I love the way that William Hartnell’s Doctor can only take the politest of interests in this new adventure – hearing the Drahvins (the alien females in conflict with the Rills) speak of their war, he seems to tut with the concern due if he’d hear them tell how they’d stubbed a toe. He’s done all this before – if you want to impress the Doctor in his third season, you’ve got to try harder than that. He gets most excited about his (frankly rather hasty) theory that because it’s quiet and he can’t see anybody, the whole planet must be lifeless. Maureen O’Brien has a jolly time cutting Steven’s hair and naming cute robots. And once Peter Purves realises that his chat-up lines aren’t working on the Drahvins, he spends the rest of the episode being rather snotty with them.
T: You had The Doctor’s Daughter on the plane? You lucky bastard – I had High School Musical 3, and a cup of tea that was of a colour no tea has ever been before. Sorry that K was comatose in the hotel room when you stopped by – she decided to utilise a traditional method, handed down through generations of shamen, to combat flight stress: six diazepam and a bottle of vodka.
Anyway, this is William Emms’ sole contribution to the series, and his voice is at odds with much of what we’ve heard before. And yet, there’s some offbeat and archaic phraseology that gives the story a curious verbal landscape – I love the substitution of “dawns” for “days”, and little touches like “metal mesh”. And it’s rather thrilling that after ten minutes of listening to the soundtrack, we suddenly get a bit of movement, courtesy of that hefty video clip recovered back in the 1990s. It gives some indication that Derek Martinus is as effective with the camera as Douglas Camfield; his framing of the characters shows he’s taken care with the visual makeup of the picture. And I really like what we see of Stephanie Bidmead as Maaga, the Drahvin leader – beneath her clipped formality and posturing, there’s a weariness that suggests she’s tired of both war and hanging around with staccato clones.
I don’t know what to make of the title, though. “Four hundred dawns”? Where, exactly? We’re told that the Drahvins left their homeworld 400 dawns ago, but the action of this episode revolves around an anticipated planetary explosion in 14 dawns; at the climax, that’s shortened down to a scant two dawns. So, why refer to “four hundred” in the title at all? It’s like calling Underworld episode one Departure From Minyos. And we’re not actually in Galaxy Four either – it’s where the Drahvins are from. So to review: we’re in a story named after where it isn’t set, and the opening episode has a title depicting a time span that isn’t relevant. It’s most peculiar.
And it’s also hard to deduce just how much Emms expected the audience to be fooled by the old “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” switcheroo concerning the beautiful Drahvins and the “evil” Rills, or if he thought they’d know the score from the very start. After all, Steven has already deduced that the Rills’ offer to help the Drahvins escape the dying planet might be genuine, and Vicki senses that Maaga would enjoy killing them. Even the Doctor mistrusts the Drahvins from their very first encounter, which suggests that any story-twist where the Drahvins are concerned might not have quite the same impact as the one in The Sixth Sense.
Even so, I do think the premise of two spaceships marooned on a doomed planet is a novel one, whatever the script’s bizarre desire to spoon-feed us. And isn’t it interesting that if the new series wants to do a race against time, the Doctor and company only have 42 minutes to prevent total disaster? Here, the shocking cliffhanger is they’ve only got a day!
Trap of Steel (Galaxy Four episode two)
R: There’s a lovely moment where the Doctor searches inside his pockets for... a screwdriver. Not a sonic screwdriver. Not yet. But we’ll get there.
It seems to sum up this episode rather well. Galaxy Four feels like an interim story between two different styles. It’s not the adventure series we were promised by Dennis Spooner’s time as story editor, nor is it the more experimental drama we’ll be getting when his successor Donald Tosh gets to work with incoming producer John Wiles. This is the fag end of Verity Lambert’s time on the show, and it feels like as everyone swaps their work overalls they’ve taken their eye off the conveyor belt. William Emms’ story feels as if it’s been written by someone who has a vague idea of what Doctor Who is like – and, because it’s a script which has a lot of the tropes (weird robots, people getting captured, ugly monsters) but absolutely none of the heart, it’s absolutely not like anything we’ve ever seen before. There’s not much going on in Galaxy Four. But as with the screwdriver, the elements are in place – and we’ll get there.
There’s still stuff to enjoy. Hartnell and O’Brien sparkle together nicely, and make the most of a script which has some witty lines. (The bit where Vicki works out how to best a Chumbley is really very funny: “I noted, observed, collated, concluded, and then I threw a rock.”) And Peter Purves’ attempts to introduce a Drahvin drone to the concept of equality are really rather delightful.
T: I’m sorry to be so fixated on the episode titles, but they’re getting increasingly enigmatic. Is there a “trap of steel” in this episode, or is William Emms just mucking about with us? I suppose the Drahvin’s broken spaceship could be one, in a way, sort of, but otherwise I just don’t know what it means.
Like you, Rob, I can mine some good points from this. The episode starts out with some strong dramatic dialogue – the Doctor’s comment that “Tomorrow is the last day this planet will ever see” sets up the tempo very effectively at the start, and for a time the audience feels as if the heat is on. There’s a good, foreboding moment where Vicki notes the size of the Chumbley corridor, and then looks at the Rill corridor and gets a bit freaked out – this sets us up nicely for the cliffhanger, which has Vicki screaming at her first sight of the Rills, and cuts into an otherwise cutesy scene. The regulars are on good form, and the Chumblies wibble sweetly enough.
But really, what strikes me most about this episode is that for all it promises a fight for survival on a dying planet, not a lot actually happens, does it? The Doctor and Steven get stuck in the TARDIS for a bit, then they walk from the TARDIS to the Drahvins. Then the Doctor and Vicki walk over to the Rills. Steven argues with a Drahvin, then Maaga. The Doctor and Vicki continue walking, and we learn that the Rills are ugly. The End.
I wouldn’t so much mind the slower pace if the story seemed to be going somewhere interesting, but I’m not feeling very confident about this. In fact, the scene with Steven and the Drahvin – although an effective demonstration of his intelligence – if anything just demonstrates that the clones Maaga commands are thick as two short planks. It’s hard to feel intrigued by what’s coming next when the baddies we’ve seen so far amount to a gun-wielding harridan and her posse of the dimmest aliens in the galaxy. I know, I know... we’re supposed to stay positive here, but I need something to work with!
February 12th
Air Lock (Galaxy Four episode three)
R: It’s okay, I’m beginning to find my way into Galaxy Four now. I had a bit of a shaky start, partly because it wasn’t the story I imagined it to be. I’d always had this idea it was a simple moral tale about how the ugly Rills were (shock!) nice, and the beautiful Drahvins were (no, what?) evil. But it’s clear right from the beginning of episode one that Maaga is about as affable as a driving instructor, and I was floored. I find I rather like the Drahvins now. There’s a certain world weariness to Stephanie Bidmead which is very appealing – and I love the way she pulls out from that to describe with such enthusiasm how the Rills and the TARDIS regulars will die horribly on an exploding planet. Because her Drahvin soldiers are just drones, it comes across a bit like she’s telling a gruesome fairy tale to infants – only to give up, and get bored with her audience, because they haven’t the imagination to appreciate horrific deaths they can’t see for themselves. It’s all rather wonderful. There’s a downside to being the most evil person in the army, and that’s when your subordinates haven’t got a clue just how nasty you�
�re actually being.
The Rills, in contrast, are a bit humourless and dry. But it’s very funny that they use the Chumblies to be the voiceboxes for the alien voices – Robert Cartland is so solemn and sonorous, it’s a bit like imagining the Quarks suddenly voiced by James Earl Jones.
T: Hooray, as the episode title promises, there’s an airlock in this episode! Okay, it’s probably not the most dramatic or riveting of story-elements, but it is as advertised!
I too appreciate Stephanie Bidmead – it’s so novel to have a commander whose frustration with her underlings is understandable because they’ve been created as grunts, as opposed to their just happening to be rather ineffective and hapless. Drahvin high command has evidently issued an edict requiring that a creature with brains, emotions and imagination serve as the leader of each task force, whilst the other members are expendable labour. It makes sense up to a point, and results in a terrific scene where Maaga berates her troops for lacking the imagination to picture and savour the destruction of her enemies. All of this makes the Drahvins more interesting than episode one suggested.
But really, my attention keeps being drawn to the Rills – who for a time were widely regarded by fandom as the only Doctor Who monsters for whom no visual representation existed. (Remember that in those days, we’d never heard of Celation, an alien from The Daleks’ Master Plan who was for a while only represented by nothing, and then only a tiny, rare photo, and finally was revealed when episode two of that story was found.) Now there’s... what? One, maybe two surviving photos of the Rill that the Doctor and company meet? The lack of moving pictures means that we’ll never know how effective the Rills were on screen – something that I fear is the case with a lot of this story. We know from elsewhere that Derek Martinus is a director who can keep things flowing and looking good, so it’s incredibly frustrating that much of what we glean from this is guesswork. It’s a neat idea, for instance, that the creatures are dependent upon ammonia and thus obscured by gas – I would like to think that this was rendered in an interesting way, but there’s no way to find out.
It’s not a shot in the dark to say, however, that this episode is fundamentally about contact – or rather a discourse – between the Doctor and the Rill, who to look at them are two very different creatures. When the Doctor asks where a Chumbley is off to, the Rill – in Robert Cartland’s dignified tones – gently admonishes him by pointing out that it’s off to repair the damage he has caused. Hartnell then gets very flustered and embarrassed, and it’s a lovely bit of interaction between them. What’s more telling, though, is when the Doctor gives the Rills’ embarrassment about their appearance very short shrift: “We’re not children,” he sagely points out. We could, if we wished, mock this story because this core message – judging by appearances is just immature – is overly simple, but it’s one that society is still struggling to learn, even 40 years after this was made.
The Exploding Planet (Galaxy Four episode four)
R: What’s to like about The Exploding Planet? That’s honestly a tough one. It’s as if William Emms gave up writing after episode three, and decided to wait out the 25 minutes until the story was over – it’s pretty much what the characters do. The Doctor spends the time siphoning energy from the TARDIS into the Rill ship, whilst constantly getting time updates from his companions, and reassuring them they’re under no particular pressure to do this any more speedily. And he’s right: watching this is a bit like pretending that someone fixing your car is high drama. The Drahvins know that unless they attack the Rill spaceship in a desperate attempt to get off the planet, they’ll die – and yet, somehow, they don’t quite get around to doing anything more urgent than bashing a single Chumbley on the bonce with a bit of metal piping.
I was at a convention in the mid-80s, where William Emms sat on the stage with the likes of JN-T and Eric Saward, and spoke of how the current production team, sitting only inches away from him, wouldn’t read the scripts he submitted to them. And he grumpily concluded that was because “modern” TV was all about sparkly special effects, and not about intelligent drama. (I was 14, but even I could tell at that age this wasn’t the best way to endear yourself to people you were trying to get work from.) After relistening to Galaxy Four, I’m still waiting for Emms’ intelligent drama. Actually, I’d even put up with a few lowbrow brain-dead special effects.
Peter Purves complained of this story that he’d simply been given lines written for Jacqueline Hill, and that Steven didn’t come across as a character at all. I’d disagree, actually; he gets the one interesting scene in the episode, in which – cynical space pilot that he is – Steven refuses to believe that the Rills are quite as selfless and altruistic as they claim, and demands to know their real agenda. It’s like a breath of fresh air through all the moral homilies. And it’s only a shame that he’s wrong, because it might have made the episode a little more dramatic.
And I do quite like the end. In these days of modern Who, when one story every season has to find a way of writing out the Doctor, they haven’t yet hit upon this idea: simply having our heroes point at the scanner, pick out a planet, and wonder what’s going on there. As it is, the brief lead-in to the next story entails Barry Jackson being rather brilliant, remembering that he should kill – and saying so in such a reasoned and affable manner that it sounds rather chilling. It’s a lot more interesting than what happened on the exploding planet, at any rate.
I’m sorry, Toby. I really tried hard to find something good to say. I was defeated. It’s up to you to rescue this baby. I’m now off to the hotel bar downstairs to talk with fans about some good Doctor Who. You salvage this Galaxy Four review – do it well, and there’s a nice shiny glass of wine in it for you.
T: I saw William Emms at a convention too – although not the one you mentioned – on a very grumpy panel about the Hartnell years that bemoaned the current state of the series. Along with countless others who – like myself – hadn’t actually seen any of these 60s “classics”, I applauded heartily. We’d never watched the work in question, and so perhaps weren’t in the best place to judge, but by Heaven – we knew for certain that Doctor Who wasn’t as good as it used to be!
Fortunately, times have changed – not only are we now working professionals and convention guests (I find this somewhat impossible to believe, and am a bit daunted by it all), but also, the new series is in such rude health that fandom is very proud of it and isn’t quite as strident and defensive about bygone eras of Doctor Who as it once was. I very much doubt that we’ll see panels in which people previously associated with the show will take shots at the current production team. (Well, maybe a little, but not very much.)
As for the final instalment of Galaxy Four... hmm, as you say, it’s less a “race against time” and more a “saunter against time”. It begins with a certain amount of incident, though – a bomb gets chucked through a window, Steven is freed and our heroes escape from the Drahvins with lots of breathlessness and urgency. It’s only afterwards that things start slowing down, but I don’t seem to mind this as much as you – there’s lots of build-up to the planet disintegrating, and events keep upping the dramatic ante. It’s a bit like the constant eruptions in the TARDIS in The Edge of Destruction. And the Drahvins work better than you might think – there’s an interesting scene in their spaceship as Maaga falls back on shallow military catchphrases to calm the nerves of her soldiers.
All in all, this is a reasonable stab at doing something different. I like the Rills’ dignified nature, and feel sorry for the poor old Chumbley who sacrifices himself to get the travellers back to the TARDIS. To put it another way, Doctor Who is such a strange series that I’m here made to admire a noble warthog and get emotionally attached to a twittering dustbin.
And now, as I didn’t whine, I think I’ve earned some, er, wine. Time to hit the bar and take you up on your offer... if, of course, I can prise you away from your adoring fans.
February 13th
Mission to the
Unknown
R: Aha! Now that’s more like it. We all think of this, of course, as being the only classic Doctor Who story that has neither the Doctor nor any of his companions in it. But structurally, it’s a lot weirder than that. You could call this the first of a 12-part adventure... which then unexpectedly has a couple of comedy stories (The Myth Makers and The Feast of Steven) in the middle of it. But this gives us a sense of the genuinely epic; it’s a story that can’t be told in one go, and needs a couple of breathers put in. And if we were talking about how you could play around with audience expectations in Season One by simply never letting them know how long a story was going to last, then they’ll be confounded absolutely by this. Everyone watching would be sitting there waiting for the sound of the TARDIS to cut through the weird alien shrieks of the jungle – and waiting in vain. And because the regulars never show up, everyone here dies. You get the feeling not only that the Doctor is a genuine saviour, and that his presence alone can make things better, but that the world is a far more brutal place without him. So, who do we look to in his stead? Space security agent Marc Cory, that’s who – he’s clearly smart and resourceful, but he’s also an emotionless killer who’ll get his mission accomplished at the cost of his own life and anybody else’s.
Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) Page 26
