Historical Episodes
Historical episodes such as Marco Polo, that feature no science fiction elements beyond the basic premise of the show, were relatively common for the first few seasons of Doctor Who. Marco Polo is notable for featuring many educational elements, both historical and scientific, as was originally part of the show's remit. The next historical adventure arrived later in the first season with The Aztecs, and such stories continued to be regularly featured until 1967, when the purely historical format would be discontinued after The Highlanders. The format enjoyed a brief revival in 1982 with Black Orchid, and in novel form with 1995's Sanctuary, and in the Big Finish audio series of Doctor Who, has made a resurgence, with a conscious decision being made to have each Doctor have at least one purely historical episode. Examples include The Marian Conspiracy, Other Lives, The Fires of Vulcan, and The Council of Nicaea. However, this format has not been repeated in any televised form.
Read more about this topic: Marco Polo (Doctor Who)
Famous quotes containing the words historical and/or episodes:
“By contrast with history, evolution is an unconscious process. Another, and perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that evolution is a natural process, history a human one.... Insofar as we treat man as a part of nature—for instance in a biological survey of evolution—we are precisely not treating him as a historical being. As a historically developing being, he is set over against nature, both as a knower and as a doer.”
—Owen Barfield (b. 1898)
“Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)