Doctor Who: in praise of "The Savages"

The last of three lost Doctor Who serials that don’t get nearly enough praise or attention. To check out the first, “The Abominable Snowmen,” click here; to check out "The Smugglers," click here.

Let’s not just make the case for “The Savages” as a supremely satisfying, highly underrated, sadly overlooked “lost” Doctor Who story. Given that this series of blog entries is about making the case for lost serials, that would be dull and predictable — and besides, does anyone really need another of those essays? Instead, let’s make the case for “The Savages” as the best First Doctor story that’s not a historical.

Or at least let’s make the case for “The Savages” as the best Hartnell that’s neither historical nor character study, as both of the Whitaker two-parters — “Edge of Destruction” and “The Rescue” — are pretty damned splendid. It’s understandable, of course, that the Hartnell historicals are so superior to the futuristic, sci-fantasy adventures, especially at first. The trips into the future, to alien words — replete with a mysterious Doctor, his precocious granddaughter, and two hijacked schoolteachers — had no model from which to draw. There was no template for “Unearthly Child” or “The Daleks” or, heaven help us, “Keys of Marinus.” The writers and producer and story editor were reinventing the wheel — so of course it took a while to solidify tone and structure. The historicals were the BBC’s bread and butter. The set and costume designs were familiar — a lot of them could be pulled from existing stock; the conflicts and pacing were simpler for the writers to nail down. And critically, for Hartnell, who right from the start was burdened with memory issues, the historicals came easier to him. There was no technobabble to overwhelm him; there were no monsters or machines or special effects to distract him. And the way he played the Doctor — as a sort of avuncular authoritarian — meant he could slip into pretty much any time period and instantly assert himself.

So is it really surprising that when we think about the jewels of the Hartnell era — the serials that work from start to finish, and the ones in which Hartnell particularly shines — we think first of the historicals? I myself think of “The Crusade," “The Massacre,” “The Myth Makers” and “Marco Polo.” And I’d have to throw in “The Time Meddler” and “The Smugglers.” These are masterful stories — gloriously conceived, helmed and designed — with acting beats that rival any from Doctor Who’s long history. And if I think of the serials with alien worlds or futuristic settings, I think of more problematic stories. Even in the ones I quite like, I can point to issues of pacing (“The Daleks' Master Plan”), or production design that compensates for directorial deficiencies (“The Dalek Invasion of Earth”) or directorial flair that compensates for production limitations (“Galaxy 4”) — and in at least one crucial case (“The Web Planet”), a bewitching story hampered mostly by Hartnell’s own discomfort. Because here’s the bottom line about the Hartnell era: there’s only one subpar historical (“Reign of Terror”), but of the others, there are some real clunkers.

But not “The Savages.” Ian Stuart Black was one of those freelancers (like Chris Boucher a decade later) who invariably had a good handle on how best to use the Doctor and his companions — sometimes better than the script editor himself. He came armed with good ideas, and in the case of “The Savages,” he came to the show at precisely the right time: with a production team in place — producer John Wiles and story editor Donald Tosh — who were determined to test the limits of the series, to take it to fresh and deeper places. (Their tenure on the show was short, and Wiles notably, vocally, hated the assignment — but they dreamed big. Arguably no Doctor Who season stretches the boundaries of the show itself like Season 3.) Black wanted to examine mankind's darker impulses in an adventure that eschewed standard action tropes. This was perfectly in line with Wiles and Tosh’s manifesto, but more to the point, it was an ideal story for Hartnell. It was the sort of character- and issue-driven story that suited Hartnell best, and the kind in which his sense of moral outrage — at which no Doctor greater excelled — could come to the fore.

In devising a sci-fi story for Hartnell, Black does him the best turn possible: he writes a historical set in the future. Oh, "The Savages" has its out-of-this-world technology — the plot turns on a machine that can absorb the life force from one human and implant it in another — but at its heart, it's about the TARDIS team visiting a society whose ways are familiar to the Doctor, and Hartnell doing the sort of pontificating at which he excelled. (The planet is inhabited entirely by humanoids. No Daleks, Zarbi or Rills here.)

And no First Doctor story worked so hard — or so effectively — to make the Doctor himself seem so impressive. It’s part of the design, and it’s precisely the right move at this point in the series’ run for both the character and the actor. Hartnell, of course, had been seen less and less onscreen during Season 3, as his health issues demanded more weeks off — and Wiles and Tosh, to boot, had excluded him from episodes as a means of showing their superiors the show could survive without him. And at the same time, due to the darker nature of Season 3, the Doctor himself had had a series of failures and disappointments. Yes, the Daleks were defeated at the end of “Master Plan,” but at the cost of countless lives, including three of the Doctors’ own colleagues. And although it had long been established that the Doctor didn’t dare tamper with history, and had to leave civilizations as he found them, had his inaction ever seemed quite so maddening as at the end of “The Massacre,” where he refused to save even one soul knowing thousands were doomed to die? (Much as Steven Moffat, 40 years later, used “The Girl Who Died” as a response to “The Fires of Pompeii," it’s impossible — perusing the history of the series — not to view “Pompeii” as a response to “The Massacre.”) Even in the lighter stories, like “Celestial Toymaker,” the Doctor seemed to lack (literal) substance.

But “The Savages” redresses the balance: showing us the Doctor is a force to be reckoned with. It makes us marvel at him. It makes certain we marvel at him. One of Black’s tactics is to let us underestimate the Doctor, to show him in a position where he seems to be weak and ineffectual (as we had frequently seen him during Season 3), then undermine our expectations. We see the Doctor rise like the phoenix from the ashes, and the effect is exhilarating. Black will pull this trick a handful of times during the serial, all to wonderful effect.

The serial starts by leading us to believe that the Doctor has been duped by a futuristic society falsely presenting itself as a utopia. The Council of Elders shower him with gifts and flattery, and although they seem a little too unctuous, he seems taken in by it all. He even brushes aside Dodo when she comes to him with concerns. But nothing of the kind; he saw right through them, and was merely waiting until he was out of earshot to express his misgivings and develop a plan. Then, in case we’ve had any qualms about Hartnell’s ability to deliver the goods during Season 3, as his screentime and memory have dwindled, Black gives him back-to-back scenes that rival anything he’s done over the previous three seasons. It reminds us of everything the Doctor stands for, as he rails against a society that mistreats half its population, that subjects them to cruel experiments and leaves them lifeless shells of the people they once were. He protests first to a guard:

Doctor: What do you know of this?
Edal: He's one of the savages. I shouldn't let him worry you. He's probably shamming. He should be back on the reserve. Come on, you lazy animal, get up, move! Get back to your sector.
Doctor: What are you doing, fellow? Leave the man alone. He'll probably die.
Edal: I don't think there's much chance of that, Doctor. Come on, you, move.
Doctor: I insist that you leave him alone!
Edal: I don't think you understand, Doctor.
Doctor: I think I understand only too well.
Edal: You do? And you still waste time on this creature?
Doctor: This human being!
Edal: Why the concern, Doctor? They are only savages.
Doctor: They are men. Human beings, like you and me. Although it appears at the moment that you're behaving in a rather sub-human fashion.
Edal: They have not developed like we have. They are savages! Come on.
Doctor: I forbid you to touch him!

and then to the chief of the Elders, who is perplexed that the erudite Doctor opposes his practices:

Doctor: Indeed I am going to oppose you, just in the same way that I oppose the Daleks or any other menace to common humanity.
Jano: I am sorry you take this attitude, Doctor. It is most unscientific. You are standing in the way of human progress.
Doctor: Human progress, sir? How dare you call your treatment of these people progress!
Jano: They are hardly people, Doctor. They are not like us.
Doctor: I fail to see the difference.
Jano: Do you not realise that all progress is based on exploitation?
Doctor: Exploitation indeed! This, sir, is protracted murder!
Jano: We have achieved a very great deal merely by the sacrifice of a few savages.
Doctor: The sacrifice of even one soul is far too great! You must put an end to this inhuman practice.

A mere recitation of the lines doesn’t suggest the fury and passion with which Hartnell imbues them. Nor should it have to. The lines are perfect. They’re simply written, to give Hartnell the best chance at remembering them easily and delivering them effectively. And because they’re so ideally suited to him, when he delivers them, they pack a punch. These two scenes are among Hartnell’s best work on Doctor Who.

And then once again, Black subverts our expectations. The end of Episode 2 has the Doctor taken captive, and (apparently) chained down helplessly, destined to be the latest victim in the society’s inhumane experiments. Jano insists that he is going to be the sole recipient of the Doctor’s life force. The Doctor seems powerless — but there’s a double twist in store. Not only is the Doctor's life force transferred to Jano, but so is his character. The power of the Doctor’s personality is so large, the script insists, it can’t be buried or consumed. And Jano, now holding the Doctor’s moral compass, realizes the Council of Elders’ barbaric practices have to end — and sees to it that they do. And then, yet another surprise: the Doctor knew full well that this would happen. He was so aware of the strength of his convictions, he predicted the outcome. He was confident about his ability to save the day, without lifting a finger. “The Savages” allows us to consistently see the Doctor as a dupe and victim, so that it can assure us — at regular intervals — that he is neither.

Season 3 writers were challenged with devising scripts as original and entertaining as anything that came before them, but also with minimizing Hartnell's role so that he could power through. Black solves the problem, of course, by having the Doctor drained by the life-force machine at the end of Episode 2, so that he's able to sit out much of Episode 3. But once his life force is transferred to Jano, it allows Frederick Jaeger, in a bravura performance, to do a spot-on impression of Hartnell's Doctor. (Hartnell, who appreciated the week off to regroup, nonetheless stayed on set to coach Jaeger.) It keeps the Doctor’s spirit alive while Hartnell gets time off to recharge, but more than that, it asserts that although Hartnell's screen time is dwindling, nothing can suppress the power of his personality and presence. Just four serials away from Hartnell's swan-song, Black writes him a most endearing tribute.

The regulars are all in good form, and that’s a good part of the appeal of "The Savages,” because the Doctor, Steven and Dodo are a superb trio. Jackie Lane is the newest addition to the team, of course, but as an actor, she starts strong, and only grows stronger. On the surface, she fills much the same role that Maureen O’Brien did, but I’d make the case that Lane is more suited to the Doctor-Steven dynamic than O’Brien. Don’t get me wrong: I love O’Brien, and the trio of stories with the Doctor, Vicki and Steven – “The Time Meddler,” “Galaxy 4” and “The Myth Makers” — are among my favorites. But for me, the balance is more satisfying with Dodo. David Whitaker designed Vicki with a host of striking traits, but it was mostly her innocence and sweetness — and her unwavering affection for the Doctor — that were utilized during her time in the TARDIS. She was conceived as the sort of character you wanted to tuck under your wing, as the Doctor, Ian and Barbara took turns doing. The show acquired a harder edge under Wiles and Tosh. There was really no place for a waif like Vicki; with the Doctor and Steven so frequently consumed with fussing and feuding about method and approach, there was no one to look after her. Dodo, it was clear, could take care of herself; her tomboyish pluck fit neatly into the good-natured combativeness between the Doctor and Steven. (Because so many Season 3 stories are missing, it’s easy to forget that the Doctor and Steven were a potent pair whose double act extended across some 45 episodes. Small wonder that, as they imagined a third companion, it took Wiles and Tosh a few tries before they hit upon the right one, but they absolutely nailed it with Lane.)

And she provided balance in another way. With a Doctor from a distant galaxy and an astronaut from the future, it was terribly nice to have someone from modern-day Earth on board the TARDIS. “The Savages” makes good use of that. We don’t learn much about Dodo during her time with the Doctor, but in “The Savages,” it seems clear that Dodo’s curiosity and suspicious nature spring from her upbringing and background, as does her recklessness. (As Steven puts it here, “If it isn’t allowed, Dodo will be the first in the queue.”) Dodo is key to the telling of “The Savages.” The Doctor is too busy having his ego stroked by the Elders; Steven is too busy marveling at achievements that the people of his own time merely dreamed about. It’s Dodo — so far removed from a world she recognizes or understands — who can’t accept what she’s being told, who feels the need to snoop. And it’s fitting that it’s Dodo who’s confronted with the first episode’s horrors: the attack by (apparent) primitives near the top; the soulless victim approaching her down a long corridor in the cliffhanger. It’s Dodo who’s our audience surrogate: who understands intuitively that this world isn’t what it’s claiming to be. And who — like her two colleagues — isn’t easily cowed. Stumbling upon laboratory experiments that seem somehow disturbing, she gives the lead scientist a piece of her mind: “I don't know what you do in here, but whatever it is, I don't like it.” And she’s not about to bullied by some guard, either: “Oh, no you don't! I don't know who on Earth you think I am, but you'd better keep back. This equipment must cost a packet. Keep back, or I'll smash the lot!”

And then there's Peter Purves, not merely one of the most magnificent companions, but the most consistent one — the one who never had a bad week. Purves filmed nine serials with Hartnell; only three survive in their entirety. He's in many ways one of the true saviors of Doctor Who, the one who kept the show running as Hartnell's dwindling memory sapped his onscreen charisma. I'm sure there were many other versatile performers available at the time Purves was cast — but story editor Dennis Spooner and producer Verity Lambert couldn't have suspected, when they hired him, all that he'd ultimately be called upon to do. As companions came and went, as Hartnell disappeared from more and more episodes, as his lines started getting reassigned to Purves (e.g., the last two episodes of "The Daleks' Master Plan"), if Purves hadn't turned out to be such a charismatic chameleon — equally adept at making heroics look convincing and exposition sound interesting, at alternating (seemingly without ego) between sidekick and co-star, all while mastering the technobabble that was increasingly handed him — would the show have continued? He was equally home in the high comedy of "The Myth Makers" and the tense drama of "The Massacre.” And Hartnell adored him — that much is clear. The scripts made much of their onscreen antagonism, but it was always clear that behind the scenes, there was mutual affection. (It’s surely no coincidence that in the first few episodes of “Master Plan,” when Steven’s injuries sideline him, Hartnell seems off his game. And the minute Steven returns to form, Hartnell does too.) With all respect to Ben and Polly, Purves’ Steven Taylor was the link that got us from Barbara and Ian’s exit to the Second Doctor’s arrival, and if he hadn’t been able to pick up so much of the slack for so long, so winningly, it’s hard to say whether Who would have survived.

"The Savages" is a great showcase for Steven; it shows him as smart and resourceful and commanding as ever. We don’t have a lot of surviving video footage of “The Savages,” but most of what we have is of Purves, and he’s spectacular. Making his way through the planet’s rugged terrain with his comrade Chal, trying to avoid guards armed with stunguns, you can’t help but marvel at how energized and purposeful he seems. You see his eyes darting from side to side, alert to danger, and his arms prepared to engage in battle at any moment — all while he’s processing and parroting information. Aside from Jenna Coleman, no Doctor Who companion had a greater ability to multitask – an almost obsessive need to do so. (Small surprise that the two companions who are the biggest control freaks have the biggest blow-ups with the Doctor: Steven in “The Massacre” and Clara in “Kill the Moon.”) And as with Coleman later on, that aspect of Purves’s acting style was written into his character. Like Clara, Steven didn’t just ask the companions’ favorite question “what do we do,” but “why?” (It was a reasonable question for an astronaut from the future, and especially for one prone to overthinking things.) You see Steven’s mind going a mile a minute in “The Savages.” You see him take control of countless situations, and devise shrewd solutions to thorny dilemmas. (The way the mirror the Elders gift Dodo in Episode 1 is used by Steven to thwart a guard’s weaponry in Episode 3 is a clever piece of scripting, but it could have come off as a little convenient — if Purves hadn’t so beautifully shown Steven’s mind racing for a solution, weighing a dozen options, and zeroing in on the best one.)

It was rumored that Purves was discontented with Steven‘s lack of development through the course of Season 3, but when you look at the trajectory of Steven’s time on Doctor Who, it’s a marvelous story. Purves ensures that it is. The extrovert from the future — who seemed in “The Chase“ like the happiest person ever to be trapped on a prison planet — has a dickens of a time during his earliest months aboard the TARDIS: emasculation, injury, abandonment, illness. He’s put to the test in ways, it’s clear, that he never imagined. It’s really not until the second half of “The Ark” — six serials in — that Steven has a chance to get his bearings, to regroup, to start to consider what he’s learned and how he’s grown. And the stories that follow show the results of that arduous journey. Steven’s transformation isn’t spelled out the way later companions’ are. His growth isn’t built into the scripting the way it is with Jo Grant or Tegan, or Rose or Donna, or Clara or Nardole. It falls to Purves to make that transformation clear without a story editor guiding him, but as he showed so magnificently in “The Massacre” (and as I analyze with great admiration here), Purves was fully capable of tying together story strands that even the writers and script editors, it seems, weren’t aware of. The overriding arc of his time on Doctor Who is a supremely satisfying one, with a lovely, suitable sendoff.

Through the course of “The Savages,” Steven is ingenious, brave, sensible, selfless and commanding. You believe he’s putting to use everything he’s learned during his time on the TARDIS, and when the time comes for him to say goodbye to the Doctor and Dodo, you believe those qualities will serve him well on his new home. Purves makes it fully believable that Steven has so impressed a planet full of people that they would look to him to broker a peace treaty. (Black creates the template for all the companions who leave the Doctor upon finding their true calling, from Jo Grant to Romana II, from Nyssa to Nardole.) In Purves’s performance, you see Steven’s gratification at how much he’s learned, and what he’s accomplished — and how honored and humbled he is that this once devil-may-care astronaut, who as a child probably dreamed of nothing more than sailing through space, now has a chance to do something significant. To alter history, in a way he couldn’t once before. Purves gets choked up as Steven says goodbye to the Doctor and Dodo, but as so often with Purves, he’s multitasking emotions: he’s conveying not only his sadness at bidding farewell to friends, but his pride at being seen as worthy — and feeling worthy — to carry out such a weighty task.

As noted, “The Savages” is a spectacularly good showing for all three principals, and it’s expertly performed not just by the leads and Frederick Jaeger, but by Norman Henry as chief scientist Senta; Ewan Solon as Chal; and Clare Jenkins as Nanina, the Elders’ latest target. (The winning Jenkins will next appear on Who as Tanya Lernov in “The Wheel in Space.”) But its virtues extend far beyond the acting challenges it offers its ensemble. It’s also a thematic triumph. “The Savages” is a brutal attack on exploitation, and colonialism exploitation in particular: a practice carried out by European nations — and by the British Empire in particular — for a thousand years. Exploitation colonialism is routinely defined as an economic policy of conquering a people to exploit its population as labor and its natural resources as raw material. Except here, the novel twist is that the natural resources are the conquered people themselves.

The Council of Elders have decided that their ability to achieve, as the script puts it, “greater energy, greater intellect and greater talents” validates the persecution of those they consider lesser beings. Black doesn’t reveal why one faction of this society has come to view the other as inferior — there’s no obvious racism, sexism or ageism at play — but that omission doesn’t render the story-line generic; on the contrary, it makes it that much more universal. It allows for countless parallels throughout history: broad ones like the European expansions into India and America, singular ones like King Leopold’s colonization of the Congo. And it’s not just a topic tied to a distant past. Although the British Empire, by 1966, had mostly dissolved, British colonialism and imperialism — a mere half-century earlier — had embraced more than a quarter of the world’s population and nearly a third of its land surface.

“The Savages” captures how leaders have long justified turning whole races into commodities — or casualties — by pointing to the economic benefits they yield. As Jano informs the Doctor, matter-of-factly, “Life preys on other forms of life, as you know. Wild beasts live on other animals. Mankind must have food, water and oxygen.” Exploitation is an age-old, readily-accepted practice. Is the Doctor really going to condemn “this great artistic and scientific civilisation because of a few wretched barbarians?” The serial conveys the correlation between colonial expansion and economic success that leaders use to invite an outpouring of national pride. (The two young people who show Steven and Dodo around the city are caught up in that sense of jingoism. “Our scientists have made one simple discovery,” the young man proudly informs them, and because of that, life is wonderful. That that “one simple discovery” calls for tyrannizing others is unimportant.) And Black understands, too, how the inequities in the economic ladder are maintained by making the lowest rungs to blame for their own misery and misfortune. “The Savages” asks: how do nations justify this sort of brutality, and the answer is right there in the title. If you regard the oppression of people as morally unacceptable, then one way you justify your actions is to dehumanize the victims. During the Nazi era, Jews were depicted as rats; during the Rwandan genocide, the Tutsi were cockroaches that needed to be cleared out. The Atlantic Slave Trade was made tenable by an insistence that Africans were in every way inferior; merchants and the public alike were assured that Black people were unsuitable for anything other than slavery. Dehumanization dampens our empathy for others; to use a recent example, it makes us numb to the pain of separating immigrant children from their parents.

And thus it is that the Elders have labeled the others “savages,” because it frees them from feeling and absolves them of guilt. (“They have not developed like we have. They are savages!”) The title of the serial is, of course, ironic. As the Doctor points out, the real savages here are the ones forging their self-proclaimed utopia with no regard for the suffering of others. This is exceptionally mature subject matter — and a provocative take — for a “children’s program” like Doctor Who: a condemnation of a thousand years of exploitation colonialism. (Black’s original title, “The White Savages,” was even more damning.) It’s one thing to tell stories about “superior races” when your villains are pepperpots or insects. But when your antagonists are flesh and blood creatures — white savages — well, that’s something else altogether.

That Black was able to get a plot like this past the BBC brass is a credit to the ingenuity of his design. The Doctor announces at the top that the TARDIS has materialized in the distant future, during a time of great peace and prosperity; Black uses the Doctor as an unreliable narrator. And Black’s plotting is so confident, his pacing so spot on, and his details so plentiful that even as the story’s darker side starts to emerge (when Jano speaks of “the perfection of our race,” anyone with a knowledge of history can’t help but shudder), the polemics never overwhelm the entertainment values. The serial has an easy inevitability, and yet a steady stream of surprises. It’s the best kind of Doctor Who story.

And Black is aided immeasurably by the talents of his creative team. Director Christopher Barry was a proficient helmsman who excelled when he had affection for the stories he was assigned; by his own account, he thought this a splendid script, and he brought his A game. Working closely with production designer Stuart Walker (a multi BAFTA Award winner, in his only Doctor Who contribution), Barry ensures that everything has purpose and specificity. The story calls for a host of scenes on the planet’s surface; Shire Lane Quarry in Buckinghamshire and Oxshott Quarry in Surrey were chosen for the location shooting, and with the obvious exception of “Planet of Fire,” I can’t think of a better use of a setting’s natural terrain to assist and heighten the story-telling. There are chases through craters and caves, rocks and ridges, all of them splendidly choreographed. In one extended sequence, Nanina, hunted by guards, makes her way across a ravine — mustering every bit of speed she can, while choosing her steps so carefully as to remain undetected. She scrambles from one hiding spot to another, and her efforts are so successful that not only can’t the guards find her, but neither can Chal, struggling to catch sight of her from a nearby location. She’s so familiar with the planet’s terrain that she knows how to remain undetectable from multiple vantage points. (Ultimately, she’s betrayed by the slightest bit of carelessness: her foot unearths a shower of stones that alerts the guards to her position.) Barry and Walker convince you that Chal and the others know the topography of their planet so well that they’ve been using it for years to elude would-be captors.

Best of all, Barry and Walker use the life-force machine itself to ground and elevate the proceedings. They appreciate its value as much as the Elders do; they use the grandeur of its design almost hypnotically, so that, as a viewer, you truly understand the allure of its power. The life-force machine features prominently in every episode, and you can’t help marvel at it: the computer banks and control panels with their knobs and gauges and switches; the glass panels and partitions; the diamond-shaped cubicles that fill with white mist; the intransference chamber with its oversized cylindrical helmet mounted on a pivoting arm. And most of all, the giant vats at the back of the laboratory, which give a visual component to the unseen energy being harnessed, as the liquid within them bubbles and churns, its viscous contents turning from black to clear and back again. Black, Barry and Walker disguise the brutalities of the past in a story about the wonders of the future. Even as they expose the atrocities to which the vanquished are subjected, they insist you experience the victors’ sense of conquest: the pride and unity that stem from their shared scorn and callousness. A regular viewer of Doctor Who, Black thought that his children would be impressed if he earned a scripting credit on the show. What he ended up writing was one of the most adult tales in the Classic Who canon. And one of the finest.

Want more Doctor Who? I offer up reviews of seven Classic Who stories that I consider unfairly neglected or maligned, one for each Doctor: "Terminus," "The Ark," "Delta and the Bannermen," "The Wheel in Space," "Attack of the Cybermen," "Death to the Daleks and "The Leisure Hive." I look at the eleven actors who've played the Doctor for more than one full-length story, and assess their best and worst performances. And I do the same for thirty-three companions. I also take an affectionate look at the William Hartnell era; do an overview of the Jon Pertwee era; and take an expansive look at the Peter Davison years. And finally, in a 16-part series, I rank and review all 158 Classic Who serials, starting here.