Twice Upon a Time - spoiler review
Dec. 28th, 2017 10:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
llywelaFollowing on from my brief summary of the Doctor Who Christmas special, Twice Upon a Time, this is the much longer version!
The Good
It was an entertaining romp of a Christmas story that was both fun and touching to watch with the whole family on Christmas Day. I enjoyed the pensive note the episode struck, reminiscent of Tom Baker's regeneration in Logopolis – which was the very first Doctor Who story I have any memory of! I'd have been four years old when it aired.
There were some really beautiful moments scattered through the episode. 'Previously on Doctor Who – 709 episodes ago' was genuinely awesome, as was the transition from Hartnell to Bradley. Actually including footage from The Tenth Planet was a really nice touch and showed respect to the show's history that the rest of the episode lacked. Some of the quieter, more meaningful moments the characters had with one another were lovely – although overshadowed by the really bad writing in other exchanges. And I liked the gimmick of there ultimately not actually being any evil plan to have to thwart – surely a first for the Doctor – while the use of the Christmas Truce to squeeze out a happy-ish ending was cleverly done and very touching…albeit very much in keeping with Moffat's ongoing refusal to allow any character to actually die.
Peter Capaldi has had the time of his life playing his childhood hero in his favourite show and put in a lovely performance as his swansong, and everyone else did a great job too. I do like David Bradley as the First Doctor, even though the writing for him was not good (and he didn't really come close to capturing the essence of Hartnell's performance), and it was good to see Bill again (sort of).
Captain Archibald Hamish Lethbridge-Stewart! That was a nice touch – I should have realised what was going on when they referred to him as 'The Captain' throughout, surely a clue if ever there was one.
I still feel in my gut that the Doctor is a man in the same way that Wonder Woman is a woman, but since the die is cast I am on board with Jodie Whittaker's casting and looking forward to finding out who her Doctor is – I enjoyed the brief glimpse we got of her here!
The Bad
So someone with super-duper advanced tech is wandering through history harvesting the souls of everyone who ever lived, right at the point of their deaths? And not just from Earth either, but people scattered all through space? We've seen this story before, and not very long ago either, only that time it actually was an evil plan and it involved Missy and Cybermen. The sheer logistical ridiculousness of it shattered my disbelief then, as well. Moffat has in common with Davies that he tends to believe bigger is always better and often ends up over-egging the pudding as a result, while I'm of the opinion that less is usually more – if they'd said they were going through history harvesting a random sampling of souls for Testimony I'd have been bang on board with the concept. That would have been far easier to swallow than their claim that they get absolutely everyone who ever lived, especially since it's only been a couple of years since Missy claimed to have achieved the exact same thing! Moffat really does like to recycle the same plots over and over – does he honestly think we won't notice, or does he just not care?
Ben Jackson was a good couple of inches shorter than Polly, plus he was blond not mousy-brunette – it's a simple detail to get right, if only casting actually cared about getting it right. I know it was only a brief little scene, but this is the second time the modern show has re-cast him (he showed up in An Adventure in Space and Time too) and both times the actor chosen has been far too tall! The wig they put on the Polly actress was pretty awful, too.
(When I re-watched with the Other Half, immediately after watching The Tenth Planet, we agreed that if only they'd got the casting right we'd have loved to see a completely different crossover story in which Ben and Polly played a full part!)
I could have lived without the Clara sequence. "Don't go forgetting me again because it was kind of offensive," really? She was the one who wiped his memory of her in the first place! Who'd have thought, after all this time, that she'd still have the power to make my blood boil in a 20-second guest appearance that wasn't even filmed with the rest of the episode because the actress wasn't available. I'm not keen on this whole thing about having to get all the past companions back for each Doctor's regeneration anyway. A couple of Classic Doctors had flashbacks of the people who'd been important to them as they regenerated, which seems reasonable, but coming up with more and more elaborate ways of allowing the Doctor to interact with old companions as he 'dies' just takes it too over-the-top for me.
I'm also over the New Who insistence on approaching regeneration as death – not to mention the ongoing trend of dragging it out for as long as possible. Less is more, people! Just get it done, dragging it out is tedious! For that matter, I need them to stop making regeneration such a violent process that it blows up the TARDIS – that's not what regeneration is, it shouldn't have that effect! If it did, Rose would never have survived and neither would any other companion who was standing right there when it happened! I much prefer the gentler, more low key Classic regenerations.
New Who really has made the character of the Doctor much bigger than he ever should have been, bigging him up into a semi-deity, almost, and it doesn't suit him. No, he really isn't the only thing holding the universe together – and no, his name really isn't so special and significant that it sings through the stars to be heard only by those capable of tuning into it. It's just a name – every Time Lord has one. I'd enjoy the show so much more if they could cut out all the melodrama.
The first ever female Doctor…and she is immediately written as blowing the TARDIS up and then falling out in her very first scene? Nice one, male writers – way to pave the way for an inevitable year's worth of 'women driver' jokes. I've even seen fans speculating that the TARDIS deliberately rejected her, which – come on, people, the TARDIS was damaged by the regeneration and span out of control, and she fell out as a result. I'm not seeing the need for conspiracy theories there – but I'm counting it as a strike against the writing that the sequence immediately generated said conspiracy theories.
The Ugly
Hoo boy. Okay. So, long before this episode ever aired, I read publicity interviews for it in which put me on my guard, so at least I was forewarned. Specifically this from David Bradley, explaining his take on the character to the Radio Times:
“What we did emphasise [about the First Doctor] was the old fashioned nature and how he is from the 60s,” revealed David Bradley, who plays the part opposite Peter Capaldi’s more enlightened incarnation.
“[The First Doctor] brings all his 60s sensibilities, what’s lovingly called casual chauvinism,” said Bradley, speaking at the London Film and Comic Con. “He’s just talking [as if] the [companions] are there just to help out, and do the dusting and do all the domestic chores – his attitudes to a lot of things come right from the 60s.”
Which could, let us charitably presume, simply be a case of the actor misreading the character – especially since he was given a fairly unflattering portrayal of William Hartnell to play in An Adventure in Space and Time. Easy to conflate the two, perhaps. But there was also this from Steven Moffat, also to the Radio Times, explaining his assumption that there has to be a reason or justification for the Doctor to regenerate as a woman:
“I suppose at the back of my mind I’ve known for ages the next Doctor was going to be a woman – although I didn’t know which woman – so I was thinking, “Why does he subconsciously make that choice?” Maybe seeing the whole span of his life as a man, seeing himself as the Hartnell Doctor, might make him think maybe it’s time to be a bit more progressive. Looking at how the first Doctor was, he’s hilariously not progressive. Without being too outrageous I think we have re-created that version of Hartnell’s Doctor, with all the 1960s political incorrectness in place."
So no, it is clear that Bradley's interpretation of the character was based entirely on how that character was written in the script he was given to perform, and there is so much to unpack in these quotes, even before addressing how it actually played out on screen.
Let's start with the fact that although we first met the Doctor in 1963, he does not and never did come from that time! The First Doctor was not actually a man from the '60s with the views of that time period; he was as much a Time Lord from Gallifrey as the Twelfth is. It is a huge mistake to confuse the time in which the show was broadcast with the character. Not to mention that although 1960s Doctor Who might be 'hilariously not progressive' by modern standards, it was extremely progressive for the time in which it aired, which is the standard against which it should be judged, and if it fell short at times there is still no reason to re-create those failures today when that was never intended to be an integral part of a character designed to be progressive – doing so does such a disservice to both the character and the intentions of those who created him. No show can be expected to live up to the standards of fifty years in the future, each can only live up to and attempt to exceed the standards of their own day – and Moffat's own writing fails in that regard far too often for him to be throwing stones at the show's past, quite frankly. His attitude here comes across with shades of 'doth protest too much' misdirection – look over there, nothing to see here…
The writers of The Five Doctors did much the same thing when they re-created the First Doctor in 1983. Funny how some writers like to prove they’re less sexist now by projecting sexist lines onto the past, while totally failing to notice the sexism in the show as it is during their own time. Such as, for example, the fact that multiple characters played a part in this adventure and only one of them was female (no, a recording of a speech by another woman doesn't count).
But Steven Moffat has never really shown any respect for the rich history of the show he claims to love, that much has been amply demonstrated time and time again – he prefers to trample all over that history and re-make it in his own image rather than honour it.
Anyway, having watched the episode through once with the entire family (not exactly the ideal viewing circumstances), I then sat down on Boxing Day with the Other Half for a Doctor Who extravaganza – we went all the way back to 1966 to watch The Tenth Planet before re-watching Twice Upon a Time, since the one follows directly on from the other, so to speak, and the comparison between the two versions of the First Doctor felt necessary.
And here's the thing: the First Doctor was extremely paternalistic, there's no denying it. He often talked down to his companions, both male and female. He was proud and he was cantankerous and he was arrogant and he was high-handed…but he was also so much more than that. He was charming and he was mischievous, a loving and lovable rogue, and he had a full array of quirky little mannerisms that really brought him to life as a person – such a shame Bradley was unable (or not given the chance) to re-create all the varied facets and mannerisms of the character. He had a natural gravitas, an air of authority. He was warm and he was generous and he was kind and he was funny (hard to accept Bradley's Doctor as the same person when he barely even cracked a smile, still less told any stupid [non-sexist] granddad jokes). He was a grandfather who, having been separated from his beloved Susan, went around the universe adopting new surrogate granddaughters to dote on. I mean, seriously, Hartnell's Doctor would not have been stiff as a board when Bill hugged him – he'd have hugged her right the hell back because he'd have totally adopted her already by that point! He adopted every young woman he came across!
(He also has a gay companion in Big Finish, so would not be flummoxed by Bill's reference to her sexuality).
Most importantly of all, he was not sexist. He absolutely did not see his companions as simply being there to help out with the housekeeping and keep his TARDIS clean and tidy for him, as this episode tried to claim. They were his friends – his family! He wasn't particularly house-proud at all, in fact. If anyone in his TARDIS team was going to notice dust or mess it would have been Barbara herself, who'd have ragged the Doctor about it and possibly made a mental note to do something about it later but would then immediately be distracted by another adventure. Heck, Polly might have been a girly-girl, but 1960s Doctor Who more often than not portrayed that as a strength of the character, not a shameful weakness as so many male fans of the show like to believe, and I don't believe she even knew what a duster was, never mind ever employed one on the Doctor's behalf!
Equally, the First Doctor did not believe that all women were 'made of glass' – he travelled with Barbara Wright, for crying out loud, the woman who drove through a pile of Daleks with a truck, held a knife to the throat of an Aztec priest, and would have handed his backside to him (and in fact did!) if he ever talked to her the way he did in this episode. He travelled with Sara Kingdom, the ruthless badass space agent who shot her own brother in the name of a cause she believed in and gave her life to help save the universe. He knew damn well that women are not made of glass! He was more likely to let his female companions go off into the action while he remained behind than he was to send them back to the safety of the TARDIS because he considered them too fragile to expose to danger! Moffat's Doctors send their female companions back to the TARDIS for safekeeping far more frequently than Hartnell's Doctor ever did, in fact - and Steven Taylor was far more of a damsel in distress than Vicki or Dodo ever were. Hartnell's Doctor delighted in exploration and investigation and loved it when his companions entered into the spirit of things with him – he hadn't learned yet to be fearful on their behalf, the way Twelve tends to be. Even when the First Doctor was travelling with a sheltered little handmaiden from the Fall of Troy who had no frame of reference for anything she was experiencing and actually did need gentle handling, he never for a moment presumed that she was fragile or incapable, either because she was a woman or became she was primitive - Katarina may not have fully understood what was going on around her, but she played a full part in proceedings anyway. The only time he ever looked down on any of his companions as inferior was when he first met Ian and Barbara, at a time when he believed all humans were inferior - he was species-ist, not sexist, and having learned his lesson he never made that mistake again, treating all companions thereafter with love and respect, regardless of age, sex, or time of origin.
I will note for the record that yes, the 'jolly good smacked bottom' line was repeated directly from one of Hartnell's episodes. Look, I never claimed that the show was perfect in any era – but re-using the line here misses the actual point of it entirely. When Hartnell's Doctor spoke that line, it was to his granddaughter, for whom he was responsible and had been for some unknown length of time, the granddaughter he was raising (through time and space), and it came near the beginning of a six-part adventure in which his and Susan's character story specifically revolved around the fact that he still saw her as a child and only gradually, through the adventure, came to realise that she had grown up without him noticing. The line serves an actual purpose in that story and belongs to that context – it is part of his character arc, closely tied to the parent-child relationship he had with Susan specifically. He never would have said it to a complete stranger he'd only just met! Sheesh.
And you know, presenting him as such a raging sexist not only undermines the character of the Doctor himself, but also gives a false impression to new viewers unfamiliar with his era that his female companions actually were completely useless and did nothing more than hang around cleaning his TARDIS while he went on adventures, which is both completely not the case and massively disrespectful to his fabulous companions and everything they experienced and achieved. Surely half the point of re-visiting old characters like this is to whet the appetite of new viewers and make them want to see more, inspiring them to dip their toes into the Classic era for the first time, not to put them off ever wanting to see any of it!
There are some, of course, who might point to Richard Hurndall's portrayal of the First Doctor in The Five Doctors as grounds for his portrayal here, to which I will counter that this was also revisionism by a writer projecting backwards a couple of decades. Moffat himself has complained that Hurndall didn't really look or behave like Hartnell's Doctor, largely because he was written 20 years later at a time when no one could re-watch old episodes to get a feel for who the character really was. With all of Hartnell's extant episodes available to both Moffat and Bradley to review, it's such a shame that they fell into the same trap anyway. Writing the character in this way was so, so unnecessary and added nothing whatsoever to the story – there honestly was no plot-related point to it at all. It was done purely so that Moffat could pat himself on the back with how progressive the Twelfth Doctor is in comparison – and seriously, if the only way you can think of making one character look good is to undermine another, there's a serious problem with your writing right there.
So there it is. Moffat's era is over at last – and good riddance, says I. Only time will tell what the Chibnall era brings. Will it be better? Will it be worse? One thing we can say with some certainty: it will be different…and I am more than ready for that!
The Good
It was an entertaining romp of a Christmas story that was both fun and touching to watch with the whole family on Christmas Day. I enjoyed the pensive note the episode struck, reminiscent of Tom Baker's regeneration in Logopolis – which was the very first Doctor Who story I have any memory of! I'd have been four years old when it aired.
There were some really beautiful moments scattered through the episode. 'Previously on Doctor Who – 709 episodes ago' was genuinely awesome, as was the transition from Hartnell to Bradley. Actually including footage from The Tenth Planet was a really nice touch and showed respect to the show's history that the rest of the episode lacked. Some of the quieter, more meaningful moments the characters had with one another were lovely – although overshadowed by the really bad writing in other exchanges. And I liked the gimmick of there ultimately not actually being any evil plan to have to thwart – surely a first for the Doctor – while the use of the Christmas Truce to squeeze out a happy-ish ending was cleverly done and very touching…albeit very much in keeping with Moffat's ongoing refusal to allow any character to actually die.
Peter Capaldi has had the time of his life playing his childhood hero in his favourite show and put in a lovely performance as his swansong, and everyone else did a great job too. I do like David Bradley as the First Doctor, even though the writing for him was not good (and he didn't really come close to capturing the essence of Hartnell's performance), and it was good to see Bill again (sort of).
Captain Archibald Hamish Lethbridge-Stewart! That was a nice touch – I should have realised what was going on when they referred to him as 'The Captain' throughout, surely a clue if ever there was one.
I still feel in my gut that the Doctor is a man in the same way that Wonder Woman is a woman, but since the die is cast I am on board with Jodie Whittaker's casting and looking forward to finding out who her Doctor is – I enjoyed the brief glimpse we got of her here!
The Bad
So someone with super-duper advanced tech is wandering through history harvesting the souls of everyone who ever lived, right at the point of their deaths? And not just from Earth either, but people scattered all through space? We've seen this story before, and not very long ago either, only that time it actually was an evil plan and it involved Missy and Cybermen. The sheer logistical ridiculousness of it shattered my disbelief then, as well. Moffat has in common with Davies that he tends to believe bigger is always better and often ends up over-egging the pudding as a result, while I'm of the opinion that less is usually more – if they'd said they were going through history harvesting a random sampling of souls for Testimony I'd have been bang on board with the concept. That would have been far easier to swallow than their claim that they get absolutely everyone who ever lived, especially since it's only been a couple of years since Missy claimed to have achieved the exact same thing! Moffat really does like to recycle the same plots over and over – does he honestly think we won't notice, or does he just not care?
Ben Jackson was a good couple of inches shorter than Polly, plus he was blond not mousy-brunette – it's a simple detail to get right, if only casting actually cared about getting it right. I know it was only a brief little scene, but this is the second time the modern show has re-cast him (he showed up in An Adventure in Space and Time too) and both times the actor chosen has been far too tall! The wig they put on the Polly actress was pretty awful, too.
(When I re-watched with the Other Half, immediately after watching The Tenth Planet, we agreed that if only they'd got the casting right we'd have loved to see a completely different crossover story in which Ben and Polly played a full part!)
I could have lived without the Clara sequence. "Don't go forgetting me again because it was kind of offensive," really? She was the one who wiped his memory of her in the first place! Who'd have thought, after all this time, that she'd still have the power to make my blood boil in a 20-second guest appearance that wasn't even filmed with the rest of the episode because the actress wasn't available. I'm not keen on this whole thing about having to get all the past companions back for each Doctor's regeneration anyway. A couple of Classic Doctors had flashbacks of the people who'd been important to them as they regenerated, which seems reasonable, but coming up with more and more elaborate ways of allowing the Doctor to interact with old companions as he 'dies' just takes it too over-the-top for me.
I'm also over the New Who insistence on approaching regeneration as death – not to mention the ongoing trend of dragging it out for as long as possible. Less is more, people! Just get it done, dragging it out is tedious! For that matter, I need them to stop making regeneration such a violent process that it blows up the TARDIS – that's not what regeneration is, it shouldn't have that effect! If it did, Rose would never have survived and neither would any other companion who was standing right there when it happened! I much prefer the gentler, more low key Classic regenerations.
New Who really has made the character of the Doctor much bigger than he ever should have been, bigging him up into a semi-deity, almost, and it doesn't suit him. No, he really isn't the only thing holding the universe together – and no, his name really isn't so special and significant that it sings through the stars to be heard only by those capable of tuning into it. It's just a name – every Time Lord has one. I'd enjoy the show so much more if they could cut out all the melodrama.
The first ever female Doctor…and she is immediately written as blowing the TARDIS up and then falling out in her very first scene? Nice one, male writers – way to pave the way for an inevitable year's worth of 'women driver' jokes. I've even seen fans speculating that the TARDIS deliberately rejected her, which – come on, people, the TARDIS was damaged by the regeneration and span out of control, and she fell out as a result. I'm not seeing the need for conspiracy theories there – but I'm counting it as a strike against the writing that the sequence immediately generated said conspiracy theories.
The Ugly
Hoo boy. Okay. So, long before this episode ever aired, I read publicity interviews for it in which put me on my guard, so at least I was forewarned. Specifically this from David Bradley, explaining his take on the character to the Radio Times:
“What we did emphasise [about the First Doctor] was the old fashioned nature and how he is from the 60s,” revealed David Bradley, who plays the part opposite Peter Capaldi’s more enlightened incarnation.
“[The First Doctor] brings all his 60s sensibilities, what’s lovingly called casual chauvinism,” said Bradley, speaking at the London Film and Comic Con. “He’s just talking [as if] the [companions] are there just to help out, and do the dusting and do all the domestic chores – his attitudes to a lot of things come right from the 60s.”
Which could, let us charitably presume, simply be a case of the actor misreading the character – especially since he was given a fairly unflattering portrayal of William Hartnell to play in An Adventure in Space and Time. Easy to conflate the two, perhaps. But there was also this from Steven Moffat, also to the Radio Times, explaining his assumption that there has to be a reason or justification for the Doctor to regenerate as a woman:
“I suppose at the back of my mind I’ve known for ages the next Doctor was going to be a woman – although I didn’t know which woman – so I was thinking, “Why does he subconsciously make that choice?” Maybe seeing the whole span of his life as a man, seeing himself as the Hartnell Doctor, might make him think maybe it’s time to be a bit more progressive. Looking at how the first Doctor was, he’s hilariously not progressive. Without being too outrageous I think we have re-created that version of Hartnell’s Doctor, with all the 1960s political incorrectness in place."
So no, it is clear that Bradley's interpretation of the character was based entirely on how that character was written in the script he was given to perform, and there is so much to unpack in these quotes, even before addressing how it actually played out on screen.
Let's start with the fact that although we first met the Doctor in 1963, he does not and never did come from that time! The First Doctor was not actually a man from the '60s with the views of that time period; he was as much a Time Lord from Gallifrey as the Twelfth is. It is a huge mistake to confuse the time in which the show was broadcast with the character. Not to mention that although 1960s Doctor Who might be 'hilariously not progressive' by modern standards, it was extremely progressive for the time in which it aired, which is the standard against which it should be judged, and if it fell short at times there is still no reason to re-create those failures today when that was never intended to be an integral part of a character designed to be progressive – doing so does such a disservice to both the character and the intentions of those who created him. No show can be expected to live up to the standards of fifty years in the future, each can only live up to and attempt to exceed the standards of their own day – and Moffat's own writing fails in that regard far too often for him to be throwing stones at the show's past, quite frankly. His attitude here comes across with shades of 'doth protest too much' misdirection – look over there, nothing to see here…
The writers of The Five Doctors did much the same thing when they re-created the First Doctor in 1983. Funny how some writers like to prove they’re less sexist now by projecting sexist lines onto the past, while totally failing to notice the sexism in the show as it is during their own time. Such as, for example, the fact that multiple characters played a part in this adventure and only one of them was female (no, a recording of a speech by another woman doesn't count).
But Steven Moffat has never really shown any respect for the rich history of the show he claims to love, that much has been amply demonstrated time and time again – he prefers to trample all over that history and re-make it in his own image rather than honour it.
Anyway, having watched the episode through once with the entire family (not exactly the ideal viewing circumstances), I then sat down on Boxing Day with the Other Half for a Doctor Who extravaganza – we went all the way back to 1966 to watch The Tenth Planet before re-watching Twice Upon a Time, since the one follows directly on from the other, so to speak, and the comparison between the two versions of the First Doctor felt necessary.
And here's the thing: the First Doctor was extremely paternalistic, there's no denying it. He often talked down to his companions, both male and female. He was proud and he was cantankerous and he was arrogant and he was high-handed…but he was also so much more than that. He was charming and he was mischievous, a loving and lovable rogue, and he had a full array of quirky little mannerisms that really brought him to life as a person – such a shame Bradley was unable (or not given the chance) to re-create all the varied facets and mannerisms of the character. He had a natural gravitas, an air of authority. He was warm and he was generous and he was kind and he was funny (hard to accept Bradley's Doctor as the same person when he barely even cracked a smile, still less told any stupid [non-sexist] granddad jokes). He was a grandfather who, having been separated from his beloved Susan, went around the universe adopting new surrogate granddaughters to dote on. I mean, seriously, Hartnell's Doctor would not have been stiff as a board when Bill hugged him – he'd have hugged her right the hell back because he'd have totally adopted her already by that point! He adopted every young woman he came across!
(He also has a gay companion in Big Finish, so would not be flummoxed by Bill's reference to her sexuality).
Most importantly of all, he was not sexist. He absolutely did not see his companions as simply being there to help out with the housekeeping and keep his TARDIS clean and tidy for him, as this episode tried to claim. They were his friends – his family! He wasn't particularly house-proud at all, in fact. If anyone in his TARDIS team was going to notice dust or mess it would have been Barbara herself, who'd have ragged the Doctor about it and possibly made a mental note to do something about it later but would then immediately be distracted by another adventure. Heck, Polly might have been a girly-girl, but 1960s Doctor Who more often than not portrayed that as a strength of the character, not a shameful weakness as so many male fans of the show like to believe, and I don't believe she even knew what a duster was, never mind ever employed one on the Doctor's behalf!
Equally, the First Doctor did not believe that all women were 'made of glass' – he travelled with Barbara Wright, for crying out loud, the woman who drove through a pile of Daleks with a truck, held a knife to the throat of an Aztec priest, and would have handed his backside to him (and in fact did!) if he ever talked to her the way he did in this episode. He travelled with Sara Kingdom, the ruthless badass space agent who shot her own brother in the name of a cause she believed in and gave her life to help save the universe. He knew damn well that women are not made of glass! He was more likely to let his female companions go off into the action while he remained behind than he was to send them back to the safety of the TARDIS because he considered them too fragile to expose to danger! Moffat's Doctors send their female companions back to the TARDIS for safekeeping far more frequently than Hartnell's Doctor ever did, in fact - and Steven Taylor was far more of a damsel in distress than Vicki or Dodo ever were. Hartnell's Doctor delighted in exploration and investigation and loved it when his companions entered into the spirit of things with him – he hadn't learned yet to be fearful on their behalf, the way Twelve tends to be. Even when the First Doctor was travelling with a sheltered little handmaiden from the Fall of Troy who had no frame of reference for anything she was experiencing and actually did need gentle handling, he never for a moment presumed that she was fragile or incapable, either because she was a woman or became she was primitive - Katarina may not have fully understood what was going on around her, but she played a full part in proceedings anyway. The only time he ever looked down on any of his companions as inferior was when he first met Ian and Barbara, at a time when he believed all humans were inferior - he was species-ist, not sexist, and having learned his lesson he never made that mistake again, treating all companions thereafter with love and respect, regardless of age, sex, or time of origin.
I will note for the record that yes, the 'jolly good smacked bottom' line was repeated directly from one of Hartnell's episodes. Look, I never claimed that the show was perfect in any era – but re-using the line here misses the actual point of it entirely. When Hartnell's Doctor spoke that line, it was to his granddaughter, for whom he was responsible and had been for some unknown length of time, the granddaughter he was raising (through time and space), and it came near the beginning of a six-part adventure in which his and Susan's character story specifically revolved around the fact that he still saw her as a child and only gradually, through the adventure, came to realise that she had grown up without him noticing. The line serves an actual purpose in that story and belongs to that context – it is part of his character arc, closely tied to the parent-child relationship he had with Susan specifically. He never would have said it to a complete stranger he'd only just met! Sheesh.
And you know, presenting him as such a raging sexist not only undermines the character of the Doctor himself, but also gives a false impression to new viewers unfamiliar with his era that his female companions actually were completely useless and did nothing more than hang around cleaning his TARDIS while he went on adventures, which is both completely not the case and massively disrespectful to his fabulous companions and everything they experienced and achieved. Surely half the point of re-visiting old characters like this is to whet the appetite of new viewers and make them want to see more, inspiring them to dip their toes into the Classic era for the first time, not to put them off ever wanting to see any of it!
There are some, of course, who might point to Richard Hurndall's portrayal of the First Doctor in The Five Doctors as grounds for his portrayal here, to which I will counter that this was also revisionism by a writer projecting backwards a couple of decades. Moffat himself has complained that Hurndall didn't really look or behave like Hartnell's Doctor, largely because he was written 20 years later at a time when no one could re-watch old episodes to get a feel for who the character really was. With all of Hartnell's extant episodes available to both Moffat and Bradley to review, it's such a shame that they fell into the same trap anyway. Writing the character in this way was so, so unnecessary and added nothing whatsoever to the story – there honestly was no plot-related point to it at all. It was done purely so that Moffat could pat himself on the back with how progressive the Twelfth Doctor is in comparison – and seriously, if the only way you can think of making one character look good is to undermine another, there's a serious problem with your writing right there.
So there it is. Moffat's era is over at last – and good riddance, says I. Only time will tell what the Chibnall era brings. Will it be better? Will it be worse? One thing we can say with some certainty: it will be different…and I am more than ready for that!
