Doctor Who: "The Chase"

Am exterminated! Am exterminated!--A Dalek, upon losing a fight with a Mechanoid

The Doctor and his evil double duel with their wood. Let the slashfic commence!

"The Executioners", 22 May 1965
"The Death of Time", 29 May 1965
"Flight Through Eternity", 5 June 1965
"Journey into Terror", 12 June 1965
"The Death of Doctor Who", 19 June 1965
"The Planet of Decision", 26 June 1965

Written by Terry Nation
Directed by Richard Martin
Script editor: Dennis Spooner
Produced by Verity Lambert

William Hartnell as the Doctor
William Russell as Ian Chesterton (final appearance)
Jacqueline Hill as Barbara Wright (final appearance)
Maureen O'Brien as Vicki
Peter Purves as Steven Taylor (first appearance)

The Doctor has been tinkering with a time-space visualiser, which he took from the space museum, and he's got it working again. With it, the TARDIS team can watch any instant in all of space and time. They watch Lincoln give the Gettysburg Address, an audience between Shakespeare and Elizabeth I, and a performance of "Ticket to Ride" by the Beatles on an episode of Top of the Pops. Vicki has heard of the Beatles, has even visited their museum in Liverpool, but "didn't know they play classical music", a description that disgusts Barbara.

The Beatles sequence isn't on the North American DVD of "The Chase" (though it was on the earlier North American VHS release), and, while I understand the rights issues involves, I think that's a shame. That performance of "Ticket to Ride" actually gets used in Beatles documentaries, and it only exists because of its appearance in Doctor Who--the rest of that episode of Top of the Pops has been wiped.

(The story goes that originally, the Beatles themselves were actually scheduled to appear in the programme--made up to appear in their seventies, they'd be picked up by the time-space visualiser while attending their fiftieth anniversary. But Brian Epstein put the kibosh on them appearing in a cheap kids' science fiction show.)

That bit of fluff concluded, the TARDIS materialises on a hot desert planet, boiling beneath the heat of two suns. Ian and Vicki dash off over a dune to go exploring, while the Doctor and Barbara hang back to sunbathe. At this point I kind of wondered in the Doctor would attire himself for sunbathing by pulling swimming trunks on over his frock coats and check trousers, a la Batman and the Joker having their surfing competition, but no, he just remains fully clothed while he lays out.

Ian and Vicki discover a metal hatch in the sand. They pull it open and descend into the crumbling tunnels of an abandoned subterranean city. But soon they're attacked by a large, tentacled creature--it looks a bit like a squid, but moving about on dry land. And it's between them and the hatch, so they have no option but to retreat deeper into the tunnels.

Back on the surface, the Doctor and Barbara are prevented from looking for their friends by a sandstorm, which not only changes the entire landscape but also buries the TARDIS. And it reveals a new threat: a squad of Daleks, hunting the TARDIS team (whom they now describe as "our greatest enemies").

They flee and take refuge with the planet's native humanoid inhabitants, the Aridians, who look like anthropoid silver fish. (I don't mean they look like anthropoid silverfish, but that they wear lycra jumpsuits and swimcaps spray-painted silver, with fins glued on to look like fish.) They explain that this planet, Aridius, was once an aquatic paradise, but that the water burnt away as the planet was drawn closer to the twin suns.

(Which opens the question as to how it came to be named "Aridius". Was it named by the Ironic Planetary Naming Authority, or by the Bad Luck Planetary Naming Authority)?

The Aridians tell the Doctor and Barbara that when the planet dried out, the mire-beasts invaded the Aridians' underground cities. The mire-beasts--one of which is obviously the creature that has cornered Vicki and Ian--cannot be defeated, and so the only solution for the Aridians is to wall off those sections of their tunnels that become infested.

The Aridians take Barbara and the Doctor to their city, but soon enough the city is contacted by the Daleks, who demand that the Aridians hand over the TARDIS team or face extermination. Not wishing to put their hosts in a bad situation, the Doctor declares that he and Barbara will leave, but the Aridians refuse to allow him to do so--the Daleks have specifically told them that if the team escape, they will destroy their city.

Meanwhile, Vicki and Ian have fought off the mire-beast, but in the process Ian took a blow to the head and got knocked unconscious. Vicki runs off in fright, and in her mad dash through the tunnels, she somehow finds a way through into the very chamber where the Aridians are holding Barbara and the Doctor. They make to arrest her, too, but before they can, a mire-beast bursts in, having followed her through the tunnels.

In the confusion, the Doctor, Barbara and Vicki make their escape, and Vicki leads the group back to Ian. He's awake--his wound looks worse than it is. (And it really does look bad--there's a lot of blood flowing from that temple for 1965 television.) While awake, he's found an exit from the tunnels--and it leads right to the TARDIS.

The TARDIS, buried in the sandstorm, was discovered by the Daleks, who captured a pair of Aridians and used them as slave labour to excavate it, then killed them when they were finished. Ian and the Doctor are able to distract the Daleks, and the team escape and dematerialise.

A few minutes after they're in flight, though, the Doctor learns some shocking news from the TARDIS's sensors: the Daleks are pursuing them. They've built their own time machine and are hunting the team through space and time.

Cut to the Dalek time machine's control room. One Dalek gives a report calculating how big a lead the TARDIS has on them, and after he gives this report, the Dalek commander demands he convert the amount into Earth measure. The original Dalek actually stutters as he does the arithmetic. ("Um ... er ... ah ... twelve ... Earth minutes.") This is one of those moments in fandom that's cited as a reason why "The Chase" isn't a very good story--the ridiculousness of a stammering Dalek. But what I'd like to point out is how unreasonable the Dalek commander's demand is in the first place--why on Earth would he need the time units converted to Earth measure? If you're, say, the pilot of an RAF bomber, and your tail gunner reports, "We've got German fighters closing in behind us, skipper! About five hundred yards!", you don't very well respond, "Sorry, Bill! Since our enemies are German, I can't act on that information until you translate 'five hundred yards' into German for me!"

Anyway. We now go into a series of set pieces, where the TARDIS materialises, the crew briefly interact with their surroundings, and then depart; then the Daleks arrive, ascertain that the TARDIS has already left, and pursue it. This includes extensive shots of the time vortex, with a cardboard cutout of the TARDIS chased erratically across the screen by a cardboard cutout of the Dalek time machine, while some very jazzy incidental music played. You kind of wonder if the BBC hired the Dave Brubeck Quartet to do the music for this serial. (In fairness, the cardboard cutouts do get larger as they cross the screen, which does an excellent job of creating the illusion that they're moving three-dimensionally rather than two-.)

The first stop on the chase is atop the Empire State Building, where the team meet Morton Dill (played by Peter Purves), a tourist from Alabama who's just gosh-darned amazed at everything he sees in the big city. When the TARDIS dematerialises a few moments later, he concludes he must have stumbled across the production of a movie, something he thinks gets confirmed when the Daleks show up a few minutes later. He examines the Dalek he meets by walking in a full circle around it, and the Dalek's eyestalk follows him, tracking 360 degrees to keep up with him--it's a really cute moment. (Morton Dill survives the encounter--the Daleks murder no one on their visit to the Empire State Building. Well, not on this visit.)

Next, the TARDIS arrives at and quickly departs from the Mary Celeste. The Daleks also arrive and depart, but not until their appearance has so frightened everyone aboard that they've jumped ship into the Atlantic Ocean, leaving the Mary Celeste deserted, with its famous half-drunk cups of coffee and breakfasts in the middle of being eaten. A Dalek falls overboard, too, and actually screams in terror as he falls.

The TARDIS's next destination is the front hallway of a spooky, dark, deserted mansion, which the Doctor identifies from its architecture as Central European. The Doctor and Ian head upstairs to explore the house, while Barbara and Vicki wait by the TARDIS.

While, they're waiting, a figure in a dark cloak approaches them, introduces himself as Count Dracula, and then departs. The Doctor and Ian discover a laboratory with a shrouded body lying on a slab; they pull back the shroud to reveal Frankenstein's monster, and quickly flee the lab.

The Doctor theorises that somehow, the TARDIS has transported them into the recesses of the human mind, a dream world. This excites Ian, because surely the Daleks can't possibly follow them into the human subconscious. But he's wrong, because soon enough, the pepperpots do indeed arrive.

A battle ensues between the Daleks, Dracula and Frankenstein, with the Daleks' guns having no effect on the monsters. In the commotion, the Doctor, Ian and Barbara pile into TARDIS and dematerialise, and not until it's already too late do they realise that they've left Vicki behind. The Doctor insists there's no way to go back and get her; he simply doesn't have sufficiently fine control of the TARDIS.

Vicki, though, manages to dart inside the Daleks' time machine and hides there; the Daleks withdraw from their battle and take off in pursuit of the TARDIS. After the spooky house has once again fallen quiet, a camera shot shows us its front entrance, where a large sign identifies it as a carnival fright house, part of the "Festival of Ghana, 1996; admission $10" (yes, dollars). But a sticker placed over the sign tells us that the festival has been "cancelled by order of Peking".

While hiding aboard the Dalek time machine, Vicki is able to watch the Daleks hatch their next stratagem: they construct a robot duplicate of the Doctor, identical to the original in every way save for the fact that he's played by an actor who doesn't really resemble William Hartnell at all, and programme to "Infiltrate and kill!" the TARDIS crew. (That phrase is repeated a good eight or ten times during episodes four and five.)

I can't really think of a better way they could have done the duplicate-Doctor, given the constraints under which they were operating, but I've got to say, it's pretty unsuccessful. The production team make a valiant attempt to have William Hartnell play the duplicate whenever possible, but most of the time, they have to use the unconvincing double. And I don't just mean that happens the Doctor and the robot have to appear in the same scene; I mean it happens whenever they appear in consecutive scenes (which happens for most of the robot's time in the programme).

1960s Doctor Who was shot "as-live", meaning that as near as possible, a thirty-minute episode was recorded during a thirty-minute block of time at the studio. So when the camera cuts from a scene between Ian and the Doctor in one location, to a scene between Barbara and the robot in another location, there simply isn't time for William Hartnell to run across to the other side of the studio to play both scenes.

In the robot's first appearance, at the cliffhanger for episode four, the double is used for a long shot, surrounded by Daleks; we then cut to Hartnell for a closeup, still stood on the TARDIS set from the previous scene, with a Dalek eyestalk extending into frame to make us think we're still aboard the Dalek time machine. But that really doesn't work: neither Hartnell's posture nor the background match the double's.

Still, two things do work. First, William Hartnell dubs all the robot's lines as the double mimics them; sure, there lip syncing's slightly off, but that's forgivable given that, once again, this was being done live. And second is the scene where the Doctor and the robot finally meet. Hartnell will speak a line playing one character (of course, by that point, we don't know if he's the Doctor or the robot) facing off to camera left; we then cut to a shot of Ian or Barbara or Vicki, during which, Hartnell turns around; we then cut back to Hartnell, now facing off to camera right, and Hartnell delivers a line as the other character.

So. The TARDIS now arrives on the planet Mechanus, a jungle planet. (No doubt it was named Mechanus by the same Ironic Yet Creepily Predictive Planetary Naming Authority that named Aridius.) But it's a jungle of large, extremely aggressive fungi that are more than happy to eat whatever human-sized creatures come near them. The TARDIS team are trepidatious about walking off into the jungle, but then suddenly, a path lights up along the ground. They follow it, and it leads them to a cave where they take refuge.

Meanwhile, the Daleks have landed and sent their robot off to find the team. Vicki waits till all the Daleks have left, then heads off into the jungle to try to rejoin her friends. From their cave, the others hear her calling for them, and Ian and the Doctor head into the jungle to find her.

While they're gone, the robot arrives at the cave and rather callously tells Barbara that Ian is dead, killed by the fungi. She doesn't believe him and insists they go look for him, so the robot accompanies her into the jungle. As soon as they're isolated, the robot attempts to kill her, but he's stopped when Ian comes upon them--Vicki has by now told him and the Doctor about the robot.

The robot Doctor runs off into the jungle, and the team split up to find him. Of course, the endgame for this is that Ian, Barbara and Vicki are all gathered in a clearing, and the two Hartnells enter from opposite sides at the same time, so that neither we nor the team know which is the real Doctor.

One of the Hartnells orders Ian to get out of the way so he can thrash his double with his cane. Ian says, "And if I don't?" to which the Hartnell responds, "Then I'll give you the same treatment!" and takes a swipe at him. Ian and this Hartnell, supposedly the robot, grapple, while Vicki, Susan and the "Doctor" watch on. Ian throws the robot to the ground and picks up a large rock, preparing to brain him.

The "Doctor" with Vicki and Susan then forcibly turns Vicki away, saying, "Susan, I don't want you to see this." This lets Vicki and Barbara know that this "Doctor" is actually the robot. Ian is stopped from braining the real Doctor by Barbara's scream. The robot runs off, and the Doctor follows him. The two of them then duel with their wooden canes, and while they're locked together, the Doctor is able to pull the robot's wiring from its chest, destroying it.

Yes, that means that the real Doctor, while aware that his fellows didn't know whether or not he was a robot sent to assassinate them, attempted to beat Ian with his cane purely for not getting out of his way fast enough. The sad part is that I can't actually say, "This is a horribly contrived, out-of-character action for the Hartnell Doctor to perform," so much as I can say, "This actually isn't all that big a stretch, character-wise, for the Hartnell Doctor."

So with that all taken care of, our heroes retreat back to their cave. But they're soon found by Daleks, who surround the cave and prepare to exterminate the team. The Doctor attempts to impersonate the robot, exiting the cave and telling the Daleks that they've all already been killed, but the Daleks see through the ruse easily. The Doctor narrowly escapes extermination.

(It's actually Ian who suggests he try it. Barbara objects immediately, and while Ian, Barbara and Vicki argue about it, the Doctor slips out at the back of the frame. They're all just agreeing it's an unworkable plan when they hear the Doctor's voice speaking to the Daleks, telling them the mission has been completed. The Daleks respond with a gunshot, and the Doctor darts back into frame, looking rather frazzled. It's a cute little scene.)

Before the Daleks can storm the cave, however, a door opens at its rear and a robot emerges. It's a giant metal sphere with bits and bobs attached, and it speaks with a droning intonation not unlike the Daleks' voices. It ushers them into the door from which it has just emerged, with turns out to lead to a lift.

They ascend in the lift. The Doctor attempts to make conversation with the robot, but it ignores him. The lift takes them to a magnificent city of what spires, built on a platform high above the fungal jungle. (Man. "Fungal jungle". I'm calling that one. You want it, you pay a royalty.)

They're ushered through the city's corridors--populated only by more of the spherical robots--to a sleeping chamber, where they meet another human being. This is Steven Taylor, who's played by Peter Purves, the same actor who played Morton Dill back atop the Empire State Building. He was a space pilot in Earth's interplanetary wars, but his ship crashed. For two years, he's had no one to talk to but his cuddly toy panda.

Steven explains that the robots are Mechanoids. Earth had intended to colonise Mechanus and sent the Mechanoids as an advance party, to build the city. But when the wars came, Mechanus got forgot about. Now the robots will only think that arriving humans are the colonists if they know the Mechanoids' code; since neither Steven nor the TARDIS party know the code, they're trapped here as the Mechanoids' prisoners.

Their cell contains access to the roof, where Steven goes to exercise. On the roof is an extensive length of electrical cable; now that there are five people here, instead of just one, they can use the cable to lower each other the fifteen hundred feet down to the ground. Vicki, terribly acrophobic, has to be forcibly held down while the others tie the end of the cable around her, then holds her eyes shut in terror as they lower her to the ground.

Meanwhile, the Daleks have ascended the lift chute and demand the Mechanoids hand over the TARDIS team. When the Mechanoids refuse, a battle ensues, and soon the whole city is ablaze. The battle is actually very well done, a montage of model shots and shots of the two different robot forces rolling around and firing (the Mechanoids are equipped with flamethrowers), framed by flames licking at the edge of the screen.

When smoke starts billowing onto the city's roof, Steven, panicked, dashes back inside, to rescue his cuddly panda. When he doesn't re-emerge, the TARDIS team assume he's been killed. They themselves finish climbing down to the ground, and they make their way through to the jungle to the Daleks' time machine. They discover it's been abandoned--all the Daleks, like the Mechanoids, have been wiped out in the battle.

Now Barbara realises that, with the intact guidance mechanism on the Dalek time machine, she and Ian can use it to travel back to 1963 Earth, if only the Doctor will show them how to use it. He angrily refuses, calling them both utter idiots, but really, of course, he just doesn't want them to leave him. It's really a terribly sweet moment, such a very true portrayal, especially for someone of Hartnell's age and generation, conditioned not to show soft emotions.

But thanks to Ian and Barbara's entreaties, he agrees, and next thing we know, the two schoolteachers have landed in London. It's 1965 instead of 1963, but as Ian says, "What's two years between friends?" There's then a lovely montage of Ian and Barbara frolicking through London; playing with the pigeons in Trafalgar Square; Ian expressing mock horror upon discovering a police box on the Thames Embankment.

At the end of the day, they climb aboard a bus, speculating about whether they'll be able to get their old jobs back. The conductor comes along to sell them their tickets, and Ian reaches into his pocket, asking for two threepennies.

"Two threes?" the conductor exclaims. "Where you been, the Moon?"

"No," says Ian, "but you're close!"

Vicki and the Doctor watch the whole thing through the time-space visualiser. Vicki is overjoyed to see them so happy, but the Doctor is still grumpy. As he shuffles off, he murmurs the truth: "I shall miss them. Yes, I shall miss them."

What Lisa thought

"Well," she gruffly conceded, "maybe I'm sort of sorry they're gone. But only because I don't get to complain about Barbara anymore!"

All gruff on the exterior to hide how much she cares on the inside. Sort of like William Hartnell, is my wife.

I, on the other hand, am pretty happy. With "The Web Planet", "The Space Museum" and "The Chase", we've now finished a run of sixteen episodes that I think are pretty dire, broken only by the first episode of "The Space Museum". And next up is one of my favourite Hartnells, "The Time Meddler".

I

Doctor Who: "The Space Museum"

Doctor, why do you always show the greatest interest in the most unimportant things?--Ian Chesterton

The TARDIS team: exhibits in the Space Museum

"The Space Museum", 24 April 1965
"The Dimensions of Time", 1 May 1965
"The Search", 8 May 1965
"The Final Phase", 15 May 1965

Written by Glyn Jones
Directed by Mervyn Pinfield
Script editor: Dennis Spooner
Produced by Verity Lambert

William Hartnell as the Doctor
William Russell as Ian Chesterton
Jacqueline Hill as Barbara Wright
Maureen O'Brien as Vicki

We start with the team gathered round the TARDIS console, still in their mediaeval costume from the previous (missing) story, "The Crusdade". Some force has frozen them, and they stare unblinkingly at the control column. The camera (unusually) actually moves slightly, panning slightly up and to the right, and that's a lovely touch--it adds three-dimensionality to the shot, and it shows us that the actors really are standing there, motionless, rather than a still image being used. (Later on, the moment will be recreated, and it's painfully obvious at that time that a photograph is being used to do it.)

There's a fade to black, and then we find the TARDIS team blinking awake--only they're no longer wearing their mediaeval clothing, but instead, their everyday clothes: twentieth-century gear for Ian and Barbara, frock coat and check trousers for the Doctor, and deeply age-inappropriate pinafore and kneesocks masquerading as twenty-sixth-century garb for Vicki. Ian, Barbara and Vicki are greatly concerned at the unexplained change, but the Doctor, in a genuinely amusing moment, dismisses their worries and declares how pleased he is that the crew have been saved having to take the trouble to change their own clothes.

The Doctor sends Vicki to get him some water. She heads into the back room and fills a glass, but as she's turning away from the TARDIS food machine, the glass slips from her hand and shatters on the floor. But then, instantly, the glass pulls back together, water pours itself back into the glass, and the whole thing rises from the floor and returns to Vicki's hand. It's obviously just a reverse of the film of it shattering in the first place, but again, it doesn't look like they're just rewinding the film, and it's achieved quite effectively. Vicki tells the Doctor about what happened, but again, he just chuckles and dismisses her concerns.

The TARDIS has landed, so the Doctor pulls up their surroundings on the scanner. At first they think they've landed in a spaceship graveyard, but then they realise they're actually in a space museum. It appears deserted right now, so they head outside to explore.

The strangeness continues. The planet's surface is covered in a thick layer of dust, but the team leave no footprints as they walk. And after a few moments, they realise they can hear no sound whatsoever, apart from each other's voices.

As they approach the entrance to the main museum building, the doors start to open, and the team dart undercover to hide from whoever's coming out. A pair of big men in white military tunics emerge. They're only yards away when Vicki can't suppress a sneeze--there's no way they could fail to hear her. And yet they do not react at all, merely walk away on patrol.

The team head inside and start looking at the exhibits. They find the empty casing of a Dalek on display. Vicki, though she's read about the Dalek occupation of Earth in her history books, has never seen one, and--much to Ian and Barbara's amused disgust--she's not impressed: "Why, this one looks quite friendly."

The museum is mostly deserted, but there are a few small groups walking around--and they clearly can't see or hear the TARDIS team, walking right past them. What's more, they're talking amongst themselves, but none of our heroes can hear anything they're saying.

Then Vicki makes the discovery that nothing in the museum, including the walls, is solid to the TARDIS team--they can wave their hands right through solid objects, or even walk right through them.

No sooner have they realised this than they enter a new hall--and come upon the TARDIS. It's not the real TARDIS, though, because they can walk right through it--it's an exhibit in the museum. And on display, right across from the TARDIS, are the team, stood in glass cases, staring lifelessly at the other exhibits, somehow preserved or embalmed.

The Doctor has by now worked out what's happened: when materialising, the TARDIS somehow jumped a "time track", and so the team somehow haven't really arrived yet. What they're seeing is their own future: they're going to end up in the museum. Or rather, it's one possible future: the team must somehow find a way to break the chain that will lead to it.

As he's explaining this, a strange sensation comes over the team, and they once more fall into a trance. Outside, we see their footprints appear in the dust, and the two patrolmen find the TARDIS. Inside the TARDIS, Vicki's glass of water shatters across the floor. Back in the museum, the team once more wake from their trance.

"Yes," the Doctor declares. "We've arrived!" It's an effective ending to a really well-done creepy first episode.

The three following episodes are completely different in tone--it's seriously a disconnect on the same order as that between part one of "An Unearthly Child" and parts two through four. We soon find out that there are two different species of aliens at the space museum: the big, brawny, militaristic men in white are the planet's rulers, the Moroks. The slight young men (they're all about twenty) with blond hair, black clothes and what appear to be Converse trainers are Xerons. The Moroks are the planet's rulers and museum curators, while the Xerons are an underclass. As soon as the Morok governor learns that there are aliens wandering around his museum, he orders them found and caught, so that they can become his newest exhibit.

The TARDIS team decide to try to make their way back to the TARDIS without being spotted, though there's some debate about that--is that exactly the course that will lead to them ending up in the display cases? Unfortunately, they've wandered so far into the museum that they're now thoroughly lost. Much to Barbara's dismay, Ian insists on unravelling Barbara's cardigan, so that they can track their path as they try to find their way out.

The first member to get separated from the group is the Doctor, who lags behind examining a display and is captured by a group of Xeron boys, led by a very, very young Jeremy Bulloch (better known to you and me as Boba Fett). He escapes from them (by hiding in the empty Dalek casing) but is quickly captured by Moroks and taken to the governor for questioning.

The governor interrogates the Doctor about where the rest of the TARDIS team are and where they came from. He has the Doctor hooked up to a machine that displays whatever image enters the Doctor's head when asked a question, but the Doctor is able to defeat the machine, sending it false images. The governor, angry, declares that if the Doctor will give him no useful information, then it's time he was processed for the museum, and he sends him into the embalming room.

The others, meanwhile, have found their way to the museum's entrance (after completely unravelling Barbara's cardigan), where they run smack into a party of Morok guards. The guards pull out their guns, but Ian has lost any fear of death: he rationalises that either the guards will kill him, which will break the chain of events leading to his embalming, or else the chain can't be broken, in which case there's no way he can die.

His fearlessness disconcerts the guards long enough for him, Barbara and Vicki to flee, through the three of them get separated from each other in the commotion. Vicki runs into the group of Xerons who earlier tried to make contact with the Doctor. They take her to a secure hiding place, where they explain the relationship between the Xerons and the Moroks.

The Moroks are a conqueror race, who have an interplanetary empire. This planet, Xeros, is one of their conquests, and the Xerons are a conquered people. The Moroks have turned Xeros into a museum to their conquests; Xerons are only allowed to live on their own home planet until they reach adulthood, at which point they're shipped offworld to serve as slaves. These Xerons would like to start a revolution, but they can't--though there are only a very few Moroks on Xeros, the Xerons have no access to weaponry of any kind.

Ian, meanwhile, manages to take a Morok prisoner by sneaking up behind him and stealing his gun. He has the guard take him to the embalming room to rescue the Doctor. There, he manages also to capture the governor, but he finds the Doctor has already entered "the second stage of preparation", and is as good as dead--no one has ever been revived after being prepared for display.

Ian, of course, nevertheless insists the governor attempt to revive the Doctor anyway, and after a little while he succeeds in doing so. But then another party of Moroks bursts in; Ian and the Doctor are once again taken prisoner. The governor locks them in the embalming room until he has also caught Vicki and Barbara.

Meanwhile, the Xerons have taken Vicki to the Morok armory. It is guarded by a lie detector-computer that asks a series of questions to anyone who wants to enter: "What is your name and rank?", "Do you have the governor's permission?", that sort of thing. The answers must be bother the right answer, and true.

Vicki reprograms the machine. She can't fix the requirement that the answers be true, but she can delete the list of "right" answers. "What is your name?" the machine asks.

"Vicki."

"For what purpose do you want the weapons?"

"Revolution!"

And the door opens. A small army of Xerons quickly gather, and Jeremy Bulloch distributes guns to them.

Vicki, now armed, heads for the museum, picking up Barbara along the way. But they're captured by Morok guards and taken to the embalming room, where they're imprisoned with Ian and the Doctor. It now appears that the four of them will, indeed, end up on display.

But events have taken on a life of their own, and the Xeron revolution is fully underway. The Xerons storm the Morok headquarters, freeing the TARDIS team and killing or capturing the Morok high command. Morok rule on Xeros is ended. As the Xerons dismantle the space museum, the TARDIS team depart. Before they do, the Doctor identifies and fixes the machinery that caused them to jump a time track--he likens it to when you flip a light switch and have to wait a moment for the light to come on; until that part activated, even though the TARDIS had landed, they hadn't "really" arrived.

What Lisa thought

Rob Shearman, author of the 2005 episode "Dalek", has a monologue on the DVD release of "The Space Museum" speaking in defence of the story, which is, after all, generally considered a low point of 1960s Doctor Who. But "The Space Museum", according to Shearman, is actually rather a good story, only it's let down by three elements--"and those three elements are episode two, episode three and episode four."

After "An Unearthly Child" and "The Sensorites", this makes the third time it's happened, which I guess means we can consider it a theme--though whether it's a theme of the William Hartnell era or the Verity Lambert era, I can't tell, since the majority of the post-Lambert Hartnell era no longer exists. But time and again, the programme during this early period shows a definite talent for opening a story with a wonderfully creepy, atmospheric setup built around a solid science-fictional concept (ordinary things in our everyday lives being camouflage for a wondrous, undreamt-of world; torture by telepathy; "jumping a time track" in this story), which promise is then squandered as the story abruptly shifts gear and becomes a straightforward political morality play with characters in outlandish costume and makeup.

Certainly that's always been my feeling, and at least with "An Unearthly Child" and "The Space Museum", that's generally been fandom's feeling too. (Though I don't know if I've ever seen the dots connected before to point out that it's something the Lambert era does repeatedly.) But here, just as with "The Sensorites", Lisa disagrees.

She really liked "The Space Museum" a lot. She describes it (and I think she's thinking here of parts two through four) as "Doctor Who chick lit", meaning that she found it light and frothy--for parts two and three, she was actually surprised when they ended, because they'd gone by so quickly, she didn't think enough time has elapsed.

I asked her what she thought of the first episode, and she agreed that it was that that carried the tension through the rest of the story. Without the TARDIS team having to worry about whether or not they've broken the chain of events leading to being entombed in the museum, there might not be much left. ("The Doctor and team come to a planet where the peaceful inhabitants have been enslaved by an alien warrior race, and help them overthrow their conquerors. But get this for a twist--the whole revolution happens in the corridors of a museum!")

One thing Lisa picked up on (and really liked) that I hadn't noticed is that the Morok technology itself has a theme, based around an ability to read minds--the televisual mind reader with which they interrogate the Doctor, and the lie-detecting lock at the armoury.

Another thing she picked up that I didn't, and which really annoyed her: Barbara's cardigan. She's wearing it in the glass case, yet by midway through episode two, it's been completely unravelled. But no one comments on this or whether it means the chain of events has been broken--and this despite the fact that just a few minutes earlier, the Doctor had made a huge deal about Ian having lost a button on his jacket, and how it's a pity he hadn't noticed whether or not the button was missing in the exhibit case. He makes a big enough deal, in fact, that it very much comes off as an unsubtle piece of setting up having Barbara's cardigan be significant.

The next story is "The Chase".

I

Doctor Who: "The Web Planet"

Hilio, the Menoptra have no wisdom for war. Before the Animus came, the flower forests covered the planet in a cocoon of peace. Our ancestors carved temples like this, for resting places for our dead, but that was all the work we did.--Hrostar

Vrestin surrounded by Optera

"The Web Planet", 13 February 1965
"The Zarbi", 20 February 1965
"Escape to Danger", 27 February 1965
"Crater of Needles", 6 March 1965
"Invasion", 13 March 1965
"The Centre", 20 March 1965

Written by Bill Strutton
Directed by Richard Martin
Script editor: Dennis Spooner
Produced by Verity Lambert

William Hartnell as the Doctor
William Russell as Ian Chesterton
Jacqueline Hill as Barbara Wright
Maureen O'Brien as Vicki

From a standpoint of production design, the "The Web Planet" might just be the most ambitious story Doctor Who has ever attempted--certainly, the most ambitious of the surviving stories from the 1960s. We get a multiplicity of touches intended to make us feel like Vortis is a truly alien planet: streaks of Vaseline are smeared across the camera to make the planet look like it's bathed in otherworldly light, fog is pumped across the floor, and there's an echo on all the dialogue to highlight the thin atmosphere.

All three of the alien species that inhabit Vortis have had a great deal of effort expended on being made to look as alien as possible, through costume, movement and voice. They're all man-sized versions of bugs: the Zarbi are giant ants, the Menoptra are giant bees and the Optera are giant grubs. The Menoptra even convert the TARDIS team's names into versions pronounceable in their own language, calling Barbara "Harberra" and Ian "Heron".

It's a shame, then, that ultimately, it all fails.

The Vaseline on the camera keeps making you want to squint to bring it all into focus, even though that won't work. The Menoptra's dancing movements and singsong voices become more annoying as the serial draws on. The Optera hopping around (and the Doctor's bizarre attempts at communicating with the Zarbi by gesture) are so comical that it becomes impossible to take anything seriously. By the time you've slogged your way through all six episodes of "The Web Planet", you're really just glad it's over.

Some force captures the TARDIS in flight and forces it to materialise on the planet Vortis. The Doctor and Ian go outside to explore the blasted, rocky landscape, while Barbara stays inside to tend to Vicki, who has been taken faint by some element of Vortis. There's a cute scene where Vicki (who's from the 26th century) reacts with suspicion to Barbara's insistence that she take some aspirin, calling it "mediaeval medicine", and is surprised to learn that Barbara teaches high-school history when history is a subject that should be mastered by small children.

Outside on the planet's surface, Ian and the Doctor have made a few interesting discoveries. Ian pulls out his gold pen to allow the Doctor to make a note, and the pen vanishes out of his hand--the Doctor theorises there must be something in the atmosphere that reacts with gold. They also discover that what appear at first to be springs of water are actually springs of acid.

Back at the TARDIS, Barbara is still wearing the gold bracelet Nero gave her, and suddenly some force takes control of the arm on which she's wearing it. The TARDIS doors open, and Barbara falls into a deep trance. Led by her possessed wrist, she walks out onto the planet's surface.

Ian and the Doctor hear her scream, but when they return to the TARDIS's landing site, there's no sign of her. Nor is there any sign of the TARDIS: something has dragged it away. That something turns out to be the Zarbi, a race of giant ants who communicate only in unintelligible electronic trills. The actors in the Zarbi costumes all walk bent at the waist to simulate the idea that they're walking on all fours (or all sixes, I suppose). A herd of Zarbi appear and capture Ian and the Doctor, then lead them off.

Barbara, meanwhile, is still walking in her trance across the planet's surface. She's intercepted by a group of Menoptra, who shepherd her into a cave and remove the bracelet from her wrist, breaking the trance. The Menoptra explain that the Animus, the alien being who rules Vortis, can use gold to control other beings telepathically. These three Menoptra are a scouting party, travelling in advance of a larger invasion force who will soon arrive to attempt to destroy the Animus and conquer Vortis.

The Menoptra dance gracefully across the floor, and when they speak, they hold their forearms in front of them with their palms facing upward, and their voices lilt melodically. It's impossible to take them seriously. A debate now ensues amongst them over whether they can trust Barbara; if they can't, she has to be killed. Rather than staying to find out the verdict, Barbara waits till they're not paying attention to her, then dashes out onto the planet's surface.

She's ambushed by a Zarbi patrol, who place a harness made of gold on her shoulders, bringing her back under the Animus's control. So enthralled, she leads the Zarbi straight to the Menoptra's cave, where the Zarbi attack the Menoptra scouts. Most of the scouts are killed. Barbara and a Menoptra named Hrostar are the only survivors; imprisoned, they're led away to be used as slave labour.

Ian and the Doctor are taken to the Carsinome, a dark, twisting warren of tunnels that seems to be the lair of the Animus and the Zarbi--in fact, the Animus's consciousness seems present throughout the Carsinome (a name I love). In a chamber in its bowels, they find Vicki and the TARDIS.

The Doctor is able to communicate with the Animus through communications device that descends from the ceiling, though no one is allowed to see her. She informs him that Barbara has been captured and put to work in the Crater of Needles, and also tells him that she knows of the planned Menoptra invasion, but does not know when it will arrive. The Doctor offers to use his astral map to help her locate the approaching invaders, but tells her that her surveillance of the TARDIS is interfering with the map's functioning. Reluctantly, the Animus turns off her awareness of the chamber where they're being held, and Ian takes the opportunity to escape the Carsinome, heading for the Crater of Needles to rescue Barbara.

On the way, he meets a Menoptra named Vrestin, another survivor of the Zarbi's attack on the scouting party. From Vrestin, he learns that the Menoptra were the original inhabitants of Vortis. The world was a paradise of flower forests then; the Menoptera buzzed above them, while the Zarbi, cattle-like, lived on the ground. The Carsinome appeared and grew slowly, with the Animus at its heart; the Menoptra did not take notice of it until it was too late. Their invasion force is returning now, because if they wait much longer, the Carsinome will cover the whole planet.

Ian and Vrestin are found by the Zarbi, but they escape from them down an underground tunnel. Underground, they encounter the Optera, the planet's grub-like race, who move around by hopping on their single leg. (It's as ridiculous as it sounds.) Ian realises that the Optera are descendants of Menoptra who fled underground, and over the generations evolved to live down there, losing the ability of flight. Though the Optera, suspicious of those who live "in the Light", are initially inclined to execute Ian and Vrestin, they're soon persuaded instead to join the fight against the Animus.

Barbara and Hrostar have been put to work in the Crater of Needles. Hrostar, and all the other Menoptra there, have had their wings torn off to stop them from escaping. It's a wonderful touch: a visible reminder that, even if the Animus is beaten, many of the Menoptra will still be crippled for life.

When the Zarbi guarding over them are suddenly called away (the Doctor has picked up Menoptra radio signals on his astral map and told the Animus that the invasion is about to begin), Barbara and Hrostar are able to escape, climbing out of the Crater and onto the plateau, where the troops of the Menoptra invasion spearhead are starting to land. But the spearhead are ambushed by the Zarbi and massacred; only a handful of Menoptra, including Barbara, Hrostar, and the spearhead leader Hilio, escape, taking refuge in a cave that turns out to be an abandoned Menoptra temple from the days before the Animus.

The survivors are now hopelessly outnumbered, but they have two things on their side: the "isop-tope", a bomb that will destroy the Animus if they can get close enough to her, and a Zarbi that they're able to control telepathically using the power of the Doctor's magic ring. (It's never actually called "magic", but we've never heard of it before, never hear of it again, and the Doctor explicitly refuses to discuss how it works. So. Magic.)

They therefore decide they must attempt to infiltrate the Carsinome and destroy the Animus. They're able to gain entrance using their captured Zarbi, and then make their way to the central lair, where the great, tentacled mass of the Animus is located. There, they find the Doctor and Vicki, who have been imprisoned. But the presence of the Animus somehow mesmerises our three heroes, who all start to fall asleep; and Menoptra, being insects, are drawn insatiably towards its core, because it emits light.

The day is saved when Ian, Vrestin and the Optera break into the ceremonial chamber, tunnelling up from below. This disturbance lets Barbara get enough of a grip back on her senses to drop the isop-tope into the Animus's innards, killing the alien being. The Carsinome starts to disintegrate; the Zarbi return to their normal, bovine-like state; the springs of acid once more become springs of water. With the planet slowly recovering, the TARDIS crew depart.

What Lisa thought

Lisa pretty much agreed with me that the serial ultimately fails as a story. It's unfortunate that narratively, it's essentially a rehash of "The Daleks": the TARDIS materialises in what was once a verdant forest, but is now a blasted landscape. The first episode is spent without alien contact, as our heroes spend their time either in the TARDIS or exploring the terrain nearby. The team discover the carcass of a small animal, which provides them a clue to the nature of the plot: in "The Daleks", it's the creature that's been fossilised into stone by the atomic blast; here, it's the abandoned exoskeleton of a giant larva that has moulted. We ultimately learn that the planet's peaceful, agrarian inhabitants are being threatened by an implacable, industrialising enemy. The final, against-all-odds assault on the enemy is spread out over two or three episodes, as the TARDIS team and their native allies are required to split into groups and approach the enemy stronghold from different directions. There's even the open liquid on the planet's surface turning out to be pools of acid, which, while not from "The Daleks", is from another Terry Nation-penned story, "The Keys of Marinus".

Though, Lisa was willing to concede one thing: through all the screen time Barbara got in this story, she didn't find her annoying. I guess she's finally warming up to her, two stories before her departure.

The next story is "The Crusade", in which Barbara is captured for Saladin's harem and Ian is knighted by Richard the Lionhearted, but two of its four episodes are missing. Therefore, the next story in our rewatch will be "The Space Museum".

I

Doctor Who: "The Romans"

Vicki: Has the Doctor told you where we're going next?
Barbara: Oh, no. He never does that.
Vicki: You mean it's a surprise?
Ian: Yes. To everyone.

Nero attempts to woo Barbara

"The Slave Traders", 16 January 1965
"All Roads Lead to Rome", 23 January 1965
"Conspiracy", 30 January 1965
"Inferno", 6 February 1965

Written by Dennis Spooner
Directed by Christopher Barry
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

I'll be honest. For a long time, I didn't really get the Ian and Barbara fans. They were perfectly adequate companions, but I didn't get why they generated such intense adulation in the little corner of Who fandom they can call their own. (To be fair, Ian-Barbara fandom is pretty shipping-centred, and I don't get shipping in general.)

But after seeing "The Romans" for the first time, I got it. The banter between Ian and Barbara in episodes one and four absolutely sings, and it does so because of the chemistry between Jacqueline Hill and William Russell. We're talking Josiah-and-Abigail-Bartlet levels of chemistry, here.

The TARDIS crew are having something rare: a holiday. For the past several weeks, they've been staying at a Roman villa. The owner is away, so finding the villa deserted, the team decided to stay awhile.

Ian and Barbara are loving the idleness, but the Doctor is chafing to go off and have an adventure--and so too is Vicki, who after all has only just joined the crew. The Doctor manufactures a spat with Ian and Barbara so that he can declare, in a huff, that he and Vicki are going to visit Rome. They'll be back in a few days, and Ian and Barbara are not invited.

As the Doctor and Vicki are walking along the road in the twilight,* they come upon the dead body of an old man. He's been murdered, but it wasn't robbery--he's been left holding his lyre, a very valuable musical instrument. The Doctor picks the lyre up and examines it; as he's looking at it, a centurion arrives. Seeing him with the lyre, the centurion assumes the Doctor is the famous musician Maximus Pettulian, who's known to be travelling on foot to Rome to play for the Emperor Nero.

The centurion claims to have arrived to escort Maximus Petullian along the dangerous roads, but the Doctor realises something else is going on: whoever murdered the real Maximus Petullian was hired by the centurion, who has only come out here on the roads to check for himself that the murder was carried out. The Doctor decides to masquerade as the musician (much to Vicki's consternation), and accepts the centurion's company on the way to Rome.

Meanwhile back at the villa, Ian and Barbara are contentedly lazing after enjoying a fine meal. (Barbara has taught herself Roman cooking during their stay; the menu of a Roman aristocratic supper is described in detail during an Educational Moment.) But in the nearby village, a pair of slave traders are passing through. They're leading prisoners from Gaul, who will be sold at auction in Rome. But the traders are dissatisfied with the quality of their merchandise; they won't fetch a good price. Hearing that the villa is currently occupied by four undefended strangers--two of whom are women and one of whom is an old man--they decide to see if they can't kidnap the TARDIS team in order to enrich their stock.

They break into the villa and attack Ian and Barbara. The two schoolteachers fight back. Barbara lifts a pot high in the air to smash over the head of one of their attackers--but the slave trader ducks out of the way, and Barbara brings the pot smashing down on the back of Ian's head instead. Ian's knocked unconscious, and Barbara is quickly captured. They're taken back to the slave traders' camp, where Ian is sold almost immediately, to a galley captain who needs oarsmen straight away. Barbara is shackled with the rest of the prisoners, to be auctioned off in Rome.

The Doctor, Vicki and the centurion stop at an inn for the night, where the centurion meets up with the assassin he hired to to kill Maximus Petullian. The assassin is an illiterate mute (so if he's captured, he can't give up the identity of his employer) and is understandably confused to learn that Maximus Petullian is still alive. He sneaks into the Doctor's room and attacks him, and we're treated to the sight of the aged Hartnell Doctor having a fistfight with a vicious Roman ruffian, until Vicki comes in and pushes the assassin out the window.

Barbara is taken to Rome, where she's auctioned off before a raucous crowd. She's bought by Tavius, who brings the auction to a surprised halt by raising the bid from two thousand sesterces to ten thousand sesterces. Tavius turns out to be the majordomo for the Imperial household, and he puts Barbara to work as the new chambermaid for the Emperor Nero's wife, Poppaea.

The Doctor and Vicki have also arrived at the palace, where they meet Nero. Nero demands that the Doctor immediately perform on the lyre, but the Doctor worms his way out of it by asking that Nero play instead. (Nero, as the Doctor well knows, fancied himself the greatest stage performer of his day, and expected his subjects to treat him as such.)

Ian, meanwhile, has been shackled to an oar aboard a galley, but during a storm the ship wrecks. He washes up on the beach with Delos, a fellow slave whom he'd befriended aboard the galley. Ian and Delos head to Rome to look for Barbara, but they're recaptured by the original slave traders, who decide to train them as gladiators to be killed by lions in the arena.

After his audience with Vicki and the Doctor, Nero proceeds to his wife's bedchamber, where he discovers Barbara. Instantly he's besotted with her.

From this point, part three descends into intentional farce. Barbara flees as Nero chases her around the palace. His continued attention to her provokes Poppaea's jealousy. Several times hay gets made from having Barbara and either the Doctor or Vicki narrowly miss each other, such as when Nero is chasing Barbara round Poppaea's bedroom and the Doctor knocks on the door. Nero appears in the doorway and bellows at the Doctor to leave; after Nero slams the door in his face, the Doctor is turning to leave when Poppaea arrives. The Doctor informs her that Nero has another woman in the room with him, so Poppaea bursts in and finds Nero on the bed, holding Barbara to him. Even the death by poisoning of Nero's valet is played for laughs.

The Doctor eventually falls from favour when, at a banquet in his honour, he cannot get out of performing with his lyre. He pulls an Emperor's New Clothes, telling the audience that his new composition is an exceptionally fine melody that can only be heard by a sufficiently cultured ear. He then mimes plucking at the chords of his lyre; his listeners hear only silence, but none of them are willing to admit that they can't hear his music. Nero gets jealous at the adulation receives and resolves to kill the Doctor. He'll invite him to play before a packed crowd at the arena--but as he plays, the Emperor will have the lions released to devour him.

Before he does that, though, Nero decides to take Barbara out on a date--and when you're a Roman Emperor, a date involves taking a lady to a slave barracks to watch a private gladiator duel. Of course, the gladiators who are chosen to duel are Delos and Ian. It's a fight to the death; whoever wins must kill his opponent, then will be set free. Delos wins, but instead of killing Ian, he launches himself at Nero. Nero escapes the assassination attempt, and Ian and Delos escape out into the streets.

Back at the palace, the Doctor and Vicki are exploring when they come across Nero's office, and on his desk they find his extensive plans for completely rebuilding Rome--plans that Nero hasn't been able to put into effect because the Senate won't vote him the money. The Emperor, just returned from the gladiators' palace, comes upon them. The Doctor accidentally sets fire to Nero's plans, and Nero becomes furious--until the burning plans give him an idea. He will set fire to the city of Rome itself, burning the city down so that he can build his new one in its place. He leaves Vicki and the Doctor, hurrying off to put his new brainstorm into motion.

Nero has some street thugs rounded up and brought to him, so that he can instruct them to set fire to the city. Ian manages to sneak into the palace with the thugs, and then he sneaks off and finds Barbara. The two of them escape, heading back toward the villa and the TARDIS. The Doctor and Vicki, too, have now snuck away from the palace, heading for home. They watch the Great Fire of Rome lighting up the sky from a hilltop overlooking the city.

Ian and Barbara arrive back at the villa first, and we get another great scene between the two of them (though Ian chasing Barbara round as she shrieks with mock fear would probably qualify as sexual assault nowadays). By the time the Doctor and Vicki arrive, the two schoolteachers have fallen asleep on a pair of couches. The Doctor chastises them for idling around the villa for the past few days. Ian and Barbara attempt to explain about their own adventures, but the Doctor won't let them get a word in edgeways. The four of them depart for the TARDIS and a new adventure.

What Lisa thought

The main impression the story made on Lisa was how it paired off the regular characters. Ian and Barbara got some of their best scenes together, and the pairing of the Doctor and Vicki let us know for certain that Vicki--as Lisa puts it--really is going to be Susan by another name. She's still not warming towards Barbara, but she concedes that she's enjoying that she and Ian are becoming more playful in their scenes together.

The next story is "The Web Planet".

I

*I find it irrationally annoying that for the sake of plot, we're not supposed to point out how unrealistic it is that they would start the day-long walk to Rome at sunset.

Doctor Who: "The Rescue"

Why, this is the planet Dido. I've been here before. I know them very well. They're very friendly people.--The Doctor

Koquillion menaces Vicki

"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".

I

Doctor Who: "The Dalek Invasion of Earth"

The Doctor: Conquer the Earth, you poor pathetic creature? Don't you realise that to conquer the Earth, you would have to destroy every living thing?
Dalek: We are the masters of Earth. We are the masters of Earth. We are the masters of Earth!

A Dalek patrols occupied London

"World's End", 21 November 1964
"The Daleks", 28 November 1964
"Day of Reckoning", 5 December 1964
"The End of Tomorrow", 12 December 1964
"The Waking Ally", 19 December 1964
"Flashpoint", 26 December 1964

Written by Terry Nation
Directed by Richard Martin
Script editor: David Whitaker
Produced by Verity Lambert
Associate producer: Mervyn Pinfield

William Hartnell as the Doctor
William Russell as Ian Chesterton
Jacqueline Hill as Barbara Wright
Carole Ann Ford as Susan Foreman (last regular appearance)

Ian and Barbara are initially elated when the TARDIS arrives in London, under a bridge on the south bank of the Thames. Susan is so excited that she scales a pile of debris to get a better look at the city. But the debris isn't as stable as it looks, and being disturbed causes a small avalanche. This results in two problems: first, Susan has twisted her ankle badly, and worse, the TARDIS is now blocked behind a large iron spar, far too heavy for the TARDIS team to move on their own.

And the Doctor has noticed something is wrong: London seems deserted. Not just deserted--entirely devoid of life. They can't even hear birdsong. And under the bridge, a large sign is posted: IT IS FORBIDDEN TO DUMP BODIES IN THE RIVER.

Ian and the Doctor head into an abandoned warehouse to see if they can find an acetylene torch to cut the iron spar, while Barbara remains behind to tend to Susan. Inside the warehouse, they find an old desk calendar, printed for the year 2164, and they find a dead human body, hidden in a crate. The dead man is wearing some sort of elaborate, futuristic headgear with a radio built into.

("But Doctor," Ian gasps, "you mean these people have invented some form of--personal communication?")

From a factory window, the Doctor and Ian see a massive flying saucer make its way over London, then set down somewhere in the vicinity of the Chelsea heliport. They decide it's time to leave, and head back to the TARDIS. But Susan and Barbara aren't there anymore.

They've gone because a man arrived, David, who expressed dismay that the two women were out in the open and demanded they come with him. He leads them across the ruins of London in a brilliantly atmospheric film sequence, which I've already lauded in my earlier review of this story.

But meanwhile, back at the TARDIS, the Doctor and Ian find their companions missing, and they've been replaced by four men in the same headgear as the corpse at the warehouse was wearing. And it's more than just a personal radio--the weird metal helmets are also brain control devices, turning the men who wear them into human robots ("Robomen"). The Doctor and Ian make a break for it, attempting to escape from the Robomen, but they're headed off by the creature that's controlling them: a Dalek.

The Earth has been occupied by a Dalek invasion force, and now Ian and the Doctor are Dalek prisoners. A full year after the programme's debut, and in a time when it was exceedingly rare for TV episodes ever to be seen again after their first viewing, this is the first time that Doctor Who has returned a villain, and for a few minutes some hay is made from the novelty of the experience, with Ian being horrified to hear the Daleks' voices again, and the Doctor explaining that, while their previous meeting occurred in the species's twilight days in the far future, the twenty-second century is the Daleks' Golden Age, when they have an interstellar empire.

David has now led Susan and Barbara to their destination: an underground hideout, used as the base for a cell of the human resistance movement against the Dalek occupation. We meet other resistance fighters: Tyler, the morose, fatalistic leader of the cell; Dortmun, the resistance's scientific genius, bound to a wheelchair; and Jenny, the brusque young woman who's in charge of the cell's organisation and administration.

The Doctor and Ian are imprisoned aboard the Dalek saucer that they saw landing from the warehouse window. There, they're told the history of the Dalek invasion by their cellmate, at the same time as Barbara and Susan learn it from the resistance members: first, about ten years ago, came a wave of asteroid impacts, followed by a horrible plague. These two combined to wipe out much of the Earth's population, particularly in Asia, Africa and South America. The few communities that remained were too small and isolated to resist the Daleks when they arrived. The Daleks enforce their rule by enslaving the Robomen, who only last for a limited time before the Daleks' mental control drives them insane and they kill themselves.

Tyler's resistance cell mounts an attack on the Dalek saucer, using a new hand grenade that Dortmun promises will penetrate the Daleks' casing, made of an extraterrestrial named dalekenium. But Dortmun is wrong; the bomb has no effect, and the resistance cell is mostly wiped out. Before that happens, though, they manage to get aboard the saucer and free a number of the prisoners held there, including the Doctor. As soon as the attack is repulsed, the saucer takes off. Ian is still aboard, but he's not a prisoner--he's hidden, Star Wars-style, in a secret compartment under the deck, with a fellow escaped prisoner, Larry.

After the failure of the attack, our heroes have been sorted into three groups, in which they'll remain for the duration of the story. There's Ian and Larry aboard the saucer. There's Barbara, Jenny and Dortmun, who have remained at the resistance headquarters and decide, when they hear of the attack's failure, to attempt to travel to another resistance rendezvous point in the North. And there's Susan and the Doctor, reunited when the Doctor was rescued from the saucer, who are accompanied by David and Tyler, the resistance fighters. Holed up in a makeshift hiding place, they listen to the sounds of the Daleks exterminating what resistance remains in the streets of London.

From David and Susan, the Doctor learns that the Daleks have turned the whole of Bedfordshire into a gigantic mining area, and he surmises that this facility must be the focus of their activities on Earth. He therefore decides that the four of them will strike out toward Bedford to investigate it. He can also see that some sort of connection is forming between Susan and David. The Doctor himself takes a liking to David when the young man, rather than attempting to take charge of the group, instead defers to the Doctor as the "senior member of the party".

Barbara, Jenny and Dortmun make their way across London, avoiding Dalek patrols. It's to this sequence that the famous images of the Daleks trundling across Westminster Bridge and standing guard in Trafalgar Square belong. When the three of them stop to rest and resupply at the Civic Transport Museum, Dortmun gives his life to save the two women. He rolls to a stop in front of a pair of Daleks and clambers awkwardly up out of his wheelchair, so that he can die on his feet.

With the distraction Dortmun has provided, Barbara and Jenny take a lorry from the Transport Museum's collection and are able to escape the Daleks into the countryside. They stop for the night, seeking shelter with a pair of haggard women in a creepy country cottage near the Bedfordshire mine. But the women turn out to be informants for the Daleks, enjoying their freedom in exchange for turning in runaways from the mining camp. Soon a Dalek arrives and arrests Barbara and Jenny, and they find themselves pressed into the mine's slave labour force.

The saucer carrying Ian and Larry also heads to the mine. Ian and Larry sneak off, and are saved from being captured by the camp foreman, who takes them with him to a meeting with a black marketeer who sneaks into the camp periodically to sell the foreman food for the workers. The black marketeer is a cynical, calculating individual (his line, "You're not one of these 'brotherhood of man' types, are you?" with his lip curled in disgust at Ian, takes on a whole knew meaning once one is familiar with Brotherhood of Man), but he nevertheless agrees to take Ian out of the camp and back to London.

Before he can do so, though, he's eaten by the Slither, a hissing, shambling monster that roams the camp at night, a pet of the Black Dalek, the camp commandant (and apparently the senior Dalek of the occupation force). To escape the Slither, Ian and Larry head into the mine's tunnels, where they're confronted by a Roboman, whom Larry recognises as his brother, Phil. When his attempts to make Phil remember who he is fail, he strangles him, and the two of them die together, with Phil shooting Larry.

Barbara and Jenny have gained access to the Daleks' control room by claiming to have knowledge of an imminent revolt. There, they learn the purpose of the mine: the Daleks are drilling to the centre of the Earth. They then plan to drop a bomb into the Earth's magnetic core, hollowing it out so that they can replace it with a propulsion device.

Now the Daleks are ready to drop their bomb down the completed mineshaft and detonate it. They start the countdown and depart, leaving Barbara and Jenny to die in the blast. Unbeknownst to them, however, Ian has come upon the bomb shaft in the mine tunnels, and he's blocked it. The bomb will still go off, but it will do so up here at the mine, having no effect on the Earth's core.

Barbara and Jenny are rescued by the Doctor, Susan, David and Tyler, who have arrived at the mine and mounted an assault. In the Dalek control room, Barbara identifies the microphone from which the Daleks give the Robomen their orders, and she and the Doctor give them one final command: "Turn on the Daleks. Destroy them. This order cannot be countermanded."

The Robomen and the people of Earth turn on the Daleks, and the occupation ends. (Presumably, all the Robomen still suffer horrible deaths of painful, insanity-driven suicide.) The Doctor leads the people at the camp to safety--apparently, a bomb that's big enough to hollow out the Earth's magnetic core can be safely evaded by moving a few hundred yards away to a cliff.

Everyone heads back to London, where the TARDIS is soon unearthed, and the team prepare to make their goodbyes. Susan's shoe has completely worn through at the sole, and despite her protestations that she has dozens of other pairs in the TARDIS, the Doctor insists on taking it into the TARDIS to mend it.

When Barbara and Ian have also entered the TARDIS, David approaches Susan before she can join them. He asks her to stay and marry him, offering her that which she herself admits she's never known: one place, one time. She's reduced to tears. She admits she loves him, but refuses to stay--her grandfather needs her.

Just then, the TARDIS door slams shut, locking her out. Inside, the Doctor has been listening to all of it, and he has realised that she will never leave him of her own volition. So, seeing what's best for her, he has humanely chosen to maroon her on a planet desolated by war, without even an entire pair of shoes on her feet, and announces over the TARDIS's public address tannoy how much he loves her and admires the woman she's become, and promises one day to return.

(Seriously, it's a really moving scene, as we see the Doctor what's undoubtedly his hardest good bye, emotionally, in the programme's history; the impact on the Doctor of a companion's departure gets dwelt upon more here than it will for anyone else up until the death of Adric in 1982. But when you really break it down like this into describing what actually happens, there are ... implications.)

The TARDIS dematerialises, and Susan and David walk away, hand in hand. Susan leaves behind her TARDIS key, its chain draped across the rubble where the blue box stood.

What Lisa thought: She cried. Susan's good bye scene made her cry. She tried to brush this off by claiming she was crying because it wasn't Barbara who was leaving.

I'm on record that I think this is the First Doctor's best story, and one of the three best Dalek stories the programme has ever managed. Both those mentions sum up the ways that I think the story beautifully captures the atmosphere of a Britain under authoritarian alien occupation.

The next story is "The Rescue".

I

Doctor Who: "Planet of Giants"

"Planet of Giants" directed by Mervyn Pinfield, 31 October 1964
"Dangerous Journey" directed by Mervyn Pinfield, 7 November 1964
"Crisis" directed by Douglas Camfield, 14 November 1964

Barbara is menaced by a normal-sized housefly

Written by Louis Marks
Script editor: David Whitaker
Produced by Verity Lambert

William Hartnell as the Doctor
William Russell as Ian Chesterton
Jacqueline Hill as Barbara Wright
Carole Ann Ford as Susan Foreman

As the TARDIS is landing, its doors suddenly open before materialisation has finished. They close again, and whatever the fault was appears to have fixed itself, but the Doctor is nonetheless flustered. Something serious must have gone wrong for the doors to open in mid-flight, and he's worried what sort of further repercussion it might have that hasn't manifested itself yet.

At any rate, the TARDIS has now materialised fully, so the crew head outside. They're at the base of a massive, vertical rock face, but weirdly, the rock sits on a bed of cement as tall as a man. Who could have been so worried about such a massive rock formation being moved that they've wedged it in place with six solid feet of cement?

They split up to explore. The Doctor and Barbara come upon what appears to be a massive earthworm, half a man's height and so long that it stretches out of camera view, but it's dead. Susan and Ian, meanwhile, happen upon a giant ant standing guard over a mound of giant eggs, but the ant, too, is dead. Then they come across a fifteen-foot-high bottle of night scented stock and a mammoth matchbox, lying partially open. Susan has concluded that they've been shrunk to about one inch in height, but Ian scoffs at this, insisting that they must have just materialised in a museum exhibition or something like that.

Evidence seems to fall pretty firmly on Susan's side, though, when the ground quakes at the approaching footsteps of an impossibly huge giant of a man. Susan and Ian both scramble into hiding places, but Ian's chosen hiding place is inside the matchbox. The giant has arrived to collect the matchbox; he closes it, with Ian inside, and carries it away.

The TARDIS has in fact materialised at the bottom of a garden path--in fact, it's a garden path in contemporary England, so the Doctor has in fact succeeded in getting Ian and Barbara back to their own time and place, though not in a form that's useful to them. The giant, whose name is Farrow, heads up to the top of the path, where he sits outside his house, enjoying the warm summer day. Before long, a second man arrives, a businessman named Forester. Forester is developing a new pesticide, named DN6, and Farrow is a government inspector who's been testing DN6 for viability.

Farrow reluctantly informs his visitor that's he going to have to put a stop to development of DN6, as it's too lethal--not only does it kill pests, but it kills everything it comes in contact with, including insects that are necessary to the continued functioning of our ecosystems. And it accumulates, never washing out of the soil, so eventually, people who eat foods that have been treated with DN6 will accumulate enough of it in their bloodstreams that they'll start dying too.

Forester is visibly upset to learn that a project into which he's sunk his entire fortune is about to be killed, but he seems to accept it, and asks Farrow what happens next. The government inspector's answer reveals that he has what is probably the most profound case of genre blindness ever found on British television.

Nothing's going to happen straight away, Farrow says, because his two-week holiday began yesterday. He's already written his report, but he won't be turning it in until after he gets back from a fortnight spent aboard his boat, exploring the coastal waterways of France.

(In other words, he's about to embark on a holiday where he won't be missed for two weeks, and where it's totally reasonable for him to be killed in some sort of accident that will leave no body, just an overturned boat bobbing somewhere in the Bay of Biscay.)

(And considering how upset Forester is at the failure of DN6, why is Farrow boring him with such details of his holiday? I mean, he presumably isn't intentionally pointing out how easy he'd be to murder right now, so why doesn't he just say, "Well, I'm on my holidays for the next fortnight," rather than dangling it in the other man's face how carefree he's going to be for the next two weeks while Forester deals with the fact that his career is over?)

(And, especially considering he's already written his report, isn't "turning in the hugely important report on what could be a revolutionary new tool in feeding the world" the sort of thing one takes care of the day before leaving for two weeks' holiday, rather than the day after returning?)

So, yeah. Forester takes out a gun and shoots Farrow dead.

The Doctor, Susan and Barbara hear the gunshot as a tremendous explosion coming from the top of the path, so they head that way. There they find Ian, unharmed, but along the way they've noted that every piece of wildlife they've come across in the garden is dead.

Forester calls an associate, Smithers, to help him cleaning up Farrow's body. Smithers is the chief scientist behind the development of DN6. Forester tells him that Farrow planned to steal the formula for DN6 and take credit for it himself, that the gun was Farrow's, and that it went off as the two men struggled with each other. Smithers instantly sees through the story about Farrow being killed accidentally, but he's willing to accept the broader theme--that Farrow was planning on stealing DN6--because he's so excited about the possibilities of DN6 ending world hunger. He agrees to help Forester clean up evidence of the murder and hide the body.

As part of their cleanup, one of them picks up Farrow's briefcase and carries it inside, setting it on a countertop in Farrow's lab. This once again separates the TARDIS team, since Ian and Barbara have for some reason disappeared inside the briefcase. (Get your minds out the gutter.)

When Ian and Barbara emerge from the briefcase, they find themselves next to a small (five feet high, to them) pile of corn, coated in some thick, sticky substance. When Barbara, unbeknownst to Ian, touches this filmy covering, she finds she can't get it off her hands. A few moments later, a giant housefly lands on the corn and dies instantly because the sticky substance is, of course, DN6.

Barbara's reaction to this is just as great a display of unjustified stupidity as Farrow's was in episode one--in fact, it's probably a greater display, since Barbara sustains her stupidity for almost two full episodes: she absolutely refuses to tell anyone that she's come into contact with DN6. Even when it's become certain that she's been contaminated with pesticide. Even when during the repeated instances when the team will be discussing how dangerous the pesticide is, and then someone will say, "Yes, but the immediate problem is how to get ourselves back to the TARDIS and returned to normal size," and Barbara will respond with shrill hysteria at the change of subject. Even as Barbara grows sicker and weaker and nearer to death. She refuses to give her friends the most important piece of information they need to help her, and she apparently does so for no other reason than to build dramatic suspense.

Anyway.

The Doctor and Susan gain entry to the lab by climbing up a drainpipe into the sink, and there our four heroes are reunited. As they explore the lab, the Doctor finds Farrow's notes, on which are written the formula for DN6, and he deduces that they've stumbled into the testing stages of an extremely lethal pesticide.

They decide they need to do something about the danger the pesticide poses, so they lift a phone off its receiver by wedging a pair of corks underneath it. This connects them to the village switchboard operator, but they're unable to make themselves understood to her because their shrunken vocal cords mean their voices are pitched too high for normal-sized humans to understand. So instead they turn on a Bunsen burner and position an aerosol can in front of it, hoping that it will explode and set the lab on fire.

Meanwhile, Smithers has come across Farrow's notes in the lab, and he realises the real reason Forester murdered Farrow. Seeing his plan unravel, Forester draws his gun on Smithers, but before he can take action, the aerosol can explodes, blinding him. It's at that moment that the village constable arrives--the village switchboard is also the village constabulary, and when strange calls from Farrow's house arranged the switchboard operator's suspicions, she sent the village constable (her husband) round to check up on Mr. Farrow. The constable arrests both men.

(If the idea of the village switchboard and the village constabulary being in the same room seems too trite and cliche, bear in mind that in the village where my dad grew up, the village post office was my grandparents' living room.)

By now, the team have escaped back down the garden to the TARDIS, though Barbara is near death and finally explains what her problem is. But as soon as they're back inside and dematerialised, the Doctor is able to restore everyone to their normal size. This reduces the contamination in Barbara's bloodstream to a minimal amount, and she recovers instantly.

What Lisa thought: We both really liked this one. The Farrow-Forester-Smithers plot had a very period feel to it--it was more distinctively 1960s than any other black and white Who I can think of; the fact that the guest characters had no interaction with the regular cast gave it a feel like a 60s anthology show--The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits. The fact that the guest plot had absolutely no science fiction elements was also a good choice; the whole thing was a very atmospheric change of pace.

The next story is "The Dalek Invasion of Earth"

I