Although Doctor Who is the title character, the First Doctor (William Hartnell) and his granddaughter Susan (Carole Ann Ford) weren’t the first lead characters. There’s a long-standing fan argument about whether the title of the show is a question, or the Doctor’s actual name. Steven Moffat memorably played around with this concept during the 50th anniversary season when he introduced the concept of the “oldest question” – Doctor, Who? Moffat also mischievously suggested Doctor Who was the Doctor’s real name, when Missy (Michelle Gomez) effectively role-played as the Twelfth Doctor (Peter Capaldi) in “World Enough And Time”.
It was always the intention of the show’s creators, Sidney Newman, Donald Wilson, and C.E. Webber for the title Doctor Who to suggest the air of mystery that surrounded the character. With such a mysterious and irascible title character, Doctor Who needed audience identification figures as their way into the TARDIS. Susan was intended to be a relatable “kid” that the audience could identify with, but it was really her teachers, Ian Chesterton (William Russell) and Barbara Wright (Jacqueline Hill) who were the audience’s way into Doctor Who.
Ian & Barbara Were Doctor Who’s First Lead Characters
Although the Doctor and Susan are the title characters of both Doctor Who and its very first episode, “An Unearthly Child”, they’re not the leads. After watching the initial unaired pilot, Sidney Newman felt that the Doctor was too scary, while Susan was too strange. Although these edges were smoothed out in the version that made it to air on November 23, 1963, they’re still not what audiences would recognize as protagonists of the story. Those protagonists are the two schoolteachers, the immediately warm and likable Ian and Barbara, who are drawn into a mystery that Ian would later recall as “a mild curiosity in a junkyard“.
For the first three serials of Doctor Who season 1, the Doctor was depicted as an unpredictable and untrustworthy figure, and Ian and Barbara were sometimes the only characters the audience could trust. In the first serial, Ian stops the Doctor from killing a caveman with a rock, and in the very next serial, The Daleks, the Doctor’s scientific curiosity about the Dalek city puts everyone’s lives at risk. By the end of the third serial, Inside the Spaceship, Barbara has had enough and confronts the Doctor about his behavior, after which, Hartnell’s performance notably shifts into something more akin to the kindly grandfather that Sidney Newman had first envisioned.
How The Doctor Became Doctor Who’s True Lead
Ian and Barbara were Doctor Who‘s leads for a considerable number of episodes, from 1963’s “An Unearthly Child” to, arguably their departure in the 1965 serial The Chase. With William Hartnell the only original actor left in the show, it’s unsurprising that the Doctor himself became the lead character of Doctor Who. It’s telling that the very first story after Ian and Barbara leave is The Time Meddler, which is the very first time the show introduces Doctor Who‘s Meddling Monk, a fellow member of the Doctor’s species, further expanding his backstory.
It’s thanks to Ian and Barabara’s positive influence that the Doctor ultimately became the hero of their own story. After settling their differences in Inside the Spaceship, the Doctor, Susan, Ian, and Barbara become a family, with the older Doctor as its protective patriarch. It’s interesting to watch “Sentence of Death”, the fifth episode in Doctor Who‘s fifth ever serial, The Keys of Marinus. Contained in the scenes where the Doctor sweeps in to defend Ian against the charge of murder are the hints of the genius, the wit, and the charm that still defines the Doctor’s character, and their position as Doctor Who‘s true lead.
