Episode 4: The Firemaker

Synopsis:

The Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Susan are recaptured by Kal and the men of the tribe before they can reach the safety of the TARDIS. Back at the tribe's encampment, Kal accuses the injured Za of killing the old woman. The Doctor points out that Za's flint knife has no blood on it. However, he is very impressed with it, claiming it the best knife he has ever seen. The jealous Kal disputes this and shows them all his knife. The Doctor points out that this knife does have blood on it. It was Kal who killed the old woman. he admits the crime, claiming it was because she had let the strangers go free. The Doctor urges the tribe to cast Kal out. A recovered Za leads them in doing this - then has the travellers sealed in the Cave of Skulls once more. He orders the secret entrance guarded.

Ian starts to make fire using friction between pieces of wood. Hopefully once they give Za fire, he will let them go. 

Kal sneaks back to the camp and kills the guard at the secret entrance. He enters the cave but is distracted when he sees Ian's fire. Za enters and the two rivals fight. Za proves the stronger and he kills Kal. His corpse will add to the bones of the Cave of Skulls.

Za seals his leadership with the fire Ian has made, but he wants the travellers to stay and teach him other things. They remain captives.

When Susan plays around with a skull atop a burning torch, Ian is given an idea. Four torches are set up with a skull on each. When the superstitious tribespeople see these, they think the strangers have been transformed. In the confusion the travellers sneak out of the cave and run into the forest.

Za realises they have been tricked, and the tribe's warriors give chase once more.

The travellers soon reach the edge of the forest and see the TARDIS. They get inside just in time, and Za and the others are shocked to see the blue box vanish into thin air.

Ian asks if the Doctor is taking them back to London, 1963, but he claims he cannot do this as they took off too quickly from their last location and he lacks data to plot a course. The TARDIS arrives at its new location very quickly. On the scanner they see a mist-shrouded forest of strange trees. 

They decide to clean themselves up before going out to explore. The Doctor asks Susan to check the Geiger Counter. It is reading normal, but after they have left the room it moves up into the danger zone...

Next episode: The Dead Planet.

Data:

Written by: Anthony Coburn

Recorded: Friday 8th November 1963 - Lime Grove Studio D

First broadcast: 5.15pm, Saturday 14th December 1963

Ratings: 6.4 million / AI 55

Designer: Barry Newbery

Director: Waris Hussein

Critique:

Doctor's Who's first ever story, which we now know as An Unearthly Child, concludes after four weeks, although it ends with another cliff-hanger to lead into the next. At this stage, the programme was going to be one continuous adventure whose overarching plot was the various attempts by the Doctor to get Ian and Barbara back home again. Each individual story would be a diversion from that main mission. 

The production team knew roughly what each story was called - based on its writer and production code (this is Story A), but the general public were only given individual episode titles week by week, with no idea of how long any one adventure was going to last.

This episode is significant for its treatment of the Doctor. He hasn't done a lot so far, and what he has done has mostly been negative - abducting the teachers, who he constantly argues with and belittles, and then appearing to contemplate the murder of an unarmed, injured caveman. However, we get our first glimpse of the Doctor who is to come here, in the sequence with the knives. The Doctor has worked out the way these primitive people think. He knows how to manipulate Kal into exposing his guilt by playing on his envy of Kal, as well as him being generally dimwitted. He realises that Kal has only a limited capacity for deviousness, and that if challenged he will quickly cave in (no pun intended) and admit the truth. The Doctor tricking the enemy into revealing their schemes will become one of his general character traits.

Ian is still the male heroic lead at this stage. Susan was supposed to be more involved in the flaming skull ruse, but this was changed to make Ian more proactive in the plan.

It has been a relatively low key start to the series, with the average audience around the 6 million mark. Relatively minor squabbles between cavemen might not look like a recipe for great success, and the series might not have survived long had it continued in this vein. Something special was needed to really grab the public's attention - and this would prove to be just around the corner...

Trivia:

• The opening shot is of Ian, as he sees Kal and the cavemen blocking the way to the TARDIS. To save putting the prehistoric landscape set up for one shot, Russell was taped in front of black drapes. The landscape seen at the end of the story had been part of the October Ealing filming.
• The climactic fight between Kal and Za was also filmed at Ealing in October, and directed by Hussein's assistant Douglas Camfield. He had more film experience. The fight arranger was Derek Ware who played one of the cavemen (Kal), the other (Za) being stunt performer Billy Cornelius.
• Hussein and producer Verity Lambert had a falling out over this scene. The director had wanted to use the sound effect of a vegetable being crushed for the scene where Za strikes Kal's head with a rock to kill him. Lambert vetoed the sound effect as unnecessarily gruesome.
• BBC bosses did contemplate moving the programme to a later time slot, but when Sydney Newman returned from a trip to New York he insisted it stay where it was, though he would be asking for some minor changes regarding levels of violence.
• The meats which the travellers are given were lamb chops. Derek Newark (Za) rubbed some of the grease from them onto his wig, to look grubbier.
• There was a fade to black after the scene with the travellers in the cave, realising they were not going to be set free. This was TV shorthand for a passage of time, but had the bonus of being an ideal place for foreign TV stations to have their advert break.
• Closing captions were originally going to state "Next week:...", but this was changed to "Next episode:..." as foreign broadcasters might not show the programme on a weekly basis.
• It was originally intended that this story would be followed by another Anthony Coburn script - known as "The Robots" or "The Masters of Luxor". Instead of the alien forest on the scanner, they would have seen a futuristic city, a model of which was commissioned but never used as Coburn's story was dropped.