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| Here's the big bag of used gauze I've been creating to prove it. |
I will be doing this out of order, thanks to the
difficulties with watching the series in its "proper" order.
Attempting to watch Doctor Who in its broadcast order is a madness-inducing
exercise in futility that puts many people off the Classic Series before they
ever learn that they're not required to start at the beginning. The biggest
obstacle in this respect, of course, being that some early episodes are either
partially or completely missing, which I'll go into detail about in a future
post.
As long as you know that the Doctor is an alien
time-traveler who flies around in an oddly disguised time-ship alongside his
often-human traveling companions... then you know all you need to know to start
reading these Recaps. Heck, that single sentence was all you really need to
begin watching the Classic Series, really.
But before we begin with today's story, "The
Gunfighters," it's probably a good idea to go into why and how this story
even exists. Especially since, as I'll later elaborate upon, there are plenty
of people who wish that it never did exist.
And... well, I'll admit that I'd prefer this serial be one
of the missing episodes rather than something like "Fury of the Deep"
or "The Abominable Snowmen." But we can play the "What If?"
game another time. Right now, it's time to play the "Why?" game.
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| And the "Who" game. Pun definitely intended. |
....
Okay, maybe I oversimplified it a little too much. I'll try
again.
The year was 1965, and Doctor Who was a big hit. The show
had not only caught on with both children and adults, but it was enjoying
something that Doctor Who still hasn't quite managed to reach today: Undeniable
mainstream appeal.
...By which I mean the Daleks were the alien menaces. They
weren't crowding in front of anyone's TVs.
But while millions of people were excited to watch Doctor
Who, very few people were excited to be making it.
When you look at Doctor Who as a whole, backstage issues
seem to be par for the course. In the 60s, we're talking staffing issues. In
the 70s, it was union issues. In the 80s, BBC controller Michael Grade was
actively setting the show up to fail. In the 90s, it was finding an American
channel that was willing to help produce a continuation. The one thing that
never changed was the budget issues.
Heck, the early 2000s are no stranger to behind-the-scenes
issues. Why do you think Christopher Eccleston left after only one season?
Verity Lambert, one of Doctor Who's considered
"creators" (the show was essentially created by a committee, with the
two primary contributors being Sydney Newman and Verity Lambert) had been
working on the show since its beginning. But for various reasons, by 1965 she
had decided to move on from her position as producer. And the script editor at
the time, Dennis Spooner, had decided to do the same soon after.
Spooner was replaced by a man named Donald Tosh, who
previously helped make the now-long-running soap opera Coronation Street. The
BBC basically said "You wanna do Doctor Who?" and his response was an
overwhelming "Yeah, I guess so."
Verity Lambert was replaced by John Wiles, who was an
experienced writer/script editor in his own right... but he certainly didn't
want to be a producer. He was a nice guy, by all accounts. He just didn't want
the job he'd been handed.
So Wiles and Tosh were a bit of an unlikely pair to be
working on Doctor Who. One of them didn't want the job, the other didn't really
care one way or the other. But by God, if this is what they had been handed,
they were determined to leave their mark on the show.
Here's the problem.
Verity Lambert didn't just hand John Wiles the key to the
TARDIS and say "Don't scratch the paint." He had to essentially do a
transition period where he'd be shadowing her.
Which means that she was still doing her job after he came
in to replace her.
Which means that she commissioned some episodes that she
didn't stick around to actually produce.
Which means the job fell to, you guessed it, John Wiles.
Remember, Wiles came in wanting to shake things up. And now
he had to produce episodes pertaining to somebody else's vision of what Doctor
Who should be. Specifically, a twelve part Dalek story.
Daleks were the breakout villains of Doctor Who, and Lambert knew
it. Every single Dalek story had raised the stakes from the previous one, so
hiring someone to develop a 12-part Dalek story to end all Dalek stories was a
no-brainer. And since Verity Lambert fought tooth and nail to feature the
Daleks in the first place, it makes sense that she'd be the one to get the
gears into motion. Shame about the timing, though. At least, Wiles and Tosh
thought so.
In the end, making the Dalek story work was simply a
grueling exercise in creating something they didn't want to create in the first
place, despite very good ratings. And unsurprisingly, Wiles and Tosh ended up
giving up and deciding to move on to other things. Which was a pretty ironic
turn of events when you realize that the two had been trying to get rid of the lead
actor, William Hartnell, since almost the moment they took over the show, and
now he was outlasting them.
Now, that's not as terrible as it sounds. It sounds a lot
like two people who couldn't care less about Doctor Who came in out of the blue
and tried to change the lead actor for no reason. But there were reasons. Good
ones, to be honest.
William Hartnell suffered from arteriosclerosis, hardening
of the arteries. The disease led to vascular dementia, which led to emotional
outbursts and difficulty remembering things. Everybody who worked on the show
knew how difficult it was for Hartnell to deliver many of his lines. Since TV
was shot in largely one take like a live show, you can see a lot of these
"Billy Fluffs," as the cast and crew called them, in the finished
product.
John Wiles did not get along well with William Hartnell, who
was already becoming increasingly hard to work with in general. Not helping
matters was the fact that Wiles wrote the character Vicki out of the show,
since he was under the impression that the actress (Maureen O'Brien) wanted to
leave. Oops.
Hartnell was very upset over this, since he saw the show as
his baby. He was the Doctor, and he was very opinionated on what was best for
the show. And writing out an actress he had become fairly close to was not what
he would consider "good."
It got to the point that Wiles and Hartnell had to talk
through intermediaries. Staff members even used coded phrases to tell each
other that John Wiles had shown up, since they didn't want Hartnell to know
when he was around.
Before Wiles and Tosh left, they commissioned a few final
episodes which they would not end up seeing through to completion, ironically
(again) recreating the circumstances that led to their own disillusion with the
show.
Their second-to-last-commissioned episode was an odd little
number called "The Celestial Toymaker," with which they planned on
taking advantage of the surreal story to write out William Hartnell. The
titular Toymaker would render the Doctor invisible, and he would reappear with
a different face. Well, when it came time to do it, the Doctor reappeared still
looking very much like William Hartnell.
John Wiles and Donald Tosh were being replaced by Innes
Lloyd (producer) and Gerry Davis (script editor), respectively, and they took
it upon themselves to transform the quirky, offbeat, surreal episode into
something more akin to a classic Star Trek episode if it were set in
Wonderland. And the one where Dr. McCoy runs into the White Rabbit... well, I guess that kind of counts. The Toymaker himself became something of a precursor to Star
Trek's numerous equally childish and omnipotent beings
The postponed recasting of the lead role had the effect of
turning the last Tosh and Wiles serial, "The Gunfighters," into a
William Hartnell story. Which must have delighted Hartnell, as he had
apparently been wanting to do a Western for quite some time.
But William Hartnell was, by and large, the only person
excited to be working on the episode. Lloyd and Davis, like Wiles and Tosh
before them, wanted to start working on their own vision for Doctor Who. As
such, Lloyd had Donald Cotton rewrite the script to add a bit more humor in the
hopes of lightening up the episode.
Luckily for Lloyd and Davis, "The Gunfighters"
gave them the excuse to prevent any more stories like it or "The Myth
Makers," an earlier Tosh/Wiles-commissioned story (written by the same writer,
Donald Cotton) that bears many similarities to this one; both stories took
place in the past and featured about three episodes of comedy mixed with an
episode of drama.
A common myth is that "The Gunfighters" has the
worst ratings story of the Classic Series. This is not technically true. That
(dis)honor goes to "Battlefield" with 3.1 million viewers at its
lowest point, while "The Gunfighters" never dipped below 5.7 million
viewers. But all that means is that a lot of people tuned in. This serial does
have the lowest audience appreciation score of any Doctor Who serial (a measly
30% for the final episode), which gave Gerry Davis the excuse to suggest that
the writers focus on creating "escapist futuristic science-fiction
stories, with a strong scientific concept, and loads and loads of menace."
Yes, you can thank Gerry Davis for encouraging the eventual Doctor Who
stereotype of "run from the monster" episodes.
For additional reasons, this episode was referred to for a
very long time as the worst Doctor Who serial ever, but I'll get into that in
the Review.
But before I review, or even recap, I think it's also
important to quickly explain the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, which is where
the Doctor will find himself today.
There are a few classic Wild West legends that could have
been drawn from. Of them, the story of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral was
chosen, probably because the story of two posses having a shootout perfectly
encapsulates the pop culture version of the Wild West.
The audience at the time would have immediately recognized
the phrase "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral," but the story isn't exactly
as famous as it used to be, thanks in no small part to the decline of Westerns
in the popular consciousness. To be fair though, the kids these days probably
know some of the classic Old West names, if not the stories associated with
them. Billy the Kid. Doc Holliday. Sheriff Woody.
But the Wild West wasn't as full of gunplay as people tend
to think. "Cowboys" were basically itinerant farmhands, shootouts at
noon were a rare occurrence, and public places usually made you check your
weapon at the door. The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral is primarily famous simply
because it actually was one of the few times real Wild West history matched up
with what we see in the movies.
Essentially, it was a thrity-second Old West gang fight,
with one gang (the Clanton family and their pals) throwing down with the
closest thing the town had to a police force, primarily consisting of gamblers.
Details are largely irrelevant to discuss here, since this serial plays fast
and loose with history for the sake of the story.
But is it a story worth telling? Decades of Doctor Who fans
say "no." Well, although I love the show to death I've seen Doctor Who deliver some utter crap, so
that's no small claim. Let's see which holds up, the claims or the serial.
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