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