Review Detail

Here's where it all began: An Unearthly Child. It's 1963, a pair of schoolteachers, concerned for and intrigued by their new enigmatic young student, Susan, follow her 'home' only to discover a Police Box standing in the middle of a junkyard. Who is this girl and her mysterious grandfather?

This story covers the pilot episode and the first adventure. Most of the pilot episode is left intact, whereas the companions' encounter with the cave tribe has been considerably cut down and restructured, providing for a much more straightforward plot and resolution. The way that MusicEd has manipulated the available footage to tighten this story is quite clever, and just about works. The added incidental music is subtly incorporated, and for the most part complements the dialogue and action.

If you just want an introduction to The Doctor and the first companions, but aren't so keen to sit through 4 parts of a somewhat plodding serial, then this a pretty decent alternative, running under an hour. That said, I will caution that what I consider the Doctor's best bit is totally gone from this edit since the entirety of the related plot has been cut. A number of main character interactions are gone too, for better or worse. And while the original plot isn't all that gripping, this edit results in a lot more focus on the tribal leadership struggle, meaning we spend less time with the Doctor and companions overall.

Most of the edits are well done, and closely match the techniques used in studio. The new episode titles look convincing, too. One apparent liability for editing early Who is there are very long studio takes and the near absence of B-roll. So having this down by about half, without totally losing coherence is quite ambitious. The edit does succeed in removing a lot of sideplot and some filler and cringe elements, including some inferior treatment of women, (but that means there's scant left about the women in the tribe at all.) Finally, in terms of quality, I was surprised to see this is in 720 resolution whereas the best source video I'm aware of would be PAL 576 video and it's not clear how the upscale was accomplished (I own only the NTSC transcode for reference).

Overall, I enjoyed this edit about the same as the original story, but as I mentioned previously, there are things that I definitely missed when seeing this edit. We still get a good feel for the early, almost wholly unlikable, Hartnell Doctor and the beginnings of a gradual cohesion of the TARDIS crew over the next few stories.