I actually quite like An Unearthly Child, the episode, that is. Although I, as someone who started watching in 2005 with Rose, already knew who the Doctor is, and that he lives in a police box that can travel in time and space, but the perspective characters, Ian and Barbara, do not. All they know is that Susan is not a typical human 15-year-old girl. Should they, as teachers, have followed a student home? No. Definitely not. However, as the audience surrogate figures, Ian and Barbara doing so to solve the mystery of the episode (who and what is Susan?) makes sense, and if they hadn't, we wouldn't be here now, would we?

It's episodes 2-4 that bring down my rating for this episode. I think it's nice that the Doctor isn't the character he grows into being, that humanity rubs off on him during his travels, but the story doesn't have enough going for three episodes. A lot of the caveman conversations feel like you're going round in circles, with cavemen repeating what are functionally the same lines, mostly about how either Za cannot make fire or Za will make fire. This isn't surprising when notes for the story state that they originally had less to say, at least in English. Perhaps it would have worked better if they hadn't been speaking in English, as we wouldn't have known that the conversations were so circular.

Another issue I have is with Barbara and Susan. I don't think there's an issue with having a companion who screams a lot, but it becomes a bit of an issue when two of the companions spend a lot of the time screaming or crying. Some of the things that set them off I can understand, Susan panicking when her grandfather is attacked by a caveman, but others seem like Coburn just thought that one of the women needed to scream and then start crying. I guess I can give him some leniency for that, given the time. This is probably also why Barbara collapses into the chair, and Ian to the floor.