Colony in Space

I want to see the universe, not rule it.--the Doctor

Not Doctor Who's finest moment in monster making

Episode One, 10 April 1971
Episode Two, 17 April 1971
Episode Three, 24 April 1971
Episode Four, 1 May 1971
Episode Five, 8 May 1971
Episode Six, 15 May 1971

Written by Malcolm Hulke
Directed by Michael Briant
Script editor: Terrance Dicks
Produced by Barry Letts

Jon Pertwee as the Doctor
Roger Delgado as the Master
Nicholas Courtney as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart
Katy Manning as Jo Grant

And at last, two years after the Doctor last travelled in time and space, he's doing so again--though it's somewhat against his will.  The Time Lords send him and Jo to the desert planet Uxarieus in the twenty-fifth century, where a small group of hardy human colonists are attempting to build a new life in the arid soil.

But all is not well in the colony.  Some colonists see giant, dinosaur-like monsters roaming the plains at night, and a pair of homesteaders are killed, their bodies scarred with giant claw marks on their body.  And a bedraggled hermit shows up (played by Roy Skelton, the voice of the Daleks), claiming to be the sole survivor of a former colony that was first attacked by these monsters, then destroyed by the planet's primitive humanoid inhabitants, who live in the ruins of a stone city some way to the south.

And then to top everything else off, a heavily-armed ship arrives from the Interstellar Mining Corporation, looking to exploit the planet's vast duralinium deposits for the voracious market on Earth.  But to do so would destroy the planet as a livable habitat.  The colonists claim that the miners are trespassing, and that the Earth government has allocated the planet for colonisation.  But the miners' story is that a faulty computer on Earth must have allocated the planet both for colonisation and for exploitation; the only solution is to call in a legal official called an Adjudicator to settle the dispute.

What's really going on is that the mining ship know full well that it's the colonists who have rights to the planet, but they're trying to scare them away so that they can exploit its resources.  They're manufacturing the monster sightings (there are no such monsters); they're killing the colonists and making it look like monster attacks; and the "survivor from a previous colony" is actually a spy from the mining ship's crew.

But things get more complicated when the Adjudicator arrives--because he turns out to be the Master, in disguise.  The Master's interest is in the ruined city where the native primitives live.  He has learnt that the extinct advanced civilisation from which the primitives descend created a doomsday weapon but never used it--a weapon that can turn any star nova in the blink of an eye, destroying any worlds that orbit it.  The weapon still exists, somewhere beneath the city, and the Master wants to find it so he can hold the universe to ransom and make himself ruler of the cosmos.  (That's, ruler of the cosmos, as in ruler of the universe, not ruler of the Cosmos, as in ruler of the New York team in the 60s/70s-era North American Soccer League.)

Open violence has now broken out between the miners and the colonists, with the miners eventually defeating and capturing the colonists.  The captain of the mining ship convenes a kangaroo court and convicts the colony leader of treason, but he agrees to commute the death sentence on condition that the colonists depart the planet immediately.  The colonists object--their ship was never intended to be flown again, and its engines are in such poor repair that they could well break up in flight.  But the mining captain has no pity for them, and they have no choice.  They depart, and their spaceship does indeed blow up moments after liftoff.

But it turns out there was only one person aboard--the colony leader, who sacrificed himself so that his colonists could live.  The colonists themselves were in hiding, and once the miners think they've all died, they sneak back, mount an ambush and defeat the miners.

Meanwhile, the Doctor and the Master have headed to the primitives' city to find the doomsday weapon.  But the ruler of the primitives turns out to be a tiny little being whose brain has expanded so much that he has developed powers of telepathy and telekinesis.  He sees the evil in the Master and instructs the Doctor that, for the good of the galaxy, he must operate the self-destruct mechanism on the doomsday weapon.  This also has the effect of destroying the ruined city, and the primitives themselves die when they refuse to leave their doomed home.

But the Doctor and the Master, of course, get out alive, and the Master escapes in his TARDIS.  Their errand complete, the Doctor and Jo are returned to UNIT HQ by the Time Lords.

What Lisa thought

I think this is a pretty good story, and one whose main theme--the common man being screwed over by a powerful corporation surreptitiously aided by a government in thrall to the elite--resonates just as strongly in 2012 as it did in 1971.  I was surprised that Lisa wasn't terribly impressed by it, especially since it's a jaunt into space opera after a season and a half of exclusively earthbound stories.  But she found the plot structure offputting, with the colonist v miner conflict running in parallel with the mystery of what was in the primitives' city for much of the serial.  She did, though, like episode six a lot, in which the two plot lines were neatly tied together at their resolution.

The next story will be "The Daemons".

The Seeds of Death

The Doctor, Zoe and Jamie peruse the rocketry museum

Episode One, 25 January 1969
Episode Two, 1 February 1969
Episode Three, 8 February 1969
Episode Four, 15 February 1969
Episode Five, 22 February 1969
Episode Six, 1 March 1969

Written by Brian Hayles
Directed by Michael Ferguson
Script editor: Terrance Dicks
Produced by Peter Bryant

Patrick Troughton as the Doctor
Frazer Hines as Jamie McCrimmon
Wendy Padbury as Zoe Heriot

It's the end of the twenty-first century.  Travel on Earth has been revolutionised by the invention of T-Mat, a teleportation device able to transport people and goods instantly from anywhere with a T-Mat terminal to anywhere else with a T-Mat terminal.  Life on Earth is now fully integrated with T-Mat; food and medical supplies are teleported across the globe all day long, such that a sudden breakdown in T-Mat would lead to massive food shortages in Earth's major cities within just a few hours, and to complete societal breakdown shortly after that.

(Spoiler: Earth is about to have to endure a total shutdown of the T-Mat network.)

Humanity's reliance on T-Mat has become so total, and so second-nature, that they don't even have a backup transport system for if T-Mat fails--no rockets or other forms of physical transport.  This also means exploration into the solar system has stopped; T-Mat can't send you anywhere that doesn't already have a T-Mat terminal at the far end, and no one is interested in travelling by rocket to set T-Mat terminals up in outer space.  So humanity has only ever got as far as the Moon, where we've set up the most important T-Mat terminal of all--a relay station whose good operation is essential for keeping Earth's T-Mat network running.

So there's a lot of consternation when the T-Mat moon base suddenly shuts down totally.  T-Mat stops working all over the world, and those vital food and medical shipments stop flowing.  And communications with moon base have also been cut off--T-Mat Control in London can't raise them on the radio.  Without a backup fleet of rockets, there's no way for technicians from Earth to get up to the Moon to find out what's wrong.

Luckily, and in a spectacular piece of plot-helping good luck, the TARDIS materliases on Earth at just this time, and it actually lands in a museum dedicated to the lost art of space rocketry, run by a cantankerous old man who just happens to be the respected former colleague of Commander Radnor, who's now in charge of the T-Mat system.

And but so, in short order we've got Jamie, Zoe and the Doctor piloting Earth's one working rocket up to moon base to see what's up.  I don't know about you, but if I were responsible for restoring Earth's teleport network and alleviating an imminent global societal collapse that's entirely down to my own failure to keep a backup rocket in reserve, I'd certainly be sending in three strangers who conveniently showed up right when the teleport system collapsed, and not any of my own expert technicians.

Anyway.  Our heroes get up to moon base, and discover it's been taken over by Ice Warriors, the spearhead of an invasion force from Mars.  They've killed everyone on the base except for two men, one who escaped into its labyrinthine corridors and another who agreed to help the Ice Warriors rather than be executed.

(Fewsham, the technician who collaborates with the Ice Warriors, is probably the most interesting character in the whole serial.  He really looks like a moral coward for the first four episodes--"I don't want to die like that!  I want to live!"--but then saves Zoe's life from an Ice Warrior at the start of episode five.  When everyone else T-Mats back down to Earth, however, he tricks them into letting him stay behind, and goes back to working for the Ice Warriors.  But he secretly opens a direct video link to Earth, so that T-Mat Control hear everything the Ice Warriors say to each other and thereby learn their invasion plan; when the Ice Warriors discover this, Fewsham faces his execution defiantly and bravely.)

The Ice Warriors' full plan is to take control of T-Mat, then teleport some special seeds to major cities throughout Earth's cold-weather regions.  These seeds release spores, and the spores quickly grow into a fungus that covers much of the planet, sucking oxygen out of the atmosphere at a rate that will reduce Earth's atmosphere to a level comparable to Mars's (and kill most human life in the process).  One Ice Warrior will teleport down to Earth's weather control building to stop the weather control bureau from making any rain over the affected parts of Earth, as water (in a rather comic-book development) is the fungus's one weakness.  A radio signal from moon base will then guide the rest of the Ice Warrior invasion fleet into Earth orbit, and the Ice Warrior army will land on the depopulated planet and take it over.

The TARDIS team and the Ice Warriors spend a couple of episodes chasing each other around the corridors of moon base, until the Doctor defeats them by using their own comic-book weakness, turning up the heat.  (Moon base turns out to have both the most baroque and fastest-acting thermostat in the solar system.)

By that time, however, the fungus has already been released and is threatening the Earth, so next the TARDIS team have to head to weather-control in London, where they get to spend another episode chasing the last Ice Warrior around corridors that look remarkably like the moon base corridors.  After that's taken care of, the Doctor then sends a satellite into orbit broadcasting a signal that mimics the guidance signal for the Ice Warrior invasion fleet, so that instead of entering Earth orbit, the signal leads the fleet into plunging straight into the Sun.

All done and dusted in time for tea.

What Lisa thought

She really liked this one, which was a big pickup from "The Invasion", which she hadn't liked.  She found Fewsham's character arc a compelling one, and she was also fascinated with the idea of T-Mat.  It's a concept that had had a degree of thought put into it, with side-effects like the idea that Earth had completely abandoned space exploration beyond the Moon.

The next story is "The Space Pirates", an effort from Robert Holmes.  It's also the very last Doctor Who story with missing episodes, so we'll be missing it and heading on to "The War Games".

The Ice Warriors

Miss Garrett: That's not a weapon. It's a scientific instrument.
Varga: I see things differently.

An Ice Warrior hunts Victoria in the glacier caves.

One, 11 November 1967
Two, 18 November 1967
Three, 25 November 1967
Four, 2 December 1967
Five, 9 December 1967
Six, 16 December 1967

Episodes in italics have been lost.

Written by Brian Hayles
Directed by Derek Martinus
Script editor: Peter Bryant
Producer: Innes Lloyd

Patrick Troughton as the Doctor
Frazer Hines as Jamie McCrimmon
Deborah Watling as Victoria Waterfield (later extant appearance)

In the distant future, Earth has entered a Second Ice Age. We have brought this upon ourselves: as our population expanded in the late twentieth century, we deforested the planet in order to create enough space in which to house our increasing numbers. This vastly reduced the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (!), thereby initiating a period of massive global cooling (!!).

Most of the population has been relocated to temperate Africa. The glaciers are swallowing much of the northern hemisphere, held back only by a series of undermanned bases that use a technology called the ioniser to raise the temperature at the glaciers' perimeter, thereby preventing them from expanding.

In the ice, a survey team from one of the bases has found a frozen prehistoric man. Only it's not a man--it's an alien. When defrosted, he reveals himself to be Varga, an Ice Warrior from the planet Mars, who has been frozen beneath the ice for millennia. He kidnaps Victoria and has her help him find his ship, also buried in the ice, and revive three more members of his crew, so that he will then have the resources to decide whether to go back to Mars or stay and conquer the Earth.

The Doctor and the staff of the base realise that they can use the ioniser either to free the Ice Warriors' ship from the ice, or destroy it, but there's an issue--they don't know what sort of drive the ship has. If it has an atomic drive, the ioniser could well cause an explosion, destroying the base along with the spaceship. The Doctor sets off for the ship to try and find out what the situation is.

But while he's gone, the Ice Warriors stage a takeover of the base and proceed to steal the ioniser's fuel cells to replenish their ship's power supply--though of course, that will result in the destruction of the ioniser and the overrunning of Europe by the glaciers. Before they can make their getaway, though, the Doctor--now at their spaceship--is able to reconfigure the cannon they have pointing at the base, restructuring it the beam it projects so that it is destructive to Ice Warriors but not to humans. The Ice Warriors therefore have to flee the base, abandoning the fuel cells.

It's now been determined that directing the ioniser at the spaceship could indeed result in an atomic explosion. The staff's human crew have been accustomed to turning all decisions over to their control computer, but the risks here are so finely balanced--directing the ioniser at the glacier, leading to atomic explosion, or not doing so, leading to the base being swallowed by the glacier--that it refuses to make a decision. The base's staff are paralysed by fear, until ultimately their rogue lead scientist, Penley, chooses to risk attacking the Ice Warriors. Their spaceship explodes--killing the aliens--but the explosion is contained within the glacier and does not harm the base. The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria slip away while the base staff celebrate.

What Lisa thought
She wasn't too impressed with this one. It's pretty thin on plot--I managed to detail the entire six-episode storyline in six paragraphs, after all, and even that was stretching it. Essentially, the plot of "The Ice Warriors" is Ice Age, aliens pulled from glacier, aliens threaten the Earth, the ioniser can stop them, the ioniser does stop them. To draw this out, seriously four episodes are devoted to debating whether or not to use the ioniser.

Besides the first appearance of the Ice Warriors, there are a couple of noteworthy elements here. The first is the appearance of a young Peter Sallis ("young" being a very relative term for an actor whose main claim to fame is forty years as the star of Last of the Summer Wine) as the renegade scientist Penley. Then there's also the quaint expectation that the Earth's rising population would actually lead to a loss of carbon dioxide, triggering another Ice Age

And finally there's the prediction of us growing to rely on computers so much that we need their assessments to make all our decisions for us, and are paralysed by indecision when they prove incapable of doing so. It's easy to dismiss that as being just as incorrect as the idea of global cooling, but I'm not so sure--I think that might really be a pretty solid extrapolation of where we're going, with our drive to renounce responsibility as much as possible and our reliance upon computers to make determinations in situations where variables change too quickly for the human mind to keep track of them.

The next serial after this is "The Enemy of the World", in which the TARDIS team fight Salamander, dictator of much of the world in the early twenty-first century--and the physical double of the Doctor.

Then comes "The Web of Fear", in which the Yeti that the Doctor fought in "The Abominable Snowmen" invade the London Underground. The Doctor is assisted in combatting them by the British Army, led by a mysterious colonel by the name of Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, making his first appearance on the programme.

Then is "Fury From the Deep", in which hypnotic evil seaweed attempts to take over a North Sea oil rig. The Doctor realises the seaweed is susceptible to high-pitched sound, so he defeats it by amplifying the sound of Victoria's screams of terror, in what must undoubtedly be Doctor Who's most metatextual climax until 2011's "The Wedding of River Song". (How, how can this story by missing and unavailable to us?) Victoria leaves at the end of this one, staying behind with the family of one of the rig workers, Harris.

And then there's "The Wheel in Space", in which the Doctor and Jamie defeat an attempt by Cybermen to take over a human space station, the Wheel. When they depart at the story's end, the Doctor and Jamie take with them one of the station's crew, a young mathematical genius named Zoe Heriot.

All these stories are, sadly, lost, so we'll pick up our rewatch with the next story after "The Wheel in Space", "The Dominators".

I

The Tenth Planet

Our brains are just like yours, except that certain weaknesses have been removed. You call them emotions, do you not?--the Cyber Leader

A Cyberman incapacitates General Cutler

Episode 1, 8 October 1966
Episode 2, 15 October 1966
Episode 3, 22 October 1966
Episode 4, 29 October 1966 (episode no longer exists)

Written by Kit Pedler
Directed by Derek Martinus
Script editor: Gerry Davis
Produced by Innes Lloyd

William Hartnell as the Doctor (last regular appearance)
Anneke Wills as Polly (latest extant appearance)
Michael Craze as Ben Jackson (latest extant appearance)

Earth's far future.  Space travel is routine, governed by an association of Earth's military and scientific associations called the International Space Command.  People use weirdly but unmistakably phallic telephones.

The year is 1986.

The TARDIS materialises at the South Pole, where the crew are quickly captured by soldiers--because they've arrived at Polar Base, a command centre for the International Space Command.  Currently, the base is coordinating a spaceflight by a pair of astronauts (one is American, the other is ... something else).  But something is going wrong with the mission--unaccountably, the spaceship has started losing power at a dangerous rate.

Learning this information, the Doctor immediately grasps what's going on, but the base's commander, an American general named Cutler, won't listen to his theory.  The Doctor therefore writes down his prediction and gives it to one of the base's scientists for safekeeping, like he's guessed the murderer on an episode of Morse or Poirot.

Soon, the base's astronomers become aware of something momentous indeed: a new, previously unknown planet is drawing close to Earth.  As it gets nearer, the base's inhabitants get a better look at it.  It is exactly Earthlike; even the land masses are identical to our own, with the exception that they're flipped upside down.

This, it's soon proven, is exactly the prediction the Doctor had made, but that's not enough to get General Cutler to trust him.  It soon doesn't matter, anyway, as even more visitors arrive at Polar Base--from space.

A spaceship, undetected by the base's guards, lands a short distance away, and three metal men emerge.  They surprise a patrol of the base's guards, kill them and steal their heavy coats.  Thus disguised, they're able to sneak into the base and make their way to base's command centre, where they reveal themselves and take command of the base.

They are called Cybermen, and they come--unsurprisingly--from the new planet approaching Earth, called Mondas.  Mondasians were originally identical to humans, but their scientists began replacing vulnerable, flesh-and-blood parts of their bodies with superior cybernetic implants.  Eventually, very little was left of the Cybermen that was human; their scientists had even found a way to remove their greatest weakness--emotions--leaving them a cold, pragmatic race.

But Mondas has now begun to run out of energy.  As it draws closer to the Earth, though, it will draw away the Earth's energy.  This will renew Mondas's energy, but leave the Earth a darkened, lifeless husk.  Humans need not fear, though; they will be transported to Mondas to save their lives--and to be converted into Cybermen.

(Planets stealing energy sound ridiculous to you?  Then you, sir, have no sense of wonder.)

Ben and General Cutler are able to steal one of the Cybermen's Cyber-guns, which they use to shoot down the three invaders and free the base.  Cutler immediately gets on the radio to the International Space Command's head office in Geneva to warn them about the coming invasion and the energy drain of the approaching planet.

That spaceship with the two astronauts aboard that was losing power?  It's burnt up in the atmosphere by now, killing the crew, but before that happened, Geneva sent up an attempted rescue--piloted by General Cutler's son.  Cutler now faces the task of trying to get his son back down to Earth as quickly as possible, or the young man will die.

But he's soon distracted by the news that a fleet of over a hundred spaceships has left Mondas, bound for Earth.  Cutler knows that he won't be able to save his son so long as Mondas is in the sky, so he determines to launch a missile at the alien planet armed with something called a Z-bomb (pronounced "zee-bomb", because he's American), powerful enough to crack a planet right open.

(With Earth apparently not having expected to be literally attacked by another planet, one does have to wonder why they troubled to come up with a planet-destroying missile.  We have for many decades had, say, fusion bombs in our arsenal, capable of irradiating the Earth's surface so that no life can survive.  Yet even a complete bombardment with fusion bombs would do next to no damage to the physical rock that is planet Earth.)

The Doctor is horrified by Cutler's plan to use the Z-bomb.  Doing so could well destroy the Earth as well, and at any rate, he says, Earth is in no danger from Mondas anyway: the planet is going to be so overwhelmed by the energy that it draws from Earth that it will be Mondas that gets destroyed in the process.

But Cutler dismisses the Doctor's concerns, and orders him and Ben confined.  And the Doctor is growing strangely weaker, and soon passes out, leaving Ben and Polly to foil the general's plan on their own.

A second Cyberman task force arrives at the Pole, but base's guards, now armed with Cyber-guns, are able to fight it off; we witness Cybermen actually running away to escape being cut down.

Meanwhile, Ben and Polly have recruited an ally: Dr Barclay, the base's chief scientist, who's as horrified as the Doctor at the idea of using the Z-bomb.  Barclay assists Ben in escaping from his cell, then distracts the engineer in the missile launch silo while Ben (acting on Barclay's instructions) sabotages the missile.

But Cutler discovers their plot and stops them, then orders the missiles launched.  The episode three cliffhangers sees the launch about to commence.

Which is as far as I've seen of the story, because episode four has been lost.  It's one of the most unfortunate of sixties Who's many losses, because it means we don't see the base once again invaded by Cybermen, who determine to use the Z-bomb to destroy the Earth.  We don't see Ben discover the Cybermen are incredibly susceptible to radiation, and use this knowledge to defeat them.

And critically, we don't see the Doctor, Ben and Polly head back to the TARDIS at the episode's conclusion, where the Doctor, complaining of feeling tired, collapses.  The TARDIS whirs into flight, and the Doctor changes, his whole body transforming into a completely different person--Doctor Who's first ever regeneration sequence, with William Hartnell leaving the title role to be replaced by Patrick Troughton.  And the programme would never be the same.

What Lisa thought

The Cybermen are fascinating in their first ever appearance.  Soon enough, they'd assume their familiar nature of being, essentially, scaled-down Daleks: a human brain inside an anthropoid robot body.  But not yet.  In "The Tenth Planet", they're recognisably mutilated humans, with human hands and, behind their masks, visible human eyes--blinking human eyes.

There's an interesting approach taken to their speech.  The Cyberman actor opens his mouth and holds it, open but perfectly still, while another actor recites his lines off camera.  It's a really good idea, though two things let down its execution.  The first is the unfortunate fact that the Cyberman actor doesn't seem terribly in sync with his off-camera counterpart, so several times he has to hurriedly open his mouth after he's already started "speaking", while at others his mouth remains open several moments after his dialogue has finished.  The other problem is that the actor delivering the Cyberman lines--presumably attempting to sound emotionless--delivers his lines in a far too quick-paced drone, and actually sounds rather friendly.

Lisa thought the first episode, in which no Cybermen appear until the cliffhanger, perceptibly dragged, but the story really picked up for her once we moved on to episodes two and three.  Like me, she's frustrated that episode four is missing--but I think we have to keep in mind that, as awesome as it would be to have the first ever regeneration, at least the story isn't completely missing.  We still have the first three episodes of the Cybermen's first ever appearance.

It doesn't vibrate, but it does ring.

And those phones.  Man.  Those phones are phallic.

Following "The Tenth Planet", no less than Patrick Troughton's first seven stories as the Doctor are missing.

First, "The Power of the Daleks", which eschews the epic scale of "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" and "The Dalek Master Plan" to tell the story of the struggle between the crew of a crashed Dalek capsule and the population of a single human colony world, spiced up by Ben and Polly debating with each other over whether this strange little clown of a man is really the Doctor or not.

Then "The Highlanders", in which the Doctor, Ben and Polly arrive in the Scottish Highlands just after the Battle of Culloden in 1746, and end up imprisoned as suspected rebels by the redcoats mopping up the area.  At the story's end, they leave with a new companion, Jamie McCrimmon, a young piper in the rebellious Jacobite army.

In "The Underwater Menace", the TARDIS materialises on a deserted volcanic island in the South Atlantic sometime shortly after 1968.  But the crew soon discover that beneath the island lies the continent of Atlantis, its civilisation still thriving after centuries.  (This is the first of three completely contradictory explanations for the destruction of Atlantis that Doctor Who will offer us.)

Then "The Moonbase", in which the TARDIS team and the crew of an Earth outpost on the Moon must save the Earth from being destroyed by the Cybermen.

"The Macra Terror" sees the Doctor and his companions arrive on a distant Earth colony world whose population are being subtly and insidiously manipulated by the Macra, a hideous race of giant crabs.

"The Faceless Ones" features Doctor Who's first attempted alien invasion of modernday or historical Earth, when a race of identity-stealing aliens infiltrate Gatwick Airport.  The major female guest star, Samantha, is played by Pauline Collins, who would later appear as Queen Victoria in 2006's "Tooth and Claw".  Ben and Polly leave at the end of the story, when they realise that the TARDIS has landed on the exact same day that the Doctor first took them away.

And finally "The Evil of the Daleks", in which the Daleks ally with a nineteenth-century mad scientist named Maxtible and a shopkeeper named Edward Waterfield, in an attempt to genetically engineer the "human factor" (ingenuity, essentially) into the Daleks' makeup.  (That's a plot the programme would mine again in 2007.)  The story's climax sees a final battle take place in the Dalek Emperor's throne room on Skaro, in which Maxtible, Waterfield and the Dalek race are destroyed.  At the time, this was intended to be the last ever Dalek story, and indeed, we won't see them again for several seasons.

Waterfield's death in "The Evil of the Daleks" leaves his daughter, the innocent Victoria, orphaned, so the Doctor and Jamie take her along as their new companion.  We'll pick up with her first adventure as an official TARDIS crewmember with the next story in our rewatch, "The Tomb of the Cybermen".

By then, we'll have missed some significant changes in the programme.  The most obvious is that Patrick Troughton will have become firmly established as the new Doctor.  But beyond that, the very nature of Doctor Who storytelling will have changed.

Apart from the Daleks, the Hartnell Doctor had only one enemy in his entire run who appeared more than once: the Meddling Monk, who appeared all of twice ("The Time Meddler" and "The Dalek Master Plan").  But the Troughton Doctor fights the Daleks twice, the Ice Warriors twice, the Yeti twice and the Cybermen four times (they make five appearances in just three seasons once we count their debut here in "The Tenth Planet").

That's because William Hartnell's departure coincides with the transformation of Doctor Who into the monster-of-the-week show that we know and love it as today.  Now, every story has a distinctive vision.  Part and parcel of that is the decision to abandon the straight historical stories; "The Highlanders" would be the last straight historical until 1982's "Black Orchid".  They're replaced with stories set on modern day Earth, in which the world is menaced by mad scientists or alien invasions, the first of which was "The War Machines".

So with "The Tenth Planet", we mourn the end of Doctor Who's roots.  But we can also get excited as the show becomes the adventure romp at which it's at its best.

I

"The Ark"

You must travel with understanding as well as hope. I said that to one of your ancestors, once; a long time ago.--The Doctor

Monoids

"The Steel Sky", 5 March 1966
"The Plague", 12 March 1966
"The Return", 19 March 1966
"The Bomb", 26 March 1966

Written by Paul Erickson and Lesley Scott
Directed by Michael Imison
Script editor: Gerry Davis
Produced by John Wiles

William Hartnell as the Doctor
Peter Purves as Steven Taylor
Jackie Lane as Dodo Chaplet (earliest extant appearance)

In the prior (no-longer extant) story, "The Massacre", Steven became involved with a kind serving girl in sixteenth-century Paris, Anne Chaplet. Anne turned out to be one of the victims of the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre, and when the Doctor and Steven escape the Massacre at the end of the story, the Doctor failed to bring Anne along with them, insisting that saving her would have changed history. Steven was so enraged that, when the TARDIS rematerialised (in 1966 on Wimbledon Common), he stormed outside, leaving the Doctor alone.

Just as Steven is about to leave for good, however, a teenage schoolgirl shows up--and she's the spitting image of Anne Chaplet, and she introduces herself as Dodo Chaplet (short for "Dorothea"). Steven concludes that Dodo is some long-lost descendant of Anne, and the three of them enter the TARDIS and head off to times unknown.

That's where we are, then, at the beginning of "The Ark", Dodo's first adventure. The TARDIS materialises in a tropical forest teeming with life. Dodo--whose character is essentially that she's always blithely cheerful, almost always unflappable, and refuses to take Steven seriously when he attempts to put his foot down as a parental authority--at first refuses to believe they've travelled in time, or even very much in space, guessing that the Doctor has taken them to Whipsnade, a zoological garden outside London.

But she's soon forced to abandon that hypothesis. For one thing, all the animals here roam freely amongst each other--Gila lizards and tropical birds and even elephants. For another, the sky over their heads is made of metal. The Doctor concludes (correctly) that they're aboard a generation ship, an interstellar colony ship that takes centuries to reach its destination solar system, so the ship is equipped to allow the original colonists to grow old and die while they're aboard, being replaced by their descendants, and eventually by their descendants' descendants.

Soon, the TARDIS team are ambushed and arrested by the ships' crew, the Monoids. These are a man-shaped alien race, completely green, with no mouths and only a single, cyclopean eye in the middle of their faces.

A word about the Monoid makeup. Given the limitations under which the 60s production team were labouring--a shoestring budget, basically, that prevented any sort of waste whatsoever--the Monoids are, I think, a brilliantly creative achievement. Their "eye" is a ping pong ball, painted with iris and pupil, then held in the actor's mouth. The actor then dons a Beatles moptop wig and positions it so that it covers the upper half of their face, which both makes the "eye" look well-proportioned and obscures any facial features that would break the illusion. It's a great idea, and it has only one failure (a real shame of a failure, really)--the very first time a Monoid appears on camera, he's shown in extreme closeup, to better drive home his startling appearance; but the closeup is so extreme that it's impossible not to notice that his eye socket is actually his mouth.

The Monoids take the team to the ship's main living area, which is much more metal-corridors-and-spaceshippy than the animal and plant habitat. There, they discover that most of the people aboard are actually human. They are, in fact, the last humans; the Earth, visible on the spaceship's viewscreen, will shortly be destroyed as it falls into the sun. The Doctor calculates that in order to see the end of the Earth, the TARDIS must have travelled at least ten million years into the future.

The humans and their Monoid allies have come up with a plan so that their races can survive the Earth's destruction. They have identified a distant planet, Refusis II, of a size and gravity and atmosphere entirely similar to the Earth, orbiting a star very much like the Sun. But it will take them seven hundred years to travel there, so they have shrunk the entire human and Monoid populations down into their constituent parts, essentially preserving them. The populations will be restored once they reach Refusis II. In the meantime, a skeleton staff mans the spaceship; they're called the Guardians, and they and their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren will guide their two races to salvation.

Of course, something soon goes wrong. Dodo has a cold, and both the Monoid and human populations quickly start catching it. Bacterial and viral infections were wiped out literally millennia ago, and Guardian science has no recollection of how to deal with them. On such fertile territory, the virus quickly mutates, and soon enough, both Guardians and Monoids start dying from it.

This is an even more serious problem than it would be other times, since the operation of the ark spaceship is so finely balanced--if one crewmember unexpectedly dies, there's no one to take their function. And of course, the ark's second-in-command--who takes charge when his superior is the first to fall ill--is deeply suspicious of the TARDIS team, and concludes that they have infected the humans intentionally. He therefore imprisons them rather than allow the Doctor to research a cure, and of course, soon Steven falls prey to the mutated virus. The whole thing has strong echoes of "The Sensorites".

You can, of course, guess how things turn out. The Doctor is released and develops a cure, saving both Steven and the crew of Guardians and Monoids, just in time for everyone to witness the Earth's final disintegration on the ship's viewscreen. The team head back to the TARDIS and depart.

And that's when we discover "The Ark"'s central conceit: that's it not actually one four-part story, but rather two two-part stories, set on the same sets, but hundreds of years apart. For the TARDIS rematerialises once again in the ark's zoological garden, but when the team make their way to the main habitation section, they discover that seven hundred years have passed. The ark is about to reach Refusis II.

This is conveyed through a neat little piece of storytelling. The Guardians are building a massive statue of a human male, about the size of the Statue of Liberty. They're using the "old methods" of construction, building by hand; it will take seven hundred years to complete. In the first two parts, only the feet have been completed, but now the team find a finished statue. Only, something's changed: instead of a human head, it bears a Monoid head.

That's not the only thing that's changed, though. The Monoids have risen up and established themselves as an overclass, following a bloody revolution; the Guardians have been reduced to a small group of slaves. The Guardians have been led to believe that they will accompany the Monoids to Refusis II and serve them there, but the Monoids secretly have a different plan: they will leave the humans on board the ark, which will then be destroyed when the fission bomb they have hidden inside the giant statue's head explodes.

The TARDIS team are taken prisoner and added to the Guardian slave labour force. The Doctor and Dodo accompany one of the Monoids down to the planet, as advance scouts. They discover a verdant forest world. In a valley, they find a luxurious house, but they see no signs of intelligent life.

It turns out the Refusians are disembodied psychic beings. They have known of the ark's approach for some time, and have welcomed the idea of humans and Monoids living amongst them--they built structures like this house for just that purpose. But now they have discovered the violence and oppression that marks Monoid rule of the earthlings, they're having second thoughts.

That problem is about to take care of itself, though. The Monoids start arriving on the planet in numbers, but one of them, named Four, is plotting to overthrow the ruling Monoid, named One. A civil war breaks out against the Monoids, and pretty soon, both sides have annihilated each other.

This leaves only the problem of the fission bomb hidden aboard the ark. The Doctor and Dodo have learnt from One that the bomb is in the massive statue's head, but the statue is so heavy that there's no way to move it before it explodes.

One of the Refusians takes care of that. He heads up to the ark and, as a disembodied psychic force, has no trouble lifting the statue into the ship's launch bay, from where it tumbles out into the vacuum of space and harmlessly explodes.

The Guardians then begin the process of moving the Earth's miniaturised population down to the surface so they can be repopulated. The Refusians agree to let them live on their planet, so long as they and the few remaining Monoids can make peace and live in harmony.

What Lisa thought

The high-concept idea that forms the basis of "The Ark" is an intriguing one--the Doctor coming back after centuries and being forced to deal with the consequences of his first visit to a location. The programme will tackle it again, in the 1970s ("The Face of Evil") and 2005 ("The Long Game" and "The Parting of the Ways").

But the results of this first treatment, Lisa and I are both agreed, are fairly disappointing. What we end up with, by splitting the serial up into a pair of forty-five minute stories, is an early cautionary tale about the length of Doctor Who adventures--a lesson (two lessons, in fact) about how limiting the forty-five minute format can be for a programme that has to spend the first twenty minutes of every tale setting up a brand new milieu, and that Who is generally able to provide much deeper, more satisfying stories if given ninety minutes to tell them, rather than forty-five.

The first two-parter has absolutely no twists or subplots. Dodo makes everyone sick; the team get imprisoned; the team get released; the Doctor finds a cure. You know, when the ark's commander falls sick as part one's cliffhanger, exactly how part two is going to go.

And the second two-parter never manages to elicit much dramatic tension at all. First, it has the same barebones-plot problem that the first two-parter has, but then also, by midway through its first episode, the Doctor has made contact with the Refusians, who turn out to be an omnipotent alien race who explicitly will not allow the Monoids to continue ruling the humans as slaves. So we know that Monoid defeat will be soon and easily accomplished.

It also bothered that we saw two generations of a generation ship--and never once did we see a child from either species (and, in fact, only one person over the age of forty).

The next story is "The Celestial Toymaker", which has been lost. It's the first of that tradition of Doctor Who stories taking place in fantasyland, continuing right up to 2010 with "Amy's Choice", which typically do very well with fans and very poorly with general viewers. The next story up on our rewatch will be the one that follows it, Doctor Who's trip to the American West, "The Gunfighters".

I

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 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".

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