That first episode was called An Unearthly Child, and is (mostly) set in what was then contemporary-era London. A pair of school teachers, concerned about a pupil, follow her home and end up in something well beyond their imagining. It's difficult to overstate just how odd this first episode must have appeared to the audiences of 1963. Fantasy and genre TV tended to involve much younger children battling against smugglers or traitors (Pathfinders, Secret Beneath The Sea, etc), or at the very least, lots of strings (Joe 90 and suchlike). Doctor Who, with a teenage girl, a older man well known to fans of The Army Game, and an attractive couple in the later part of their twenties, make up a cast that genuinely seems to have something for all the family.
It's been said time and time again (no pun intended) that this first episode is a genuinely brilliant piece of Sixties television - not just of sci-fi, but of television drama, full stop. You're not going to read anything vastly different from that opinion here. As an episode that's both an opener, and heavy on the exposition, it should collapse under the weight of its own narrative, but it's remarkably clear eyed, fast paced, and hurtles towards its conclusion.
The real masterstroke of that episode, however - certainly to modern eyes, and certainly to Matt Smith fans who might watch this episode for the first time as part of the 50 year celebrations - is that the episode isn't about the mysterious Doctor at all. Sure, he's the engine that drives the plot, but really, he's only so much of a macguffin: the story isn't even about the Unearthly Child of the title. Well trodden fan lore will have it the William Hartnell's Doctor is nothing like the incarnations that will follow him, being irritable, impatient, and distrustful, but if you watch An Unearthly Child in the wider context of the entire series, and make-believe for a moment that they're not simply making this show up as they go along, then Hartnell's characterisation is completely in keeping with what comes up four decades later. At the time of writing, Doctor Who's latest episode was the Christmas 2012 special, The Snowmen, which has Matt Smith's Doctor keeping humans at bay (while choosing to live amongst them) and only coming out to play when won over by an Earthling's insatiable curiosity. And it's this that's the driving force behind the narrative in this episode. Ian (William Russell) says as much himself: the only reason he and work colleague Barbara are getting involved with Susan's secretive private life is not much more than nosiness. It's also worth remembering that ever since the reboot of Doctor Who, the importance of the companion has been continually restated. Whether it be The Doctor sending villains to their death in A Town Called Mercy and Dinosaurs On A Spaceship, being told (and told again) that he needs a traveling companion near him, or the battle scarred Doctor in Rose referring disparagingly to the entire human race as 'stupid apes', The Doctor is not, by instinct, the sort of alien that later fanboys like to think of him as: the peacemaker who will never pick up a gun. He is a genuinely alien creature whose more peaceable and pacifist characteristics are honed by the humans he travels with. This will be underlined in the next couple of episodes, when many of the major decisions are made not by The Doctor, but by Ian Chesterton, a teacher from 1960s England.
In its first episode then, Doctor Who is, as it will be fifty years later with characters like Oswin and Rose, all about the companion. This being 1963, where the sixties have barely begun to twitch, let alone swing, those companions are not exactly young, but there's enough spark and wry humour there to relate to. Jacqueline Hill as Barbara in particular is great: managing about twenty different versions of her character without ever contradicting herself: stiffly formal when in teacher mode, visibly relaxing and playfully sardonic when Ian charms her, and - in a role that she will revisit many times over the next couple of weeks, a mother figure to Susan.
Carole Ann Ford as Susan, The Doctor's granddaughter, does excellently in what she will discover to be a somewhat thankless role in her time as part of the TARDIS crew. She manages to combine the two disparate elements of her character seamlessly: gauche fifteen year old and exotic alien. When she speaks about loving England in the twentieth century, it's with all the passion of a gap year student who's just discovered Paris in the Spring: she would be quite happy to come back to this planet, and this era, again and again, because she genuinely loves it out of all the possible destinations she could choose from. Incidentally, two bits of fan banter can be addressed here, right in the first episode: some have tried to argue that Susan and The Doctor aren't actually related by blood, a theory that seems to be shot out of the water when she addresses him as Grandfather when she isn't aware that anyone else is around, which, unless they're taking their cover story really seriously, seems to be an indication that The Doctor really is Susan's grandfather. Plus, there's a lot of fan theory around the fact that Susan claims to have come up with the name for the TARDIS, some fans thinking that suggests that perhaps she had something to do with creating the spaceship herself. But it seems more likely that she's simply telling the truth, and nothing more: that she came up with the name based on the way that it travels: Time And Relative Dimension In Space. It doesn't seem to be too much of a stretch to assume that the Time Lords back home simply adopted their name for all their craft, in much the same way that most stupid apes call their vacuum cleaners Hoovers.
It's also very much worth mentioning the TARDIS itself here. It's a brilliant invention on the part of the production team, and that's even if you ignore the looking-like-a-police-box thing, or the bigger-on-the-inside thing. The TARDIS control room works so well, and looks so modern even fifty years later simply because it makes no sense. With most spaceships in popular culture, there's at least a semblance of a traditional airplane's cockpit, with a pilot seated in front of a screen showing the craft's destination (think Star Trek). There's none of that here: a vast white room with odd, unexplained things suspended from the ceiling, mixed in with incongruous items that The Doctor has presumably nicked from the junkyard. It still looks modern fifty years later, simply because it loos so weird and alien. We'll discuss it a little more next time, as we look at the next few episodes, sometimes called 100,000 BC, and sometimes called The Tribe Of Gum, despite the fact that nobody on screen is referred to as such, but, somehow, the name stuck. As it were.
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