Doctor Who: 10 Best First Doctor Stories

From the opening minutes of The Aztecs, a mysterious and compelling atmosphere is created when the four leads step out of the TARDIS and into an ancient Aztec tomb. The room is a shrine to the god Yetaxa, and the body within is draped an a large amount of riches in jewellery, including a bracelet that Barbara takes and wears herself. When the travellers leave the tomb, the find that the door is constructed so that they cannot return through it, and a wandering Aztec priest summons guards to imprison The Doctor, Susan, Ian and Barbara. When the Aztecs notice that Barbara is wearing the bracelet that the departed "god" was wearing, they mistake her for Yetaxa. From here, Barbara is forced to assume the position of the Aztec god if the travellers are to ever recover the TARDIS, a task that is made all the more difficult by the fact that one of the high priests has doubts about her divinity.

The Aztecs is one the earliest "pure historical" stories in Doctor Who, meaning that besides the main cast and the TARDIS, there are no other science fiction elements. Having the villains simply being tyrannical, bloodthirsty historical figures works extremely well in the case of The Aztecs, especially given that the titular civilisation was infamous for carrying out brutal sacrifices to their gods in order to ensure that basic phenomenon such as the rising of the sun and the coming of the rains actually happened.

It is these brutal ritualistic killings that also form the basis for one of the story's main plot threads, as Barbara tries desperately to prevent the high priests from killing innocents, with both parties failing to understand the ideology of the other. It is in The Aztecs that the Doctor states for the first time the fundamental law of time travel: observe, but do not interfere (even though the Doctor would break this rule a year later in "The Romans", when he suggested that Emperor Nero should burn Rome). Try as you might, you can't rewrite history. Not one line.

Ambitious and thought-provoking, The Aztecs serves as an amazing jumping-on point for anyone exploring this era of Doctor Who for the first time (as it did for this writer).