Doctor Who: The peculiarity of The Feast of Steven – Classic Who’s only Christmas episode
By James Aggas
Confused policemen, Charlie Chaplin and Bing Crosby as a clown. Is the only Christmas episode in Classic Doctor Who one of the strangest episodes ever?
Words can’t even begin to describe just how strange The Feast of Steven is. It’s very much an oddball episode in the entire history of Doctor Who. From extremely light-hearted comedy to breaking the fourth wall, it’s just an incredibly bizarre episode in Doctor Who canon.
The episode begins with the TARDIS landing in (at the time) modern day Earth. Ironically, this is one of the only times that the First Doctor lands there, due to his inability to control the TARDIS properly at this point, and yet neither of his companions are from the Sixties.
In fact, the Doctor even warns them that the atmosphere is “extremely poisonous”. He says this because they’re used to a much cleaner atmosphere on Earth in the future, rather than all the pollution of our time.
Very confused policemen
But of course, they don’t just land anywhere on modern day Earth. In fact, they land right outside a police station. This naturally causes a lot of confusion with the police, who don’t know why a Police Box has suddenly appeared out of nowhere.
But even funnier is companion Sara’s confusion, as she initially believes that they’ve landed on the Doctor’s planet, before he explains that they’ve arrived on Earth.
In fact, the rest of the time spent in this time period becomes pure farce. The Doctor needs to repair the scanner on the outside of the TARDIS, but of course gets questioned by the policemen instead. Sara tries to fix it herself, but ends up beating up some policemen, and Steven gets mistaken for another officer. And this is all within the first half of the episode, before they head off in the TARDIS.
And then things get really weird.
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The rest of the episode features a story (if you can call it that) of the TARDIS team arriving else in Earth’s history. They try to “save” a young woman’s life, before finding out (or at least, the audience finds out) that it’s just a scene for a movie, and they’ve arrived at Hollywood in the 1920s.
The TARDIS crew are chased throughout the studio by an angry film crew, bumping into several famous stars along the way, including Charlie Chaplin and Bing Crosby (dressed as a clown)! And, to top it all off, the whole thing is accompanied with silent movie era style piano music!
By the end, everyone – and I mean everyone – was very confused. Even the TARDIS crew had no clue what was going on! And this is all resolved with the following message:
"Incidentally, a happy Christmas to all of you at home!"
That’s right. The Doctor breaks the fourth wall. This was the only time that the Classic Series did this so directly. (But to be fair, definitely not the last time Doctor Who did it altogether.) To be honest, that still comes across as one of the least bizarre things about this episode.
When it takes place
Especially when you take into account of when this episode took place: right in the middle of The Daleks’ Master Plan. Arguably one of the darkest Doctor Who stories of the era. Literally weeks after a companion died (and, in fact, weeks before another was killed off), and this bizarre episode happens.
I’ve mentioned before that fans were initially worried about The Christmas Invasion. Frankly, after listening to The Feast of Steven, (only the audio survives of the episode,) it’s easy to see why.
Having said all of that…it’s still worth checking out. It’s bizarre and random and completely out of place in the story it’s a part of. But it’s a great bit of fun for Christmas Day itself.
Next. The serial itself: The Daleks’ Master Plan. dark
Have you checked out The Feast of Steven? Do you think it’s one of the stranger episodes of Doctor Who? Or can you think of anything stranger, and why is it Kinda? Let us know in the comments below.
