Settings: 100,000 BC

Although An Unearthly Child is marketed as a single story, and was produced and directed as such, it involves two quite different settings and there’s a notable change in tone between the first episode and the subsequent three. Those three episodes give us our first exotic setting to explore, even if it’s one that we wouldn’t normally associate with a science fiction show. For that reason, I’ll treat it separately from the first episode here, and I’ll likely do something similar for other stories that spend significant time in more than one setting, such as The Chase. 

Where & When

Based solely on internal evidence, there is no way to date the setting of the story much more precisely than ‘the Stone Age’. This is a vast stretch of time, perhaps 99% of the whole of human history, depending on your definition. However, we know that the writer envisaged the date as 100,000 BC and that that was even the title used in some early BBC publicity in the days before the serials had onscreen titles. The geographical location is even vaguer, and, again based solely on the story as televised, we can’t even be confident it’s on Earth, since the DW universe has many alien races physically indistinguishable from humans. However, it’s clear that that’s not the intent, so “somewhere on Earth, approximately, 100,000 BC” it is.

Settings: An Unearthly Child

I’m going to start a new series of posts here – and who knows whether it will prove any more popular than the previous ones. Not exactly a large audience here, although the D&D posts have done well enough, as did the “companions as PCs” posts back in the day. This is going to be similar to the other Doctor Who related things I’ve done looking at things from an RPG perspective, but with a focus on the episodes and, more specifically, on their settings. 

This has, of course, been done before. It’s pretty much the basis of the DWAITAS individual Doctor sourcebooks that I’ve reviewed elsewhere. But I don’t have a constraint on page count here, nor a publishing schedule to keep up with (these are likely to be very irregular) and, hopefully, I can come up with some different angles and try to avoid duplicating what they did too much.