This post was supported by 4 backers on Patreon – pledge as little as $1 today for early access to the final First Doctor blogs! If the Patreon hits $25 per post, the Idiot Box will cover Patrick Troughton’s era of Doctor Who. You could also make a one-off donation to my Ko-fi 🙂

Which writers have defined the third season of Doctor Who to this point?

If we were to ask this question of the first two seasons, for instance, a few names readily emerge as being the most influential. Terry Nation and John Lucarotti surely stand out as the most prominent guest-writers, and Lucarotti’s 1964 serial The Aztecs posed profound ideological challenges that the programme has been grappling with for the better part of two years. The first writer to attempt to respond to those challenges was Dennis Spooner, pushing the historical-genre as rooted in acts of costuming and performance. And, as I boldly proclaimed in the earliest blog posts, the programme’s first story editor—David Whitaker—stands tall as the programme’s first creative genius. He is also responsible for allowing a racialised rot to take root in the programme.

Turning to the third season, however, the high rate of turn-over comparatively leaves us grasping at straws. It is possible to argue that Donald Tosh was responsible for, both literally and on various thematic levels, pushing the Doctor as a more distanced figure. But was he directly responsible for this, or merely overseeing a period where other writers began to move in that general direction?

A stronger case I think can be made for Donald Cotton, the writer we’ve most recently looked at, but even in Cotton’s case this comes with a major concession: his work is best understood within the collaborative framework of television production.

The Myth Makers, from what little visual material survives, appears to have benefitted considerably from the way Michael Leeston-Smith used the camera to emphasise the themes of Cotton’s script. Similarly, it was director Rex Tucker’s choice to use “The Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon” as a chorus that further pushes The Gunfighters as a serial into a full participant in its own fictionalisation. When it comes to definitive writers in this period, each name seems to come accompanied by a major asterisk.

None of this is really helped by the third season being so turbulent, arguably to the point of incoherence. Consider the first season of Doctor Who. It began as an exploration of anxieties about the Cold War and the atomic bomb through estranged, Brechtian lenses. This was so well established that director Mervyn Pinfield used the first two episodes of The Sensorites to play with this logic in filming Peter R Newman’s scripted narrative substitution, while The Reign of Terror transposed Cold War anxieties backwards onto the French Revolution. Going into its second season the programme used The Dalek Invasion of Earth to switch from a series about estrangement towards one that embraced hedonic excess, a trend that culminated in The Chase (which, funnily enough, brings us just up to the start of Tosh’s credited tenure as story editor with the following serial: The Time Meddler).

Of course, all of this is trying to find a coherent thematic or aesthetic through-line rather than anything specifically plot-y. It also runs the risk of being overly reductive, trying to contain seasons of over forty episodes within the space of a single sentence. However, it does mean that it’s possible to see how the third season isn’t actually as incoherent as it first appears: much like the first season, it too has been defined by renewed anxieties about the Cold War and the atomic bomb. This time these themes are tied up in the decline of Britain as an imperial power and an eroding of the Doctor as a para-social protagonist. It’s an erosion which was accelerated by the departure of Vicki in The Myth Makers, which further raised questions about the hedonic spirit of adventure which had defined the programme during its second season.

There is… a lot there. It’s easy to see how all of this might add up to thematic incoherence. At the very least, it certainly doesn’t suggest Doctor Who is as confident and brazen as it was under Lambert. The new companion Dodo has recently restored some semblance of stability to Doctor Who, reasserting that the programme trends towards an adventurous spirit even in spite of an aesthetic reaction towards Lambert’s vision.

And yet that’s what it feels like. Stabilisers. If Doctor Who was hurtling towards another breaking point, it stepped away from any ramifications the instant Dodo burst into the TARDIS at the end of The Massacre.

So the tensions linger, suppressed but not resolved. How does Doctor Who manage to respond to themes which have been percolating within its frames since it began its third season in September of 1965? How does it finally reconcile the erosion of the Doctor’s para-social bond with his audience, and provide the programme the means of addressing these geopolitical tensions that have caused it such anxiety for so long?

Enter Ian Stuart Black. 

He debuts here with The Savages, yet another missing serial in a season that has been overwhelmingly missing. This has usually meant that I’ve been left grasping for whatever visual evidence remains to make points about a serial’s direction—The Myth Makers comes to mind, for example—however here we’re dealt an odd struck of luck. For the first time since The Crusades we have telesnaps: photographic slithers that preserve tangible hints of how director Christopher Barry uses his camera to film Black’s scripts.

It’s also the first serial to drop individual episode titles, instead referring to its constituent parts as “Episode 1” through “Episode 4.” It formalises a separation of Doctor Who into distinct segments and asserts that there is a unity which binds those segments together. Rather than being a sprawling, episodic adventure such as Marco Polo or The Chase, this is explicitly a story about a singular concept—in this case, the “savages”—told in four parts. If we’re looking at ways in which Innes Lloyd and Gerry Davis are reshaping Doctor Who to fit a new aesthetic vision, this certainly changes the aesthetics of the programme in a subtle but important way.

Setting aside this context, let’s talk about Ian Stuart Black. Like Williams Emms before him, Black had been a regular viewer of Doctor Who for some time before he pitched a script to the production office. In Emms’ case this resulted in a script that seemed to harken back to the programme’s earliest days in late-1963, featuring a dead world which will “explode into nothing” in “the flash of the atomic fire.” I wasn’t particularly impressed with Galaxy Four, but in returning to the programme’s first principles it certainly helped ease the third season back towards the more tense and anxious narratives of the first season.

The Savages feels like a book-end to this creative period: it too returns to first principles.

In the case of The Savages, this return actually occurs in the final moments of The Gunfighters. As the TARDIS lands, the Doctor proudly announces that he knows “exactly where we are… very much in the future… an age of peace and prosperity.” He and his companions quickly move to leave the TARDIS as the camera zooms in on the TARDIS scanner. What the viewer sees in this moment, repeated in the opening scene of The Savages, isn’t an image from “very much in the future.” Instead, like a hunter stalking its prey, a ragged man in animal skins moves ever closer to the camera.

We’ve seen this cliffhanger before, albeit from a different perspective. When we saw this before, the TARDIS stood atop a desolate hill as the camera depicted a mysterious shadow looming over that lonely police box. We have returned to the very beginning: The Tribe of Gum.

Black certainly uses the companions to further this impression in the first episode proper. Dodo very quickly spots “a man in animal skins… like a savage from the Stone Age,” and Steven himself muses that the Doctor must have been wrong: “we must be back at the beginning of man.”

It’s more complicated than this, however. Although The Savages begins by invoking the imagery of The Tribe of Gum, there’s something else going on. The “savages,” watching the Doctor as he explores the shrubland by himself, note that he isn’t carrying a “light gun” and question whether he is “one of the leaders.” Light guns aren’t very Stone Age-core, so although the people might look prehistoric the serial is set “very much in the future.” The presence of these seemingly prehistoric men, however, certainly suggests this is not the “age of peace and prosperity” that the Doctor initially assumed it was.

There’s a tension here. It’s not just in how the men appear to speak fearfully of the “leaders” and the “light gun.” The tension is in why this supposed “age of peace and prosperity” can on the one hand have very prehistoric-looking peoples on the one hand and yet gesture towards such advanced technology as a “light gun” with the other.

Within the space of a few minutes, Black has already begun to problematise the claim that this is “an age of peace and prosperity” and suggest the existence of two very different societies living opposite one another. It’s not too long before that second society is introduced, residing within a city and led by Elders who “are waiting to welcome” the Doctor to their planet.

Let’s step back for a moment and just look at the geography that this serial has very quickly sketched out. There is a barren, rocky ravine where the TARDIS has landed. Beyond that is a forested shrubland, where lurking amongst the bushes are people living in prehistoric conditions, and a technologically advanced city where the Elders preside. This geography doesn’t just evoke that of The Tribe of Gum, with its own barren wastes and dark forests. After all, The Tribe of Gum has already seen its geography echoed—a serial intentionally mirroring the events of The Tribe of Gum. I refer, of course, to The Dead Planet.

Black isn’t simply retracing the thematic shape of those earlier serials however. A major theme of both The Tribe of Gum and The Dead Planet was how atomic weapons shape and affect societies. In the former it is possible to read the serial’s image of fire, and fire as a gift from Orb, as being representative of the atomic bomb—by contrast, The Dead Planet is utterly unsubtle in being about society after a nuclear war.

Perhaps we could argue that Black is returning to images from The Tribe of Gum in service of building an alternate take on The Dead Planet. A light gun, after all, could be read as a technological evolution of the use of fire. What is clear here however is that Black seems uninterested in using The Savages to explore the same anxieties of about atomic weapons that defined those earlier serials. Instead its haunted by a different tension, one which involves the seemingly prehistoric “savages” and the urban-living Elders.

“Savages.” It’s a word I feel uncomfortable using without treating it like a quote. According to Merriam-Webster, it’s a word with multiple uses and meanings: as an adjective, for instance, it can mean a people “lacking complex or advanced culture,” whereas when used as a noun it can refer to “a person belonging to a primitive society” or “a brutal person.” Some of these meanings clearly overlap: “a person belonging to a primitive society,” for instance, might be described as “lacking complex of advanced culture” as a result. To refer to a person or people as “savage” is a judgement. Its use in the serial’s title invites us to judge its subject as the “savages.” Within the serial the Elders, Dodo and Steven all use the word to refer to a people living in more prehistoric conditions, seemingly judging them for “lacking complex or advanced culture.”

Of course, perhaps Black is being ironic. As it turns out, the Elder’s technologically advanced “age of peace and prosperity” is built upon “extracting life’s force from human beings, and absorbing it into themselves” through a process euphemistically called “transference.” The Elders specifically use the “savages” in this process. Black, then, is depicting a society built upon the literally vampiric exploitation of one people by another. The leader of the Elders, Jano, justifies this practice by stating that “life preys on other forms of life.” Earlier, he had even gone full eugenicist-on-main:

JANO: …with our knowledge, we can make the brave man braver, the wise man wiser, the strong man stronger. We can make the beautiful girl more beautiful still. You will see the advantages of that in the perfection of our race.

Doctor Who, The Savages, “Episode One,” (Ian Stuart Black)

With all of this laid out, the Doctor explodes in a moment of righteous fury. He accuses the Elders of “protracted murder” and demands that they “put an end to this inhuman practice.” What’s perhaps most interesting, however, is how the Doctor frames his opposition to the Elders and this system of exploitation that they’ve constructed:

DOCTOR: Oppose you? Indeed I am going to oppose you, just in the same way that I oppose the Daleks or any other menace to common humanity.

Doctor Who, The Savages, “Episode Two,” (Ian Stuart Black)

We can read this line in a few different ways. On the one hand, it appears to make the serial’s aesthetic gestures towards The Dead Planet explicitly textual: Black is writing a serial where human beings have built an exploitative system that makes them morally equivalent to Daleks.

Or perhaps the line serves to emphasise The Savages as something ironic. Although characters refer to the exploited under-class as “savages,” surely the real savages are those performing a Dalek-like and “inhuman practice”?

This ironic intent can be seen clearly in the serial’s original title: “The White Savages.” In this earlier draft of the serial, Ian Stuart Black had intended to write an anti-apartheid narrative where a technologically-advanced black elite oppressed and exploited the white “savages.” The intent is clearly to reveal apartheid as an injustice by transposing the exploitation of black bodies onto white ones: if it’s bad when it happens to fictional white people, it should be equally bad when it happens in reality to black people.

It’s a very Wellsian tradition of science fiction. Elspeth Kydd writes that Wells’ War of the Worlds was “an allegory for colonial expansion,” noting that through a “reversal of the power axis” London, “the heart of empire, becomes the target of the Martian’s colonizing force” (sic). We can see how Black similarly intended to perform a “reversal of the power axis”—by making a white population the “savage” and exploited underclass to black eugenicists. Chal, the wizened leader of the “savages,” even states that the serial takes place on an “island”—is it possible that Black was going so far as to imply The Savages takes place in a kind of twisted future-Britain? It’s not unreasonable to assume that a reversal of apartheid might go straight to “the heart of empire.”

And yet… none of this reflects well upon the optics of the narrative.

After all, as originally conceived the resolution to the layers of oppression and injustice in The Savages is for a white population to overthrow and keep black power in check. In attempting to critique the apartheid project, Ian Stuart Black was flirting with a narrative that “evokes those same fears of the Other that were used in racist discourse to justify” apartheid.

Thank fuck someone decided not to depict the Elders as black. Apart from their leader Jano, played by Frederick Jaegar in blackface, the Elders are ultimately presented as being as white as the “savages” they oppress.

Let’s talk about Jano for a moment. When the Doctor declares his intent to oppose the Elders in the climax of the second episode, Jano has him arrested and subjected to the transference process. It certainly suggests that the process is a form of punishment of the unlike: socially and ideologically. Jano intends to use the process to take the Doctor’s life force for himself. Or, well, he pitches the idea to his chief scientist, Senta, as a noble and selfless act of scientific caution: “it would not be right to jeopardise the safety of any other members of the city… it is for that reason that I will take the risk.” As Senta explains, they’ve never attempted to “transfer such a high form of life” before. “Anything might happen.”

So what does happen?

SENTA: Are you all right, Jano? For a moment I was afraid that—
JANO: Hmm? What’s all the fuss about? I’m quite all right. The trouble with you people on this planet is that you don’t—
SENTA: What do you mean, Jano? You belong to this planet. You’re one of us.
JANO: One of? Yes, yes of course. I’m afraid I’m not quite myself… After an experience like that, one takes time to become adjusted. I suppose my two young friends… Steven and Dodo, the child with the ridiculous name.
SENTA: The strangers?
JANO: Oh, strangers to you, perhaps, but I have known them both for… Yes, yes, of course. The strangers.

Doctor Who, The Savages, “Episode Three,” (Ian Stuart Black)

What happens is that Jano changes, and Frederick Jaegar’s performance of Jano changes in turn. Having taken the Doctor’s life force, Jano starts to perform as the Doctor. Although we’re missing footage of Jaegar’s performance, surviving audio suggests that he alters the pitch of his voice in this scene to better reflect Hartnell’s. Additionally, at a script-level, Black writes Jano as adopting some of the Doctor’s vocal tics—the questioning “hmmm,” for instance. The overall impression appears to be that some aspect of the Doctor has awoken in Jano’s body. This is certainly how the Doctor sees it, stating in the fourth episode that:

DOCTOR: [Jano] wanted my intellect. You got it, and along with it, you received a little conscience… You see, Jano is now saddled with the sense of right and wrong, which makes him an explosive element in a civilisation such as his.
…
JANO: All I know is that since the experiment I have not been sure of myself. I have grown aware of the evil that we have done and I am determined to end it.

Doctor Who, The Savages, “Episode Four,” (Ian Stuart Black)

The Doctor claims that Jano’s moral realisation is a result of the transference process, and specifically Jano acquiring aspects of the Doctor’s own moral compass. In fact, we could go so far as to say that the tide of moral consciousness arising in Jano during the last two episodes of The Savages is a fact for which the Doctor himself is ultimately responsible.

Why phrase it this way? Well, I’m intentionally twisting the words of British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan, whose 1960 speech to the South African parliament attributed the “national consciousness which is now rising in Africa” to “the achievements of western civilisation.” Which is pretty condescending, as if the peoples of Africa needed imperialism before they could be nations in their own right. Considering that Jano is portrayed by Jaegar in blackface, the viewer is invited to see him as being an ethnic character. His moral realisation being a result of the transference of the Doctor’s aspect to Jano, and that it is only after this process that Jano “is now saddled with the sense of right and wrong,” suggests something essentially moral about the Doctor. Considering Hartnell’s character has long been costumed as an Edwardian gentleman, the optics of a villainous black character needing to acquire a “sense of right and wrong” from an old white man aesthetically from the early 20^th century is ehhhhhhhhhhhh.

It’s easy to see why Black has done this. Clearly he is trying to depict the Doctor as an essential catalyst for societal upheaval, albeit a role he performs more passively here. We could even see the basic gist of this plot—the antagonist being overwhelmed by the Doctor’s conscience—as furthering a theme lingering in the programme since The Space Museum. There, the Doctor states that having “met people, spoken to them and who knows… [maybe] even influenced them” leads to those same peoples to taking control of their own destinies and the worlds around them. In this case, Jano is literally influenced by the Doctor—he has received a part of the Doctor’s own moral aspect—and aids the “savages” in infiltrating the city and destroying the transference technology.

To be fair, the outright destruction of the transference technology is a radical solution to the exploitation Black depicts in The Savages.

Compare this to the way that the Doctor chastised the human Guardians in The Ark, who had treated the alien Monoids “like slaves” before the Monoids rose up and “repaid [the Guardians] in kind.” I suggested that this was a sign that Doctor Who was limited in how far it could judge and challenge the legacy of an empire built upon the “racial superiority of the world’s colonisers.” I described Hartnell as performing these lines like a schoolmaster: taking aside troublesome students and asking them to set aside their differences and get along. That’s not what Black does here in The Savages: although the episode is lost, brief footage from the final episode depicts the act of destruction as the Doctor, his companions, Jano and the “savages” destroy the machinery which had been used to transfer life force from the “savages” to the Elders. The Doctor even endorses radical action, sharing a brief exchange with Dodo:

DOCTOR: You know, my dear, there’s something very satisfying in destroying something that’s evil, don’t you think?
DODO: Yes!

Doctor Who, The Savages, “Episode Four,” (Ian Stuart Black)

So there is a recognition that the exploitation depicted in The Savages is inhuman and Dalek-like, and Black depicts an uprising as not only the means to overthrow such a system but as political action endorsed by the Doctor. If Jaegar wasn’t portraying Jano in blackface, this honestly wouldn’t be as messy as it is.

But he did portray Jano in blackface. It’s a fact of this serial, and in its own way it limits how adequately The Savages can challenge the “racial superiority of the world’s colonisers.”

Further adding to the difficulties The Savages faces in this area is how Ian Stuart Black handles the departure of Steven. He’s a character I feel I’ve struggled to really grapple with over the course of this project (not helped either by the delays that have affects the third season posts), and now his tenure has ended. If this is the last opportunity I have to discuss Steven, and Steven’s role within Doctor Who, then I need to set aside some space here to grapple with who he is, what he has become, and how his departure plays into the other issues Black has tried to explore throughout The Savages.

Steven was initially inspired by characters like Buck Rogers from future-war literature, a science-fiction genre that was built upon the “racial superiority of the world’s colonisers.” Rogers himself, for instance, was a hero whose role was to help “white America reassert itself” over an “occupying force” of foreigners.

Crucially, however, Steven has not worked in this register for quite some time, if at all. The Dalek’s Master Plan was the serial most indebted to future-war literature, and there it was Sara Kingdom who came across as far more derived from a Buck Rogers-tradition than Steven. Instead he’s been more defined by a sceptical and practical approach to the world around him. In fact, Steven has increasingly been both costumed and written as something of an everyman for much of the third season. Far from being the protagonist of an imperialist narrative, then, Steven has been pushed into being an increasingly ordinary character. Matthew Kilburn, writing about the lingering legacy of Donald Tosh over the third season, suggests that Steven was both Tosh’s “voice of human reason as well as morally-inspired impetuousness.”

We could, perhaps, see aspects of this “morally-inspired impetuousness” throughout the first half of the third season. Whereas it’s the Doctor who calls out the Elders for being Dalek-like here, back in The Ark it was Steven who condemned the Guardians for their own racism: “that, unfortunately, tells me only one thing… You still fear the unknown, like everyone else before you.”

Perhaps this begins to gesture towards why Steven departs here: whereas he has previously been used to morally condemn the “racial superiority of the world’s colonisers,” here it’s the Doctor who fills that space. Does this mean that the reason Steven leaves, on one level at least, is because he fills a role that is now moving towards the Doctor?

It’s possible to see this reflected in the nature of Steven’s departure. Having finished destroying the machinery used to transfer the life force of the “savages” to the Elders, Jano discusses with the Doctor how “the feat and hatred of the past will only die slowly” and that both societies will need “someone like yourself as a mediator” to ease this transition from one society into a new one. When the Doctor declines, Chal—the leader of the “savages”—immediately nominates Steven to be this mediator. Jano, then, wants “someone like [the Doctor]” to be their mediator and Chal recognises Steven as that sort of person: as if Steven is a moral understudy, or even Doctor-lite.

And yet, arguably, Steven is a more moral man than the Doctor. His disgust towards the Doctor’s apparent callousness was certainly intended as a breaking point in Tosh’s rewrites of The Massacre. So in the end, maybe Steven really was that “voice of human reason” and “morally-inspired impetuousness” all along.

But is this how Black uses Steven here in The Savages? Imagine, for a moment, that instead of the Doctor it was Steven who Jano subjected to the transference. Imagine that Jano took on Steven’s moral conscience. This wouldn’t resolve the inherent tensions in an anti-apartheid serial featuring a blackface antagonist developing a “sense of right or wrong” after exposure to a white man, but it would certainly anchor Steven as the defining morality of the serial. It wouldn’t be the Doctor’s conscience pushing Jano into aiding the “savages” and assisting them in overthrowing their oppressors, but Steven’s. When Steven then remains, it’s to help oversee the building of a new society whose beginnings he helped to influence.

All of this requires imagination, however. That’s not what The Savages is about. It’s been about a return to first principles. That’s why the focus is on the Doctor, not Steven.

Before we conclude this analysis of The Savages, let’s cast ourselves back to that opening episode. When the Doctor first encounters the guards of the city during his initial exploration of the shrubland, they explain that the Elders have been “plotting the course of [the TARDIS] for many light years.” Upon being led to the city the Doctor is introduced to the Jano, who goes into greater detail about their foreknowledge of the Doctor:

JANO: You are welcome, welcome indeed. Though we know you only as a record in our charts of space and time, yet you seem to us like an old friend.
DOCTOR: Well, that’s very kind of you to make me feel so welcome.
JANO: We are honoured by your visit. The whole city looks upon you with admiration… To mark our admiration, we would be pleased if you would accept the office of one of our high Elders.

Doctor Who, The Savages, “Episode One,” (Ian Stuart Black)

What is most obvious from this exchange is that, essentially, Jano claims that the Elders are Doctor Who fans. They have engaged with him “only as a record,” someone whose actions have only been observed at a distanced—basically, the Elders have watching Doctor Who on their space TV.

And yet there’s something more than that going on. Jano mentions that the Doctor “seem[s] to us like an old friend,” and tells him that “the whole city looks upon you with admiration.” There’s a bond asserted here that goes beyond merely the Elders watching the Doctor as a television character. The Elders act “as if [the Doctor] were in the circle of [their] peers” and, in offering him “the office of one our high Elders,” actively treat him as such.

In a serial that returns to first principles, Black uses the Elders to reassert the Doctor as a character with para-social qualities.

For the moment, it’s still something very much restricted to the characters within the television screen. And yet one of the defining trends of the third season has been how Hartnell’s ability to reach through the television screen and cultivate a bond with his audience has been successively eroded and denied.

Throughout the third season, anxieties about Britain’s declining empire and the tensions of the Cold War have at turns overwhelmed the programme or been a challenge too large for Doctor Who to handle. Alongside this growing unease the Doctor’s para-social relationship to the viewer has been challenged. He has been written out of serials, directors have taken away his ability to speak directly to the camera and through it to the audience at home, and treated as somehow separate from his companions. And now, after a season which has tried to distance the Doctor, Black appears to realise that the secret to the character’s narrative power is how he interacts with an audience. After a season away, the Doctor is returning.

We could end the third season here.

But there was one more trick left in Ian Stuart Black’s sleeve. He resolved the layers of oppression and exploitation in a moment of hedonic revolution, machinery facilitating an “inhuman practice” destroyed by human hands. It’s a reminder of something we have seen once before.

A revolution that took place in a materially real world, caught on film. The moment when Lambert’s vision for Doctor Who outpaced that of David Whitaker, establishing a hedonic tone which would dominate the programme until late-1965.

We have returned to The Dalek Invasion of Earth.