historicals are an established variety of doctor who story. historical settings appear across eras, and historicals themselves have several subgenres. there is, for example, the division between pure historicals and pseudohistoricals, pure historicals being historicals driven by the characters' interactions with the past, pseudohistoricals being driven by an alien or non-contemporary to the period villain. the overwhelming majority of pure historicals are confined to the hartnell era; practically every other historical is a pseudohistorical. the fires of pompeii, for example, is a pseudohistorical, but that's not the bit that makes it interesting. the interesting bit is how it focuses on donna's emotional reaction to visiting a historical catastrophe. once she realises where she is, she becomes upset, and ultimately asks the doctor to save the people around them. the doctor insists that he can't; distraught, she begs him to save a suspiciously capaldi-shaped roman and his family, so that even if most of the people she met have to die, they can make some difference, however small.
anyway, this post isn't about the fires of pompeii. this post is about the massacre, which is a first doctor story. the massacre shares a few elements with the fires of pompeii - the doctor and his companion (steven taylor, here) visit a historical setting and eventually realise everyone around them is going to die horribly. meanwhile, a doctor lookalike wanders around causing trouble. in the end, steven cracks at the doctor's apparent callousness in his refusal to change history, and is ultimately comforted in the knowledge that they may have saved one life.
the similarities, however, stop there. the massacre is far bleaker than the fires of pompeii, for a whole host of reasons. first off, it follows on from two serials in which steven and the doctor have lost several people they love in quick succession: vicki leaves without steven being able to say goodbye; katarina throws herself out of an airlock; sara kingdom shoots her brother and then ages to death. this leaves steven alone with only the doctor for company - making him, oddly enough, the first solo companion. the massacre is also a tragedy of very different proportions to the fires of pompeii. aliens or no, the eruption of vesuvius is a natural event; the massacre, on the other hand, is an eruption of human violence, gruesome religiously-motivated slaughter across paris.
worse, steven, unlike donna, knows nothing of the history of the st bartholomew's day massacre. he has no idea he's about to walk into a bloodbath; he doesn't even know that he's stuck in the middle of a civil war tearing france apart. every single move he makes is the wrong one. he tells people he's english - so they assume he's protestant - then he chases after the doctor's double (who he's convinced is the doctor), who is a catholic. as such, neither side trusts him. when he tries to help the huguenots, they treat him like a spy, yell at him and kick him out, but so too do the catholics in power. the doctor essentially abandons steven for most of the story in the middle of one of the most violent civil wars in french history. and when they finally do figure out where they are, it's the doctor who figures it out, and drags steven away before he can learn of the massacre. it's only once they've escaped that the doctor tells steven of the massacre, and steven, reaching a breaking point after a relentless series of losses, multiple of which involved watching people he loved die in front of him, helpless to do anything, loses his temper and shouts at the doctor for his callousness, blaming him personally for the (presumed) death of one of the women they met, because the doctor could have taken her with them and guaranteed that her life would be saved, but chose not to in an act of what steven perceives as selfishness. then steven demands to leave, and storms off the tardis.
context is helpful here. it's not just that steven is heartbroken that he couldn't save anyone. it's not just that he's lost several people close to him already. it's not just that he's got no one with him to rely on but the doctor, and the doctor essentially abandoned him. it's not even just that the doctor refused to help him. it's all of those things together, along with his utter helplessness - steven is repeatedly forced to lose people he's befriended without any ability to save them. the massacre would've been devastating for him anyway, but saving one life might just have helped hm feel like he had made a difference. but he didn't. and, crucially, the massacre was not a natural disaster, but intentional human cruelty. i think it's more than just his faith in the doctor that's shaken - it's his faith in people, full stop.
and so the doctor gets perhaps one of his greatest and loneliest monologues, quietly noting that steven simply cannot understand his perspective or his isolation from other people because they have fundamentally different perspectives to him. unlike all the people he's travelled with, the one place the doctor cannot go is home.
the massacre is one of my favourite historicals. it's also one of the darkest. but it's such a good story for both the doctor and steven they're a lot more similar than they'd like to admit. when everyone else has left or died... it somehow seems to end up being just the two of them left. and steven has to come back, as he ultimately does. why? because at the end of the day, each other is all they have.
