Doctor Who A-Z #22: The Massacre (1966)

Also known as The Massacre of St. Bartholemew’s Eve, this is a case of crazy name, surprisingly sober story. The Massacre sees John Lucarotti return to Doctor Who after taking a break for the show’s second season. By the 1970s, that kind of break would be unremarkable; Robert Holmes sat out Jon Pertwee’s middle season, but a year later he turned in Carnival of Monsters as if nothing had happened. Lucarotti’s absence, though, saw the show seriously rework itself, taking stock of the impact the Daleks had made, as well as trying to reconcile the whole idea of a pure historical story with the Doctor’s increasingly proactive, heroic characterisation. If the Doctor is now a man who topples alien dictatorships, why should he stand by and insist – as he did in Lucarotti’s The Aztecs – that “not one line” of Earth’s history can be rewritten?

There are two reasons why the Hartnell years saw this extraordinary rate of reinvention. The first, and most obvious, is that the show was new, and still working out what it could and couldn’t do. The second, which is less commented upon, is that the show’s early seasons were extraordinarily long. When a season and a half of William Hartnell’s Doctor Who covers more actual screen time than Jodie Whittaker’s entire tenure, it’s inevitable that there’s a lot of development within those seasons. By the time Lucarotti returned to writing historical stories, for instance, the subgenre had changed from being focused on historical events to being focused on genre parody. That doesn’t seem to have been among Lucarotti’s interests, and even if it was it doesn’t give you much of a window into how to write a story about the 1572 Massacre of the Huguenots. “The Doctor runs afoul of Emperor Nero” is a story hook that dictates the genre of the finished serial. “The Doctor tries to escape Catherine de Medici”, less so.

As a result, The Massacre sits very strangely in Season Three’s roster of historical stories, sandwiched between a sword-and-sandal spoof and a Western spoof. It feels very conscious of its status as the last ‘serious’ pure historical, the last time Doctor Who could play out as a historical adventure serial without the distractions of science fiction or comedy, and perhaps Lucarotti really did know this. He had tried to pitch a story about the Sepoy Mutiny, only to have it rejected by incoming producer John Wiles as being too close to recent events. Given that The Chase had used more recent events – the Gettysburg address, the abandonment of the Marie Celeste – as little more than throwaway gags, it’s possible that the recent event Wiles was really thinking about was the 1947 establishment of Indian self-rule, which had granted Raj-era stories a new, contentious topicality. Either way, Lucarotti probably had a sense the show was moving away from the kinds of stories he enjoyed writing.

None of this, however, means The Massacre is bad. Quite the opposite – it has a go-for-broke quality, a last hurrah for the Lucarotti style of complex, adult historical storytelling. The political machinations that led to anti-Huguenot prejudice being first revived, then taken to gruesome extremes, are beautifully drawn by the excellent guest cast. They are performed within the generic standards of 1960s historical television, which is to say that everyone has a British accent apart from one working-class barman, played by an actor who’s aiming for French but ends up sounding like the Elephant Man. It’s a dated performance style, but there’s nothing wrong with it, particularly when it’s done by expert practitioners. Even André Morell, whose accent as the villainous Marshall Tavannes is a hair shy of Steven Toast, stays on the right side of parody.

In its general themes, too, The Massacre is not as much of an outlier in Season Three as it first seemed. Season Two had ended with the Meddling Monk delivering a moral challenge to the Doctor; are you going to defend the poor, helpless people you meet on Earth, or will you continue to define yourself as a tourist even in the face of this misery? Season Three seems unusually carefully designed to answer that question, and not just in the historical stories. The Doctor completely loses control of the situation in Ancient Troy, but he also loses two companions in his fight to stop the Daleks. Steven is disgusted by the latter failing, and he’s even angrier at the Doctor leaving Anne Chaplet to be killed by the de Medicis’ soldiers. The arrival of Dodo, a companion rather unconvincingly implied to be a descendant of Anne Chaplet (are the surnames matrilineal in her family?) shouldn’t overshadow how much time the script spends on this moral debate, and how seriously Hartnell in particular takes it. As he contemplates Steven’s threat to leave, the Doctor seriously considers returning to his home planet. None of the mythos around Gallifrey had been sketched out at this point, of course, but the scene is even more dramatic in retrospect: the Doctor is, essentially, wondering whether he should turn himself in.

By the end of this season, the Doctor will have worked out which way to jump. The image of him standing his ground in the face of a War Machine serves notice that, from now on, he will be as much of a hero on Earth as he is on other planets. The Massacre shows the Doctor – and Doctor Who – at the crossroads, and the story retains its power to disorient the viewer even when the outcome is known. The stakes are raised by the fact that the Massacre of the Huguenots is surely the most obscure historical event ever to be the basis of a Doctor Who story, so most of the audience are as helpless as Steven when it comes to working out what’s going to happening here. Steven’s alienation is increased by the fact that he’s separated from the Doctor for two episodes, and so are we – episodes two and three do not feature the Doctor at all.

This isn’t that unusual for the show in the 1960s. As noted above, the sheer volume of television that was being made meant they occasionally had to book one or two weeks off for the lead actor. Except that’s not what’s happening here. Hartnell is present throughout the story, but in episodes two and three he’s playing the Abbot of Amboise, a Catholic priest allied with Tavannes. (Wiles suggested this to avoid having to do costly split-screen effects, but it plays as a delightful in-joke about the series’s now-familiar holidays for the leading man) Steven is convinced the Abbot is the Doctor, going undercover for who knows what reason, and it’s hard to discount the suspicion. Later impostors like Ramon Salamander and the Kraals’ android Doctor will give themselves away by behaving out of character, yet in The Massacre even the Doctor seems uncertain what that character is.

The absence of the Doctor for half the story makes The Massacre feel radically more dangerous than any of the historical stories that follow. In its own way, too, it provides an answer to the question of whether a story like this can work as part of the series’ current direction: if the Doctor has to be removed for half of the story in order for it to work, the answer is no. In its own way, then, The Massacre is more of a death knell for the pure historicals than The Highlanders or Black Orchid. As a discrete piece of art, though, it’s thrilling, purposeful and – in the grisly montage of period illustrations showing the carnage the Doctor has ran away from – genuinely shocking. If this is the last time the series could do this kind of story, Lucarotti ensures it bows out with its head held high.

Next: The Ark (1964)

Graham’s Archive – The Massacre

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