Day 21 — January 21st 2021
A Bargain of Necessity and Prisoners of Conciergerie
A Bargain of Necessity (The Reign of Terror — Episode Five)
I’ve grown to quite enjoy Ian telling people he’s from the future. He did it with Marco Polo, and he does it again today when describing how he ended up in revolutionary France;
‘I flew here with three friends in a small box. When I left England it was 1963.’
I’m not sure why it amuses me, but I quite like the idea of Ian telling all and sundry the truth about his travels in time and space, because he knows they won’t believe him anyway. I like to imagine that once he does get back home, he carries on doing it for the rest of his life. Embarrassing his grandchildren by telling their boyfriends and girlfriends all about his adventures in history.
Look, I really want to like The Reign of Terror, but it’s still not grabbing me. This episode is a step up from the last, I’ll admit, but there’s still just too many characters kicking around for me to really keep track of what’s going on. It doesn’t help that the two missing episodes of this story are the first missing episodes for which there’s no tele-snaps, so I can’t even follow along with a handy spotter’s guide.
And it’s not only the lack of tele-snaps that affect this episode. A Bargain of Necessity was the 43rd episode of Doctor Who to be made (and the 41st to be broadcast, taking into account the unaired Pilot and original recording of The Dead Planet), and it’s the first one for which there aren’t any photographs of production (to the best of our knowledge). You can see examples from the first 40 episodes above.
I’ve been keeping track of images available for each episode as I go along because I’m interested to see when they start to dry up. I’m amazed that we’ve had some for every episode so far, especially knowing that by the time we reach the early Troughton years there’ll be a fair drought!
I don’t have a huge amount to write about this episode, and I’ll admit that a lot of it has already slipped from my mind in the couple of hours since I listened to it. I wonder what kids would have made of this in 1964? People talk of The Sensorites being slow, but at least it has some cool alien costumes to look at. Were kids gripped by this story of the French Revolution? I find it hard to believe.
4/10
I’ve one other question about today that I want to ask anyone else who has the narrated soundtrack. For a fair length of time during this episode, the Doctor Who theme music seems to be playing quietly in the background, but I can’t find any reference to this online. Was it a mistake in the studio in 1964? Or was it accidentally added during production of the narrated CD release? I thought I was imagining things to start with, and the fact that I can’t find any mention of it makes me wonder if I was!
Prisoners of Conciergerie (The Reign of Terror — Episode Six)
It definitely helps having this episode available to watch, as it means I can keep better track of who’s who and where we are. I’m sorry to say that the story still isn’t grabbing me, but at least it has picked up a little at the end. Heading out of Paris to go and meet Napoleon gives the story a little kick in the final episode, and it’s nice to have our regulars back together.
It’s especially nice to have Barbara and Doctor Who reunited, as it gives them another chance to have a beautiful scene together;
Doctor Who: ‘What is it? What do you find so amusing, hmm?’
Barbara: ‘Oh, I don’t know. Yes, I do. It’s this feverish activity to try and stop something that we know is going to happen. Robespierre will be guillotined whatever we do.’
Doctor Who: ‘I’ve told you of our position so often.’
Barbara: ‘Yes, I know. You can’t influence or change history. I learnt that lesson with the Aztecs.’
Doctor Who: ‘The events will happen, just as they are written. I’m afraid so and we can’t stem the tide. But at least we can stop being carried away with the flood!’
Increasingly, I find this pairing the heart of the show, and it’s lovely when they get some dialogue to share like this.
Something that surprises me about this episode is that they went to the trouble of building the entire original TARDIS set for the final scene… and then only shoot a tiny part of it! For the longest time it was assumed that only a small corner of the set was put up, but a photo relatively recently surfaced confirms that wasn’t the case.
It baffles me a bit, because they took a photograph of the police box in the woodland set because they wanted to save space for the production of this episode, but actually they’d have been better off relocating that final scene to the outside of the TARDIS, and not having to build this whole room!
I’m not really complaining, though, as it’s a lovely final scene, and it ends on a lovely note for the end of the first season as broadcast;
‘Our lives are important, at least to us. But as we see, so we learn. Unlike the old adage, my boy, our destiny is in the stars, so let’s go and search for it.’
5/10
