“The Aztecs”, for me, is an exceptional piece of drama. Not just because pretty much everyone acts their socks off, not because it’s bordering on amazing that they have temples, floods and fight scenes in a studio about a tenth the size of a football pitch and make it totally believable but because, in the best possible way, I find it a deeply uncomfortable and thought provoking watch and, unlike “Marco Polo”, I’m transported to a world where I can believe in the guest cast’s points of view, even those I don’t share myself. Best of all, it makes me wonder if I could even bring myself to travel in time.
Many stories down the line (and many Doctors too), the Doctor will eventually get called out on his behaviour as being “inhuman”. Only, by that stage, we’ll long since have learned that he’s definitely an alien. Right now though, nothing is certain. We’ve not had an info-dump detailing the Doctor’s background, we’ve not had useful medical scans to confirm he has weird blood and we’ve not learned where he comes from (let alone visited there). There were vague comments in “An Unearthly Child” about other times and places (thank goodness they decided not to go with the specifics given in the unscreened pilot episode) but so far we could easily just be travelling with a human from the far future, who’s smart enough to have built a time machine but isn’t smart enough to have kept a backup copy of the operating manual. We have no frame of reference for his background or his belief system. Our link to the world on screen is in the form of Ian and Barbara (and even now they’re somewhat distant from the modern day audience) and when Barbara tries to get involved in Aztec politics, it feels very natural that we should be siding with her and we should be angry with the Doctor for trying to stop her. For the time being we will ignore “that” line and come back to it in a few blogs’ time so, instead, I want to use this blog to completely fail to answer the question my brain keeps yelling every time I watch this story. If you travel in time and space, and visit other civilisations, do we really have the right to try and change them?
There are three distinct cultures involved in the clash in this story. At one end of the scale you have the brutal world of the Aztecs, with human sacrifice and religious doctrine. At the other extreme end you have the Doctor, who doesn’t like what he sees but strongly believes in letting the Aztecs get on with it. Then, slap bang in the middle, there’s Barbara and Ian, our twentieth century heroes, who pick the side they think is right. Doctor Who, being the show that it is and was at the time, doesn’t have a consistent attitude towards this but neither does a lot of science fiction. Barbara has 20th century morals (the same as Sarah has when she eventually visits Peladon). The story is set somewhere around 1430, about 500 years before Barbara’s native time. Therefore, let’s invent a new time traveller (Professor Z) from somewhere around 2430. How likely is it that he’ll have exactly the same moral code as 20th Century Londoners? Women were on the verge of the sexual revolution, but what if Z arrived and said that women getting equality was a huge mistake and morally the wrong thing to do? I’m pretty sure that Barbara would have had one or two things to say to him that couldn’t be broadcast on a Saturday tea-time. Or how about if he came back and gave Ian a lecture about how morally correct national service was and that he should be ashamed that the UK stopped it in 1960? At least, I’m hoping that it was in national service that Ian learned his fighting skills as seen in this story and not in the Coal Hill staff room over who ate the last of the good biscuits. Z would, in all likelihood, see his time period as having the proper morals and the 1960s as being some primitive culture that needed educating. Barbara and Ian would probably get very annoyed. I know I would. But the trouble is, that’s exactly what Barbara is doing in “The Aztecs”, she’s putting 20th century morals onto what is bordering on an alien culture The devil’s advocate part of my brain wishes that Z could turn up in one story and get locked in a room with Barbara, with them only being allowed out of the room once they’d agreed who was correct.
To me, the placement of this story is also highly awkward, coming straight after “The Keys of Marinus” which was about trying to fix a machine that imposed its “will” onto everyone, whether they liked it or not. In the first episode of that story, the Doctor and co put up resistance to the idea of doing the leg work and hunting down the circuits but it’s not really until the very last episode that there’s even a hint that, well, this super computer might not actually be a good thing after all. The Conscience of Marinus gets followed by the Conscience of Miss Wright. In “Marco Polo” as well, we’re expected to be shocked that Ping Cho is going to marry someone she’s never met (which, ironically, is the potential fate of Susan in “The Aztecs”) but, at the time, that’s just how it was. How would we feel if Z turned up and told us “Actually, all marriage is wrong”. Would we just accept his morals as they’re from the future and thus more “advanced” than ours? Were we supposed to be shocked that the Doctor thought nothing of kidnapping Ian and Barbara in the first place because, in his moral code, he saw that as the sensible thing to do?
Doctor Who relies on the Doctor being alien enough for the show to allow for alien biology to save the day when the plot requires it, but as close to our own morals so as not to do things that are too weird for us to cope with. We wouldn’t be so invested in the adventures if it wasn’t that way. But, in my mind, I know that through the whole of human history, mankind has gone through periods of believing all kinds of things and that deep down I’d desperately want to be Barbara, trying to take a stand for what I believed in. But in the back of my mind, there would always be that strange voice of Professor Z, making me question why I was so convinced that I was right and the people in history were wrong.
Then again, I guess that’s also why I love watching Doctor Who and why Professor Z has never made it to air. Time travel throws up too many awkward questions as, indeed does space travel. Do you think the morals of aliens are going to be any easier to deal with? No matter what your answer… I definitely sense you’re right.