The Aztecs: Ranking - 39

 

The Aztecs

(Season 1, Dr 1 with Ian, Barbara and Susan, 23/5/1964-13/6/1964, producer: Verity Lambert, script editor: David Whittaker, writer: John Lucarotti, director: John Crockett)

Rank: 39

In an emoji: 🍫

   'How this story might have gone with different Drs and companions in the Tardis: 

Vicki: 'Ooh look an Aztec warrior! Is he house-trained?!I'm going to name him stabby and adopt him! Although its a shame he's not a Trojan warrior, they're dreamy...'

Ben: 'Ere, this isn't England. Blimey these Aztecs do go on a bit don't they? Where's the Dr? Oh, he's trying on another hat, just great. Put the kettle on for some hot chocolate duchess!' 

Zoe: 'You want to sacrifice me you say? Oh this is going to be fun, I'm going to learn a lot from you!' 

Jo: 'Groovy! Who does your makeup?!' 

Brigadier: 'We'll soon put a stop to this sacrifice mumbo jumbo. Chap in war paint there - five rounds rapid!' 

Sarah Jane: 'Oh just great! When I said I wanted to go somewhere hot doctor I meant for a holiday. Now I'm being chased left right and centre and now I'm to be sacrificed. Again! I want a bath - and not in boiling oil if you don't mind!'  

Leela: 'No no no point your knife like this - that way you'll get better blood flow and better appease your culture's primitive Gods' 

Turlough: 'Ooh are you working for the Black Guardian too? Look sacrifice the Dr, you don't want me, the sun God doesn't care about me, it's him you want...'

Peri: 'Tloxtoxl you say? Well I'm Perpiguilliam Brown and I can shout just as loud as you can!'  

Ace: 'Aztecs! Swords! Ace!' 

Donna: 'Just save one of them Doctor, just one! Preferably that good looking one over there that reminds me of Clariss' ex! You wait till they see me walking round London with him on my arm'

 

Clara: 'Run you clever boy - and take that silly head-dress off!' 

River Song: 'Hello sweetie! Miss me? By the way, I'm a God now. What was that about rewriting history again? Oh and ancient tribe you want to know how things turn out for the Aztec empire?  Spoilers'

‘The Aztecs’ is where Dr Who as we know it properly begins. Which seems an odd thing to say about the sixth story of a series that had hit the ground running and already created all its main characters, its most famous Dalek-shaped baddy, the theme tune, opening credits and the time-travelling police-telephone box that everyone associates with it, but is nevertheless true. Because what a lot of fans miss is that ‘The Aztecs’ was the first story written by someone who could actually see how this series was shaping up on screen and the first to be composed from scratch following script editor David Whittaker’s re-write of the rules in ‘The Edge Of Destruction’. For while ‘The Aztecs’ might have only been on air just six weeks after the end of writer John Lucarotti’s first Who story ‘Marco Polo’ this is a different beast in every way, far more recognisable to fans who came along later. That story is the last gasp of creator Sydney Newman’s remit about the series being educational, about our heroes and heroines becoming involved in someone else’s world portrayed on screen with as much detail and accuracy as possible. ‘The Aztecs’ though is more like the stories that follow, about our characters and what being trapped in that world does to them and which has the realism and education as a background detail. In ‘Marco Polo’ the Tardis crew couldn’t change that world even when they wanted to (because that’s not what this series was for), while in ‘The Aztecs’ the frustrations of not being able to change this world and being tied to that format is what the plot is all about. Arguably it’s the first time someone writing for this series has sat down and thought about the implications of time travel (beyond Ian and Barbara being taken away from their home) – till now this series has been about exploring, of re-creating other lands and times in a corner of a BBC TV studio for 1960s viewers, but this story starts a new trend: Dr Who as moral conundrum. There had been scifi books and films about time travel before of course. Even in the Victorian era Mark Twain was writing about contemporaries lost in King Arthur’s Court and trying to get home again, along with H G Wells’ ‘The Time Machine’ and our old friend Quatermass surely the single biggest influence on Dr Whos early days. As far as I know no one anywhere had posed the question ‘what happens if history gets changed?’ before this one though – that’s a huge concept to come up with. Even if everything is tidied away by the end, so that the Tardis might never have arrived, the future of Dr Who and more than a few other franchises too (‘Back To The Future’ for one) wouldn’t exist without this story. 

It’s also written with half an eye on the success of ‘The Daleks’, Lucarotti smart enough to realise that this series is all about ‘monsters’ now, whatever his boss and friend Sydney wanted it to be and boy is it about monsters, with Tlotoxl the baddy closest to a Dalek in human form as we ever see on screen until Davros a decade later, someone who gets his kicks exterminating people according to his own internal logic, on what appears to us to be a whim. Only, unlike the Daleks who do it because they hate all life, Tlotoxl has the weight of an entire religion and empire on his side, a civilisation convinced that the world will end if they don’t have someone this ruthless on their side, sacrificing victims because they think that’s not just the best but the only way to survive, in order to make the sun God rise every morning. Barbara knows better of course. She’s a history teacher who comes from ‘our’ era (though ‘now’ reads 1964 in this instance), someone who knows that the sacrifices are all coincidence, that the sun will rise whether or not the Aztecs kill people and that ultimately it’s the horror of their sacrifices that will cause the Spanish Conquistadors who first discover them to put their empire and all the wonderful things they built that Europeans of that day could only dream of to the sword. And there are a lot: of all the places from Earth’s history we visit in the first few years this is the world that seems closest to ours and Lucarotti portrays this society with a lot of living details cleverly woven into the script: there’s retirement at fifty (something the Doctor nearly takes advantage of), the children are educated in school (Susan reads out her Aztec legends from memory in a scene that looks very like those at Coal Hill School in ‘An Unearthly Child’), there’s agriculture and plant cultivation o a sort Europeans won’t match for some time (Ian finding himself trapped within the tunnel that’s used to water the plants at the end of episode three) while the Aztecs knew every bit as much about astronomy, medicine and food in the 15th century as ‘we’ will until the 18th century or further. Drop the average viewer of 1964 into this world and they’d cope quite well – unlike the comparatively barbaric worlds of Ancient Rome, Ancient Greece or Ancient Cathay – with their biggest obstacle the climate. Well, part from the sacrifices anyway. By 1964 the general view of The Aztecs was just their bloodlust, with the idea that they were backward hopeless savages that Cortez destroyed because they were intrinsically better. But Lucarotti knows beyond the textbooks and the clichés and creates the first real Who story about how the past isn’t always as far away as we might think. 

 Barbara thinks that if she can just persuade these people to keep the good and throw out the bad this great wonderful culture, full of so much wisdom and knowledge far beyond anything the Europeans had, will last and the Earth will be a better place for it. But Lucarotti has been watching Dr Who since it was first on and he’s seen something that no earlier writer of this quirky little series that’s not like anything else seen on television before can see, because they’ve been working on their own tiny projects: a pattern emerging between stories apparently unrelated in past present and future, a bigger picture of how you can’t separate the good from the bad, that you have take the whole of a culture and humanity, good and bad, because its who we are (mankind in the future is no different to mankind in the past or present, with repeated cycles of heroes and villains and people in between in all eras, a running theme in all of Dr Who). It’s a side plot in ‘An Unearthly Child’ where some cavemen are nice and others nasty. It’s a by-product of the first Dalek story, which is really a cold war fight between aggressors and pacifists. It’s there in the background of Lucarotti’s own ‘Marco Polo’ where Kublai Khan is a nice and friendly old man who plays backgammon with the Doctor after a lifetime of wreaking havoc and destruction on the people he’s colonised, because that’s how circumstances made him and what people of that era expected him to do. It’s sort of there, if you squint a lot, in ‘Edge Of Destruction’ (where the Doctor’s impatience nearly sends everyone back to the big bang) and ‘Keys Of Marinus’ (where a whacking great Voord makes everyone do his bidding searching for keys on alien planets that needs everyone to come together to solve). But now it’s front and centre and it’s a theme that still runs through more stories than it doesn’t to this day, the idea that no culture is all bad – except maybe the Daleks (even the Cybermen, Dr Who’s other most ruthless race, started off as a side effect of helping people with cybernetics that got woefully out of hand, while the Sontarons and Ice Warriors and co are fighting out of defence so no one else invades them first; even The Daleks get re-written from natural aggressors to being almost the victims of their own warped xenophobia). Barbara tries hard to change Aztec culture (and its notable how much Barbara comes to the fore in these later first season stories, as writers get to see just how good Jacqueline Hill is and how this comparatively inexperienced actress compared to the other three regulars, who got the job as a favour to her director husband as much as anything, wipes the floor with everyone up to and sometimes including William Hartnell), but even though she’s greeted as a God and tries hard to be like a God, she isn’t a God because she’s a mere Human no better or worse than the people’s she’s trying to save and she can’t rescue these people from themselves no matter how many head-dresses she wears and what booming voice she uses. 

 The Doctor is re-written too to become the mouthpiece of the series’ rules, Lucarotti making the most of the chance to re-write him to be the kinder, more humble timelord we see walk off the Tardis at the end of ‘The Edge Of Destruction’ (and which came too late to be incorporated into ‘Marco Polo’) but also someone more experienced than the others as opposed to just being from a world full of superior technology. The Doctor knows that Barbara’s efforts are futile because he’s tried and ‘you can’t re-write history– not one line’. The past is a set line on the bumpy progress of human (and then other) civilisations, a necessary moment of growing to be where we are now, that can’t be avoided and which we have to go through instead (just as ‘now’ is a line on the path to a possible future that Dr Who has fun imagining). He’s more ‘human’ here, for lack of a better word, sympathetic to what Barbara is trying to do even while he tries to stop it and even gets a romance – by accident, as he tries to find a way back into the catacombs so everyone can leave, but a romance that makes him seem wistful with talk of settling down too. You feel in this story that the Doctor is just trying to get ‘home’ too, every bit as much as the ‘kidnapped’ Ian and Barbara. 

 This is all part of a bigger story about respecting the customs of the people you visit, rather than taking them over and submitting them to your will (the way that Cortez did – and even more than Tlotoxl he’s the ‘villain’ of this story, destroying the good along with the bad). But does that mean you sit on the sidelines while innocent people are murdered – even ones who are pleased to be chosen to die? After all, for everyone who end up on the sacrificial altar they’re expecting to wake up in the afterlife, their Gods pleased with them. It’s an honour – who is Barbara to get in the way of that with her 20th century sensibilities, even if to modern viewers she’s clearly ‘right’? The Aztecs’ sun Gods are as real to them as anything in Coal Hill School; they’re not mystical beings but those to consider above the needs of the individual. You totally feel for Barbara though: she can see the good in these people and desperately wants to nurture that so nobody has to die at all. Her downfall is that while she can convince those like Autloc who are sympathetic to her ways she can’t convince Tlotoxl and the two sides of Aztec nature are so deeply entrenched you can’t have one without the other – as indeed you can’t in any period of time, the good and the bad, it’s all a part of the human experience. It takes more than a returning Goddess in a funny accent to change the whole fabric of society and it’s all much much bigger than Barbara. She tries hard to at least save Autloc, to make him see the truth so that maybe he can pass it on to everyone else, much the way the Doctor ‘saves’ one family from ‘The Fires Of Pompeii’. But equally one man versus a whole way of life is doomed to failure. 

 What’s funny is that local baddy priest Tlotoxl is ‘right’ as it happens: the arrival of the Tardis does spell trouble and this particular tribe of Aztecs would have been better without the civil war chaos Barbara causes, precisely because he’s the only person in this story working as fate meant him to without questioning it. John Ringham plays Tlotoxl just right, as a tragic Richard III figure (the Shakespeare version as his enemies wrote him, not the real historical figure who was as close to a decent King as England ever had in real life, complete with half-hump and leer) the victim of his own downfall because he’s convinced himself that he’s right and who won’t listen to reason. Director John Crockett gave him the actor the advice to ‘make all the children in Britain hate you!’ and Ringham succeeded, though far from being a pure psychopath like so many lesser villains in the series to come there’s a certain intelligence and logic about his choices: he’s doing what he thinks is best for his people, to save them the way he and his ancestors have been taught going back centuries. The warrior is up against the worrier Autloc, a second wonderful character played by Keith Pyott, who like Lucarotti’s ‘Marco Polo’ before him is a Dr substitute: moral, upstanding, wise, curious, benevolent as far as he can be. Only of course Autloc is ‘wrong’ – Barbara isn’t a Goddess as he believes and his utopian ideals are in error, for this period anyway. The (spoilers) ‘twist’ is that Barbara and Autloc lose and Tlotoxl seems to win, but only on a smaller scale – by sticking to his bloody ways The Aztecs die out under Cortez and everybody in this world loses. 

 The great irony of all this, too, is that for her and her friends to survive Barbara has to lie, to pretend to be the Goddess Yetaxa reincarnated because it’s that or see her and her friends murdered too. But even though she’s right about the greater truth of what will happen to the Aztecs she can’t fully take the moral high ground here. Autloc begs her at one stage not to turn out to be a false Goddess, but of course she is, even though she’s ’right’ about everything that will happen. Similarly Tlotoxl is telling the truth as he sees it when he says that sacrifices are necessary, even though he’s ‘wrong’ about that (at least according to our 20th/21st century beliefs). Not telling the truth gets everything into a muddle: The Doctor helps Ixta with a trick to defeat a soldier because that seems to be the best way to win his favour and find out the way back to the Tardis. Only he doesn’t realise the warrior he’s been asked to poison and drug is Ian. Then again on the other side Susan is in trouble precisely for speaking her mind and refusing to go along with Aztec customs of marriage and sacrifice. Suddenly in this story time-travel doesn’t seem so easy: at least in ‘Macro Polo’ all everyone had to worry about was getting their Tardis ‘caravan’ back but here they’re in a whole heap of trouble. Unusually, too, they basically end the story by fleeing for their lives, the damage done, Autloc embarrassed and saddened. But what other result could there be? 

 From now in Dr Who we’ll get a simplified version of this theme over and over, as this becomes a series where humans who are monsters and aliens who are nice and cultures made up of both will become what Dr Who does, as it switches from being a series about goodies overthrowing baddies and becomes a series about karma, about justice, where the Doctor is karma’s right hand wiping all the bad things away. But for now ‘The Aztecs aims higher than that: it’s a series about how civilisations are doomed to fall despite the people working to make life better, because of the rotten apples that bob to the surface of life’s barrels and make all the noise; the bad people who doom the rest of us to a fiery death when their unsustainable actions causes everything to collapse in on itself. For ‘The Aztecs’ isn’t just about Mexico in the 15th century but a warning from history about mankind in the 20th century (and beyond), transmitted at a time when a cold war was raging, when kind and benign scientists telling themselves they were working on behalf of peace were creating the most terrible weapons of war and about how all our good, all our art and culture and kindness and cleverness and all the things that make us great wouldn’t count for a thing if Russia or America chose to wipe out half the planet at a press of a button (with England a potential victim of both, a second obvious place to attack once the Russians had destroyed the Americans but also on the edges of the deadly sphere of killer radiation if the Americans chose to drop a bomb on Russia, a sad casualty of ‘friendly fire’ in their fight with the commies, a ‘sacrifice’ in a war that didn’t need to be fought). After all, what were the 1st and 2nd World Wars if not human sacrifices on a massive scale in order to make a better world – even when we sitting here in 2023 (or in 1964) knew it was never to be? Like ‘The Daleks’ (a successful story any writer in these early years wanted to copy) this is also a parable of sorts between the aggressors and pacifists – and you’d be surprised how many people across history seemed to think their own half were all sweetness and light and the other was violent and ‘the enemy’, even though to modern eyes the superpowers were both as bad as each other in so many ways. 

 I think where Lucarotti differs from Terry Nation’s nuclear war in ‘The Daleks’ is that he’s writing about ‘1964’ in more ways than just the cold war though. This was an era of big change, of a generation gap where the children were scared of their parents and grandparents who had become involved in two world wars and didn’t seem to be able to solve problems without resorting to shooting at things, while the parents were scared of their children who seemed to be growing up as aliens, refusing to fight and with a culture all of their own that might as well have come from another planet. They’re precisely the argument being waged between elder statesmen Autloc and young warrior Tlotoxl, even if the ‘generations’ are here the other way round; the theme is still the same though – perhaps the biggest war in society is that between generations. ‘The Aztecs’ feel like Lucarotti, the learned professor and historian, taking on Sydney Newman’s mantle of being ‘educational’ but with the wisdom of all great professors that actually they might yet learn a thing or two from their pupils. In some ways its almost an apology for the wars of the past and an acknowledgement that maybe the kids who want a better future are onto something good after all (though Ian and Barbara don’t seem young by modern Dr Who standards at somewhere round about thirty, they’re young enough to make the case when set against the impossibly rigid, ancient immovable Doctor – plus Barbara would have been around twelve when the second world war ended, old enough to see the damage and not want to live through it again). At the same time, though, he remembers the battles of the past in a way the youngsters only know secondhand, he lived through a time when WW2 at least seemed inevitable and just, where a monster that killed millions had to be stopped somehow and that fighting is still better than the alternative – Germany winning and the sun never coming up tomorrow. The script sides with Autloc, makes him brave and wise and kind and noble, and then at the very end shows him to be naive in thinking he can stem the tide of what the world can be like when a baddy evil enough comes along to knock everything out of shape. This is, after all, a plot all about sacrifices (often quite literally): in the ‘old’ days’ they seemed necessary as a means to live in peace but now peace is so fragile still Lucarotti isn’t so sure – the hippies have pulled at his heart with their new way of life without suffering and yet the writer knows that life isn’t like that and maybe one day they’ll face a choice of having to sacrifice their loved ones too as the lesser of two great evils. Lucarotti himself was 38 when he wrote this – too old to swing with the youth of the day, too young to simply sneer and have children old enough to be adults living in this world just yet, caught midway between the two worlds and feeling he could comment on things evenly. And if that seems far-fetched (and maybe it is) remember that Terry Nation was interviewed a lot in the wake of the Dalek success and loved explaining where his ideas came from, making multiple references to WW2 and the Nazis in his interviews, which Lucarotti would have heard while writing this script (if anything Terry bigs up just how much that was on his mind in order to have something interesting to say to the press – it’s the sequel ‘Dalek Invasion Of The Earth’ that’s really about the Nazis for the first time).

If that’s true then Susan is sadly, as she so often is, the weakest link: Lucarotti doesn’t know what to do with a character who emotionally is at the same age as the ‘youth’ side of the argument and yet who is impossibly old and alien like the Dr and the ‘elder’ side, so he sticks her on the sidelines to scream and be wet, even though this of all scripts, about the young v old, is where she should shine the most. It doesn’t help that Carole Ann Ford has two weeks’ holiday booked so is shunted out to a temple to learn the ways of the Aztecs and be prepared for marriage, only appearing on pre-recorded film (although Susan still gets a great moment when she’s the one of the Tardis crew who outright refuses to do what the Aztecs expect of her). Similarly, with the Dr made softer and gentler, there’s not much for Ian to do except be the action hero; it says much for William Russell’s acting ability that he manages to make even this reduced part seem important as Ian is in a bit of a civil war himself, willing to follow Barbara in everything the way he always does, but also a teensy bit swayed by the Doctor’s arguments. He is, however, a great shoulder to cry on, with a sympathy and empathy that goes beyond the fight scenes, effectively doing the job we would normally associate with the Doctor in modern companion-heavy stories. 

 Even if that undercurrent of generations is nonsense ‘The Aztecs’ would still be one of my favourite stories even without it. I’ve loved the Aztecs ever since my history teacher got me into them (thanks Mr Rizzoto!) – he was so passionate he even wrote a musical about them, complete with sacrifices made using dummy knives containing tomato ketchup (No sign of Tlotoxl, whose completely fictional as far as we know, though Autloc owes a lot to tar of our show, doomed Aztec chief Montezuma II, torn between the glorious past and fading present while trying to work out how to best give his people some sort of future; he holds the Aztec people together until his death but without being united enough to last far past his demise; I was an Aztec extra in case you’re wondering; probably the one in the ‘square’ just trying to get on with his job while all hell around him explodes in episode four). The Dr Who version is as accurate as they can get it for a TV production in a tiny studio on a low budget in 1964: Lucarotti had written about this time period before and had even lived in Mexico for a while and you can tell: every detail feels ‘real’ and right, with more little nuggets of this culture in the script than we get in later years and from other historical writers. Of course it doesn’t quite look like The Aztec Empire would have done really: there are only six sets - one of them the Tardis - each of the other five with a rather obvious painted backdrop (although it’s worth remembering that in 1964 people would be watching this on murky televisions, not high definition and they looked pretty decent on my battered old VHS copy), there’d be a lot more people than that milling about than a handful of bored looking extras, the step-pyramids would be way more impressive than they seem as a blown-up photographic backdrop, there would be a lot more props and furniture than this and both men and women would be walking around topless (something you absolutely couldn’t put on TV in 1964!; the costumes are all a complete invention that almost work, a cross between Medieval cloaks and Roman-like tunics. Full marks for the elaborate hats though, which are at least vaguely accurate). However kudos to the set dressers (with good old Barry Newberry in charge again): unlike cavemen furs or Marco Polo’s world they couldn’t simply take this stuff from BBC stock and had to build it from scratch, using as many ‘real’ examples from history as possible to get it right. Note the many little period details such as the hieroglyphics on the walls (the Aztecs didn’t have writing as we know it), the lack of metal weapons (because the only metal the Aztecs had was plundered from other cultures and they didn’t know how to make it themselves) and the fact that there are circles on the walls but never one as an actual object (because they never developed the wheel but did have circles on children’s toys). It all looks gorgeous: throw in some nachos and take me there now please; I’ll even go along with the human sacrifice bit (better than being blown up by one of our politicians anyway, which amounts to much the same thing). 

It’s the script that makes this one such a success story though: it’s intelligent in all the best ways, with a complex, intricate plot that develops naturally out of these circumstances and full of believable characters in situations that seem more alien to us than Skaro did (which was, after all, a sort of near future) and yet still make utter sense (give or take sacrificing people to a sun God and even that’s portrayed as such a natural custom nobody can quite get rid of it even though many people are starting to think its an outdated anachronism that does more harm than good, like daylight saving time, morris dancing. The Royal Family or The Conservative Party).It’s also the acting: we’ve already discussed three of the regulars and the two main guest stars and they’re exemplary, their moral clashes at the heart of this story. Jacqueline Hill shines most though in the story that gave Barbara the most to do of all her stories. I adore Barbara, whose one of the unsung heroines of these early days, who (along with Ian) is our representative in a way that no future companion ever is. She’s scared when she needs to be, but brave and resilient and while she sits around waiting to be rescued (often by Ian) she spends her time wisely, always learning about the culture she’s in, always looking to use her brain. She’s your mum in space, in sensible shoes and a cardigan, but smart enough to know that world’s dead to her now and she has to improvise, trying to make sense of a bewildering world coolly and calmly. Jacqueline Hill knows just how to play Barbara: scared out of her wits but trying not to show it and refusing to give in to panic with a stiff upper lip that still can’t help quivering when she thinks no one else can see. William Hartnell too is superb, revelling in this kinder, softer, gentler Dr that’s been written for him and more like his real self, after a career of playing hard-nosed bullies much more like the ‘original’ version of his timelord. In this story he gets whole new dimensions to play with past being crotchety or other-worldly. He even gets engaged, of a sort, misunderstanding the significance of the sweet and gentle Cameca offering him a cup of cocoa (an Aztec aphrodisiac long before it was a Victorian and then 20th/21st century one!), the closest the Doctor comes to having a romantic relationship until he turns into Paul McGann in 1996! . Poor Cameca: there Barbara is trying to stop everyone from tearing out people’s hearts physically and the Doctor goes and does it symbolically! The Doctor’s gentleness and his embarrassment is a whole new avenue for this Dr to explore and it was smart of Lucarotti to realise Hartnell could pull it off (especially so soon after ’Marco’ where the Dr is at his tetchiest). It may be, too, that Lucarotti was trying to show the youth of the day that the youth didn’t ‘invent’ love – that the elder generation knew the glories of living in peace too, even if the Doctor has to make ‘sacrifices’ of his own in order to let things run their natural course and say his goodbyes; note though that there seems to a whacking great age gap between himself and Cameca, even without the revelation that the doctor’s hundreds of years old just yet). I do wish, however, that one of the famous Billy fluffs’ in rehearsals had made it to screen: work had to be stopped for a few minutes the room was laughing so hard when Hartnell refereed to the story as ‘The Anzacs’… 

The result is a triumph that has no disasters bar a couple of dodgy fight scenes and nothing a bit more money wouldn’t have put right with a sophistication that seems a world away from the daftness of the futuristic stories around it. Suddenly everyone making this show in front of and behind the cameras is pulling together with newfound confidence, safe that the audience at home are both childish enough to embrace the time-travel aspect and adult enough to get what’s going on here, because they have done with the other five stories already and Whomania is showing no signs of slowing down yet. In short, ‘The Aztecs’ is a magnificent piece of telly, working as both the educational, intelligent bit of TV it was commissioned to be and the high stakes emotional drama it was written to be now that everyone knew what this story was for, almost as lush and gorgeous as ‘Marco Polo’ but with even better characterisation of the regulars and a lot more compact at four episodes rather than seven. This story was so good it took a long time to be beaten and set the benchmark for just how classy, intellectual and brave this show could be. Without it and the almost as strong stories that came before it the sun might not have risen on this series the next day. We owe it’s sacrifices a lot because ‘The Aztecs’ is, of all the stories in Dr Who’s first year, the one that made the sun came out and set this story on the track that everyone recognises today. 

 POSITIVES + The musical score is by Richard Rodney Bennett, a future Oscar winner (for ‘Murder On the Orient Express’ in 1974), then at the start of his career but even at just twenty-eight clearly something special so it was quite a coup for the show to get him at all. In this era he’s working on his second opera ‘The Midnight Thief’ simultaneously with his TV work and close to his big breakthrough, though he was already deeply immersed in music: his dad had been taught personally by Berlioz and his mum had been taught personally by Holst, being one of the singers in the post-WW1 premiere of ‘The Planet Suite’, where she was the wordless choir in ‘Neptune’ that fades away to nothing (a special effect created by the singers leaving the stage and slowly walking outside!) He’s already doing something special despite one of the hardest commissions of the lot (I mean, you don’t get many conch shell players in orchestras these days do you?) and while I don’t know how the Aztec empire sounded any more than you do this score sounds ’right’ somehow. 

 NEGATIVES - The fight sequences are the one aspect of this story that’s pretty poor, boring and overlong, there as rather obvious plot beats to break up all the talking rather than to serve the plot (basically Ian keeps getting into fights and wins, but by refusing to kill Tlotoxl’s minions he puts himself in danger all over again – although even this could be another comment on hippie pacifism and what might have happened if Hitler hadn’t been stopped). By now the DW production team have been working for half the year with only a week’s gap per cast member and are running on fumes – they know their lines well enough (a few charming ‘Billy fluffs’ aside as ever) but the fight sequences are where the lack of rehearsal time most shows itself and looks more like modern day choreographed wrestling than a real fight to the death. The shot of the defeated Aztec warrior falling to his death through a trapdoor – which is basically the actor flailing his arms about against a black curtain while being shot by a camera from above – is also one of the ropiest shots of the 1960s (but could have been worse: Newberry says that it was his last minute substitute for the original idea of having the actor simply disappear through an open doorway). 

 BEST QUOTE: Barbara: ‘Oh, don't you see? If I could start the destruction of everything that's evil here then everything that is good would survive when Cortez lands’. Doctor: ‘But you can't rewrite history! Not one line!’

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