For a story as weighty and bleak as “The Massacre”, I suppose it seems a little weird to focus on the TARDIS wardrobe still. We’ll get onto the whole doppelganger aspect later on (especially as I’ve had to re-write it after making the mistake of checking for some facts) and also talk about Dodo’s rather abrupt entrance as well but, for me, they simply aren’t as important as the costume aspect of this story. It’s the fact that there IS a costume aspect to it that actually marks this story out as important as it’s going to raise more questions about what’s inside the ship as well as what’s inside the Doctor’s head.
“The Massacre” is one of the more under-represented stories in Doctor Who’s long history when it comes to the visuals. Not only is it one of only three stories for which no moving footage is known to exist (“Marco Polo” and “Mission to the Unknown” being the other two), it also has no telesnaps and there aren’t exactly a huge number of photos that exist for it. Having said that, the Loose Canon reconstruction does an amazing job of showing what the story might have looked like but the opening scenes are definitely a little vague in my mind because they seem to have the Doctor once more make some amazing (though in this case accurate) deductions in an exceptionally short space of time. Admittedly, we’ve seen him do this before in stories such as “The Space Museum”, where he pronounced an entire world to be devoid of life based on just one rock, but at least that was a geology deduction which tied in with the specialist knowledge he seemed to possess in seasons one and two. This story opens with the TARDIS landing in a gated yard (and the Doctor seems very certain it’ll be safe for some reason) and Steven and the Doctor emerging in their regular outfits (though see the bits about Steven’s dress sense in the Daleks’ Master Plan blog to see just how loose this use of the word regular is). Based on the surrounding buildings, the Doctor guesses it is probably medieval which is apparently a mere 1000 year window from about 500AD to 1500AD. Then, based on the soundtrack, one person comes into view, goes to a house and asks for a specific name. This then seems to instantly narrow it down to “the middle of the 16th century”. As history in general isn’t my strong point, I resorted to googling the name to see if it was indeed a notable figure from history. Google either wanted to send me to various social media profiles under that name or, more depressingly, wanted to send me to various websites about this particular story. Finally, in episode 4 we get the precise year as 1572. This raises a couple of questions in my mind. Firstly, is 1572 really “the middle” of the century and, secondly, just exactly how thorough is the Doctor’s knowledge of French fashions that he can seemingly narrow the date down by the way one person is dressed. Of course, if this story existed on video then we might find there’s a whole host of other visual clues that the Doctor might have used but, as it currently stands, the Doctor does seem to take a massive leap in such a very short time. These days of course, where the Doctor can seemingly measure things visually to a fraction of a millimetre, they’d probably glibly pass it off as him being able to identify it from sniffing the air and his inbuilt time sensitivity or something but this is Hartnell’s Doctor who can’t always even get a sentence out coherently, let alone identify where he is. The fact that the Doctor then goes off to meet someone suggests that he’s VERY confident about which precise year it is in the 16th century and that he’s not going to meet Preslin as a teenager. And if he is pretty sure of the exact year then surely, by now, he should have twigged which particular date the TARDIS is likely to have landed them on?
Presumably, based on Gaston’s outfit, the Doctor has a rough idea of what to wear so as not to stand out but we then get a weird short term memory failure not just by the Doctor but also by Steven. When the Doctor suggests going back into the ship to put on something more appropriate, Steven wants to know if the Doctor has the right clothes and the Doctor cheekily replies back that Steven would be surprised at what he has in his wardrobe. Except in the previous two stories we’ve already seen Steven raid the dressing up box to pass himself off as a Greek soldier and also get dressed into his jacket and slacks outfit. And presumably the Doctor’s forgotten that Steven’s been travelling with him for quite some time now and has presumably been changing his clothes regularly in that window as well? As well as this memory failure though, the simple fact that the Doctor suggests getting into period appropriate garb is very unusual. Admittedly, in most of the previous stories, the Doctor has been separated from the ship before he can suggest it but it’s not something we ever really see him do again and the few times he could have done it previously he didn’t. Take “Marco Polo” for example. For the first parts, the Doctor is still at least sleeping inside the ship but he doesn’t seem to suggest to Ian or Barbara that he could sort out a backpack full of outfits for them to wear. The photographic evidence for that story suggests that the time travellers seem to wear the same clothes for a few months which must make them very tatty. Or, off screen, does the Doctor smuggle out a few fresh pairs of boxers for Ian and find out what cup size Barbara takes? “The Crusade” could have seen him pop back into the ship for better gear as well and, after this story the wardrobe doesn’t seem to really do anyone favours (I’m thinking Polly in “The Tenth Planet” for starters). Yet the Doctor has multiple outfits to hand for this precise window of time in French history. So, does the ship have a wardrobe that has absolutely everything from Greek soldier to 20th century everyday wear? You’d certainly think that Steven would remember browsing that collection and assume it was “complete”? Does the wardrobe have a limited number of eras for which it can dispense outfits and it’s actually the wardrobe that has control over where the Doctor lands? We know the Doctor’s favourite part of history is, weirdly, the French Revolution but that’s still quite some way off. And why, more than any other time, does he feel the need to be inconspicuous for this story and very few others? Does he get Steven to dress appropriately so that he can accidentally ditch him there and not leave modern fabrics as part of history? After all, given that the Doctor randomly goes missing for two episodes (and doesn’t even have the decency to tell us where he was when he does come back) there must have been something going on in the background. If it weren’t for the whole dressing up in period garb thing, this could have been the perfect place to slot in “The Three Doctors” and “The Five Doctors”!
The production reality is that it gave Hartnell the chance to play a different role for two episodes. “The Massacre” is very unusual on this front, seemingly the Doctor doesn’t know who the Abbot is (otherwise he might have known about the whole potential confusion) and there isn’t the usual ‘impersonation’ going on (as in “The Enemy of the World”, “Meglos” etc). I initially thought I had two issues with this part of the plot but, after a spur of the moment googling to see if I had something right… it turns out I probably only have one. Television series, when set in the past, nearly always sanitise things and smarten them up. We don’t have pictures of Hartnell as the Abbot, so we don’t know for certain how his hair was styled for the role. If the Doctor wanted to impersonate the Abbot, redoing his hair wouldn’t have been an issue. In 1600, the average life expectancy was about 35. However, as always, this will have been lowered by the sheer number of infant deaths and women that died in childbirth. So it’s not impossible that the Abbot would have been alive to resemble the Doctor (Hartnell was 58 when “The Massacre” was made). Admittedly we get into more unlikely realms that the Abbot’s build would have been a perfect match for the Doctor (google wasn’t able to give me a decent summary of what size waist was common in 1570) and goodness only knows what accent Steven was hearing when the Abbot spoke (thankfully the story doesn’t even try to do accents) so it’s impossible to know if the voice could have been the same. However, as I said, the story has been sanitised and I strongly suspect that the chances of the Abbot having a set of teeth close to Hartnell’s 20th century set were very slim. As always in TV, everyone in the past seems to have a mouth full of teeth with no sign of broken teeth, rotten teeth etc. There’s a very large part of me that thinks that (in anything passing reality) Steven would have been able to know if the Abbot was the Doctor or not purely by looking at him when he spoke. As for the second issue, the one I thought I had, it turns out that the production team got randomly lucky with a story set in the late 1500s. One of the things that I had always ‘believed’ was that people were shorter in the past. I know from visiting various historical attractions throughout my life that ceilings have definitely not been at a height suitable for your average modern person. So, when I was trying to decide how likely it was that the Abbot was going to be tall enough to be Hartnell’s double, I had assumed that there would have been a height issue. However, it turns out that there was a spell of unusually ‘good health’ around that era and people were, on average, only maybe an inch or so shorter on average than we are in modern times. OTHER periods in history they’ve been a lot shorter but, probably out of pure luck, the Doctor managed to run into someone with the same face in an era where height wouldn’t have been a problem.
That really just leaves us with Dodo. We’ve got LOTS of publicity shots of her posing with the fake TARDIS prop and, if you’ve never seen them, it’s almost impossible to convey just how wrong the majority of the prop looks. So just how did it look on screen? How carefully chosen were the camera angles to ensure that we didn’t see the bits with far too many windows painted on to it? And, more importantly, was that really the best way they could think of to get a new companion on board? The behind the scenes issues were immense during the production of season three but really? A random girl wanders into the TARDIS looking for a phone because there’s been a (road) accident and a child’s been hurt. If you’re thinking this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s like the opening of the novel version of “The Daleks”, played out at about five times the speed. I really do wonder if they were stuck for ideas and just happened to have a copy of the book laying around.
If you’re really wondering why I’ve focussed so much on the very start and very end of “The Massacre”, it’s because the story is played so utterly seriously and with such total conviction, I find pretty much the meat of the plot very difficult to criticise or comment on. And Hartnell’s speech at the end is absolutely amazing. It’s strange to think that in two stories’ time, the first attempts would be made to get rid of him.