Why, this is the planet Dido. I've been here before. I know them very well. They're very friendly people.--The Doctor
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"The Powerful Enemy", 2 January 1965
"Desperate Measures", 9 January 1965
Written by David Whitaker
Directed by Christopher Barry
Script editor: Dennis Spooner
Produced by Verity Lambert
Associate producer: Mervyn Pinfield
William Hartnell as the Doctor
William Russell as Ian Chesterton
Jacqueline Hill as Barbara Wright
Maureen O'Brien as Vicki (first appearance)
Doctor Who is currently midway through its thirty-second season. One of the things that's always been true over the forty-eight years it's taken to accumulate those thirty-two seasons is that the programme has shown a capacity endlessly to reinvent itself, to grow and change and sometimes even regress, so that there's really no such thing as a "typical" episode of Doctor Who--no single episode that would represent the entire half-century of the programme's run. That's both a necessary prerequisite and a necessary consequence of lasting for fifty years, in which regard, I suppose, it's a bit of a timey-wimey quality.
Thirteen months into the programme's run, we now get to its very first period of change. We get the first cast change, with the Doctor's departing granddaughter, Susan, being replaced by a pseudo-granddaughter, space orphan Vicki. In so doing, the programme establishes a baseline characterisation for the Doctor's primary companion: an adolescent girl--in fact, a schoolgirl, if she comes from a society where that's the appropriate situation for an adolescent; and often, one who's been robbed of her parents, and so needs the Doctor to serve as a paternal stand-in. These are traits that will generally hold true until the end of the 1960s.
We also see the first changes in Doctor Who's creative authorities. Script editor David Whitaker leaves, replaced by Dennis Spooner; in so doing, he begins the tradition of a departing script editor writing the first script of his successor's tenure. And Mervyn Pinfield is about to leave, too, after the story that follows this one, leaving Verity Lambert the programme's sole producer. Lambert--who, when Sydney Newman put her in charge of his new children's science fiction programme, became not only the BBC's first female producer, but also its youngest producer--had now proved herself capable of running the programme on her own.
We start off aboard a crashed spaceship, its wreckage strewn across a valley nestled amongst craggy mountains. Two survivors are living aboard the ship: the aforementioned teenager Vicki, and Bennett, a middle-aged man who's confined to the bed in his cabin by a leg injury.
Vicki gets excited because the ship's radar has detected another spaceship, landed somewhere up in the mountains. The rescue ship must have arrived early. But Bennett scoffs at this; the rescue ship must have landed early. But Bennett scoffs at this: the radar didn't detect the spaceship landing, only after it had landed, and besides, the rescue ship should still be days away. He has Vicki radio the rescue ship to confirm, and she's stunned when they confirm that they are, indeed, still three days from reaching them. Bennett also gives Vicki a dark warning to "watch out for Koquillion."
What the radar has picked up is, in fact, the TARDIS, which has materialised in a dark cavern up one of the mountains. The Doctor has nodded off and actually managed to sleep through the materialisation. Ian and Barbara wake him, and he prepares to lead them outside. "Susan," he says, "open the doors," before he realises Susan isn't there anymore. Once outside in the cavern, he encourages Ian and Barbara to go off and explore, then declares, "And I think I'm going to have a nap!" and disappears back inside the TARDIS.
Ian and Barbara are bemused at this behaviour, but they reason the Doctor must be somewhat depressed by Susan's departure. They make their way out of the cavern and find themselves at the top of a sheer cliff face looking down into the valley, where they can see the crashed spaceship.
Before they can start looking for a way down, they're confronted by Koquillion, a native of the planet. He's a fearsome looking humanoid, with a mane of threatening spikes, a pair of curved tusks that look like giant mandibles, and long claws for hands. His words are friendly, but his manner is threatening. When the humans reveal that there's a third member of their party back at their spaceship, he sends Ian into the cavern to fetch him, leaving Koquillion alone with Barbara, who's clearly uneasy.
No sooner has Ian gone than Koquillion pushes Barbara over the edge of the cliff, then uses a bulky sonic device he's carrying (it looks like a large adjustable wrench, to be honest) to seal the Doctor and Ian inside the cavern with a rockfall.
The Doctor emerges from the TARDIS when he hears the rocks; he and Ian search fruitlessly for an exit. The Doctor has realised from a rock sample that they're on the planet Dido, which he has visited before. From Ian's description he recognises Koquillion as a member of the native species, but he's surprised at such aggressive behaviour; he remembers the Dido people, whose population is only about a hundred, as profoundly peace-loving.
Barbara has survived her fall without any real injury; Vicki finds her at the base of the cliff and brings her back to the spaceship, then hides her when Koquillion comes visiting. The fearsome alien makes some threatening remarks about how Vicki should remember that she owes him her life, then decides to visit Bennett, locking himself in the older man's cabin.
Once he's out of the way, Vicki returns to Barbara and explains how the situation came about. She was a passenger on the ship, headed to a colony world, but it crashed on Dido. The people of the planet invited the ship's crew and passengers to a feast, but Vicki couldn't go as she had a fever. During the feast, a tremendous explosion wiped out everyone from the ship--the humans, including Vicki's father, had been lured to their deaths by the natives. Bennett, badly wounded, was the only survivor, and he crawled back to the ship. Now he and Vicki are in the power of Koquillion, who claims to be protecting them from the other natives; they haven't told Koquillion about the approaching rescue ship.
Once Koquillion leaves Bennett's cabin and departs the ship, Vicki takes Barbara to Bennett. He's stunned to learn of another human being alive. Barbara suggests that together, the three of them can overpower Koquillion, but while Vicki is receptive to the plan, Bennett angrily declares it too risky and refuses to countenance it.
Vicki and Barbara return to the spaceship's main cabin, leaving Bennett to rest. There, they're elated when Ian and the Doctor arrive. The two men, having failed to find a way past the rockfall, moved deeper into the caves and found another exit from the tunnels. After hearing Vicki's story, the Doctor determines he wants to meet Bennett, but he wants to meet him alone. He makes his way to Bennett's cabin and knocks on the door, but Bennett's voice responds, "No, you can't come in!" This doesn't deter the Doctor, who breaks the door down.
Inside, he finds the cabin empty. Bennett's voice came from a tape recorder. The Doctor also discovers a hidden trapdoor in the floor, allowing Bennett to lock his cabin door and then leave the spaceship unnoticed.
Back in the main cabin, Ian and Barbara are explaining to Vicki that they're not just space travellers; they're time travellers. "What year was it when you left Earth?"
"Why, 2493, of course," Vicki responds, then boggles when Barbara tells her that she and Ian left Earth in 1963. "But ... that means you're about five hundred and fifty years old!" she exclaims.
Ian doubles over with laughter at this while Barbara tries not to feel offended; it's a truly charming moment, probably one of my favourites in all of Doctor Who (amidst an otherwise unremarkable story), because it's so genuine.
(William Russell has a real talent as an actor, I'm discovering in this rewatch, for having his character laugh at things a real person would laugh at, and do it in such a way that I honestly wonder if it's Ian who's laughing, or Russell.)
The Doctor, meanwhile, has gone through the trapdoor, and found himself in the Great Hall of the Dido natives, where he waits. Eventually, Koquillion arrives, as the Doctor knew he would. The Doctor has figured out what's going on: he recognised Ian's description of a Dido native, but he realised that when Ian described Koquillion's appearance, he was describing clothing, not physical form. Koquillion is simply wearing the ceremonial robes of the Dido people.
So Koquillion removes his mask, revealing that he is, of course, Bennett. Bennett explains to the Doctor what really happened: he murdered a man aboard the spaceship and was arrested for it. So when the ship crashed and the Dido people invited the crew to a feast, it was Bennett who set the explosion with supplies from the ship's armory, killing both the humans and the entire (tiny) population of Dido.
(Bennett says it was "easy" to set the explosion, though he doesn't give us any hint as to why it was so easy for a man under guard for murder to gain such complete access to the ship's armory.)
Vicki did not know of Bennett's crime or arrest, so after the explosion, Bennett dressed up as Koquillion to convince her of the foulness of the planet's native population; once the rescue ship arrived, she would confirm his story, and he'd be a free man.
Bennet and the Doctor grapple hand to hand, with Bennett winning the upper hand. But just as he's about to strike the killing blow, two men emerge from a hidden recess in the great hall. These are the real natives of the planet Dido--possibly the last two natives, survivors of the explosion. Bennett, terrified, runs from them, but he falls over a cliff and plunges to his death in the caverns.
Vicki, then, is left with nobody to care for her, so of course the Doctor, Ian and Barbara invite her aboard the TARDIS. As it dematerialises, we cut back to the spaceship, where the rescue ship is radioing that they're about to land, but they receive no response. The two Dido natives enter the cabin and, not wanting any contact with the species that has just wiped out their entire population, smash the radio to pieces.
What Lisa thought
"I thought it was pretty good. It was a good introduction to Vicki." A pause. "I think I like the four parters best."
All of which I'm inclined to say is just about right. "The Rescue" is clearly just there to introduce us to New SusanVicki. It's a cute enough little story--there's no world-shattering stakes in play, and it gets a nice little twist at the end. There's also a few good light moments, like the scene where Vicki calculates Barbara's age, or the scene where Barbara shoots a fearsome beast dead as it creeps up on Vicki, only to learn that it was in fact Vicki's pet, a sand crawler she'd named Sandy. She'd been training it to come to her for food. Vicki retains an endearing, slightly petulant resentment at Barbara for this throughout the story.
So it makes a nice break, but Doctor Who's at its best--as it turns out Lisa agrees with me--with the ninety minute stories.
The next story is "The Romans".
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