An Unearthly Child

An Unearthly Child is a four-episode serial that is clearly broken into two parts. Part one being the first episode, which acts as a Pilot episode, and part two being the last three episodes. Right off the bat, going from Matt Smith's finale to William Hartnell's introduction is jarring to say the least. TV in the Hartnell era was a very different landscape from what it is today, so I have to give it a little slack for that. Plus it feels like the original production team had some serious budgetary constraints.

Putting that aside, the story is decent. The first episode in particular does a good job of introducing all of the characters, and everything is remarkably consistent with current Doctor Who, which gives a great sense of continuity through the decades. The meat of the story involves cavemen, but no aliens or monsters or anything, which would hardly pass in this new age of Doctor Who. All said, not at all a bad way to get the show started. Something that I particularly enjoyed was how the end of the last episode transitioned seamlessly into the beginning of the next story, a feature that wasn't really present in the revived series until this year's Matt Smith series. And with that I (more or less) seamlessly transition to tomorrow's serial The Daleks!