18: Galaxy Four

Before Watching

I think that there was a feature in this in one of the very first Doctor Who Weekly Magazines I read in the late 70s, and I remember thinking – well, this doesn’t seem very good - when I read it. So I’m not expecting miracles from this one to be perfectly honest. The reviews I’ve read since in some of the definitive works on the subject really struggle to say much that is positive about it either. So what have we got to expect from the next four episodes? Nasty blonde Drahvins, nice ugly Rills, and some rather silly looking robots called Chumblies. Any more than that, well, we’ll find out over the next four episodes.

After Watching

Right, well, the version I watched was made of 3 recons and one surviving episodes. The recons weren’t quite the standard telesnaps versions I’ve become used to, as wherever possible fragments of live action, and appropriate bits from other episodes have been stuck in to break up the monotony. And I’m sorry to say it, but monotony is one commodity of which there is no shortage in Galaxy Four.

Our heroes arrive on a planet where two alien spaceships have crashlanded. One contains the Drahvins, and the other the Rills. The Rills breathe an ammonia based atmosphere, and are therefore unable to leave their ship – and so they use some rather silly looking round robots. For some inexplicable reason Vicki decides to christen the robots ‘chumblies’. The chumblies want to take the travellers to the Rills’ ship, but the Drahvins intercept them, and take them back to their ship.

Right, the Drahvins. These are warlike humanoid women with identical uniforms and identical blond syrups. Three of them are soulless, indeed brainless warrior servants, and the other, Maaga, is the leader, an arrogant one dimensional piece of work. The Drahvins need to get themselves off the planet which they believe will blow up in 14 days’ time. Well, they’re right it’s going to blow up – but in a much shorter timescale. They tell the Doctor that they were attacked by the Rills, and the crash has rendered their ship inoperable. The plan is to take over the Rills’ ship, which is supposed to be operable.

Of course, the ‘pretty’ people are the baddies, while the ugly old Rills are actually as nice as pie. They never attacked the Drahvins in the first place, and have already offered to take the Drahvins with them when they leave the planet. Of course, they need the Doctor’s help to leave – he recharges their ship from the TARDIS with about 20 minutes to spare.

There really isn’t a lot more to the story than this, and it’s pretty dire, when all is said and done. In episode 3 Maaga gets what is probably meant to be a serious monologue about how soul destroying it is to only have the company of these warrior ‘drones’ who don’t have a though in their heads, but her own behaviour before and after this means that it is actually out of place and out of character. Then there is the question about who you should believe and who you can trust, when Steven is left alone in the Rills’ ship, and they have to break through his scepticism. But it’s heavy handed at best. The visuals, while no worse than, say, The Sensorites and The Keys of Marinus do nothing to detract from the poverty of the script.

I think that this is my least favourite William Hartnell story so far. It’s just so . . . terminally bland. All of the cast try their best at different times, but nobody rescues this leaden production. It hasn’t got much going for it at all – after all what can we say positive : -

-          Its heart’s in the right place

-          It’s not a 6 parter

-          Umm – that’s about it really.

What have we learned?

Including this story and ‘The Daleks’ the score currently stands at Mingers – 1, Pretty People 1.

Season Two: Overview

The Second Season – Overall

Well , that was different, wasn’t it? Repeat after me – yes it was. The emphasis in the first season, for me, always came back to the crew, and the relationship between all of them. By the time of Planet of Giants they were working together as never before, and had become a really tight little unit. Then the Doctor locked Susan out at the end of The Dalek Invasion of Earth, and it was never going to be the same again. It’s been a season of flux. Vicki was actually a good addition to the crew, and allowed , at least in her first couple of stories, to do quite a bit more than Susan ever was. But then seeing off Ian and Barbara at the end of the Chase. That for me symbolized that the Doctor is now undoubtedly the hero of his own show. Yes, Steven will undoubtedly do some of the physical stuff that Ian did, but I can’t see that any companion will ever be the focus of identification for the viewers in the way that the two teachers were for the first season.

I think that there’s been another change as well. In the first season, I think you can argue that the Travellers only really make any difference to the places and people they encounter in The Daleks – The Keys of Marinus and The Sensorites. In fact, the most notably sci fi of the stories. That’s only 3 out of 8 stories. There are 9 stories in the second season, and of these you can argue that they have an effect in “The Dalek Invasion of Earth” - “The Romans” – giving Nero the idea of burning Rome -  The Web Planet – The Space Museum – The Chase and The Time Meddler. Now ok – in the Time Meddler the Doctor is only acting to preserve the status quo. But there’s another interesting thing – the Time Meddler seems to provide some proof that you actually can change time. That’s a big change too.

But it was a lot of fun wasn’t it? Accuse me of watching through rose tinted spectacles if you like, but there was something to enjoy about each of the 9 stories this season delivered- even if there wasn’t that much you could say that of in The Web Planet. It was a season where the production team(s) continued to experiment – most noticeable for my money in Planet of Giants and The Web Planet.

  

Mighty 200 Ratings

The Dalek Invasion of Earth – 44

The Time Meddler – 75

The Romans – 97

The Crusade - 100

The Rescue – 127

The Chase – 157

Planet of Giants – 163

The Web Planet – 178

The Space Museum – 190

Now my rating

The Dalek Invasion of Earth

Planet of Giants

The Time Meddler

The Crusade

The Romans

The Space Museum

The Chase

The Web Planet

The Rescue

The most obvious differences between my list and the mighty 200 rating is that I put Planet of Giants so high. But I honestly thought it was very good indeed – miles better than what I’d heard said, and what I’d read about it in the past. The Rescue, on the other hand, is the bottom of my list, because, well, I’m sorry, but it’s just so bland. The only thing that really saves it at all is Maureen O’Brien’s performance as Vicky – she’s foregrounded n this story and she makes the most of it. As regards The Web Planet – well, I have such mixed feelings about it that if I did the list again tomorrow, I might put it quite a bit higher. Nah, scratch that. I wouldn’t. 

17: The Time Meddler

Before Watching

I watched this one for the first time a good few years back, when UK Gold were showing a complete series on a Friday night. My memory of it is sketchy – I remember enjoying a lot of the Doctor’s dialogue with the Monk, and the scenes with the Monk’s TARDIS, but that’s about all. The Saxon and Viking stuff is a blur to me – I know that there’s Saxons and Vikings in it, but that’s about as far as it goes. The first on screen meeting with another Time Lord, though – that’s got to be worth watching. It’s scripted by Dennis Spooner, so there are going to be some laughs along the way too, I should imagine.

After Watching

What a smart move it was casting Peter Butterworth as the monk. I can imagine the director saying to him –

“Pete, you know that character you play in the Carry on Films?”

“Which one?”

“All of them. Can you play the Monk like that, only tone down the lasciviousness?”

So what you get is a wonderfully mischievous character, who you find it no trouble to forgive for locking William Hartnell in a cell – let’s be honest, we all wanted to do that at one time or another during the first season. The point of the Monk is that he is not a two dimensionally evil character. In fact, he’s not an evil character at all. What he is, it seems, is a character whose moral compass is skewed differently to the Doctor’s, and to the viewers’ and this often makes for an interesting personality.

Compare the Doctor and The Monk. According to their dialogue, the Monk left – Gallifrey presumably – 50 years after the Doctor did. Yet the Doctor is scrupulous about towing the (Time Lords’) non-intervention party line. Sort of. Whereas the Monk, he does it blatantly. Sometimes for personal gain, but more because he ‘wants to help’ – he envisages jet airliners by the 14^th century – and gloriously – because it’s fun! What a wonderful reason for doing anything. What I like about the Monk as well is the contradiction in the fact that although the Monk claims he is only meddling in order to make things better, when Vicky and Steven enter for the first time they find that his TARDIS is full of treasures and works of Art he has purloined from across History. So ‘helping’ obviously means helping himself to a great extent.

At this point shall we remind ourselves about how Steven has come to be in the TARDIS. He turned down the chance to run with the others into the TARDIS when he realised he’d left his little fluffy panda behind him in the Mechanoid City. Having fetched it he just managed to run back into the TARDIS – before the doors closed – without anyone noticing he was there. Really? Well, apparently so. Actually this does allow a lovely scene with the Doctor and Vicki trying to convince Steven that he is actually on a space and time ship. Speaking of which, what is it with Steven and the panda? I mean, am I missing something?

Alright then, to the plot. There are two distinct strands to this story which run together by the end. The most interesting strand is of course, the story of the Doctor’s first meeting with one of his own kind, and his battle of wits with the Monk. The second, less interesting story is the one involving the Vikings and Saxons. The TARDIS has materialised somewhere on the coast of what I presume is North Yorkshire, just prior to the Viking invasion of 1066. The villagers are understandably jittery about strangers, especially when they have to fight off an advance party of Viking invaders. I’ll be honest, I found this part of the story a bit of a bore, and a distraction away from the things I was really interested in which all involved the Monk.

Way back in the mists of time I studied Old Norse Literature and Old English Literature, and some of this involved gaining a pretty useful understanding of English History up to and including the events of 1066. This story does actually raise the interesting question – could Harold Godwinsson have defeated William of Normandy had he not made the lightning march North to defeat the Viking invasion of Haraldr Hardrada in the weeks preceding the Battle of Hastings? Well, since he could have won the Battle of Hastings anyway with just a little change of luck the fairest answer is, yes, maybe he could. The Monk’s plan is to use modern military hardware to defeat the Vikings and save Harold the trouble, and maybe this would have worked. Precisely how this would lead to jet airliners before the end of the 14^th century, though, nobody quite explains.

The Saxons and Vikings in this story are, I’m sorry to say, a rather sorry bunch. At least none of the Vikings had horns on their helmets – there isn’t the slightest shred of evidence that real Vikings ever did. Mind you, when the crew leave the TARDIS in episode 1 they immediately find a helmet with horns on it – still, that was a necessity since it enabled the disbelieving Steven to lead the Doctor to make his quip about it possibly being a space helmet for a cow. Steven’s disbelief that the TARDIS can travel through space and time actually leads to some other good lines in the first episode, “Up there is the scanner, those are the doors, that is a chair with a panda on it. Sheer poetry dear boy. Now please stop bothering me.” Going back to the Saxon milieu, though, both Saxons and Vikings are both rather scruffy, and at the same time rather unconvincing. It is rather shocking when the advance party seize Edith, the wife of village headman Wulnoth. When next we see her she is in a hell of a state, and adult viewers can’t help thinking that the Vikings have been practicing one of their favourite occupations on her – by which I don’t mean pillage. Very schocking in what is otherwise quite a light hearted romp for the most part.

Worthy of consideration is the contribution that this story makes about the issue of whether you can change History or not. At no time does the Doctor actually tell the Monk what he told Barbara all those weeks ago. If you really can’t change History, not one line of it, then the Doctor does not need to do a thing, because the Monk will be unsuccessful. The fact that the Doctor does take action to stop the Monk suggests that now he knows full well that you can change History – it is just that you mustn’t. . . Unless it’s absolutely necessary. Now, ok, the series still has several true historicals to go – the Myth Makers – the Massacre of St. Bartholemew’s Eve– the Gunfighters – the Smugglers and The Highlanders – but this story seems to signal a significant sea change in attitude towards Earth History and how it can be used in the series – off the top of my head I can think of The Evil of the Daleks – The Abominable Snowmen – The Time Monster and The Time Warrior which all use Earth’s past as a setting, while essentially being Sci Fi rather than Historical stories.

The ending was a bit rushed, and it’s interesting to see that the Doctor uses the removal of the Monk’s Dimensional Stabiliser to immobilise his TARDIS. In the Pertwee era he immobilises the Master’s TARDIS by removing the dematerialization circuit. This has the effect of shrinking the interior of the Monk’s TARDIS so that the inside actually fits into the stone sarcophagus that it appears to be. Which means that it is too small for the Monk to be able to get inside now. It’s rather cruel too, since the note the Doctor leaves for the Monk does hold out the hope that he may one day return and free him. Yet earlier in the same story, when Vicky and Steven found that the TARDIS had disappeared – actually it had just been covered by the tide – she made a point of saying that the Doctor wouldn’t have moved it, because if he had then he would never have been able to come back, the TARDIS being so erratic.

Overall, this was a new direction for the show, and it was one I rather enjoyed. Which is just as well since, as far as ‘Doctor Who’ was concerned, this was the future, baby.

What have we learned?

The Monk is of the same planet and species as the Doctor

The Monk’s TARDIS is not the same as the Doctor’s. For one thing, his works. For another, it has a drift control which allows it to materialise in space. Hmm – I’ve seen the Doctor’s TARDIS do this later on. Anyway, presuming that the Monk’s TARDIS is later than the Doctor’s (a reasonable assumption since he left Gallifrey 50 years after the Doctor) then on Gallifrey – mark 4 comes later than type 40. Go figure. 

16: The Chase

Before Watching

Even though I’ve never watched “The Chase” before I know that this is Ian and Barbara’s last story. I have mixed feelings about it. I think that William Russell did a sterling job in what , at times, must have seemed to him like utter nonsense, and my admiration for the acting skills of Jaqueline Hill has already been put on record in this very blog on more than one occasion. But I do accept that things change. Ian and Barbara’s job was originally to be the viewer’s anchor, our point of focus. With so much strange an unusual going on around them, with the Doctor proving so mercurial and unpredictable in the earliest stories, they were a reassuring presence. But things have changed since then. We know the Doctor now, and while he can still be snappy, and prone to sudden fits of anger, we know that he wants the best for his friends, and will never let them down. His body might not let him solve situation through his physical prowess, but he’ll solve them anyway, through other means. He is now the hero of his own show. He no longer needs Ian to get him out of scrapes, and he no longer needs Barbara to argue with, and to pull him back in when he is out of line. Time for them to go.

As with the preceding story, “The Space Museum”, this one really doesn’t have much of a reputation. It’s not true that fandom in general has no good words for the story – they have many very good words for it, none of which I can use in a family blog. As ever, though, I intend to keep an open mind – and I have a box of tissues on standby for Ian and Barbara’s farewell.

After Watching

Never has the phrase ‘somehow manages to be less than the sum of its parts’ been more appropriate for a Doctor Who story. “The Chase” doesn’t maintain the level of sustained madness we saw in “The Web Planet”, but it has moments which are so . .. well, for want of a better phrase, downright wrong, that are unmatched in any of the shows I’ve watched since I began. And yet . . .

I liked the way that the first episode took it for granted that you had remembered what had happened before, and showed the TARDIS crew having some downtime and the equivalent of a lazy Sunday afternoon, before tuning into the Dalek channel on Time TV. It’s not quite as good as Dave, but better than QVC.  I also liked the scene of the Dalek assassination squad trundling their way into their time machine. Their time machine itself, I did not like so much. The only way that I can describe its external appearance is like this. I once saw a coffee table made out of three pieces of MDF. Two piece slotted together in an X to make the stand, and on top of that went a large circular piece for the table top. Imagine that scaled up, and that’s what the Dalek time and space ship looked like. It’s all very disappointing. I suppose that the Daleks never did get a hang of aesthetics. Their spaceship in The Dalek Invasion of Earth earlier in this season looked crap too.

In Terry Nation’s non-Dalek story, The Keys of Marinus, he opted for a very episodic series of episodes – if that’s not a tautology – or to put it another way – under the umbrella of the search for the keys, the travelers ended up participating in several different self-contained adventures, and there’s more than an element of this in “The Chase” too. The first of these takes place on the desert planet, Aridius. This planet is home to the Aridians, a race of semi humanoids with some rather fishy features, who remind me just a tad of the aquaphibians’ King Triton in “Stingray”. I knew from “The Wife in Space” and “Running through Corridors” that one of the Aridians is none other than Hywel Bennett. The same sources had alerted me to the fact that Martin Jarvis was also one of the Menoptera in “The Web Planet”. In both cases I wouldn’t have spotted this fact unless I’d noticed it on the credits. These fishy wimps are put to work, brushing the sand away from the TARDIS by the newly arrived Daleks – using toothbrushes by the look of it – and as soon as the Daleks put the slightest bit of pressure on them they promise to hand over the Doctor and the crew. Serves them right that the Doctor did nothing to solve their own problems and left them in the lurch.

The next part of the story saw the TARDIS land on the top of the Empire state building, which allowed me to indulge in another enjoyable bout of pointless pedantry. When the TARDIS eventually dematerializes, the wall behind it is clearly a brick wall. Well, the Empire State Building is not, and never was made of bricks. The nearby Chrysler Building, which is slightly smaller, and slightly older to the tune of a few months, was built from bricks, and is actually the world’s tallest brick building. Blue Peter’s Peter Purves (remember the name, he’ll be back) plays the amiable cretin Morton Dill from Alabama, who decides that the sudden appearance of the TARDIS denotes that a movie is being shot there, and greets the Daleks when they appear soon after in the same manner. Why don’t they shoot him? Heaven alone knows, but then this section of the story is very clearly being played for laughs. Doesn’t find many of them, but it tries.

Off again then, and this time onto a sailing ship. For the very last time, a humanoid male gets the hots for Barbara again. When she got back to civilization, I bet that was one thing she didn’t miss. Although I don’t know, maybe in 60s Britain this was the norm for her. Anyway, the Daleks arrive soon, the Travellers escape, and a jolly free for all ensues in which the crew all end up leaving the ship , as does one Dalek which walks – er – trundles the plank for reasons best known to itself. Hands up who didn’t know that the deserted ship would turn out to be none other than the famous Mary Celeste?

Enough of this enforced jollity. The TARDIS lands in a haunted house – and for a while the DOCTOR decides that this must be a recess of the human mind. Huh? Barbara becomes a most un-Barbara like screamer, as Dracula and Frankenstein both rear their unconvincing heads. The Daleks arrive, and are attacked by the Dracula and Frankenstein robots? – if that is what they are. Vicki somehow gets separated and ends up on the Dalek ship, just in time to see them making a replica of the Doctor, whose mission will be to kill the Crew. As the TARDIS departs we see that this is all an exhibit for the Ghana international fair of 1999.

Well, with two episodes of pointless padding over, we can at least now get on with the story – such as it is. Vicki somehow manages to evade capture on the Dalek ship. These Daleks are particularly inept – as you can see from the pig’s ear they make of the Doctor’s replica. In many shots he is played by Edmund Warwick, who, bless him, didn’t bear much of a resemblance to William Hartnell, either facially, or in body type. I’m sure that there was some rationale behind the decision not to have William Hartnell double up as his own double, but it was to the detriment of the story.

Right then, to the climax on Mechanus. Mechanus, planet of giant mushrooms, and robots that look like geodesic domes. Actually I like the idea of the Mechanoids. They were robots left on Mechanus to tame the jungles, make it habitable for humans, and build a city, and then the humans abandoned the project, and the Mechanoids developed minds of their own. There’s quite a nice model city, where the daleks have a good old rumble with the Mechanoids, and the Travellers meet the shipwrecked space pilot Steven Taylor. Now, Steven’s resemblance to Morton Dill is a hell of a lot better than the robot Doctor’s resemblance to the Doctor, and hardly surprising since it is the self same Peter Purves we first met a couple of episodes ago, although not the same character. Was there a rule against having more than one actor playing two parts? If so – why do it this way. It makes no difference whether Peter Purves or another actor who looks nothing like him plays Morton Dill. Go figure.

Alright, Ian and Barbara’s departure. This one forms a real contrast with Susan’s. There’s no room for sentiment here as they have to practically beg the Doctor to set the controls on the Dalek timeship to take them home. He gets all angry and grumpy, telling them that there is a 50% chance that they will die in the process. We know while we’re watching it though he is only saying this because he can’t bring himself to tell them how much he doesn’t want them to go, and how much he is going to miss them. I have to say – me too. I’ll be honest, I’d think twice about getting into a timeship that looks like flat pack MFI furniture. It was good to see them get a little montage of them enjoying being back in London. They’re going to be alright, and if they manage to get a little jiggy with each other now, well, good for them.

What Have We Learned?

Well, we know what really happened to the Mary Celeste - sort of

Doctor Who and Dracula and Frankenstein really don't mix

Aridians are a bunch of ...  
Peter Purves had a career before Blue Peter

15: The Space Museum

Before Watching

Why is it that pretty much all of the Hartnell stories that I really wanted to watch when I was a kid have such terrible reputations? Possibly it might have something to do with the fact that they’re all sci/fi or alien worlds stories, as opposed to Historicals. The Beeb knew how to do the Historicals. Look at the Historicals we’ve had up to this point – Marco Polo – The Aztecs – The Reign of Terror – The Romans – The Crusade. Alright, I prefer some to others, but they’re all well made pieces of drama, with never less than solid performances from all involved, and in some cases excellent performances. Why couldn’t they always manage this with other stories?

And so to The Space Museum. Now, when I read the synopsis of this as a kid – the TARDIS crew come face to face with themselves stuck in cases in the eponymous museum – I thought it was a wonderful idea, and really wanted to watch the show. I still feel that it’s a great idea, and so I’m interested to look at how it’s done.

Another point of interest is that this is a story that dovetails into The Chase, the following story. even though, up to this point, the Hartnell stories tend to end with a cliffhanger leading directly to the next story, I think this is the first time that two of them are so closely linked. Other examples, if I recall correctly would be Frontier in Space – Planet of the Daleks , and Keeper of Traken into Logopolis.

After Watching

Well, that wasn’t as bad as I’d heard – but it wasn’t as good as I’d hoped, either. I think that if I could just write about the first episode, then I would be applying some superlatives to this particular post. But I can’t, and so I can promise that superlatives are going to be rather thin on the ground.

I did enjoy the first episode, though. The TARDIS lands on a planet where the view is dominated by the building housing the Museum. The crew decide to investigate. As they walk towards the museum, they notice that they are not making any footprints. They are passed by several humanoids, who act as if they are not there. So they begin to explore the museum, eventually finding 4 glass cases, with their frozen bodies on display. As individual episodes go it is one of the best I’ve seen in the whole of the Hartnell era thus far. The only trouble is that the three episodes become concerned with the doings of the Moroks and Xerons. 

Right, the Moroks are the Bad Guys. Ok? They are all in white. The Xerons are the good guys. They are all in black. Clever, innit? Oh, and in case that’s too confusing for us we can identify that the Moroks are villains because they speak with South African accents (this was 1965, remember) are a little overweigh and have strange hairdos. The Xerons are nice blond boys and girls, and they have double eyebrows, so they’re alright. The actual backstory is quite interesting. The Moroks are a conquering warrior race, who have built the Space Museum on a conquered planet to display the spoils of conquest to the Universe, I suppose. Over time the Moroks have become decadent, lazy and complacent – and the Museum seems to have become run down and rather neglected. For one thing in four episodes it has no visitors other than the TARDIS crew. The Xerons are the oppressed race whose home planet the Museum has been built on. They long to overthrow the yoke of cruel oppression they are forced to wear by the Moroks, who make them sweep up the corridors, and presumably wheel the tea trolley around.

What “The Space Museum” does do, though, is to add another strand to the ‘you can’t change History’ debate. What it turns out has happened to the Travellers I that they have slipped their own time stream – well, something like that, and seen their own future. Now, once the time stream sorts itself out, the Frozen Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Vicky all disappear from their cages. They are forced to ask themselves the question – is this definitely going to happen, or can we change our own future? This does give the viewer a problem. We know that they’re not going to end up in the cases, because that would be the end of the show for good if they did. So, not able to exploit much tension from that source of plot, we get this rather tedious story about the Xerons’ attempts to overthrow the Moroks. Which might work a little bit better if we cared, but I found I didn’t. For one thing the Moroks aren’t mean enough for me to care that much whether they are overthrown or not. For that matter, the Xerons aren’t oppressed enough for me to care whether they succeed. This sub plot is tedious stuff that makes you glad that it isn’t a six parter.

The last episode does serve the purpose of introducing an important plot element that is necessary to kick start “The Chase”. In the museum the Doctor finds a Space Time Visualiser. He has always wanted one (presumably he just gets socks for Christmas and Birthdays like the rest of us). It’s kind of like a telly that can tune into any event, any time, any place anywhere. What does it tune into? Why, nothing less than the Daleks preparing their own time machine, with an assassination squad to seek and kill the Doctor.

Maybe it’s just me, but I thought that this ending was a wee bit cynical. It’s kind of like the show is saying, ‘Yeah, we know the last three episodes have been a bit pants, but look – we’ve got the Daleks for you next week! You like them, don’t you?”It’s like the naughty man in the overcoat tempting you into his car with a bag of sweets and a promise that he’ll take you to see some puppies. Whether it will have such potentially sinister consequences we’ll find out when we watch it.

What have learned?

The future is changeable – without any room for argument now.

The Daleks’ technology has advanced at such an astonishing rate that they have been able to build their own time machine. 

14: The Crusade

Before Watching

Well, after the relative madness of “The Web Planet” it’s something of a relief to be back on the relatively safe ground of a Historical. This was written by David Whitaker, the show’s first story/script editor, who had moved on and been replaced by Dennis Spooner. This one promises to be more of a return to the style of Historical that John Lucarotti gave us with “Marco Polo” , with real life Historical figures being foregrounded.

This was actually the third Doctor Who story to be novelised after Doctor Who in an exciting adventure with the Daleks – and – Doctor Who and the Zarbi (The Web Planet). It was originally published in 1963 – David Whitaker wrote the novelisation of his own script, and I read it beck in the early 70s, not long before Target began their successful series. I enjoyed this one a lot more than the Doctor Who and the Zarbi, but I’ll be honest, I can’t remember much about it, apart from the Doctor’s explanation of why Richard decided to turn back before he got as far as Jerusalem.

After Watching

Once again, as historical scores more highly than I might have expected. Right, cards on table. I can only realistically judge a stry by how I feel about it now. It’s probably futile for me to attempt to judge just how the ten year old me, for the sake of argument, would have reacted to watching it, but somehow I don’t think that I would have rated it as highly then, as I rate it now.

I’ll try to explain. For one thing, as well as the regulars, this has three terrific actors in the three main roles – Jean Marsh (due to be short lived companion Sara Kingdom in the next series) as King Richard’s sister Joanna, Bernard Kay (who we saw a few weeks ago as Carl Tyler in The Dalek Invasion of Earth) as Saladin, and Julian Glover as Richard the Lionheart (later to be Scaroth in the wonderful City of Death). Any one of those has the ability, like Philip Madoc, to lift any production. Put all three of them into it, and you’ve got every good chance of something special. One of the main plot points is Richard’s desire to find an honourable way out of the situation he is in, which leads him to consider giving his sister Joanna in marriage to Saladin’s brother, Saphadin. This makes for some great scenes between Marsh and Glover. Which actually highlights one of the strengths, as well as one of the weaknesses of this story. One of the strengths, as I have said on more than one occasion, is that the BBC were so good at doing historical drama serials. On the other hand it’s a bit of a weakness in this particular story as I find myself far more interested in Richard, Joanna and Saladin than I am in anything involving the regulars. In fact, they are rather incongruous in this story, an element that doesn’t quite gel with everything that is going on around them,.

As for the script, well, this is a very literate piece of work from David Whitaker, and the actors obviously relish this. To a younger audience I wonder whether some of it might not have come across as a little heavy, but to me it worked just fine. What interested me was that the story takes a very modern tack, which I think might well have been quite surprising for 1965. To me, it was Saladin who came across as the civilised, reasonable, pragmatic leader, while Richard came across as petulant, mercurial, and hot headed – which in truth is probably pretty close to the real, historical Richard.

Which is not to say that the script abjures all clichés. The ever popular ‘the crew gets split up and Barbara gets captured’ is, frankly, wearing a bit thin, now, and that’s one thing I won’t be sorry to see the back of when Ian and Barbara leave at the end of “The Chase”. I expect Barbara would have been quite happy about it as well. Once again she ‘s found herself as the object of desire of some ne’er do well who has no intention of being a gentleman about it. The poor girl should seriously consider hanging her perfume. Another cliché – although not specifically a Doctor Who cliché, and one that I rather enjoyed, was the way that Ian was staked out and smeared with honey after caught by bandits.

Of course, this suffers in the same way that any Historical featuring real and well known Historical figures is going to suffer. In “Marco Polo” we know that Tegana can not kill Kublai Khan – because he didn’t, and that Kublai Khan will eventually sallow Marco to go home – because he did. In the same way we know that Joanna will not be forced to marry Saphadin, because she wasn’t, and Richard will conclude his treaty with Saladin and return home – because he did. And that’s the problem. There just isn’t enough uncertainty, and in a story involving King Richard the Lionheart, the Doctor and the companions are only ever going to be the bit part players, and never the heroes.

Overall, then, it was a perfectly good Historical although it did just sort of , well, end, and even for all that I certainly enjoyed it more than the Dennis Spooner Historicals, if not as much as the John Lucarotti ones.

What Have We Learned?

 Saladin was rather a decent chap, while Richard was a bit of a rotter. I’d always sort of suspected that.

13: The Web Planet

Before Watching

I have such mixed feelings going into this one. On the plus side it is one of my old Hartnell hit list of stories I really wanted to see if I ever got any chance to do so. It’s another space/aliens/monster story, and these are what Doctor Who’s success was built on.

On the other hand, I do recall reading the Bill Strutton novelisation of his own script. Doctor Who and The Zarbi was the second novelisation ever published, in 1965. My primary school had a hardback copy of both this, and the slightly earlier Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks. I enjoyed the Dalek book when I read it, but my reaction to “Doctor Who and the Zarbi” was, and I quote – what was that load of rubbish all about? – Well, to be fair, I was 9 or 10 at the time. At around about the same time I read the first Doctor Who annual, which had stories featuring Sensorites, Voord and also Menoptera and Zarbi. I thought that the Zarbi in the story were just dumb, and the Menoptera got on my wick.

While we’re at it, very little of what I’ve read about The Web Planet is complimentary either, and the photos I’ve seen from it – well, either they don’t do the production any favours, or the whole thing looks a bit ridiculous. Not that I am biased, you understand.

After Watching

Well, what can you possibly say about that? That hasn’t already been said, I mean? One half of me kind of almost wants to watch it all over again just to prove to myself that I wasn’t hallucinating, and it really was like I think it was – while the other half of me is saying – over my dead body.

Now, this isn’t the first time that Doctor Who has featured giant insects. We had one earlier in the season in “Planet of the Giants”, and we’ll have them again in such future delights as “The Green Death” and “The Ark In Space”. Lots of people find normally sized insects rather unsettling, so giant ones are something of a natural choice for a show such as Doctor Who. The problem is, though, that giant insects are very difficult to do convincingly, especially if your special effects budget amounts to the equivalent of tuppence ha’penny and a used bus ticket. So, while the Zarbi bodies aren’t bad, they only ever use one set of legs, and that set of legs are unmistakably human legs. I rather like the menoptera masks, but their bee/butterfly costumes aren’t the best. Then there’s the optera. Pedantry corner. You can understand the name Menoptera. Optera comes from the greek for –wings. So either the idea behind them is an English/Greek hybrid word for men-insects with wings – which is fine – or its meant as a shortening of Hymenoptera – the family of insects including bees and wasps. Again – that’s fine. Now, when Ian and Vrestin find the regressed species descended from menoptera that live beneath the surface, they call them optera. Which means wings – which they don’t have! It’s an irony which I don’t believe for one minute is intentional – and it’s like calling a race of blind aliens the Eyeballs.

Oh, and the optera costumes are terrible too.

How often do we see the Doctor and the crew take it for granted that the atmosphere on a planet on which they land is breathable? Alright, they might check it but it’s a pretty good bet that it will be breathable. So it was a bit of a surprise when it turned out that the atmosphere of Vortis, the ‘web’ planet of the title, is very thin, and so Ian and the Doctor go out in their special breathing anoraks. Just the first clue that “The Web Planet” is Doctor Who, but not as we know it. The breathing anoraks run out of air, and our heroes nearly die from lack of oxygen. Then they recover and we hear no more about it.

The plot is relatively straightforward. Vortis is a planet in habited by giant antlike creatures called the Zarbi. Normally stupid and harmless creatures, the Zarbi are under control of an entity called the Animus. Animus is Latin for mind, and so it’s an appropriate name for a creature that controls the minds of others. So at least Bill Strutton knows his Latin, even if he’s a wee bit shaky on Greek. An a way, the animus reminds me a little bit of the Great Intelligence in the two Troughton yeti stories, and the Nestene Consciousness in the two Jon Pertwee auton stories. Both of them also use proxies to do their dirty work, although the Animus, like the Nestene, does have a body, unlike the Great Intelligence.

The formerly dominant species of Vortis are the Menoptera. These are hybrid bee/butterfly/men in suits creatures. They plan to invade Vortis to defeat whatever is controlling the Zarbi, and win back their planet. The Doctor  and the companions become involved with an advance party of Menoptera, and after winning their friendship, do their best to aid them to defeat the Animus.

Is there a lot more to it than that? I didn’t see an awful lot more to it, I will confess. There’s the usual plot device of the crew splitting up. As with “The Romans”, Vicki and the Doctor make one team, while the Ian and Barbara team is soon split up, and the two of them have to fend for themselves. If the script and the director are both very good, then this can work extremely well. If they’re not, then it can make for a tediously episodic story, and to an extent that’s what we are dealing with in “The Web Planet.

Yes, I know, this was made in the mid 60s, and I will admit that there are aspects of it that almost pull it off. All the shots on the surface of Vortis are shot with some fairly heavy filters on the cameras. Now, I know that there is a story that they actually had Vaseline smeared over the lenses, but my industry insiders say that this was highly unlikely to be the case, since it would have ruined the expensive cameras. However it was done, it does give the shots on the surface eerie fuzzy edges, which does add to the feeling of unworldliness that the team were trying to achieve.

There are moments when the production heaves its bulk out of the mire of its own making. Flight is a motif which recurs throughout the story. Now, I could point out that thin atmospheres and winged flight really don’t mix, but that would be churlish. At one point Barbara asks one of the wounded Menoptera, whose wings were destroyed in a fight with the Zarbi whether his wings will grow back, and he replies that he will never fly again, and there is such real pathos in that moment that you can see just how important flight is to the Menoptera, and what it means to be a Menoptera who has been denied the right to fly. Speaking of which, there were just a couple of shots of the Menoptera flying which despite myself I found rather impressive. One jumps off a ledge just as he’s about to be caught by a Zarbi, and there’s another shot of Menoptera from the main invasion party landing.

While I liked the fact that the production tries so hard to make the Menoptera seem more insectoid by the way they speak, and the way they move (I don’t need to mention the credit “Insect Movements by Roslyn de Winter” credit, since everybody else who’s ever written about this story has already done so) it just starts off weird, and then becomes bloody annoying after a while. Making another point about the way they speak as well, I don’t get why they insist on calling Ian ‘Herron’ and Barbara ‘Abara’. I mean, it’s not as if these would be Menopterised versions of Ian and Barbara – for they sound nothing like the names the Menoptera have for themselves – they have names like Vlasta and Vrestin. Yes, nitpicking again.

With so much that is unusual and atypical about “The Web Planet”, I have to ask myself why I didn’t enjoy it a lot more, and why I couldn’t accept it for what it was, rather than pull it apart for what it wasn’t. I think I can boil it down to a number of things : -

* I think that I read once that this is the only story with no humanoid characters other than the TARDIS regulars. I can only imagine the terrible demands that this made on the costume department. Now, the Menoptera are good – I like the individual masks especially, but they don’t exactly blow your socks off – and I doubt that they removed much footwear back in 1965 when it was first broadcast either. The Zarbi are a pretty decent attempt at doing a giant antlike creature in a costume which an actor can wear – but – and here’s the rub – they are just not frightening. They make some weird noises whenever they are near, and they bump into each other, and that’s about it. Now, you can have mindless monsters that never speak which can be frightening if you make them relentless and unstoppable. Neither can be said of the Zarbi. They have what are called larva guns. These are rather woodlousey looking creatures which scuttle along, firing nastiness from what I can only assume is their proboscis. They look rather pathetic, although not as pathetic as the optera. Speaking of the optera, I couldn’t believe the way that they moved – bouncing around like people in a sack race.

* It’s a six parter, and it’s clearly too long. You could edit away a good half hour of this, and if you did it carefully nobody would be any the wiser.

* The story really isn’t great. It’s the sort of thing which you can end up with when you have a putative script discussion like the hypothetical one below –

“Bill, insects are frightening. Giant insects even more so. Can you write us a giant insect story?”

“I suppose. What’s in it?”

“Giant insects.”

“No, I mean yes, but, what’s happening in it?”

“Giant insects.”

“Ok, but like, is there any theme I can explore?”

“Giant insects”.

Which is why, dear friends, what we have in the web planet is a story about a plentiful of giant insects. And not a great deal more.

What Have We learned?

Don’t pull the wings off a Menoptera. It’s cruel and they get very depressed.

Either the Menoptera are hermaphrodites, or their males are the only species in the Universe immune to Barbara’s charms. 

12: The Romans

Before Watching

This is another Dennis Spooner historical. Well, you may recall that while I could appreciate the Reign of Terror, I couldn’t say that I really enjoyed it that much. I thought that it was somehow less than the sum of its parts – just my opinion, and of course, feel free to disagree.

I’ve heard or read sometime in the past that The Romans is supposed to be just this side of Carry On Cleo. Which wouldn’t actually worry me too much if it’s true, since Carry On Cleo is my favourite of that particular series of films. It’s only 4 parts too, so if it isn’t that good, well, at least it isn’t going to last that long.

After Watching

I don’t know what I was expecting, but I wasn’t quite expecting that. Just when you think you’ve got to grips with what the First Doctor stories have to offer . . . If we take the first episode – The Slave Traders – it opens after the travellers have been staying in an empty villa in the roman countryside for several weeks already. Now, like me, it’s possible that you might well have thought from time to time – why doesn’t the Doctor and the crew find somewhere nice, and chill out for a while? Well, in this story it’s clear that they have done so. In the first episode we see Vicki and Barbara taking a walk down to the local market – and they’re just like any modern day tourists. It’s such a familiar scene – and yet it really isn’t familiar in the context of Doctor Who. The Doctor decides that he’s off to Rome, and doesn’t want Ian and Barbara along, leaving them potentially for several days. At this stage I have to say that I’m pretty sure that the scene before the two of them are captured in the villa is deliberately designed to leave adult viewers to draw the conclusion that they have done the deed, as it were, without actually saying anything that a parent would be embarrassed to have to explain to a seven year old.

When Ian and Barbara are taken prisoner in the villa, and sold by the slavers, I couldn’t help but think of a similar scene in Carry on Cleo – alright, the slavers in this weren’t actually called Marcus et Spencius like in the film, but it still made me think of them.

One of the things I like about watching the Hartnells story by story is that you can actually see the Doctor’s character develop. Yes, he looks old, but actually he is the youngest he will ever be. The mean, grumpy and inconsiderate edges have all been practically worn off by this time, and here Hartnell is at his most impish, and virtually twinkles through every scene. He and Vicki chance upon the body of the murdered lyre player Petulian on the way to Rome, and when he is mistaken by a centurion for the lyre player he is quite happy to play along. The centurion escorts him to Rome, where the Emperor Nero awaits a command performance.

I was interested to see how the story would deal with Nero. It’s very easy to see him as a buffoon – he acted like a buffoon at times, but he was also an amoral killer. Derek Francis goes for the buffoon here, although this does mean that when we are allowed just a glimpse of the monster – when he intentionally poisons a slave who is getting on his nerves – it is much more effective. I guessed that Nero would be the latest to join the massed ranks of men who’d like to force their attentions on the divine Barbara, and his pursuit of her charms has all the subtlety of a Feydeau farce.

Now, I know that this one was played for laughs, but I think even now you can see how Dennis Spooner was trying to change the show’s attitude to the Doctor altering/influencing Earth history. It’s made fairly clear that it is the way that the Doctor accidentally burns Nero’s architectural plans that gives Nero the idea of burning down Rome. (OK – short historical digression. Almost certainly Nero was not responsible for the burning of Rome. He wasn’t even in Rome at the time.) Only last season the Doctor was telling us that you can’t change History, not one line of it. Now, apparently, it seems that either the Doctor has steered Earth History in one direction – or that he was predestined to do it. Alright, let’s not go down that line of argument again.

All in all I don’t have a great deal to say about this story. It was pleasant enough – and probably the fact that everyone involved was clearly having a blast with the story made it more enjoyable too. Given the choice between having to watch this, or the Reign of Terror again, I’d watch this one every time. Still, it does make you think , when you see that the team wanted to experiment with not just doing another Historical, but specifically doing a ‘funny’ historical. Did that suggest that they were losing patience with or interest in the genre? Well, there’s another one along in two stories time, and that should help us answer that. 

What Have We Learned?

Good question. 

The TARDIS crew do actually stay in the same place for relatively long periods of time.

Ian and Barbara are definitely 'at it'. 

11:The Rescue

Before Watching

Confession time. I have actually watched this story before. Years ago now UK Gold used to show some of the old stories on a Friday night. I watched “The Rescue”, “The Time Meddler”, “Tomb of the Cybermen”, and the last few parts of “The War Games” if I recall correctly. At this stage of the game, many years later, it’s difficult to recall that many details of any of them, although some of them made more impression than others at the time.

The Rescue then. Let me summarise what I remember. Alien planet. Crashed spaceship from Earth in the future. Young girl, Vicky, terrorised by large spiky alien. In the end she joins the TARDIS crew, which Susan has handily just left.

It’s only two parts so it should be relatively painless, but from what I recall I’m not exactly expecting a classic here.

After Watching

It was interesting to see that Maureen O’Brien who plays Vicky got at least as much to do as Carole Ann Ford ever did – and probably quite a bit more than in any episode other than episode one of “An Unearthly Child”. You can see that there’s already some affection there between the Doctor and her – so obviously this is the direction that the production team decided that they wanted Hartnell’s Doctor to take, and that’s all to the good. He’s got the capability to allow flashes of the grumpy old git out now and again, just for a bit of variety and to stop the show getting too saccharine.

It hasn’t been often so far that the TARDIS has landed on a planet the Doctor has visited in the past, but I suppose it helps explain how he knows that the ‘monster’ Koquillion, is really Bennett, Vicky’s fellow castaway, in a Didonian costume. Now, this is one of my problems with this story. Bennett is, by all accounts, a nasty piece of work. He’s a criminal, who used the crash to set about murdering his captors, and the remaining Didonians he found. Vicky is only kept alive as she doesn’t know what he is and what he’s done, and she will be his ticket onto the rescue ship when it eventually arrives. As I say, thoroughly nasty , and yet, not in the least bit frightening. Or interesting for that matter.

This story didn’t look quite as cheap as I remembered. The exteriors of the ship looked quite like what Gerry Anderson was doing at roughly the same time. Scenes in the abandoned Didonian buildings look really rather good in moody black and white. But overall, this whole story, all two episodes of it, is rather bland.  If it had to stand alone – well, it wouldn’t really. But it gets by, I think because we’ve just spent 6 weeks fighting the Daleks – (well, three consecutive evenings in my case, but you know where I’m coming from) and this is at least a contrast and a change of pace. But it’s hard to find that much to get excited about with it. The main purpose of this story is to introduce us to Vicky, and to help us get to know and hopefully like her, since she’s going to be a member of the regular cast from now on. And this, at least, it does fairly well. As I mentioned earlier, there’s an interesting relationship developing between her and the Doctor.

I really haven’t got a lot more to say about this one, but then I don’t honestly think that there is a lot more to say about it anyway. The fact that it was written by story editor David Whitaker suggests that this was written to fill in a gap, and also to helpfully introduce the new companion. It’s nowhere near as unconventional as his first Doctor Who story, The Edge of Destruction. Sadly, it’s nowhere near as interesting either.

What Have We Learned?

Ian must never, ever again say the words 'Cocky Likkin'

10:The Dalek Invasion of Earth

Before watching

Produced on MS Paint using Bamboo graphics tablet

This is one of the Hartnell stories where I can honestly say that I know the storyline pretty well before watching it. This is partly through having several times seen the Peter Cushing film, “Daleks : Invasion Earth 2050” based on the serial, and partly through the Target novelization. While the film to a greater extent, and the novels to a lesser extent may take a couple of liberties with some of the plot details, by and large they’re pretty faithful enough to give you a good idea.

However, I have had it on the word of someone whose judgement on matters DW that I value – my brother – that this is a bit slow and tedious. It’s a 6 parter, and they often tend to be padded. Also the word on the streets is that the effects – albeit that they were made for tuppence ha’penny to use the currency of the time it was made, are poor.

Therefore – expectations aren’t that high.

After Watching

While not wishing to gloss over any of this show’s flaws, I really enjoyed it. I wrote about the DWM Mighty 200 poll in my round up of season 1 – and this story is ranked 44^th on the DWM Mighty 200 poll, and I think that’s pretty fair.

Actually the start of the serial, the first episode, was really on the whole rather good. I mean, I’d already in the past watched “An Unearthly Child”, and “The Daleks”, and read the Target novelisation of “The Keys of Marinus”, but when you see the opening of this, their last adventure together, you come to realize how they have developed as a group together. You can’t help wondering what the impact of this episode would have been had they kept daleks out of the title, and pre publicity for the show, and you hadn’t realized they were involved until that iconic final shot of the dalek coming up out of the Thames.

Really and truly, this should be quite disorienting. I am watching this in 2015, pretending to be London some time after 2164, while all the time making no effort to look like anything other than 1964. Although the show is set around 2164, the visuals make no concession to this, and as a result you kind of just get on with it. If anything it gives the story a nostalgic feel.

Actually, the rather gentle pace of the first couple of episodes, and the atmosphere reminded me of films such as ‘Day of the Triffids’, and if anything its maybe a foreshadowing of Terry Nation’s own “Survivors”, his 1970s drama series about life for a group of survivors of a devastating pandemic which kills a huge percentage of the human population of Earth.

 I don’t know that you can get the point of the Hartnell shows from just reading the Target books. The stories I’ve actually seen, and this one in particular give me the strong feeling that you have to watch them to understand.  I loved the third and fourth Doctors, but there was always a feeling that they were going to eventually take charge and be more than equal to whatever situation they might find themselves in. The dynamic is completely different in the Hartnell era. In “An Unearthly Child” the Doctor has taken Barbara and Ian off on a joyride to prove to them that he can do what he says he can. This is an extremely irresponsible, if not reprehensible act, since he knows that there is no guarantee that he is ever going to be able to bring them back to his own time and space. In the first episode  they do actually believe that they’re home after all this time, and it’s the dawning realization that this is not actually the case which adds greatly to the atmosphere and poignancy. I find that the way that the action and the driving of the plot is shared out between the Doctor , Ian and Barbara, and to a much lesser extent Susan, to be really different to what I’m used to as well. It shouldn’t work, and yet it actually does. For example – the extended sequences of Barbara and Richard Briers’ wife running through the streets of London pushing Dortmun should really be laughable. But they aren’t.

Partly this is because of some great acting. Look at Jacqueline Hill’s face during these sequence. I tell you the woman looks terrified out of her skin. I cheered when she drove into the Daleks.

OK – the plot, essentially, is rubbish. The Daleks are excavating the Earth’s core in order to bung a motor in it and fly it around the Universe? Yeah, right. Nonsense. The special effects shots of the Daleks’ flying saucer actually flying are rather embarrassing. They must have looked pretty crappy even back in 1964, which is why you see so little of them. I can’t help wondering why they needed these shots anyway. If you’re going to do it that badly, then why do it at all? Then there’s the Robotmen. Their headsets are awful, and some of their acting doesn’t seem a lot better. Yet harping on about these things is all missing the point. I concede all of these drawbacks, and yet I loved it.

This story is all about the triumphant resurrection of the Daleks. They had a massive part to play in the success of the first season, and as a reward they get a story which allows us the iconic shots of the lone Dalek rising out of the Thames, and Daleks trundling across Westminster Bridge and around Trafalgar Square. The shots of the robotmen overseeing the enslaved humans dragging wagons into the mine are really good too.  There’s some lovely performances too. Bernard Kay – again, a name you might not know, but a face you surely do – is always good value for money. It was nice to see Nicholas Smith – Mr. Rumboldt from ‘Are You Being Served’ popping up in the mine scenes too. If you twist my arm and force me to tell the truth I’d admit that it’s probably at least an episode too long, and yet I would still far rather watch this than the film version any day of the week. I would also far rather watch this than ‘The Daleks’ .The original Dalek serial is too long at 7 episodes, and I’m afraid that the Thals get on my wick after a while, being, in my considered opinion, a bunch of big girls’ blouses. And if that wasn’t enough, we have Susan’s leaving scene. This is neatly prepared for with a couple of the Doctor’s comments as he notices the burgeoning romance between Susan and David Campbell. Actually, I say burgeoning, but this was 1964 family viewing, so subtle hints are all we get. The Doctor has been criticised for his indecent haste in packing Susan off at the first opportunity, but I think that this is in character, as a protracted leaving scene would not be something he could handle yet. This was the first ever leaving scene in Doctor Who, and in my view Hartnell pulls it off brilliantly. These little emotional moments, where he is called on to put out real tenderness, really show off what a good actor he was.

Judging by the fact that she was willing to appear in 1983’s ‘The Five Doctors’, and other appearances on various shows and DVDs about the show, Carole Ann Ford has come to terms with her time on the show. You can’t help sympathising with her, since by all accounts she was sold on the ‘unearthly child’ concept of her role, yet found that the unearthly aspects of her character were largely ignored, and she became the first in a long line of screamers. For a lot of her time she was just used as a functional character whose purpose was there to move the plot forward. She wouldn’t be the last. I am sorry to see her go, but I think the show will cope without her far more easily than it would do without Ian or Barbara at this stage.

 What Have We Learned

Everything is cyclical. Or, put it another way, London in 2164 will be a dead ringer for London 1964

William Hartnell is capable of scenes of genuine emotional intensity

Daleks keep pets