4 episodes
Aired between 5th February 1966 and 26th February 1966
Written by John Lucarroti and Donald Tosh
Produced by John Wiles
Directed by Paddy Russell
Synopsis
The TARDIS lands in 16th Century France. From the locals dress, the Doctor deduces the rough time period and decides he would like to talk to the noted apothecary Charles Preslin. Steven wants to go with him, but the Doctor is adamant that he wants to do it alone, and tells Steven to wait in a nearby tavern for him. They both reenter the TARDIS and find suitable period clothes.
In the tavern, a gang of Hugenots (protestants) are drinking and being rowdy. Their bravado upsets a nearby Catholic who makes it known he's insulted by their behavior and threateningly suggests that Gaston, one of the rowdy Hugenots drinks to the newly married Queen Margarette. Gaston's friend, Nicholas barely keeps the peace and the Catholic, Simon Duval, walks away angry. He goes to the inn keeper and pays him to spy on the Hugenots.
The Doctor and Steven have a quick drink at the tavern, and agree that the Doctor is free to go and see Preslin, whilst Steven takes in the local sights. They will both meet back at the tavern in the evening.
As the Doctor leaves, Steven notices that a passer by recognises him, and begins to follow the Doctor away. Steven decides to trail them both, but is stopped by the innkeeper who demands payment for the drinks. Steven's attempts to pay just get the innkeeper more angry until Nicholas comes over and pays the drinks for him. Nicholas recognises Steven as an English protestant, and is friendly to him.
Having lost the Doctor, Steven asks Nicholas to take him to Preslin's shop, so he can warn his friend. Nicholas agrees, but insists Steven has a drink with them first.
Meanwhile, the Doctor arrives at Preslin's shop, and finds the apothecary home, but he is fearful and is pretending to be merely a servant, insisting that Preslin has left France.
The Doctor convinces him to drop his facade, and Preslin says that he's scared of the Abbot of Amboise, who is in the area looking for heretics to the Church. The Doctor assures him that he is a man of science too, and they begin to discuss their passion, and begin to come up with a plan to avoid the Abbot.
Back at the Tavern, Gaston is suspicious of Steven, but Nicholas is quite welcoming. They explain that the city is full of tension between the Catholics and Hugenots. Recently, there has been marriage of the Hugenot Henry of Navarre to the Kings sister, Margarite, to try and heal the divide, but the rivalry continues.
Steven thanks the Hugenots for the drinks and leaves. No sooner is he outside the door, than he bumps into a servant girl who is fleeing four Catholic guards. The guards chase her into the tavern but the Hugenots hide the girl and stand off the Catholics. Once the guards have gone, Steven asks why the girl was running. Her name is Anne Chaplette and she explains that her father was killed in a massacre of the Hugenots at Vassy. She overheard the guards mentioning Vassy and saying that "it will happen again before the weeks out". Nicholas kindly agrees to hide Anne in his masters mansion, and says that this means the catholic's intend to kill King Henry of Navarre.
By now, it's getting to evening, and there is a curfew on the streets. Steven decides to wait for the Doctor at the tavern instead. When the Hugenots are gone, Simon Duval returns and retrieves information from the innkeeper, who points out that Steven was sat with the Hugenots for a time. After a failed attempt to strike up a rapport with the preoccupied Steven, Duval pays the innkeeper to inform him on the identity of Steven's friend.
Once Anne is safe, Nicholas returns to the inn and insists that Steven can stay at his masters home until the morning. They tell the innkeeper that Steven is staying there, and instruct him to pass on the message to the Doctor if he should show up. Simon Duval gets to hear this information and goes to tell the Abbot of Amboise, who surprisingly looks and sounds exactly like the Doctor!
The next day, Gaston goes to his master, King Henry and tells him of the threat to his life. Henry is nonchalant about it, and even Nicholas says that the girl could be mistaken and there's no proof that the guards conversation meant another massacre.
Steven returns to the tavern, but the inkeeper gives him an inhospitable welcome, telling him that the Doctor didn't come by last night. Distraught, Steven goes back to Nicholas and asks for help to find his friend. Nicholas agrees to take Steven to Preslins home, but before they can leave, Robert Colbert, the man who followed the Doctor, turns up and demands to know where Anne is. Nicholas insists that he doesn't know. Steven explains to Nicholas the relevance of Robert, and is surprised when he sees him outside talking to "the Doctor". Steven tries to go to him, but Nicholas and Gaston stop him. The say that the man outside is the Abbot of Amboise, and if Steven knows him, he's therefore a Catholic spy! Steven denies this, narrowly avoiding a fight with Gaston, and convinces Nicholas to let him show the similarities between the Abbot and the Doctor by taking him to Preslin's home.
Knowing the outcome of Roberts confrontation with Nicholas, Simon Duval reports back to his master, the Marshall Travannes about the search for Anne. The Marshall is concerned that the Abbots presence at the showdown with the Hugenots has made them suspicious. He sends Duval away to inform the Abbot that he will reach a decision on the "Sea Beggar" later today.
Nicholas' master, the Admiral De Coligny arrives to meet with the Marshall, and overhears the word "Sea Beggar". He takes it to mean a nickname for the Dutch, and thinks that the Marshall is considering aiding the Dutch against Spain. The Admiral is quite happy at this.
Steven and Nicholas locate Preslin's shop, but no amount of banging on the door is answered. A passer by tells them that the shop has been empty for some time, ever since Preslin was arrested for Heresy. Even Nicholas is now suspicious and tries to take Steven back to the Hugenots for trial.
Left with no option, Steven trips Nicholas up and runs off. Nicholas returns to Gaston, who practically jumps for joy at being right about Steven's loyalty. He tells Nicholas that King Henry has finally agreed to double his protection as a precaution.
On his own, Steven finds his way to the Abbots house to find out why the Doctor is impersonating him. Whilst skulking about outside, he overhears the Marshall, Simon Duval and Robert Colbert discussing the fact that the Queen Mother (Catherine De Medici) has ordered the "Sea Beggar" to be killed tomorrow.
Steven rushes back to the Admiral's home with this information, looking for Nicholas but finding him absent. He frantically searches for a piece of paper to write a message for him, but Gaston walks in on him and mistakes the act for rifling though papers for information. Gaston wants to fight him, but Steven refuses to engage in a sword fight, leaving instead.
When Gaston relates the tale to Nicholas, he changes his mind and decides that Steven isn't a spy after all, but holds the key to an assassination attempt.
Steven is once again, out in the cold, but is joined by Anne Chaplette who has nowhere to go now. They both decide to lie low in Preslin's shop until the morning.
Meanwhile, the Admiral returns home, excitedly informing Nicholas that King Henry has finally agreed to side with the Dutch against Spain. He boasts that the King even gave the Admiral a nickname - the Sea Beggar!
The next day, Steven decides to go to the Abbots house again, despite Anne's pleas. Finding a flimsy disguise of a hat and cloak, he convinces Anne to come with him and they set off.
Over at the palace, the King, the Queen Mother, the Marshall, the Admiral, and Charles de Teligny argue over the consequences of France allying themselves with the Dutch.
This quickly descends into an argument about the persecution of the Hugenots. The Admiral incites more hatred against their cause when he openly insults the Queen Mother and suggests that she is really pulling the strings. The Queen Mother and the Marshall storm off in a huff, but the king stays, distracting himself with more important matters like a new tennis racket.
Arriving at the Abbots house, Steven tries to bluff entry, but the priests forbid it as the Abbot is at prayer. Their arguments disturb the Abbot who turns up to see what all the fuss is about. Steven tries to discreetly suggest that he recognises "the Doctor" but the Abbot has no clue what he's suggesting. Roger Colbert turns up and the Abbot asks Steven and the girl to wait outside.
Whilst they wait, Steven overhears the Abbot discussing the murder of the Admiral on the Rue De Fossain De Germain, and Colbert explains that Steven and the girl are the ones they've been looking for. With this information, Steven has no choice to wait around and decides to take Anne with him straight back to warn Nicholas.
Steven gets to the Admirals house and warns Nicholas, and together they run off to stop the assassin. Unfortunately, they arrive just too late, but the assassin failed, only wounding the Admiral instead of killing him.
The Marshall arrives and when he finds out what's happened, he is angry with the Abbot for not discovering Stevens identity and letting them slip away. He waits impatiently for news of the assassination, and the Abbot tries to reassure him that the assassin is a marksman and will not miss. When news arrives of the bungled attempt, the Marshall sees that the Abbot is too much of a liability and orders him killed.
Back at the Admirals house, Steven fills the Hugenots in on all that he's found. Nicholas is quick to believe that this is all the Abbots fault, but Steven still insists that the Abbot is really the Doctor. Whilst they discuss, news reaches them that there has been a huge Hugenot backlash, and the Abbot has been killed. Steven rushes off to the Abbots house once again to find the truth.
When the King hears of the assassination attempt, he is furious. He orders guards to be placed around the Admirals home and charges the Marshall with protecting him. He makes it clear that if anything else happens to the Admiral, the Marshall will be executed. With that, the King demands they leave him alone, but only one may dare to break that rule. He is visited by the Queen Mother. She defies him when he threatens to have her locked away, and when he says that he knows the Marshall is behind the assassination, she defends him, explaining that he was only protecting his King from those treacherous Hugenots. She points out that now the King's sister has married a Hugenot, they have a Hugenot in line for the throne and will surely attempt to assassinate the existing King.
At the Abbots house, Steven finds the old Abbot lying dead outside, circled by a mob of angry Catholics.
Steven is distraught, but when the guards recognise him, the mob take him for a Hugenot and chase after him, wanting his head on a spike. Luckily, he manages to loose the mob and makes it back to Prelin's shop by morning.
He meets up with Anne Chaplette again, who went there after they were parted. Steven is understandably upset at the Doctor's death and makes plans with the girl to head to the TARDIS and begin searching the shop for the Doctors clothes (where he surely changed into the Abbots garbs) and thus the TARDIS key.
Meanwhile, the Marshall and Simon Duval discuss the outcome of the assassination attempt, and realise that blaming the Hugenot's has probably got them off the hook.
The only loose end to all this is Steven and Anne, whom they must find and kill quickly. As they discuss this, the Marshall is handed a note from the Queen Mother, summoning him to the palace.
Back at Preslin's, Steven and Anne turn up nothing other than the Doctors cane. Steven is puzzled about where the Doctor could have changed. Out of nowhere, the Doctor turns up again and demands an explanation for all that's gone off. When he's told, the Doctor blames Steven for all the problems, saying that he should have just stayed in the Inn. He tells Steven they're going back to the TARDIS, and when Anne suggests waiting until the morning, using the cover of the St Bartholomew's Day celebrations, the Doctor is stunned. He asks what year this is, and Anne looks baffled at the question, but dutifully tells him it's 1572. The Doctor realises that they are all in a great deal of danger and commands Anne to sneak away this instant and go to her Aunt's house. Once there, she is not to leave the house for the next four days. Anne and Steven protest at this, but the Doctor is very insistent, even dragging Steven off back to the TARDIS as quick as they can go.
The Marshall meets with the Queen Mother, and explains that he has the list of key Hugenot leaders that they want to murder, but the Queen Mother brushes it aside, insisting that they incite a riot and murder as many Hugenot's as they can.
Despite his hatred for the Hugenot's, the Marshall has enough sense to advise not killing Henry of Navarre for fear of making him a martyr. The Marshall clearly dislikes the order given to him, but he follows it, instructing Simon Duval to get the guards to incite the riot, but charging him with assisting King Henry's escape from the city.
Meanwile, Steven and the Doctor make it back to the TARDIS, just as the massacre commences. Once safely dematerialised, the Doctor explains that on that day, 10,000 Hugenot's were slaughtered in Paris alone, including the Admiral and Nicholas. Steven is beside himself with anger, and blames the Doctor for his friend's deaths, and says that it's likely he sentenced Anne to death too by not bringing her with them. The Doctor tries to explain that their attempts would have been in vain, and that they cannot rewrite history. Steven practically tells him to shove it, and says he's leaving at the next location. Sure enough, as soon as the column stops, he checks the scanner and storms off onto Wimbledon Common.
The Doctor is alone and sits down, quite depressed and dejected.
In a monologue, he says that they've all left him, and that none of them can understand his responsibilities or his justifications for his actions. He muses that he might even return to his home planet, but quickly remembers that he cannot.
At that point, a young girl runs across the common, and straight into the TARDIS.
She asks where the phone is and says there's been an accident. The Doctor tries to shoo her away, but she just laughs it off, seemingly taking all this in her stride.
Steven rushes back into the TARDIS and says that two Policemen are running towards the ship, obviously thinking it's a real Police box. The Doctor quickly shuts the doors and dematerialises. Steven is anxious at the hasty action, saying that the woman might not want to go with them.
The woman reveals herself as Dorothea (Dodo) Chaplet. She's an orphan so no one misses her, and not to worry because she'd love to go on an adventure in time and space.
Steven is curious about her name, and funnily enough, she does have French roots, making it seem like she's Anne's descendant (what a coincidence). That must mean that Anne survived after all.
Trivia
- This story marked the first Doctor Who directed by a woman.
- It's the final story that John Lucarotti wrote for Doctor Who, as he moved to the Mediterranean. He originally wanted to do a story about Erik the Red, but seeing as the majority of it would take place on one ship, it was vetoed. Tosh and John Wiles gave him the Hugenot massacre to deal with instead. The script that he submitted was a far cry from what Wiles and Tosh wanted, and led to Donald Tosh rewriting most of it.
- Lucarotti allegedly got to redress the balance when he wrote the novelisation some twenty years later, returning the story to his original script. There's even apparently a chariot being pulled by greyhounds in it. No wonder Donald Tosh wasn't happy!
- Although they'd only got a few stories under their belt, Donald Tosh and John Wiles were already looking at moving on. This was Tosh's last story as Script Editor, with Gerry Davis taking over that role. John Wiles was fed up with Hartnell's tanturm's, and made provision to hand over to Innes Lloyd from the end of the next story. Before they left, they put in motions for a way to get rid of Hartnell. See The Celestial Toymaker for how this panned out,...
What worked
- Whilst there have been a couple of duplicate Doctor situations in Hartnell's run up to now, getting the actor to play the Abbot is something new, and works well here. What's more, he takes the role totally seriously with not even a hint of a whoop or a hmmmm, leading us to believe that maybe all that was part of the Doctor, and not just Hartnell buying time to remember his lines
- The removal of the Doctor from the bulk of the story really gives Peter Purves a chance to shine as Steven, and he grasps the chance with both hands. If this was Ian, we'd see a lot more "fisty cuffs" and camp, but here, the nature of the story needs Steven to play it realistic, and Steven's dialogue has always been strong in reasoned arguments.
- The Marshall's conversation with Catherine De Medici has some really nice lines in it. The scene really gives you a sense of these characters as real people, with feelings.
- Again, when the TARDIS lands in 1965, Steven and the Doctor have a great scene together. You can easily get the sense that all their recent losses spanning from the Myth Makers have been taking their toll on poor Steven, and as is evident, the Doctor too.
What didn't work
- The fact that the Doctor disappears for much of the story. If Steven mistakes him for the evil Abbot, then surely other people would too and he'd have wound up in the same plot.
- Anne Chaplette's accent didn't need to be so rural. She's a lowly servant girl, we get it.
- It's not really a problem of the original story, but the fact that this is a missing serial, meant that all those French names banded about got very confusing when I was listening to it.
- Ok, let's address the elephant in the room. What the hell was Dodo's appearance all about? I mean, 30 seconds in and she's accepted she's in a time machine, and is still looking for the phone! Over the years, fans have retconned the scene to say that the TARDIS took them to that point, exactly because Dodo was Anne's descendant, but whatever way you look at it, the scene is just shoddy. Mind you, it's amusing to think that seeing as the TARDIS landed on Wimbledon Common, it was lucky that Dodo turned up and not a Womble!
- So the Doctor's excuse has gone back to we can't rewrite history? Bo****ks! I can't work out if it was genius dialogue to show the Doctor trying to console himself, or if it was careless lack of continuity
- Dodo's accent is crap too. No wonder it changes!
Despite a couple of low points, this story is another Lucarotti masterpiece. It's got an obscure historical setting that would have been a mystery even to viewers of 1966; it's got complex French terminology, and lots of tension. This was a story made with barely a thought for the kids, and in hindsight, it's one that just gets better looking back on it.
The use of William Hartnell for the Abbot not only cut down on production costs, but it also gave him a breath of fresh air. Not a single Army Sergeant in sight, Hartnell is visibly thriving on the opportunity to show how good he can be. Purves also gleams on stage here, with the script allowing him to be resourceful and persuasive. As mentioned above, I can imagine Ian solving the misunderstanding with the Hugenot's with his fists, until they all realised he was being truthful, but here, Steven is forced out in the cold, alone and left to find his own answers. It gives him much, much more characteristics than a generic male action lead and just makes me like him more. But it doesn't stop there. When the Doctor whisks them away back to the TARDIS, Steven is allowed to say to the Doctor what everyone's thinking. We identify with him, and if you've watched it week by week from the Myth Makers, it lets you reflect on just how much bad stuff they've gone through.
I have rooted through the story for bad things to say about it, but in my opinion, there's not many. The biggest ones come from the lack of justification for the Doctor to abandon Steven, but it does sort of leave you to start speculating in wonderful ways (why was he interested in saving Preslin alone? Was he coming back to continue some previously abandoned plan like in Rememberance of the Daleks?).
There's also the matter of the confusing French names and being plonked in the middle of a situation without much explanation. For children, this story will probably seem really boring, but looking back now as a grown up, over the JFK assassination, the trouble in Ireland and all the stuff going on in the Middle East; this story really hits home.
Finally, we could go on about Dodo and the stupid way she was dropped in there, and yes, it is a big drawback to the story; but, you know...it's entertainment. The production team did flirt with the idea of bringing in Anne Chaplette as a regular, but decided that historical companions were annoying and slowed the pace too much. So, they made sure that the next companion was on board, introduced and off running. I doubt anyone cared too much after her second week and in that, the production team achieved what they wanted.
This story is worthy as one of Hartnell's best.
Rating
9 out of 10
Great plot, good costumes, barely any memorable sounds, but this is a historical, so the story doesn't hinge on "weird".
Rewatchability Factor
7 out of 10
It's a great story. The only thing stopping it being a 10 is the fact that Steven is a one man show for much of it, and the sheer amount of French names banded about make it a little confusing to follow.
Watch this if you liked...
- The Fires of Pompeii (Doctor Who Series 4)
Consulting the matrix
Do you think Anne should have been the companion? Would it have made a significant difference at all?
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