Look, it's not that The Gunslingers is awful. It's just not particularly good, either. I will grant you that at the moment there are any number of fine British actors who are able to convincingly play Americans with flawless accents. I'd even be willing to bet that in 1966 there were equally talented actors. Heck, that same year over in Italy and Spain they made The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, one of the greatest spaghetti westerns of the era. One presumes those actors simply weren't available on Doctor Who's 1966 budget, so instead we get the likes of Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and Doc Holliday performed in mostly proper BBC English with the edges roughed up into something vaguely like a cowboy accent. Oh, and we get an original song. Ugh, that song...

Let's talk about that.

A Holiday for the Doctor / Don't Shoot the Pianist

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

So, the writers saw fit to have an original song written for this story, in the style of a western saloon ballad. That would be all well and good, except the song  gets sung during the intro and outro of virtually every scene, like some kind of Greek chorus. Continuously, throughout the story, we keep hearing "The Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon", which has roughly fifty billion verses. It is mostly performed off-screen, aside from one notably bad scene in which Doc Holliday's girlfriend badly lip syncs a verse while serenading the bad guys.

Is there a plot? Yeah, sure, I guess. The Doctor has a toothache from eating some hard candy at the end of the last episode. The TARDIS materializes in Tombstone at the OK Corral just a few days before the inevitable gunfight, and rather than bounce on out to an era in which dentistry includes things like "anesthetic" and "regard for human life", he elects to have Doc Holiday pull his tooth. There is a wacky chain of events in which the Doctor is mistake for Doc Holliday, and virtually every pop culture gunslinger is either there in town or at least mentioned. Other boring stuff happens, continuously punctuated by another verse of that damn song. It turns out both Dodo and Steven can play piano, who know? 

One presumes that in tomorrow's episode there will be a gunfight. Yay.

Fun bits of trivia: 1) The role of Wyatt Earp was originally going to be played by Donald Sutherland, but he was not available. 2) The role of Johnny Ringo was originally offered to Patrick Troughton, but he was not available. He was surely available to take over as the Doctor shortly thereafter, though. 3) The role of Doc Holliday was played by Anthony Jacobs, whose son Matthew Jacobs went on to write the screenplay for the 1996 Doctor Who tv movie with Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor. 4) A week from tomorrow I will finally get Cybermen and a regeneration, and it can't come soon enough.

STATS:

Doctor(s): First
Companion(s): Steven Taylor, Dodo Chaplet
Episode(s): A Holiday for the Doctor / Don't Shoot the Pianist
Steps Walked: 6,764 today, 399,247 total
Distance Walked:  3.39 miles today, 185.71 miles total
Weight: 286.64 lbs (five day moving average), net change -20.66 lbs