Spearhead from Space, Episode 1

Well. That was more exciting than I'd expected.

As I said in my last post, I've already seen Spearhead from Space. Still, I decided to rewatch it so I could get the full sense of watching all the episodes of this era in order. And boy was it worth it.

This was my first time watching a Classic Who episode in a while. I always tend to think of Classic Who as being a step down from NuWho not only in special effects but also in excitement and character development. Naturally, I was very surprised to find that I could empathize with so many of the characters. So this review of Part 1 is mostly going to be a character list.

The Doctor. Number Three. Jon Pertwee.

Reverse the polarity!

The first we see of Three*, the TARDIS materializes in a wood and he falls out of it into the bushes. Within a little while, he's taken to a hospital where everyone discovers that Hey! he has two hearts and Hey! his blood isn't human. The Brigadier visits him, he almost gets kidnapped, and then for the cliffhanger, he gets shot in the head (I think?).

I'll admit right up front that I have no real idea what Three's character is going to be like. I've seen three stories with him in them, and other than the fact that he's good at fighting and wants his TARDIS to work, I know nothing.

I think I'm going to like him, though.

Right off the bat, he references the ending of The War Games, (or Season 6B, if you believe in it--yes, yes I know The Two Doctors pretty much makes it canon). "I can't have changed that much, surely. Oh dear, I must see what they've done to me." He's unhappy with his appearance he's not ginger and his new kidneys aren't the right color, saying that it isn't him at all. I really like that. It always seems so strange when the Doctor goes right from a very sad ending saying goodbye to all his companions and all that to perfectly happy with his new body. You could say that Ten** was more concerned with reassuring Rose and Eleven was just happy to still have legs, but it's very jarring. I mean, if I had just gotten a whole new body and mind, it would definitely take me a while to get used to it. I'm sure I would be unhappy at first (about a little more than hair, or kidney, color), no matter how good the new model was. Then again, I'm not a Time Lords, so what do I know?

The other thing that's really great about him is his wheelchair escape. I had completely forgotten that was in the episode. He's getting kidnapped, and I'm going "Oh crap, what's going to happen?" and then suddenly he breaks away, still in the wheel chair, and uses it to go down this giant hill and speed away from them. That was the moment when I started thinking, This guy is the Doctor.

Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart

The Brigadier is skeptical

See, I know his name. I mean, for a while I thought his first name was Lethbridge, and there was even a point where I didn't know what a Brigadier was and thought that was his first name, because the lady at the nursing home that the Doctor calls in The Wedding of River Song calls him Brigadier, which seemed strangely formal if it was a title. I also know that he's the father of Kate Stewart, who currently heads UNIT, and has an office in the Tower of London. With remote control ravens of death.

He clearly is someone with a lot of authority over a secret branch of the military. That, in and of itself, is cool.

Added to that, within the first few minutes of showing up, he tells Liz Shaw (I'll get to her in a moment) about aliens, orders an armed guard around a police box, and tells the press that UNIT being at the hospital is a training exercise.

A training exercise. Yes, that's right.

But aside from all the coolness surrounding him, the Brigadier seems to be a very practical man. While he does believe in aliens (he says he's met the Doctor before, so he'd have to), he doesn't seem to be the type to assume that alien or strange forces are at work in whatever he's doing. When he thinks he's found the Doctor, he's disappointed by the fact that he doesn't recognize the man at all. Rather than assuming that maybe the Doctor has changed his appearance (which, frankly, given that the Doctor's making all these comments about his face like he just got it, is the most logical conclusion), he thinks the man he's talking to is mad. He picks the most ordinary conclusion, not necessarily the most logical one. I wonder if that'll hold up in later episodes.

Liz Shaw

Is it just me, or does she look
like Princess Leia?

I really don't have much to go on here for Liz. I know she's going to be the Doctor's companion/assistant, but from her single scene, we don't get much information.

She's skeptical about the existence of aliens. That's not unusual. Everyone's skeptical about the existence of aliens. I imagine that'll go right out the window once she meets one.

She's obviously very smart. She's got about a ten degrees in a hundred different subjects by the look of it. That'll help if Three turns out to be the sort of Doctor who can stand his human companions' inability to keep up with him, but other than that, it doesn't tell me much.

Maybe there'll be more of her in the next episode. I don't honestly remember.

Sam Seeley

If RTD wrote this episode, he'd
get killed off for sure

I was originally going to call him Poacher Guy. Because that's definitely his name. I'm pretty sure he's name isn't stated in the episode, but a little Google-ing and a look at the Tardis Data Core Wiki, and I have a name for him. 

Frankly, right now, I'm not sure how he's important. I'm not sure it's ever explained who he is or why we're following what he's doing, other than that he found that pulsy-lighty thing. 

Still, I don't remember that well. I could be wrong.

Others

There are other characters in this story with character development, obviously. The UNIT soldier, the guy in the phone booth, etc. But these are the only ones who are being followed by the camera, so to speak. 

Yay for characterization in Classic Who. Hopefully it will continue.

Side Note: Parallels

It's interesting to see how many parallels can be drawn between this story and later stories. Seven also ended up in a hospital shortly after arriving on earth in the TARDIS, but unlike Three, he ended up in one that decided that heart surgery was the right option for someone who had abnormal biology, rather than the more sensible course here of simply trying to figure out what he is. Which is why Seven became Eight in the TV Movie but we don't see Tom Baker stumbling out of the morgue here.

Also like Eight, he wants the TARDIS key, though Eight has one stowed in a cubby beneath the P on the sign, while he has it in his shoes. (As a side note, I always wondered about that key in the P. Did he get rid of that during the Time War so the Daleks couldn't steal the TARDIS? It's never seen in NuWho. But then again, Eleven snaps his fingers to open the TARDIS door, doesn't he? Isomorphic controls. He doesn't really need a key anymore.)


Three's regeneration is also similar to Ten and Five's in that he spends most of his Post-Regeneration Trauma stage asleep. Which I suppose is better than trying to strangle his companion, but not quite as good as fish fingers and custard.

Side Note: My Notes

I'm taking notes as I watch these episodes. This section'll have my most strange/significant reaction notes.

Ten a minute. Isn't that really slow? Like especially for someone with two hearts.

At the hospital, they measure the Doctor's heartbeat, and say that it's settled down to ten a minute. Ten heartbeats a minute? He has two hearts. In the TV Movie, they said his heartbeat was going crazy. This is insanely slow for a human, much less a Time Lord. Unless that means something else and I didn't understand it. Just a random bit that confused me. 

Poor Doctor. And he didn't want to regenerate either. THOSE MEAN TIME LORDS!

Time Lords. More important than
the existence of time, apparently.

Nothing has changed. Literally nothing. There's still Post-Regeneration Trauma. The Doctor still doesn't want to regenerate (I'm looking at you Ten--twice). The Time Lords are still mean (The End of Time). And when they're not mean, they're usually helping fix a problem that they caused in the first place (Time of the Doctor). I don't have much hope for their 2.47 billion children growing up to be any better. Still, it's the first indication that my theory has some truth to it. The Time Lords exiling the Doctor will be a source of great annoyance at the very least.

This feels rather RTD right now. 

Reading the Tardis Wiki article for this episode, I realize that RTD actually did use this episode as a template for Rose. 

He's very much the Doctor. Go Three!

Wheelchair escape. That's all I'm saying.

Final Note: The Cliffhanger

In the words of Ten, "What!? What? What." Here I was, just watching the story, wondering what was going to happen next, when suddenly the credits role. Just like that. The Doctor gets shot in the head, and I don't know what happened to him. I did not expect the episode to end there, so abruptly. I honestly did watch this episode before, but I don't remember to Doctor getting shot!

My prediction: They missed. Simple as that. I know that's been a cliffhanger. Wasn't it a cliffhanger for The War Games? He's going to get shot, and then they missed.

I know he goes back to the hospital, but even the Doctor can't survive getting shot in the head, so that can't be why.

We shall see, we shall see. In the next post, in fact, when I watch Spearhead from Space, Episode 2***.

*It's easier to refer to the Doctors by their numbers than to type out Third Doctor or Tenth Doctor or Fifth Doctor. I know some people don't like calling Doctors by their numbers, but I'm doing it this way for the sake of ease.

** The Doctors, in order, are as follows: One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, War, Nine, Ten (and TenToo, the metacrisis) , Eleven, Twelve. I'm not renumbering because the War Doctor and Ten's first regeneration count against the limit, for the sake of clarity.

***Not all my posts will be this long. They'll probably contain various features from this post, but won't have all of them. I'm just trying things out here.