Soon after meeting the girl's irascible grandfather, they find the police box is in fact a fantastic vessel, the TARDIS, capable of travelling through space and time. They follow her home one evening to discover that she seems to live in a police box in a junkyard. She is brilliant in many areas of science and history but is ignorant of mundane matters, such as how many shillings make a pound sterling. School teachers Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright are curious about their student Susan Foreman. No edition of 'the pilot' was broadcast until 1991 and fans could not easily compare the various editions of 'the pilot' until multiple versions were released on a single DVD in 2006. Only a handful of lines of dialogue differ in the pilot and 'Unearthly', but they suggest things about the character and back story of the Doctor which would be hard to reconcile with the general characterisation they later gained. Nevertheless, all of 'the pilot''s subsequent editions had obvious differences with 'An Unearthly Child' as broadcast, especially in performances and technical recording flaws. The actual plots of the two recordings of 'Unearthly' are insignificantly different. It is merely a different version of the first episode of Doctor Who, which was not broadcast because Sydney Newman thought it had too many technical flaws and misjudged characterisations.įive different editions of this initial take on 'Unearthly' have been made available to the public over the years, creating some ambiguity over what is meant by 'the pilot'. It is sometimes imprecisely called 'the first episode of Doctor Who', but this suggests a difference from 'An Unearthly Child' which can't fairly be said to exist. The term is not strictly accurate, as pilots did not exist in the British television industry in 1963. 'The Pilot Episode' is a name used to market the first recording of the individual episode, ' An Unearthly Child'. You may be looking for The Pilot (TV story).

Original doctor who season 1 episode 2