultimately to expose Barbara as a fraud exploiting his deeply-held faith. It’s hard to really condemn him for that, seeing as that is exactly what Barbara is doing.

Like a lot of the pure historicals, The Aztecs has an all-white cast, which can make for bothersome viewing these days. You could defend it on the grounds that it would have been all but impossible to assemble a cast of indigenous Mexicans in 1960s Britain, certainly much harder than it would have been to find Chinese actors in the 1970s, and the only alternative would be to abandon the story altogether. While it’s nowhere near as grim as the moral dilemmas the TARDIS crew face here, these stories do pose a moral dilemma to modern audiences: on the one hand, the show is laudably international during the Hartnell years, more so than any era prior to Jodie Whittaker’s. Yet it only achieves this feat of cultural representation by failing at racial representation.

Fortunately, the serial’s political issues aren’t aesthetic ones. Nobody is browned-up, nobody is doing an accent, Lucarotti’s Mexico is achieved using the same theatrical anti-realism as Shakespeare’s Denmark. It’s not for nothing that I’ve invoked Shakespeare twice here: despite letting the tension slip in the final episode, Lucarotti’s script is a wonderfully-wrought piece of grown-up drama. The intersection of Barbara and Susan’s plot-lines is all the more effective for being done in plain sight; we’ve seen them run parallel, but the incident that knits them together doesn’t occur to us until someone points it out. Similarly, while Ian’s subplot is mostly a way to indulge the action-hero role the producers imagined for him before they realised how good William Russell was at comedy, the trick Ixta plays on the Doctor is a great way to bring him back into the story.

The reason why the Doctor needs to be brought back into the main plot is also the most unexpected pleasure of The Aztecs; he is off being charmed off his feet by the Aztec widow Cameca. The First Doctor is, at least implicitly, a romantic figure; he has a granddaughter, and unless you’re writing something too broad and too deep for the small screen there’s no reason to assume Time Lords reproduce asexually. Even with this in mind, it’s still surprising how effective and sweet the Doctor’s flirtation with Cameca is, played every bit as well as Paul McGann and Peter Capaldi’s later romantic plot-lines. His reaction to learning he’s accidentally gotten engaged to her is one of the funniest single shots in Doctor Who‘s history. For all John Lucarotti made a much better fist of the dramatic pure historical than anyone else would, he also deserves credit for including the first moment of irresistible comedy into the subgenre.

Next: The Sensorites (1964)

Graham’s Archive – The Aztecs

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