Watching the new DVDs of The Space Museum and The Chase, one-after-the-other serials from the second (1964-65) season of “Doctor Who,” I really don’t get all the hate. Apparently, in the show’s meta-mythology (the mythology about its mythology), these are the serials that really should’ve gotten wiped by the BBC instead of The Faceless Ones, The Massacre or The Daleks’ Master Plan. Me, I think Museum has a clever setup and that The Chase, with its patent goofiness and its loose-leaf structure (the Daleks have their own time machine now, see, so the Doctor and his companions get to run through a bunch of sets the BBC were about to junk, er, through a bunch of rich and wonderful locales), is more fun than a closetful of old toys. It has, as medieval literary critics once said of Orlando Furioso, variety of incident.
I have, obviously, a fatal attraction for badly-aged science fiction TV and film. When I try to defend this stuff, I think of a remark I once read in a music review, to the effect that bad funk is like bad pizza: it’s still pretty good. Decent science fiction offers Inception-style brainteasers and a chance to consider, even in the absence of convincingly conceived human characters, some fairly fundamental philosophical issues: What Else is Out There, It’s Funny What Perspective Can Do To Things, What Is the Nature of Reality, Where are the Boundaries Between [Important Thing 1] and [Important Thing 2]. (The same can be said of horror, if you can somehow navigate that genre’s forest of misogyny.) The mid-level stuff, if even slightly old, offers a glimpse into all the abandoned, aborted futures humankind has conceived for itself, the contemplation of which has its own melancholy satisfactions, like reading about old urban planning. I’ll never give a shit about any of the Star Wars characters qua characters again, now that I’m done being ten, but the original trilogy especially offers six hours’ worth of exactly this pleasure, and is more than held up by it. Bad science fiction, finally, still offers bits of both these pleasures, and is also funny. In sum, with this genre, it’s impossible to lose. Or, at least, it’s harder for me to lose than with many “serious” Oscar-bait films about “real people.”
’60s “Doctor Who,” especially during the Hartnell and Troughton years (the first two and most elderly Doctors), rarely offers the Day-Glo design that captivates a contemporary viewer of, say, “UFO,” “Star Trek,” or (the best of its kind, then and now) “The Prisoner.” Its visual style is rather chaste, compared with these programs and with its own 1970s iterations. What it does have is a wonderful knack for dreamlike juxtaposition: the Doctor’s Victorian cape as against the hyperfuturist Daleks as against cavemen as against … The very first ten minutes of the show, in 1963 (“The Unearthly Child”), take us into a junkyard, full of slightly spooky shadows and dead mannequins; the effect is as pleasantly strange as such chance agglomerations always are: a superfluity of incompatible signs, making discordant music with each other. Early “Doctor Who,” junky as it always is (with its unsayable dialogue, its single-take filming schedules and William Hartnell’s frequent linefluffs), also has the eeriness of the junkyard to which, at its worst, it belongs.
(The new show totally rules. As of now, it’s science fiction of the top tier. It will gracefully age into the middle tier as we live with it and stick our fingers through all its plot holes, which are many, even in the merciful absence of extravagant former showrunner Russell T. Davies. But that’s another series of posts.)
