Day 76: The Death of Doctor Who

It does look vaguely like William Hartnell. If you happen to
have lost your sight.

This episode's bonkers idea is that the Daleks have created a robot double of the Doctor, who will infiltrate and destroy the TARDIS crew. If you look to the left, you shall observe the actor who they used for his scenes, who looks nothing like William Hartnell at all, thus foiling their plan for the viewing audience at home. But let's look at the idea in detail. We're playing off the old concept of the familiar becoming unfamiliar, as we see a character attempt to kill others whom we have come to respect and admire. And on the occasions when the production team decide to use William Hartnell to play the robot double, it becomes genuinely unsettling to see him be evil, and try and kill his friends. Of course, as this is a clone story, we are in desperate need of a scene where we have to figure out which one is which. Here, that task falls to Ian, who picks up a rock and attempts to bludgeon the person who he thinks is the robot, not knowing that it is actually the Doctor. And this acts as a nice call back to the first adventure, where the Doctor was possibly going to attack a caveman with a rock, and kill him. Now we see him faced in the same situation, on the receiving end. But now, we see him as a hero, a figure to be admired. The audience can tell which one is the real Doctor, not by the way he looks, but by the way he acts. We are confronted with a man who is callous and nasty, against a man who had elements of that at first, but has grown before our eyes into a hero. Here, the time travel isn't across the fourth dimension, but showing us the past of our characters, and showing us how far we've come.