Written by Anthony Coburn | Directed by Waris Hussein | Produced by Verity Lambert | Original air date 11/23/63
The most striking thing about the first episode is how well it holds up. Viewing it for the first time after I'd seen the entirety of the 2005+ incarnation of Doctor Who (my first time being after I saw Matt Smith's regeneration into Peter Capaldi), I was impressed at how well the show set up its premise and introduced its first cast. I can't remember what I was expecting; I'd heard the "classic" incarnation of the show was very slow paced (in retrospect, it can be), but this wasn't. It's been remarked elsewhere how the weight of the future of the show impacts that first shot, where a policeman shines a torch on a sign that reads I.M. Foreman, 76 Totters Lane, then wanders away as the camera pans in and inexplicably opens the doors to show us a Police Box. Obviously, I know what it is as soon as it shows up, but I can only imagine how strange that shot must have been to viewers watching the first transmission in 1963 (the title music playing throughout the sequence plays up how odd this box must be). It's strange how that first shot really does feel like the people making the show somehow knew how important what they were making was. We then cut to Coal Hill School, and, after a few random students stroll by, we get our first shot of Susan, the eponymous Unearthly Child (though we don't quite know it yet). Two of her teachers, Barbara Wright and Ian Chesterton, discuss the strange student they have, and have a few flashbacks to some of Susan's odd behavior in their classrooms. I like these two immediately. They seem to have been working together for a while, and, since I'm married to a teacher, the way they discuss their students sounds familiar (slightly sanitized, as well, but then I live in the American southwest in 2017, so that's to be expected). I wonder what my wife would do if faced with the situation Barbara and Ian found themselves in. I suppose she'd email the parents and forward anything strange to her principal and come home. Nonetheless, Ian and Barbara care about their student and want to make sure she's all right, so they go investigate the address the school has on file for her by following Susan to it. They enter the junkyard, see the Police Box, of which Ian notes, after touching it and feeling the vibration, that "it's alive!" As soon as he says it, I picture Idris and imagine Hartnell calling the TARDIS sexy, and chuckle. I wonder when the Doctor picks up that particular affectation, or if he has already... Anyway, the Doctor shows up, and immediately starts playing Ian and Barbara. He acts as though there's nothing special about the junkyard and that there's no girl in it; strangely, he doesn't insist they're trespassing on his property and try to kick them out, or threaten to call the police. When Ian does, he calls his bluff and tells him to go ahead. After arguing for a bit (Hartnell is on fire in this scene, it has to be said - alternating between mysterious, angry, and weird, you can't help but be drawn to him), Susan calls out from inside the box, and Ian and Barbara stumble into the TARDIS after she opens the doors to see what her grandfather is up to.
I'm trying not to summarize the episode too much (and given the episodes immediately following this, I know it won't be a problem for a while), but this episode does an amazing job of setting up the show. Ian and Barbara are introduced to the concept of time travel, Susan explains she made up what TARDIS stands for (very odd in retrospect, given how Susan is barely mentioned after she leaves the show, how absolutely integral to the show at first), the Doctor explains the inner dimensions of his Ship by using television as a metaphor, and refuses to let the teachers out of the TARDIS, hits a switch on the central column, and the episode ends with what we know now to be the TARDIS dematerilization sound, and a shot of the outside of the TARDIS with a shadow looming in the foreground, its owner clearly menacing the TARDIS.
Like I said, the episode holds up very well. It flies by, and honestly I feel like it'd be a good introduction to the show even today - what immediately follows this episode, maybe not so much (though I think watching one episode per day will help me appreciate individual episodes more), but this is as good an intro as Rose was (or Love & Monsters, which was the first episode of Doctor Who I'd ever seen, and screw the haters, that's a great episode).
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Not all entries will be this long, obviously. I don't want to summarize plots this much for every entry, either, but I feel like the plot is spelled out so well in this episode that it's worth mentioning exactly how, especially considering how this episode sets up the whole series. I'm going to try to write an entry per episode, hopefully every day, probably of wildly varying lengths (the missing episodes might be difficult, as I'm not sure I'll have much to say without the visual aspects largely missing, though I am going to try to track down reconstructions for them, as opposed to listening to the audio with linking narration as I did before).
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