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The Doctor is mistaken for an Old West gunfighter!
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4 episodes: A Holiday for the Doctor, Don't Shoot the Pianist, Johnny Ringo, The O. K. Corral. Running Time: Approx. 96 minutes. Written by: Donald Cotton. Directed by: Rex Tucker. Produced by: Innes Lloyd.
THE PLOT:
The Doctor is in pain. Feeling a little too happy after his victory over the Toymaker, he bit into one of the Toymaker's sweets - and his tooth is now killing him.
Potentially, literally. The TARDIS has materialized in the American West. In Tombstone, where the fragile peace is maintained by Wyatt Earp (John Alderson), a man who is suspicious of strangers. The Doctor introduces them as actors, passing Steven off as a singer and Dodo as a piano player. He asks for a dentist, and Earp refers him to Doc Holliday (Anthony Jacobs), a former gunfighter who planst to settle in Tombstone, become a dentist, and marry local singer Kate (Sheena Marshe).
But Holliday's past disagrees with his plans. The Clantons, a family of cattle rustlers, have targeted him for killing their brother. An associate of theirs goes to Holliday's business, only to find the Doctor, fresh from a tooth extraction. When the Doctor responds to being addressed as "Doc," the dye is cast - As far as the Clantons are concerned, he is Doc Holliday. And when the real Holliday discovers the mistake, he's delighted to build on it by giving the Doctor his gun.
Leaving the unwitting Doctor walking straight into an ambush waiting at the Last Chance Saloon - while the real Doc and Wyatt Earp find themselves heading for an encounter of their own, at a Corral destined to become the stuff of western legend...
CHARACTERS:
The Doctor: "People keep giving me guns, and I do wish they wouldn't." Reportedly, Hartnell had a wonderful time making this story. It shows - He is a delight throughout. The story mines the Doctor's cluelessness about "the wild west" to good effect, from his insistence on referring to Wyatt Earp as "Mr. Wurp" to his apparent inability to grasp that Doc Holliday set him up in the first place. For all of this, he isn't played as a fool. When a well-timed shot by Doc Holliday stops the Clantons from killing him, it takes very little prodding for him to have Steven disarm the criminals. The final episode sees the Doctor reacting against the increasing violence, trying to convince first Earp, then patriarch Ike Clanton (William Hurndell) that there are better ways to resolve differences.
Steven: Was apparently lobotomized between stories. Steven has been consistently characterized as competent and resourceful. In this story, he's dumber than Dodo! I can just about get my head around Steven's hopeless handling of 19th century firearms, which should be unfamiliar to him. But he walks far too easily into the Clantons' trap at the end of Episode Two, then is far too trusting of the obviously-shady Johnny Ringo (Laurence Payne) in Episode Three. That's before he's reduced to a glorified extra in the final installment. Given how few of Steven's stories exist in the archives, it's sad that one of those few is his worst showing as a character.
Dodo:: Is actually... rather likable. Donald Cotton's script turns down the dial on the grating perkiness. She is obviously naive and seems blind to danger in situations such as the Episode One cliffhanger and the story's ending gunfight - But she doesn't come across as actively stupid, the way she did in previous stories. She gets a terrific moment in Episode Three, when she briefly has Doc Holliday at gunpoint and - unlike Steven - actually looks like she knows what she's doing with the weapon. Her naivete costs her the advantage less than a minute later - But for a moment at least, she has it. Had the character been written this way in the rest of her stories, I suspect her reputation would be stronger.
Doc Holliday:: Kate describes Holliday as a "gentleman," and Anthony Jacobs plays up that aspect of the character. For the first part of the story, he seems less like a gunfighter than a swindler, particularly when he seizes the chance to palm the Doctor off as himself. As the story progresses, other sides emerge - hints of both temper and alcoholism, which a stronger script might have done more with. We see him shoot a man in Episode Three, and he later shoots another offscreen... But it's in Episode Four that we really see him as a cold-blooded killer, his eyes dead and unblinking as he kills three men in rapid succession, one of them clearly no threat after his gun jams.
Wyatt Earp:: John Alderson lends a solid presence to the famed marshall, though Earp's characterization is much less interesting than Holliday's (then again, that's been true of every version of this oft-told tale). He is legitimately interested in keeping the peace, but is also willing to play along with the misidentification of the Doctor to save his friend. When the Clantons' threats of violence turn from words to deeds, he is quick to forsake the law in pursuit of vengeance, which loses him the tacit approval the Doctor had previously granted.
THOUGHTS:
"It's your last chance for aspirin,
Your last chance to cry.
This song will make your ears bleed,
And you'll wish you could die!"
It's not that The Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon is that bad a song. As a parody western ditty, it does the job in setting the mood when it first plays, and may have been amusing if it had been confined to episode beginnings and endings. But it is ridiculously overused! I didn't personally count, but I've read that it is played more than 30 times across the four episodes. It becomes particularly intrusive in the final episode; the story takes a serious turn, but the song prevents the assorted killings from having the impact they should.
Not that Donald Cotton's script is anything like as good as The Myth Makers, his debut effort. There are similarities between the two stories. Both begin as comedy pastische, only to gradually become more and more serious as they go along. But The Gunfighters is hampered not only by the misjudged song, but also by the weak involvement of the regulars.
The Myth Makers didn't just put the Doctor in the Trojan Horse - It made the horse his idea, and left him confronted with the worst of the violence in the final episode. The Gunfighters does reasonably well in its first half, as the Doctor is targeted by the Clantons. But once the mistaken identity is resolved, there's not much left for the Doctor to do. He voices his disapproval of the Earps' readiness to resort to violence. But the one attempt to have him actually do anything, by talking to Ike Clanton, results in one very good scene that goes exactly nowhere.
Imagine instead that the Doctor actually convinces Ike to stop the gunfight, and the two rush into town to head off the carnage. They arrive too late, of course - but in time to watch the end of the gunfight, with the Doctor expressing his revulsion and Ike declaring that he will get revenge. This would also reinforce the idea, present but not much expanded on, that violence is not a solution, leading only to more violence. The story structure isn't fundamentally changed... But the Doctor is actually part of the climax, instead of being reduced to a side character in the Umpteenth Retelling of the O. K. Corral.
I'm sounding like I dislike this story, and I really don't. Minus the song, the first two episodes are rarely less than amusing and occasionally delightful. Hartnell is terrific, Jackie Lane gets the chance to show that she could have been good in an alternate reality in which anyone had actually bothered to come up with a character for her to play, and the pace is fairly sprightly by 1960s Who standards. Even the second half isn't bad - It just increasingly slides away from working as it might, in part because the song interferes with the tonal shift, and in part because the script fails to properly involve the regulars.
Overall, worth watching for many good bits and scenes - But ultimately less than the sum of its parts.
Overall Rating: 5/10.
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