I forgot to mention during my last post that part of what impressed me about the script was Susan’s accuracy in predicting future events. She’s ridiculed by her class for thinking that the British monetary system was decimal; she said it hadn’t happened yet. She says there’s a fifth dimension of space; okay, so she’s a few dimensions short according to current thinking, but so far as I know, nobody in 1963 was conversant in string theory.
The opening of The Cave of Skulls is a bit disappointing in comparison (synopsis). The TARDIS arrives in the past, presumably the 100,000 BC of the title of the story arc, and we’re treated to a bunch of cavemen who look about as prehistoric as 1960s Klingons look alien. A caveman named Za is trying to recreate fire by rolling a bone in his hands; apparently his father discovered fire but didn’t bother to share the recipe. I’m thinking more that fire was discovered by taking it from a lightning strike, and that once people came up with the Tom Hanks methods of baking coconuts, this became part of the cultural heritage fairly damn quickly. But Tom shouldn’t feel bad, as the Doctor has also forgotten that fire can be made without matches.
We’re introduced to the friendly old trope of the TARDIS not quite working properly; according to the characters, this is the first time that it gets stuck looking like a police box, and I wonder how much of the audience looked forward to the story line where it gets fixed. They’d have a long wait.
Unfortunately, Susan sort of loses it when the Doctor gets surprised by a caveman with an axe, which is fairly un-Doctorlike for that matter. This is the first time that the Doctor’s been in any trouble? You’d think Susan would be used to this by now, and she’d trust the Doctor to take care of himself. I don’t know how far along the Doctor is supposed to be in his first incarnation by the time the story begins, but unless he’s very fresh from his zeroth incarnation (or whatever the hell Time Lords are doing when they’re growing up), this seems like a rather silly way to be put in danger.
We then go back into caveman society for a tiresome expository scene, and a plot point that should give Mark Twain a screenwriter credit. It is perhaps notable that both sides of the Cro-Magnon political struggle sound awfully similar to Republican talking points; just insert “tiger” for “al-Qaeda,” and “fire” for “millimeter backscatter X-rays at every airport.”
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