TV Club: Doctor Who, “The Aztecs”

“The Aztecs” (season 1, episodes 27-30. Originally aired May 23-June 11, 1964)

“But you can’t rewrite history! Not one line!” –The Doctor
“Anyone can make history. Only a great man can write it.” –Oscar Wilde

We’re back again in 1964, for the sixth serial of Doctor Who‘s first season. The main cast is the same as in the two shows from this era I’ve covered already—the tetchy old First Doctor, schoolteachers Ian and Barbara, and the Doctor’s teenage granddaughter Susan. And the stakes for the travelers are mostly the same as well: They’re wandering randomly through the universe in the TARDIS, and the question that comes up most commonly when they land is “how are we going to survive this?,” not “what wonders will we see now?”

That’s certainly one of the driving elements of tension in “The Aztecs,” in which the TARDIS crew find themselves stranded in pre-Cortez Mexico, and must survive in a culture whose religion is based on human sacrifice while trying to get back to their ship and escape. The Doctor isn’t a hero here in any conventional sense—all he’s really interested in doing is figuring out how to open the one-way door in the tomb of the recently deceased high priest Yetaxa atop the city’s main temple, where the TARDIS had the bad luck to land.

But this is really a story about Barbara—possibly her best in the series—as she’s mistaken for the divine reincarnation of Yetaxa and decides to use her newfound power for more than just her own safety, but to put a stop to human sacrifice. Ignoring the Doctor’s insistent advice, she takes the bull of history by the horns and tries to make it go down a different path. She fails, and her failure has a certain Shakespearian flavor to it—the moral of the story here is that a single person, even one temporarily mistaken for a demigod, stands as much chance of transforming an entire culture as Lear does of asserting his royal power in the face of a raging thunderstorm.

Originally published Sept. 21, 2011 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

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