A Journey Of A Thousand Eons...: 4. The Firemaker (An Unearthly Child, Episode Four)

This wrap up to our first story will always be remembered for me as the one where we find out that the cave people we’ve been following may not have learned about fire, but they did learn about underpants before meeting the Doctor and his friends.

The deets: The crew is dragged back to the tribe, The Doctor becomes the first lawyer and successfully defends Za from the charge of killing the Old Woman, Ian makes fire by rubbing two sticks together (which would be more effective if the two sticks were actually touching when said fire ignites), Za kills Ka in an...exciting?...fight scene (a scene that clearly displays the briefs and undershirts of the combatants), Susan figures out a way for our heroes to pretend to be dead long enough for them to get to the Tardis and escape to an unknown planet that seems to be safe...or Is It?

Oh, and Barbara...I think she trips once during their escape. Jacqueline Hill really get the short end of the stick throughout this inaugural story.

This is supposed to be the Big Climax, and it is here that we really see how low the budget is, as the tribe chasing the heroes through the forest is portrayed by a series of close-ups with stage hands off camera waving twigs around.  I was also somewhat surprised at how Za and Hur’s personalities change before our eyes--Hur is no longer as scheme-y as she was in the previous episode and Za suddenly becomes a lot shrewder than he was during the story up to then.  I get the sense that these changes are more about wrapping up the story rather than educating the chilluns.

The give and take between Ian and The Doctor still seems to be the spine of the story--Ian chooses to defer to the Doc when asked who leads the trial, but seems to challenge the Doctor when they’re back in the Tardis.  And I still really like the way Hartnell is still not softening his portrayal of the Doctor....once he’s back in a position of relative power, he is willfully deceptive to Ian’s questions.  I like this Doctor’s unpredictability; I suspect one of the reasons I don’t care for a lot of the NuWho incarnations is because there’s no ambivalence to their position as a Savior of Humanity (and also why my favorite Doctor is Colin Baker, who was dwelling in a similar shade of grey during his too-short tenure) and the sense of the Doctor not being necessarily clear as to where he stands brings a real flavor to this crew.

The last few minutes of the episode teases the next serial, and here’s where the true fun begins.  This is a significant serial....but the next one literally threw Britian into a pop culture tizzy and cemented Who’s identity.

Next time, we meet...The Daleks.