Day 34 — February 3rd 2021
The Wheel of Fortune and The War Lords
The Wheel of Fortune (The Crusade — Episode Three)
I’ve never noticed before just how many cloaks Doctor Who goes through in these first few years. Why is it that we’ve somehow accepted the rarely-used monocle as an ‘iconic’ part of Hartnell’s costume, rather than a long cloak? He has an original one in An Unearthly Child, gains a new one in The Sensorites, wears another as part of his disguise in The Reign of Terror (which he finally keeps for more than one story, as it’s also in Planet of Giants), and he’s been through two different ones in The Crusade! You wonder why he feels the need to go and steal clothes in this one, because he must have quite the collection in the TARDIS wardrobe already!
The campaign to have a cloak recognised as a key part of Doctor Who’s ensemble starts here.
It’s another good episode here, and especially great is the interplay between Hartnell and O’Brien. As with The Romans, it really works when they’re paired up together and allowed to have their own story seperate to Ian and Barbara. I guess it’s true to say that they’re paired up in The Web Planet as well, so it’s clearly a conscious decision on the part of the production team. It’s strange that Doctor Who seems to have more of a relationship with Vicki than he ever did with Susan — he’s very cuddly and charming here, and the two of them even banter nicely. It’s nice to see, and it definitely adds a different dynamic to these stories.
Elsewhere, I’m afraid I’m going to spend much of this episode praising the writing all over again. I said lots yesterday that The Crusade is written like a Shakespeare play, and today we even get a line from Shakespeare… well, sort of. ‘The eye should have contentment where it rests,’ says Joanna of Vicki, and it’s a line which will be quoted 42 years later as part of Love’s Labours Won in the fantastic Shakespeare Code. It amuses me that Doctor Who can do such a fun obscure reference to itself, and at least it means I’m not alone in thinking that this story reads like the Bard!
Indeed, the more I watch this one, the more I’d love to see it performed as a play. I mentioned during The Edge of Destruction that there’s been a few different Who stories adapted for the stage, and I’m amazed that this hasn’t been one of them. I’d love to see it done, presented as authentically Shakespeare, but with the TARDIS and our heroes thrown into the mix. Watch this space, that’s something I’d love to look into doing.
Other brilliant bits of dialogue in this one come from Saladin and El Akir; ‘Hold one hand out in friendship but keep the other on your sword,’ Saladin tells his brother, and the closing line in the cliffhanger is the wonderful ‘The only pleasure left for you is death. And death is very far away.’ There’s a very real risk that I could simply find myself posting the entire script here for this story, because there’s not a single wasted word and I’m loving it.
Also worthy of praise today are the guest cast, in particular Julian Glover and Jean Marsh. When they have their argument they both give it their all, and it’s magnificent to watch. You get the sense in some ways that it’s almost too good to be in Doctor Who, and that you’re watching some serious BBC historical drama. Camfield cast Glover as Richard the Lionheart again in a film 20 years after this, and you can see why this performance would have stuck in his mind. It’s absolutely mesmerising.
7/10
The War Lords (The Crusade — Episode Four)
I continue to maintain that Doctor Who in it’s second season has an ant agenda. We’ve had the ant discovered by Susan and Ian in Planet of Giants, eating ants eggs in The Romans, the Zarbi of course and now Ian’s going to be eaten alive by them here! I wonder if he was forever worried about going in the garden once he made it back to his own time?
The Crusade stumbles a little for me in this final episode. Having just spent the previous episode being mesmerised by Julian Glover and Jean Marsh, the former only appears here for a single scene towards the beginning of the episode, and the latter is absent entirely. It’s perhaps telling of the impact she makes that I’d not noticed before that Jean Marsh is only in the serial’s middle two episodes.
It feels like such a waste to have them sidelined like this, and while it allows some other characters — including a host of new ones only introduced today — to take centre stage, I think I’d have rather stuck with the ones we already knew. It also means that neither the king nor his sister really get any resolution in the story. Doctor Who tells Vicki that Richard cannot win the fight he’s preparing for, and that they have to let history take its course… but that’s sort of not enough. I feel like the characters have been so real and fleshed out up to now that it’s a shame to see them thrown away so casually now.
The plot all comes together a little too easy for me, too. There’s a lot of coincidence in Haroun arriving at the palace to kill a guard only moments before Ian also arrives, and then Barbara happening to be in the right spot to make her escape and Doctor Who being outside the TARDIS when they all make it back into the woods… I quite like Ian having to pretend he’s going to become an executioner to get them back into the ship, but I can’t help feeling the story could have done with one final fight at this stage, especially as the set was already in use for pre-filming.
It’s a shame, because the first three episodes of this story have all been brilliant, and this one seems to let the side down a little. I’d be interested to read the Target novel and see if it works any better there, because I reckon this final episode is only a polish away from making this an out-and-out classic story.
One more thing I found interesting today comes in the form of an interview with William Russell which is included on the narrated soundtrack. He reveals that he actually knows the area of Jaffa well, as he was stationed there during his National Service with the RAF. I’d have loved that detail to have made its way into the story, and imagine that if this had been New Testament Who it would have done — as with Bernard Cribbins getting to use his experience of National Service as part of Wilf’s backstory. I can’t help feeling that it would have been interesting for Ian to note that he knows this area well, even though he’s returned to it several hundred years earlier than when he left.
A shame to see a story I was enjoying so much go out with such a whimper. 6/10.
