 |
||||
|
Doctor Who: The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve [1966] 'Now they've all gone … none of them could understand, not even
my little Susan.' There's a rare moment here of the Doctor [William
Hartnell] all alone, after Steven [Peter Purves] has temporarily walked
out angry, lamenting how lonely he is after all his companions have
deserted him, then thinking about going back to his own planet ['but
I can't']. When, in the epilogue, Dodo is brought as a new companion,
the Doctor even says she looks like Susan. This comes at the end of
an unusual historical serial which Hartnell mostly sits out - it's established
that the Doctor is the double of an evil Abbot, but rather than play
the impersonation game [used in The
Enemy of the World] we merely have a thread of Steven wondering
whether the Abbot is his friend in disguise as he gets mixed up with
various factions in Paris, 1572, just as Catholics are firing up to
massacre the Huguenots. Steven gets centre-stage and, unusually, is
in the middle of a lesser-known bit of history, which plays out as educational
but also surprisingly grim; for once, there's a sense of anger about
leaving people to their fates and the plot is all about impending doom
rather than escape and rescue. Only the audio survives. First published in this form here. Visit Kim's Official Website at www.johnnyalucard.com
|
||||