Doctor Who A-Z #11 – The Rescue (1965)

It is currently easier to have a fresh watch of classic series Doctor Who than it has been since it was first broadcast. No need to consult a series guide to find out which episodes to watch first, no need to wait for a DVD or VHS release of a story you’re especially interested in, just open up iPlayer and watch whatever takes your fancy. This will undoubtedly change fan culture and the reputation of specific stories in ways we can’t predict right now, so it’s worth noting that a little advance information can be a good thing. Most of the first two episodes of The Rescue, for instance, are paced in the same way as the first two episodes of most William Hartnell stories. What makes the difference is knowing that, in this case, the first two episodes are the only two episodes. When Vicki is still waiting for the rescue ship that her crew-mate Bennett has called for at the halfway point in episode two, you know that rescue ship isn’t going to turn up.

Well, not that rescue ship, at least. If you know how long The Rescue is, you probably also know the other key fact about it, which is that it introduces Maureen O’Brien’s Vicki as the first new companion since the show began. Between this and the coincidental fact that the story is roughly the same length as a single new series episode, it’s tempting to compare The Rescue to 21st-century stories designed to introduce companions. Happily, it’s a comparison that makes David Whitaker’s script seem even more influential and prescient. Before the TARDIS shows up we’re introduced to the story through Vicki’s eyes, much as we will be with Rose, or Martha, or Bill. There’s also a great scene in the second episode where Vicki confronts the Doctor, saying he’s done nothing since he turned up bar make the situation worse, and Hartnell plays the Doctor as being absolutely charmed by this. He knows, as the David Tennant era will so often restate, that he needs companions not just for company, but as a check on himself.

The core idea of Vicki’s character – a headstrong young woman from the future – reveals that the writers see Susan as their template. Like Susan, her unique perspective and abilities would often be forgotten by the writers, so it’s pleasing to note that she does, at least, get a great introduction. There are all-time great companions that aren’t introduced as skilfully as this. Jamie would become one of the classic series’ best companions, but The Highlanders doesn’t really make a strong case for him being part of the TARDIS team. Jo Grant is actively incompetent in her first appearance, but Katy Manning is so likeable it doesn’t matter. Within just forty-five minutes, though, we’re told that Vicki has survived the trauma of a spaceship crash and extreme isolation, and maintained enough strength of character to challenge the Doctor. It’s an absolute masterclass in convincing us that a new companion deserves their place on the TARDIS.

The other trauma Vicki suffers, which is worth talking about, is that Barbara shoots her pet Sand Beast, mistaking it for a dangerous monster. It’s a shocking moment, since stories like The Aztecs have positioned Barbara as a key moral voice of the show, arguably second only to the Doctor. As well as adding to Vicki’s righteous frustration with the Doctor and his friends, it also foreshadows the ending, where another apparent monster turns out to be something other than what is expected.

The revelation that Koquillion is Bennett in disguise has been criticised by some fans, pointing out that once you exclude the regular cast and the new companion, Bennett is the only person who the monster might be. And this is where foreknowledge of the story becomes a problem, because the lack of suspects only becomes a problem if you already know this is a whodunnit. If you’re watching the serial blind, there is no indication in the first episode that Koquillion is meant to be anything other than a frightening alien monster. Yes, he looks like a man in a rubber suit, but so do quite a lot of Doctor Who monsters who are meant to be, y’know, monsters. The unmasking of Koquillion is perhaps the most ingenious twist the show has pulled at this point, and the set design finds an artful way of allegorising it by having the Doctor travel from the well-realised crashed spaceship set into an equally well-realised eerie underground temple. The serial is visibly becoming a totally different story.

Even rewatching it with the twist in mind, there’s still a lot to enjoy here. Bennett’s psychological campaign against Vicki now plays out as a surprisingly modern portrait of coercive control, and it brings something out of the Doctor in the same way that encountering the Daleks’ cruelty did. Whitaker is, perhaps, the first Doctor Who writer (other than Terry Nation, in the last story) to revisit that moment Nation placed towards the end of The Daleks, where the Doctor gleefully wrecks the Daleks’ machinery. Here, he reacts to Bennett refusing to open the cabin door to him by making a protracted effort to break it down. It actually happens before we’ve even had much reason to suspect Bennett is hiding anything, which is hilarious – this week, your children’s adventure hero is just smashing up someone else’s home for no reason! But Bennett has already marked himself out as someone we shouldn’t sympathise with, and watching Hartnell switch from elderly professor to delinquent schoolboy is joyous enough to justify the scene on its own. It’s a character trait that would go on to define Season Two, particularly in the very next story.

One other small innovation: the Doctor knows something is wrong on the planet Dido because he’s been there before, making this the first planet apart from Earth that we are told the Doctor has revisited. The Doctor’s history with Dido is lightly sketched in, although it has to be said that it leans heavily on the trope that some planets are good and some planets are bad. This is an unfortunate recurring element of the classic series that really lays bare the show’s roots in Victorian adventure fiction, with its colonial mentality and its belief that there is such a thing as the “criminal classes”. The most obvious example is 1985’s The Two Doctors, where the theme is so obnoxiously foregrounded that it feels like part of Robert Holmes’s frustration with what the show has turned into. Even an innocent joy like City of Death, though, will casually remark that the Jagaroth are a race of bastards, just to stop the audience feeling sorry for Scaroth and his lost home. It’s one of my least favourite things about the old series, but it rarely spoils the fun, and here it’s just a backdrop. And hey, there’s only two episodes of it.

Next: The Romans (1965)

Graham’s Archive – The Rescue

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