Doctor Who A-Z #26: The Savages (1966)

This is the first Doctor Who script by Ian Stuart Black. For all he won’t be one of the series’ most prolific or acclaimed writers, he’ll always be a step or two ahead of where the show is headed. His next story, The War Machines, maps out the core subject matter of Patrick Troughton’s tenure before Troughton had even been cast, while The Macra Terror‘s depiction of a revolutionary-minded Doctor uncovering sinister secrets in an apparently utopian society would slot in nicely alongside mid-period Tom Baker stories such as The Pirate Planet or The Robots of Death. The Savages sees William Hartnell’s Doctor enter another false paradise, albeit one that harks ahead to an even later stage in Doctor Who‘s lifespan. For the first time, the Doctor meets a civilisation who are new to the viewer, yet who have heard of him – a concept that would become central to the show under Matt Smith, forty-four years later.

Before we credit Black with too much foresight, we should also note the ways in which The Savages is very Season Three. There is a running theme of slavery and prejudice in this season, perhaps unsurprisingly considering the real-life events that were making the news in the mid-60s. Season Three has rebuked us for assuming the Rills were evil in Galaxy 4, it’s depicted a slave race rising up and enslaving their masters in The Ark, and it’s stopped off to witness the building of the Pyramids and a brutal anti-Catholic massacre in France. As soon as the Elders in this story start boasting of their innately civilised, cultured society, we’re primed to expect something nasty underneath.

One way in which The Savages differs from the other science fiction stories in this season is that it features no monsters, a decision which gives and takes. It means The Savages can’t do the full-on rug-pull of Galaxy 4, because the titular Savages never look like anything other than desperate, impoverished humans. Equally, though, it doesn’t get lost in its own ethical minefields like The Ark, which is far, far too comfortable assuming the Monoids are evil just because they’re ugly. The original title was The White Savages, an attempt to play on a 1960s audience’s racial assumptions that would land somewhat differently today – as would the original plan to have the Elders blacked-up. It’s hard to say what was intended by that decision, and Frederick Jaeger’s awkwardly bronzed Jano is the only surviving remnant of this incredibly wrongheaded scheme. Best to note that the production team came to their senses, and move on.

Because the really interesting thing about The Savages is not that the Savages are good, or that the Elders prosper by brutally exploiting them. It’s that the Elders are bad and they admire the Doctor, spending most of the first two episodes flattering him relentlessly. When Steven discovers the unethical experiments being conducted on the Savages at the end of episode one, the Doctor is initially reluctant to believe him, because he’s been so effectively charmed by the Elders. You have to ask; why does a civilisation this evil admire a man as good as the Doctor?

This is where The Savages really repays study. It’s an understandably overlooked story; it got low ratings at the time, all of its episodes are missing, good reconstructions are hard to come by, and its lack of monsters means it doesn’t even get a capsule description along the lines of “the one with the Fish People”. But it is crucial to one aspect of the Hartnell era that new series fans are always fascinated by, which is the gradual establishing of the Doctor’s heroism. This isn’t an arc, in the modern sense; it’s the result of a series of producers and script editors gradually getting a sense of what the audience want, and fine-tuning the show to fit. Yet it does work surprisingly well as a gradually unfolding story, and here – rather than The Tenth Planet – is where it ends. The Doctor meets a civilisation who have patterned themselves on the man he once was, and he is repelled by them.

Granted, he’s seduced by them first, but if the Doctor is a Christ figure – and the Eighth and Tenth Doctors’ eras suggest he can be – it’s apposite that The Savages gives him a last temptation. The Elders’ society is based on draining the life-force of the Savages, transferring the victim’s energy and even characteristics into the Elders’ bodies. The implicitly European, vaguely Ancient Greek cast of the Elders’ version of high civilisation is therefore based on a principle remarkably similar to tribal ritual cannibalism, and it backfires on them. Jano’s attempt to absorb the Doctor’s wisdom not only fails to kill the Doctor, it results in the Doctor all but possessing Jano’s body. This is a great twist, if only because it means episode three is taken up by Jaeger doing a very amusing William Hartnell impersonation. It also establishes that the Doctor, once an inspiration to this terrible society, has become a threat to the very scientific principles it is based on.

In the final episode, having reclaimed his own body, the Doctor and Dodo trash the Elders’ machine, with the Doctor giddily declaring “there’s something very satisfying about destroying something that’s evil!” It’s a callback, intentionally or not, to the moment which started the Doctor’s hero’s journey, when he realised the Daleks had to be resisted. Hartnell plays the reprise of this moment even more gleefully, and it feels like a final exorcism of the non-interventionist morality the Doctor was raised with. But of course, it wasn’t the Doctor who started the fight against the Elders, it was Steven, and this gives him the right to leave the TARDIS at the story’s end. Steven’s departure parallels Susan’s, further establishing that finding a cause to fight for is the best reason for a companion to leave. In doing so, the companion acquires a moral status comparable to the Doctor’s – and The Savages is the story that finally defines what, exactly, it means to be as good as the Doctor.

Next: The War Machines (1966)

Graham’s Archive – The Savages

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