Doctor Who: 10 Reasons Why An Adventure In Space And Time Was The Best Drama Of 2013

9. It's Not Just One Story

Despite what you may have read on the previous page, it's equally true that An Adventure in Space and Time is not William Hartnell's story. At least, it's not just William Hartnell's story. One of the things that separates good drama from great drama is that great drama is inevitably doing more than one thing at any one time. That is certainly true here. To illustrate the point, consider the sequence of events leading up to the interior of the TARDIS finally being designed. William Hartnell has a 'difficult moment' while rehearsing the first episode. Verity is unable to reassure him and Sydney Newman steps in to do so. Afterwards he chastises Verity for not being able to do it herself and she heads off to the design department to strong-arm Peter Brachacki into actually doing his job. Spelled out like that it seems like a fairly straightforward series of events, but consider how many things the script is accomplishing simultaneously. We're being shown William Hartnell's fundamentally insecurity and how that translated into being viewed as difficult by those around him because of his inability to be honest about his fears. We're shown Verity Lambert being unsure of her own abilities and faltering at her job as producer because of it. We're shown Verity being shamed for her failure by Sydney, and more importantly we're being shown that that is the exact impetus she needed in order to step up and become the forceful producer that the show needed in order to survive. In less than two minutes of screentime we have three profound character revelations, one moment of profound character transformation, and a sequence of plot developments motivated by them that spins the story forward in at least three directions. That's economy of scripting. The fact that it's done elegantly enough to not notice the fact just makes it more impressive.