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If The Chase was the end of an extended aesthetic project that had begun in 1964, serving as the finale to an entire idea of what Doctor Who is, what does that make The Time Meddler? It’s in the odd position of being the story immediately after The Chase, a finale to a season that’s already ended.

Gone are Ian and Barbara, two characters rooted in the real world of 1960s Britain. They’d been pushed in various directions, being used as moral voices and given meta-fictional qualities over their two-year story within Doctor Who, but they were always recognisably people from the same world as the audience itself. The Time Meddler picks up where The Chase left off, with the TARDIS occupied solely by the Doctor and Vicki—both characters steeped in science fiction.

The Doctor, after all, is a visually Victorian character who evokes such earlier science fiction protagonists as the anonymous time traveller in H G Wells’ The Time Machine. Vicki, by contrast, is firmly rooted in then-contemporary fascinations with space exploration. This is established in The Rescue where Vicki states, following her mother’s death, her father intended to take her with him to the planet Astra where he could find new work and presumably a new life. Together the pair forms an oddly Janus-like duo, one facing back to a Victorian science fiction tradition while the other looks forward into an age of tomorrow yet to come.

To this vision—two figures representing science fiction from two different centuries—is quickly added a third.

I didn’t discuss the character of Steven Taylor much at all in The Chase, even though he was introduced in that serial as a prisoner of the Mechonoid robots. Steven isn’t really an important character in the departure of Ian and Barbara—and The Chase isn’t the story of Steven joining the TARDIS. The denouement of The Chase, rightly, focuses more on closing out a completed type of Doctor Who than it does on introducing that which is going to replace it. This is the job of The Time Meddler.

It’s an odd job to give to this serial though.

The Time Meddler is written by Dennis Spooner, who as an outgoing story editor is in some respects fulfilling much the same job that David Whitaker had done some months previously with The Rescue. Furthermore, Verity Lambert is coming to the end of her own involvement with the programme—after production wraps on The Time Meddler, she will only oversee five further episodes. This isn’t the place to be introducing a new type of Doctor Who—this looks more like the conditions for an extended epilogue—and yet lurking here is a new figure who is going to be part of the new direction Doctor Who will take well into 1966. As part of a gradual production handover, Donald Tosh has already stepped in as Spooner’s successor. It’s a role that he will fill into 1966, but with Spooner and Lambert as present creative voices it’s difficult to say whether any uniquely Toshian vision is seeing itself birthed here. That’s something that we’ll have to see play out slowly over the course of Tosh’s own tenure on the program.

So in looking at The Time Meddler, we’re still in Spooner’s world. He’s stepping in as a senior writer to oversee the introduction of a new main character, much as Whitaker had for Vicki. In this case it’s Steven Taylor.

Who is Steven, then?

Well, we actually get some of that information in The Chase—an attempt to establish why a human character is being kept prisoner within the Mechonoid city. He appears to be a pilot of some kind, referring to “flight red fifty” when he introduces himself to the TARDIS travellers, and like Vicki seems to come from a future period where mankind is exploring the stars. He knows, for instance, the purpose and history of the Mechoniods—that they were robots intended to prepare Mechanus for “the first immigrants”—and refers to vague “interplanetary wars” that suggest Earth by his time is an intergalactic power in its own right.

Steven, like Vicki, is a character rooted in the aesthetics of twentieth century science fiction. In fact we can go a little further and suppose, given Nation originally used the name “Roger Bruck” to refer to the character in early scripts, that Steven is specifically rooted in the aesthetics of pulp heroes like Buck Rogers.

All of this, of course, doesn’t have much bearing on plot of The Time Meddler. In this serial at least, Spooner is more interested in what role Steven will play within the new main cast than he is in Steven as a Buck Rogers-type. What Steven’s backstory in The Chase does do, however, is inform the aesthetic composition of this new cast that The Time Meddler is going to finetune: a character rooted in 19^th century aesthetics travelling through time and space with two youths from 20^th century science fiction. These aren’t figures from the real world anymore. The departure of Ian and Barbara wasn’t just a case of returning them to the real physical and film world of London, but also an act that untethered Doctor Who from a material world.

This has important repercussions for The Time Meddler, considering that Spooner is actually introducing a new type of historical. As the serial’s title suggests to a modern audience, this isn’t a pure historical—instead, science fiction elements beyond the main cast and the TARDIS have intruded upon the past. In this case it’s another time traveller dressed as a monk, the “time meddler” of the serial’s title. In some respects this is further developing Spooner’s approach to history. He has in both of his past serials treated the past as a theatrical space where the cast perform historical roles. Steven, as a new companion, is therefore well suited to picking up on the theatrical qualities of the historical setting in ways that the Doctor and Vicki can’t. They, after all, are used to engaging with a more materially real history through the character of Barbara—the Doctor, notably, comments that “it’s a great pity that Barbara isn’t here” as he tries to place the time period. Steven, by contrast, immediately assumes that a Viking helmet that he’s shown by the Doctor is “part of a costume” or even a toy—that far from being a real world, there’s something performative about the past.

With an eye on figuring out how Steven fits into the new TARDIS cast, Spooner pairs him up with Vicki to figure out how these two 20^th century characters function as a double act. Part of this is out of production necessity: William Hartnell is absent in the second episode, “The Meddling Monk,” due to a scheduled holiday. Given that it’d be harder for Spooner to figure out how Steven interacts with the other TARDIS travellers if he was split off into his own subplot, he’s paired up with Vicki.

It’s Vicki who initially tries to work Steven through the basic logic of the TARDIS. When Steven says that he must be delirious, with a vague recollection that the outside of the TARDIS is “very small,” Vicki is the one who tells him he wasn’t mistaken. It’s Vicki who tells him that the TARDIS is a time machine, and explains the acronym as meaning “Time and Relative Dimensions in Space.” It’s in the face of Steven’s continued scepticism that the Doctor himself actually interacts with him, and he needs to be prodded into it by Vicki:

VICKI: Doctor? He says the TARDIS isn’t a time machine.
DOCTOR: Oh, does he now?
VICKI: Tell him.
DOCTOR: I don’t see why I should, my child. He’ll learn soon enough.
STEVEN: Look, Doctor, I’ve seen some spaceships in my time, admittedly nothing like this. Well, what does this do?
DOCTOR: That is the dematerialising control and that, over yonder, is the horizontal hold. Up there is the scanner, those are the doors, that is a chair with a panda on it. Sheer poetry, dear boy. Now please stop bothering me.

Doctor Who, “The Watcher,” (Dennis Spooner)

The Doctor here seems to intentionally distance himself from Steven, claiming that he’ll just “learn soon enough” by himself as he travels with the Doctor and quickly tells Steven to “stop bothering [him].” It’s remarkably different to his initial interactions with Vicki in The Rescue, where he immediately acknowledged and validated her. He seems quite happy to brush Steven off in comparison—although there’s a hint of pride as the Doctor confides in Vicki that they’ll “show him whether this is a time machine or not.” Where the Doctor and Vicki were characters quickly aligned with one another, there’s already a hint of tension in the Doctor’s relationship with Steven.

For much of Steven’s first adventure in the TARDIS he’s actually not really the Doctor’s companion. Instead, he’s Vicki’s—and Vicki is immediately established as an intermediary between him and the Doctor. It also means, however, that much of this serial has the Doctor separated from his two companions. This seems to be part of a greater redefining of the Doctor-companion dynamic, with Vicki later stating at the end of the final episode, “Checkmate,” “He’s the crew. We’re just the passengers.”

The separation of the TARDIS team into two groups—the Doctor by himself, and Vicki and Steven exploring the world separately—creates an interesting starting point for The Time Meddler. A structure present in both The Romans and The Crusades was the division of the TARDIS team into two distinct narratives. The Doctor and Vicki would hobnob at court with various royals and nobles and get into mischief, while Ian and Barbara would find themselves engaging with the lived conditions of ordinary people—as Fustel de Coulange writes, “to reexperience an epoch” in a way that compelled them to address it on its own terms. That this division of narratives found itself drawn along aesthetic lines—the science fiction Doctor and Vicki occupying one narrative space, while the more grounded characters of Ian and Barbara occupied another—is also crucial, because it’s not one that the series can repeat with three science fiction characters. There also isn’t that same distinction between a royal court and the lives of ordinary people in The Time Meddler—there’s a rural village, sure, and there’s a monastery nearby which is framed as somehow a distinct world separate from the village, but they occupy the same sort of geographic space. As Edith, one of the villagers, explains to the Doctor “the monastery’s been deserted for years and years” before suddenly being reoccupied, but only one of the monks has been seen and “never spoken to.” Still, this isn’t the same world of nobles and peasants that was the case in either The Romans or The Crusades—the monastery is “just at the top of the hill” and is easily reached from the village—both the TARDIS travellers themselves in addition to the villagers find themselves travelling back and forth between these two locations over the course of the serial.

It’s also a very different structure. The Doctor has interacted with characters from the lower classes before, his conspiratorial relationship with Ben Daheer in The Crusade coming to mind, but not quite as he does here. Previously, the Doctor has found himself interacting more often with noble characters such as Nero, King Richard and the Princess Joanna. In The Time Meddler he’s more regularly seen in conversation with Edith. The first episode, “The Watcher,” sees the Doctor engage in small talk with her to try and determine when it is that they’ve landed:

DOCTOR: Yes, I had heard about that battle, yes, yes. The King, er, greatly improved the position no end.
EDITH: The King? Harold Godwinson? We received no help from him.
DOCTOR: You know, it seems like yesterday that the good King Edward was laid to rest. When was it?
EDITH: It was the beginning of the year.
DOCTOR: Oh, of course. Yes, yes, yes, the beginning of the year, yes, yes, yes. How silly. Yes, it’s most refreshing.
…
DOCTOR: Now, if Harold is king, and Edward was laid to rest at the beginning of the year, then it must be 1066! Yes. Judging by the appearance of these leaves, late summer. And a balmy night, a balmy night.

Doctor Who, “The Watcher,” (Dennis Spooner)

It’s a small scene, but it actually does a tremendous amount of work. Firstly, it shows the Doctor interacting with an ordinary person seemingly so as “to reexperience an epoch.” He relies upon Edith’s responses to give him historical context, and draws further conclusions from “the appearance of these leaves” in the physical world surrounding him. His dating the year to 1066, however, suggests that the Doctor is still relying on his own historical knowledge—so he’s not quite engaging with the past as de Coulanges would recommend.

This scene further clues the viewer into the worldview of the ordinary person in 1066 England, or at least what Dennis Spooner is establishing as that worldview. In this case, it’s that there’s a tension between the King, Harold Godwinson, and his subjects, and in Edith’s unquestioning acceptance of the Doctor’s description of “good King Edward” there’s a suggestion that things were better before Harold came to the throne. Seeing how Spooner depicts a character like Edith and her relationship to her society is actually very important for the narrative logic Spooner is attempting to build here.

We’ll get to the specifics of that logic and how it relates to the single monk in the monastery, but for now let’s focus on the Doctor being depicted as interacting with a character like Edith. After all, if this is something unusual in the second season—the Doctor spending extended periods of time with an ordinary person, rather than in a royal court—then this changes the Doctor’s role in the narrative. This has profound implications for how the historical functions as a genre, because now with Ian and Barbara gone from the series we have a story where it’s the Doctor depicted as somehow aligned with a more materially real world. Rather than companions from the real world having to “reexperience an epoch” and engage with what the serial presents as the material concerns of society’s peoples, it’s the Doctor—and the Doctor is quite clearly not setting aside his historical foreknowledge. The Time Meddler treats the Doctor as a dialectical figure—capable of crossing the geographies separating villagers like Edith from the Monk in his monastery, and seemingly engaging both with historical diegesis as it unfolds whilst also utilising his own foreknowledge. Indeed, the final two episodes see the Doctor engaged in a battle of wits with the Monk himself.

I’ll get into the Monk in greater detail shortly, but for now it’s important that he clearly exists in a separate narrative space to a character like Edith. As she says, the Monk has been seen “but never spoken to.” Even if this serial explores a much smaller geography compared to previous historical serials, there’s still a sense of segregated narrative spaces: the narrative world of the Monk, and that of ordinary people like Edith. Because the Monk exists in a separate narrative space, the Doctor’s interactions with both characters—the Monk and Edith—means that he crosses between narrative worlds. He bridges and converses with these two worlds, rather than finding himself isolated within a royal court. The Doctor serves as part of the serial’s greater dialectic both between history and about history.

Although this is definitely a new role for the Doctor in the second season, it’s not a new role for the character entirely. Spooner did, after all, have the character interact both with powerful politicians like Robbespierre in addition to lower class characters like the jailer of the Concierge Prison. In The Reign of Terror Spooner seemed to be trying to find new situations within which the Doctor could function as an entertaining Trickster in a variety of comedic exchanges. The Time Meddler doesn’t seem to be operating in the same way.

The Doctor’s interactions with Edith, for instance, aren’t rooted in him outwitting the woman but rather in the real connection that he forges with an ordinary person. Something else is afoot here.

This early connection between Edith and the Doctor seems to pay dividends over the course of the serial. “The Meddling Monk” for instance sees Edith seemingly trust Vicki and Steven because of their association with the Doctor, and in the fourth episode “Checkmate” she says that the Doctor had “no reason to lie” about an imminent Viking invasion. This latter scene in particular is crucial, because it depicts the villagers determining how to respond to the Doctor’s warning of a Viking invasion and the Monk’s request for beacon fires to be lit:

WULNOTH: The old man who journeyed here spoke of a Viking invasion descending on us. And the Monk asked us to light beacon fires on the clifftops.
EDITH: The old man spoke the truth. He had no reason to lie.
WULNOTH: Fires on the clifftops would guide the ships in to land. Viking ships!
EDITH: We know and respect the monastery as a place of worship. But what of a Viking spy who passes himself off as a monk?

Doctor Who, “Checkmate,” (Dennis Spooner)

The villagers “know and respect the monastery,” but the Doctor has seemingly introduced enough scepticism for Edith and her fellow villagers to doubt the Monk’s intent. Enough doubt, it seems, for them to place more value in his words than in the Monk’s. If the Monk is a character who has been seen but “never spoken to,” it seems that the Doctor’s meeting and speaking to Edith had forged a more real connection than the implicit respect that a monastery demands as “a place of worship.”

Perhaps what we’re seeing here in The Time Meddler is a response to the lesson of The Space Museum—that history can change. The Space Museum, obviously, wasn’t a historical serial. It was science fiction, and its resolution rested on Vicki somehow having a different relationship with the world around her to the other TARDIS travellers—she interacted with the Xeron youths, talked with them and “who knows, [she] might have even influenced them.” It was this actual interaction with the Xeron youths that facilitated a revolution which, ultimately, resulted in the defeat of the antagonists of that serial. Here, however, it’s the Doctor rather than Vicki who is meeting with ordinary people, talking with them and “who knows, [he] might have even influenced them.”

These parallels with The Space Museum are even more overt in the similar result of this new ethos—of meeting with people, speaking with them and influencing them. The Space Museum, after all, featured the shocking future echo of the TARDIS travellers as embalmed exhibits in a museum—a future that they earnestly tried to avert, and only averted through the actions of the Xeron youths whom Vicki had earlier inspired. Similarly “Checkmate” sees the Doctor and his companions as prisoners in the monastery, the Monk’s plans ultimately foiled due to the villagers being “influenced” by the Doctor to begin questioning his intentions and deciding to storm the monastery themselves. In both cases, the resolution to the plot is more reliant on the TARDIS travellers making themselves a part of the world of the ordinary people living there, actually interacting with them and inspiring them to perform radical acts. This is rather distinct from the problem Barbara had faced in The Aztecs too, where she attempted to assert the values of the 1960s onto Aztec society and culture. The way to change the past is not to engage in revisionist history, but rather to meet, speak to and influence the past as it exists.  

Now let’s start digging into the logic of The Time Meddler.

We can already see that interacting with the past and influencing its people can be successful, and this is in sharp contrast with Barbara’s failed approach from The Aztecs. The thing is, Spooner isn’t just juxtaposing this form of Doctor Who with a serial that was broadcast a year earlier. There’s a character lurking within The Time Meddler, a hooded watcher a top the quiet seaside cliffs, who are themselves engaging in a revisionist historical project.

The lone Monk in his monastery is also a time traveller and, in a seminal moment for Doctor Who, also possesses a TARDIS. It isn’t until the final episode, “Checkmate,” where the viewer is finally aware of the character’s motivations, and they’re firmly rooted in a historiographic question—in this case, to what extent was the Norman conquest of England in 1066 responsible for shaping European geopolitics over the subsequent millennium?  

MONK: I, I want to improve things.
DOCTOR: Improve things? Improve things, yes, that’s good. Very good. Improve what, for instance?
MONK: Well, for instance, Harold, King Harold, I know he’d be a good king. There wouldn’t be all those wars in Europe, those claims over France went on for years and years. With peace the people’d be able to better themselves. With a few hints and tips from me they’d be able to have jet airliners by 1320! Shakespeare’d be able to put Hamlet on television.

Doctor Who, “Checkmate,” (Dennis Spooner)

To hear the Monk explain it, he believes that the wars between France and England were responsible for cultural and technological stagnation—that if Europe had experienced centuries of peace, technological innovations like powered flight and television could have been achieved centuries earlier. He’s not the first time traveller, however, to pose such a “what if” scenario—Barbara had, in The Aztecs, similarly questioned if changing the nature of Aztec society might save that civilisation from destruction at the hands of Cortes and the Spanish. There, Barbara’s failure is entwined with her struggle against Tlotoxl. In The Time Meddler, the Monk fails for different reasons. As a character seen “but never spoken to,” it’s implied that he had intentionally distanced himself from the ordinary peoples living near him. Dennis Spooner, after all, alleges that King Harold was not loved by his people—something that the Doctor discovered within minutes of actually meeting with Edith and talking to her. The Monk’s failure, then, is arguably rooted in his separation from the material concerns of ordinary people.

This creates a dialectic of sorts within the narrative of The Time Meddler between two different modes of history—one rooted firmly in meeting, speaking to and influencing ordinary people and an assertive approach. This seems like a new trick that Dennis Spooner has picked up—a dialectic isn’t really the intent of something like The Reign of Terror or The Romans.

There is one way, however, in which The Time Meddler clearly emerges from out of Spooner’s previous work.

As in both of his previous solo-scripts, Spooner is deeply interested in ideas of performance and historical theatre. The Monk, after all, is a character wearing a costume—he’s set himself up in the abandoned monastery as a quiet, secluded headquarters from which he can set about his plans. The habit that he wears is a costume, and the Monk persona a role that he is performing and does perform throughout the serial. It seems, then, that the Monk is an actor who has cast himself within a plot of his own making—a recurring feature of Spooner scripts, where characters such as Ian and the Doctor have found themselves “cast” in various roles within the historical diegesis.

The Monk is slightly different though. He hasn’t been cast in this role through a case of mistaken identity, as was the case of the Doctor in The Romans or Ian in The Reign of Terror. The Monk has deliberately planned all of this.

Rather than merely being an actor within historical theatre, the Monk seems to be an almost authorial figure. This is a trend that we’ve seen throughout the show’s second season, and is perhaps the one major recurring theme that The Chase didn’t in fact pick up on—of antagonists with very real, material authorship of their worlds.

If the Monk is another in a line of villains as authors, an archetype mostly clearly demonstrated on television in the character of Bennett from The Rescue, it must be admitted that his authorial powers are limited. They exist—he is, after all, an actor playing the part of the Monk in a plot of his own devising, and in using a gramophone recording of monk chants he’s able to manipulate the diegetic soundscapes of The Time Meddler to create the illusion of a thriving monastic order residing in the abandoned monastery. That the Monk has access to such an anachronistic prop as a gramophone reveals the extent to which he is reliant on his powers as a time traveller to function as an author: without these tricks afforded to him by his time travelling abilities, the Monk can’t write his own narratives.

It’s for this reason that the third episode (“A Battle of Wits”) ends on its iconic cliffhanger, revealing the interior of the Monk’s TARDIS.

The TARDIS, after all, has long been associated with television—something that has most recently been evident in The Chase, juxtaposing the televisual world of Doctor Who and the TARDIS with a real world viewed through the Time-Space Visualiser. The TARDIS has always been a “machine that is absolutely new and whose presence compels us to imagine a different way of conceiving our world,” but this is clearly not how the Monk uses his TARDIS. Instead, the Monk uses his TARDIS as a means to facilitate his acts of authorship.

In their analysis of the Marlowe play The Jew of Malta, Sara Munson Deats and Lisa S. Starks describe the character Barabas as a “playwright-director” whose overreach culminates in “a clumsy solo performance”—something that is clearly applicable to the Monk. He is, after all, engaged in his own “solo performance,” reliant on the time-travelling abilities of his TARDIS to pull off his plan to assist King Harold and rewrite the history of Europe. He distances himself from the villagers, rendering him a lonely villain susceptible to a character like the Doctor who actually does engage with those same villagers. The Monk’s possession of his own TARDIS becomes a further means by which the villain can be defeated. Without a TARDIS, he no longer has authorial power—and the TARDIS, with its links with the very medium of television itself, is a powerful facilitator of authorship. If it derives its power from its likeness to television, capable of doing “what seemed impossible” like “fit[ting] an enormous building into… a smaller sitting room,” then the Doctor’s act of removing this ability from the Monk’s own TARDIS robs him of a TARDIS’s televisual properties.

Lucarotti determined that the only way for Barbara to fail in her efforts to change history was to match her with a character who possessed their own narrative ontology. For Spooner, the resolution to his dialectical serial exploring how time travellers relate to history is to imbue the Monk with authorial characteristics—to write a villain who doubles as playwright—and link his powers of authorship to his nature as a time traveller. Robbing the Monk of time travel robs him of his ability to function as an author. The Monk isn’t a radically new villain imposing a radically new means of engaging with history. Instead what we have here is Dennis Spooner, the steady pair of hands who had supported Verity Lambert in her push to make Doctor Who “very exciting” hedonic television, finally seizing upon an answer to the ideological challenge that John Lucarotti made in The Aztecs.

You can’t rewrite history, not one line. You can only meet the past, interact with it, and influence its peoples to write their own futures.