What can a 1963 TV serial teach us about leadership and trust? An Unearthly Child, Doctor Who’s first story, charts a journey from fear to collaboration.
Through conflict, control and compassion, it reveals truths about power, vulnerability and how real teams learn to work together.
When budgets tighten and technology changes how visibility and opportunity are distributed, the self-employed are forced to consolidate — to make what they know work harder. Downtime isn’t a sign of failure, but a chance to re-examine craft, gather evidence, and turn experience into insight.
So it is here with a new research project for Thoroughly Good Coaching, examining a seemingly unlikely source: early television.
The professional justification (and genuine curiosity) is a year-long rewatch of all 159 stories in the classic Doctor Who series (1963–1989), casting around for metaphors and learning points. And of course, if I’m watching it on my PC monitor rather than the TV, that classifies it as work, doesn’t it?
The first story – An Unearthly Child – was originally broadcast the day after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. This exposition served as an audacious introduction to a kind of serial British television the audience had never seen before. Sixty years on, it doubles as a source of modern insight: good writing resonates differently with each generation that rediscovers it.
If you’re not up to speed on what happens, you don’t need to plough through the episodes on iPlayer (unless of course you want to).
Four travellers — two schoolteachers, a mysterious old man known only as the Doctor, and his granddaughter Susan — are accidentally transported from 1963 London to the prehistoric past. Captured by a tribe that believes fire is the key to power, they must navigate fear, rivalry, and survival, discovering along the way that cooperation, not control, is what ultimately leads them home.
An Unearthly Child exposes how authority built on exclusivity or expertise inevitably falters, how fear can temporarily unite even the most dysfunctional teams, and how trust emerges only when hierarchy gives way to shared vulnerability. In a world still dominated by expertise, ego, and uncertainty, An Unearthly Child remains a parable for contemporary leadership: we build fire together, or we sit in the dark alone.
You can read the full TV review of An Unearthly Child here.
Watching the first story through a coaching lens, what emerges isn’t a quaint relic but a psychological case study in leadership under threat. The analysis which follows begins not with Episode 1 (24 minutes of exposition establishing the lead characters) but instead with Episode 2, The Cave of Skulls. Each section identifies the themes revealed in each episode and how they might relate to today’s workplace dynamics.
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The Cave of Skulls – Leadership, Credibility and the Fear of Change
“The leader is the one who makes fire.”
Synopsis: In The Cave of Skulls, the Doctor and his companions are captured by a prehistoric tribe whose struggle for fire — and the power it represents — exposes the clash between knowledge, fear, and the will to lead.
Leadership in the Tribe of Gum is defined by knowledge. Those who can make fire command authority; those who can’t, defer. The Doctor, mistaken for a messenger from Orb, becomes an accidental pawn in a contest for power. Confirmation bias drives the tribe’s thinking — they see what fits their narrative: “This must be Orb doing this.”
Two contenders vie for control, each using persuasion, fear, and performance to assert credibility. It’s an unruly staff meeting — two ambitious men dominating the conversation while the rest look on. It takes someone outside the contest, Hur, to suggest the simplest intervention: Try.
What plays out is a familiar organisational pattern. The elders consolidate experience; the younger challenge it. Resistance to change is portrayed not as villainy but as fear — fear of irrelevance. As one character says, “Old men don’t like new things.” In every system, succession is messy.
Reflection: Leadership anchored solely in knowledge breeds insecurity. True influence comes from curiosity and the willingness to test, not to guard, what we know.
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The Forest of Fear – Negative Cohesion and the Levelling Power of Vulnerability
“Fear makes companions of us all.”
Synopsis: Escaping through the forest, the Doctor’s group faces fear, mistrust and moral choice when compassion for an injured enemy proves more dangerous than flight itself.
When an older woman sabotages the Doctor’s group to preserve the status quo, the threat forces the travellers to unite. It’s negative cohesion in action: danger strips hierarchy from relationships, compelling reliance on vulnerability and availability.
It’s the same dynamic that most team-building away-days attempt to simulate — a safe, manufactured version of crisis designed to accelerate trust.
Inside the TARDIS, the same struggle for dominance continues. The Doctor bristles at being sidelined by Ian’s pragmatic leadership. Feeling dismissed, he snaps, “Don’t keep looking on me as the weakest link in the party,” then lashes out, “You’re a tiresome young man.” Ian’s reply — “You’re a stubborn old man” — crystallises their tension: authority versus action, ego versus practicality.
When the Doctor insists, “I won’t be frightened by mere shadows,” it reads as defensiveness masquerading as control — the classic façade of a leader unwilling to admit fear. Moments later, when he tells Barbara, “Fear makes companions of us all,” the shift is complete: vulnerability replaces pretence, and empathy becomes the bridge back to trust.
Over time, the group evolves from competition to cooperation; each learns that survival depends on interdependence. Barbara continues to model empathy, influencing both her companions and the Tribe of Gum. It is she who softens the tribal woman’s fear, leading to the reassurance: “They do not kill.”
Reflection: Fear can unite teams in crisis, but sustainable trust begins only when someone names the fear and points to it rather than shying away from it.
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The Firemaker – The Shift from Power to Trust
“Everyone should know how to make fire. The person who knows how to make fire is the least important.”
Synopsis: After exposing a murderer and teaching the tribe to make fire, the travellers are imprisoned for their knowledge and must use ingenuity to escape back to the TARDIS.
By the final episode, the balance has shifted. Ian credits the Doctor as leader — a symbolic act of generosity that acknowledges trust over dominance. Susan’s smile confirms it: belonging has replaced fear.
Ian then teaches the Tribe of Gum to make fire, undermining their belief that power depends on exclusivity. Knowledge, once hoarded, becomes shared; leadership turns from possession to facilitation. The Doctor’s band collaborates to outwit their captors — their ingenuity now collective, not hierarchical.
Reflection: The most effective leaders make themselves progressively unnecessary. Sharing knowledge multiplies influence instead of diminishing it.
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Takeaway
Across these early episodes, the journey from fear to trust charts the evolution of any functioning team. The scenes that illustrate this in An Unearthly Child are a little clunky and it’s necessary to suspend present day values around TV language in order to appreciate the story. Nonetheless there are some useful insights that linger long after the credits have rolled:
- Authority and power secured from knowledge is more secure if it gives way to and rests instead on collaboration.
- Negative cohesion is inevitable, but shared values are longer lasting. Power transforms into partnership that sustains long after enmity would normally have seen alliances fall apart.
- Fear makes companions of us all — but it’s curiosity and shared purpose that move things forward, forge new links and keep them intact once the danger has passed.
We forget how valuable wisdom really is. We devalue it because age is seen as a problem or a blocker. For those us perceived as blockers, we need to maintain our ability to listen amid the ambition of others. This requires self-discipline and a growth mindset. The Doctor gets there in the end. So too does Ian. They don’t necessarily live happily ever after, but they do respect one another a little bit more.