Day 36 — February 5th 2021
The Search and The Final Phase
The Search (The Space Museum — Episode Three)
I’ve long held that the ideal length for classic Doctor Who stories is three episodes. You spend the first one setting up the mystery and introducing the new location and guest characters (and the first episode is almost always the best of a story), the second one ramps up the pressure or the tension or the mystery, which ever you like. Then the third episode wraps everything up, and we’re off to the next adventure. Lovely.
I also hold that you can often skip the third episode of most Doctor Who stories and you don’t miss out on an awful lot. In many ways, The Search is a typical Episode Three. We have lots of running around, our heroes are captured by and then escape from various enemies, and at the end of it all you don’t really feel as though much has happened.
Doctor Who himself doesn’t even appear in this one! Gone are the days when they’d try to explain away the absence of a cast member, or shoot some film material to carefully cover their break. The last episode ended with Doctor Who being sent away to be processed, and we simply hear nothing until the end of this episode, where Ian stares off camera and reacts to… well, something, presumably. They did similar with Barbara during The Web Planet, with Jaqueline Hill simply vanishing for a week with no explanation. At least William Russell got to pop up on film for The Crusade!
I’m not sure you actually notice Doctor Who’s absence, though. Ididn’t really wonder where he was, and the story didn’t feel lacking for his not being there. In many ways, this is Vicki’s episode, as she’s the only one of the regular cast who gets given anything to do here. She riles up the Zerons and talks them into staging their revolution which had previously only been a dream. I’m not sure where she picked up the ability to reprogram computers designed to securely protect vaults, but perhaps I’m thinking too much about it?
There’s not a great lot else to say about this episode. It’s not as bad as I’d been expecting, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s good. It just sort of… exists. 3/10.
The Final Phase (The Space Museum — Episode Four)
I still think there’s a half decent story in here if only it were given the chance to shine. Play the lines with more humour. Give the guest cast something more to do than just standing around being bored. I never feel as though I’ve got a handle on who the Moroks are. They’re often spoken of as being a fearsome intergalactic threat, but that’s clearly something that they used to be, not something they are any more. But you get the sense that the script hasn’t realised that’s the case, and thinks that they’re still quite threatening.
There’s an attempt to make them seem like the enemy here by telling the story of how they invaded this planet and then turned it into their Space Museum, but that just seems a bit dull to me. They invaded a planet. Well good for them. I’d half remembered the young kids with the eyebrows as being the children of the Morok, who were rising up to rebel against the out-of-touch older generation, and I can’t help but think that would have been the better story.
I think there’s scope for novelising this story, but giving it a totally new angle, to try and do something more interesting with it. Really bring out the humour, and make the story work a little harder. Give the revolution a scale which it’s lacking on screen, with rebels overwhelming the guards.
And most crucially of all, tidy up this final episode. I’m not sure what’s going on for large sections of this one, and I suspect I’m not alone, because you get the sense that the cast don’t really know what they’re saying either. There’s a sequence after Ian has freed Doctor Who from the Moroks where both Russell and Hartnell are saying lines which seem to bear little relation to each other, and everyone around them looks baffled.
In all, I’m torn by The Space Museum. I’d always had it down as one great episode followed by three awful ones, but it’s really more four slightly average episodes with very little to say. 3/10.
I do like the final scene, though, giving us a tease of the Daleks to come! Even more amazing is that this is the first appearance of the ‘new look’ Daleks, complete with the solar slats around the middle, replacing the simple rings we’ve had so far. Even more interesting (to me!) is that the Dalek seen in this final scene is the same one that Doctor Who was hiding in earlier in the serial — it’s been modified and upgraded since then ready for the appearance here.
