DOCTOR WHO-THE SPACE MUSEUM

 

DOCTOR WHO-The Space Museum aka ep 1 of …The Space Museum AND The Dimensions of Time

 

 

IAN: Doctor, we’ve got our clothes on.

 

DOCTOR: Well, I should hope so, dear boy. I should hope so.

 

Much has been written about this episode and indeed, it is very like a TWILIGHT ZONE (in particular ELEGY or an OUTER LIMITS episode, however, with continuing characters, this one is more likable. Throughout eps 1 and 2, the Doctor comes across as this likeable, yet sometimes grouchy leader, who chuckles at his own jokes, covers his own mistakes or shortcomings…sometimes, and considers his companions’ ideas about this bizarre situation but usually discards them as wrong. He’s wholly watchable again and even more so. He touches his lapels a lot in the first two episodes of this story, something attributed to this Doctor. He’s also quite funny.

 

The Tardis, or its occupants, seems to have jumped a time track, causing the foursome to find themselves not leaving footprints in the dust, sometimes moving through solid objects, and unable to hear the talk of two alien races on the planet. They are also unable to be seen by said alien races. Their clothes have changed from their Crusade disguises to their regular outfits. Vicki gets a glass of water from a machine for the Doctor and drops it but it flies back up into her hand, unbroken and with the water back in it!

 

Even worse, the foursome discover themselves seemingly dead and stuffed (?) although that’s never stated directly, as exhibits in cases in a museum of the planet. They try to find a way out of the museum…yes, they get themselves lost in it early on…and figure out a way of not ending up in the cabinets. Does staying in the museum lead to that or does leaving? I’d say staying but they are unsure.

 

As for the alien races: the Moroks come across as humanoid with strange hair and clothes but also as being sort of petty, miserable, and thoroughly unlikeable. The leader seems to want to leave this planet and return home, yet he rails on about how bored he was at home. Sounds like their planet was a nice one and yet they seem to want to spread out and invade other nicer places out of boredom.

 

As for bloopers, in ep 1, a light seems to go on as the travelers are outside the doors to the museum. This also happened in The Web Planet as a crucial moment: discussing how the light on the surface is not scary…and suddenly there is a light that came on.

 

Ep 1 is interesting and the most well loved by fans, however 2 is not a bad ep either. In 2 we learn about the Moroks more (they and the other alien race, the ones who are actually from the planet the travelers are on, the Xerons, do not talk, that we can hear, in ep 1).

 

The Xerons seem to be only teenagers and we will find out why later on (possibly the older people have all been killed or taken away) and are planning on using the travelers to start a revolution against the nasty Morok men. The Xerons have bushy eyebrows but all the ones we see are young and good looking despite that. They get the Doctor, who was so very happy that he avoided them after escaping (somehow nearly invisibly overpowering a teenage boy and tying him up and then hiding in a Dalek casing)…that he manages to turn and run right into two Moroks. Regardless of how they treated the Doctor, the Xerons seem a nice bunch.

 

The Moroks in ep 2 interrogate the Doctor, who’s stuck in a chair. He does well against the machine that tries to force him to give information from his mind and transpose it onto a screen in a quite amusing sequence.

 

In another amusing sequence, the other three are still lost in the museum so Ian takes Barbara’s cardigan to unravel it and plot their way so that they will stop going round and round the same halls and rooms. Barbara has to show him how to unravel it …at first he tries to use his mouth to pull it apart!!!? They do find their way only to have to hide from Moroks.

 

The Doctor’s joy at his own smartness is short lived. When the lead Morok realizes that he has rattled the Doctor, the Doctor is taken away to the preparation room…to be added to the museum as a display.

 

The first episode is certainly entertaining but so is Ep 2. I’d have to say two very good episodes. 

DOCTOR WHO-THE SEARCH aka the Space Museum Pt 3

 

Lots to write about this episode. The first thing to notice is that this is the first episode to that makes one sit up and take notice of the soundtrack. I don’t know if it was stock music or what but all the music used here is rather wonderful. The fight music as Ian had a lengthy and well-choreographed tangle with two Moroks is rather grand and exciting, almost from an Irwin Allen show or an early PLANET OF THE APES film. Rather wonderful, too, is the music as Barbara finds herself locked into the museum AND later, as she and one of the teen Xeron boys, Dako, face being gassed out of the museum but find no way out and pass out.

 

Vicki comes into her own here on her own as she and Barbara run separate ways when Ian starts his first of many fights with a Morok guard. Some viewers claim Ian is too violent in this story and this episode might give them some reason, however, I found his actions justified throughout. He uses a ray gun to threaten but never fires in this episode. His friend, the Doctor, only appears in the cliffhanger reprise and not at all in the rest of the episode.

 

It closes with Ian finding the Doctor and the Doctor being prepared but we do not see what’s being done to him, only see Ian’s startled face and hear his gasp, “Doctor!” What one imagines can often be worse than what actually happens and such is the case here.

 

Back to Vicki. ABOUT TIME and other places claim she’s too joyful to be planning a bloody revolution and perhaps that’s justified as well but the point is that until someone in the next episode actually dies, she doesn’t seem to understand the threat of what she is doing and I think that’s the point of her reactions in this episode as opposed to next. Of course, me being me, the person that dies in the next episode is one of the Xerons that I like. It seems that characters I like all seem to die, sometimes horribly. To be honest, and I’ll go into this next episode, Sita’s death (if I have to put spoilers on a 50 plus year old episode, well, deal with it, I’m not)---his death….now that we are on just about the 70^th episode of Doctor Who …yes they had that many per season…there’s been plenty of deaths on screen and off.

 

BUT in the next episode Sita’s death seemed to hit me the hardest as I liked him and he was useful in the last episode breaking into the armory and he was likable, as are most of the Xerons. Vicki’s reaction to his death is also quite notable and Maureen O’Brien’s finest moment in the series up to now and perhaps overall. Her acting makes it hit home even more than it should than all the other deaths before and probably since.

 

The Morok men are ALL thoroughly nasty and miserable again, even to each other. They seem to hate each other and everything, their jobs, their place in life, the planet they are on, the planet they left. They are even nastier than the Daleks. In fact, I’d like to know if a Dalek was in the museum, how did the Moroks beat them if the museum is as Sita and Tor say…a museum of their conquests and achievements.

 

This episode might be THE very first where aliens try and fail to get into the captured TARDIS, even though they don’t seem to try very hard to break into the doors. The window on the right seems a bit…well, not open but sort of pushed in. This might also be the first time since THE DALEKS, that the Doc and his friends (this time, mostly Vicki) take an already brewing but mostly ineffectively started revolution and instigate a total rebellion into a successful revolution…but it won’t be successful until the middle of NEXT episode. As usual in DW, things go…wrong.

 

In short, I love that everyone gets separated; love that Ian uses force (and honestly it’s not more force than say Jamie might or K9 or Leela in future episodes), and love Barbara’s reactions to everything in this episode and in this story. Her bouncing off the Doctor and Ian is just about perfect in this story and in every story. I am finding this story very cool, very entertaining, and fast paced. Nothing about it is boring or slow moving.

 DOCTOR WHO-THE FINAL PHASE-aka THE SPACE MUSEUM pt 4

 

Okay so there’s this thing I’m stuck on about Sita. If anyone has an answer---based on the official publications such as script or interviews with the writer---- let me know.

 

On screen we see: Sita, Vicki, Barbara, and Dako all taken by surprise by Morok guards and the Commander. The Commander shoots Sita and Sita falls down, his body crumpled. Dako is just hit down and clearly survives as we later see Tor find him and revive him and Tor orders another Xeron youth to stay with him.

 

Now, here’s the thing, there seems to be some conflict over whether or not Sita survived. As seen, almost all the ray guns used appear to be completely deadly. No one seems to survive them and none of them seem to be stunners. In addition, we see Tor check Sita and then quickly move from Sita to Dako. When he finds Dako alive, he stays with him a while and asks him for info. He orders another to stay with Dako. Tor then asks the “rest” to come with him. He and TWO Xerons leave to go find Barbara, Vicki, Ian, and the Doctor and save them from Lobos and the Commander. The three Xerons shoot the Moroks. THEN, a fourth Xeron comes running in and joins them and he has the same belt that Sita wore AND he looks a lot like Sita but it’s in a long shot. In close up, we only see Tor with our TARDIS crew and wouldn’t Vicki have acknowledged Sita being alive? We don’t see her with Dako again nor Sita. We know Dako survived…but he was not shot. Did Sita survive or not?

 

TARDIS WIKIA says Sita was fatally shot. But this also wrongly states that Dako stormed the office with Tor. Clearly, Tor ordered some other Xeron to STAY with Dako so Dako did not storm the office. WIKIA also states that Dako was shot and clearly he was not shot, just hit.

 

So with Tor were three Xerons. He left one with Dako to watch Dako as Dako recovered. He tells the others (mind you, there are now only two, minus the one left with Dako) to follow him. Tor and these two enter the museum and shoot (and kill?) the Commander and Lobos. A fourth runs in and is with them. This clearly cannot be Dako as Tor ordered him to stay where he was and the other Xeron to stay with him. The fourth one who enters looks EXACTLY like Sita but from afar and wears his belt.

 

THE DOCTOR WHO REFERENCE GUIDE sidesteps the whole thing. The novelization has Sita only wounded and he survives and he helps win the revolution. Yet the novelization also has Dako doing the same.

 

Was this a blooper and Sita was in long shot by mistake and that was filmed before Sita was killed? Or was Sita meant to survive? It sure looked like his crumpled body, shown several times and unmoving, meant he was dead.

 

One of the lines from the commander was, “Have any arms fallen into Xeron hands.”

 

This episode seemed rather shorter than usual and indeed, most sources say it is about 22 minutes long. As the other story before this one, THE CRUSADE and most other stories during this time, ends with a cliffhanger into the next story, aka the next episode as remember there were not supposed to be any “stories” that ended and began during this time.

 

This episode is rather good, too and is also perfunctory. It does its job but the main thing for me is whether or not Sita survived. What do you think? I wonder if there is any source material for finding out about the making of this story or the script itself.

 

The inside of the police box is seen from the outside…and it’s not the console room!

 

 

All of DOCTOR WHO in eight sentences or more: The Doctor is a mysterious alien that, at first, we know nothing about, but who travels with many companions over the course of his long life but when we first meet him he is with only his grand daughter, Susan.

 

After Susan leaves, a succession of other companions, all of them close to the Doctor in friendship or even love, at times, come in and out of his life, coming and going, usually through circumstances beyond their control or where they are forced to make decisions and take control of their lives to help others.

 

The Doctor, it is slowly revealed over many seasons, is an alien with two hearts (most of the time), a different respiratory system (a bypass system), and who can regenerate into a new body when his body is damaged, destroyed, or wounded or as he is dying (most things in Doctor Who can be looked at from various, different and often, opposing POVs), thus allowing many actors over the years to play him.

 

Because he may have had to leave his planet and time era in a hurry, he stole a TARDIS, a machine which is partly alive (according to some seasons), larger on the inside than the outside, and which he may have built or at least, been partly involved in building or providing parts and devices for and at first, hides from his people for many years, his planet not being named in the series until season ten or so but once they catch him, they exile him to Earth for a short time and send him on missions to do their bidding but mostly, he resists this.

 

While on Earth, a sort of military organization named UNIT recruits him as his willing/unwilling scientific advisor and he is instrumental in stopping horrible alien invasions of Earth. He regains his ability to travel through all time and space (and very occasionally to other universes, parallel times and other dimensions) when he defeats one of the many renegades, who is, like the Doctor himself, a Time Lord, aliens who used to observe but never interfere with time because in the past, they learned to do so results in worse disasters for the timelines, space and history.

 

The Doctor tries to help the various planets that have problems, solve those problems and many times, there are alien forces either directly from those planets or invading from other places and these forces becomes the Doctor's deadly enemies, many of them returning in some form to face him again and again but otherwise he, was, at first just exploring history, time and space, wanting to meet new civilizations, to see new worlds, and find out about new things.

 

At times he ends up just seemingly lost in time and space but at other times he had a mission to finish such as the time the White Guardian sent him on a mission to find the Key to Time before the agents of the Black Guardian did. 

 

I'm sure there is more but I cannot recall.