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CAST
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Plot Outline from Wikipedia The TARDIS crew are still missing Susan Foreman when they land on an unnamed planet, which the Doctor later recognises as Dido, a world he has visited before. The trio soon encounter two survivors of a space crash, Vicki and Bennett, who are awaiting a rescue ship, due to arrive in three days time. Vicki and Bennet live in fear of Koquillion, a bipedal inhabitant of Dido which is stalking the area. Koquillion encounters the time travellers and attacks, pushing Barbara over a cliff and temporarily trapping Ian and the Doctor. Vicki finds Barbara injured and rescues her from Koquillion, and they share reminiscences. Vicki’s father was amongst those who died when the survivors of the crash, save Bennett and Vicki, were lured to their deaths by the natives of Dido. She is evidently very lonely, having befriended an indigenous Sand Beast for company. However, when Ian and the Doctor reach the ship tempers are fraught because Barbara mistook the Sand Beast for a threat and killed it. The Doctor enters Bennett's room, and finds things are not as they seem. The supposedly crippled Bennett is missing, and a tape recorder hides his absence. He finds a trap door in the floor of the cabin and follows it to a temple carved from rock where he unmasks Koquillion as Bennett. Bennett reveals he killed a crewmember on board the ship and was arrested, but the ship crashed before the crime could be radioed to Earth. It was he who killed the crash survivors and the natives of Dido to cover his crime. He has been using the Koquillion alias so that Vicki would back up his story. Just as Bennett is about to kill the Doctor, two surviving native Didonians arrive and force Bennett to his death over a ledge. With no living family and nothing left for her on Dido, Vicki is welcomed aboard the TARDIS.
Analysis by Cuisle The rather thin plot of The Rescue was really just a vehicle to introduce Vicki, who was obviously going to replace Susan in the TARDIS. There are obvious problems with the storyline. The unconvincing Koquillion monster is not, in fact, one of them, since it is MEANT to be a fake. The real question is, if the Dido inhabitants were NOT wiped out, where were they all the time that Bennett and Vicki were alone - apparently fighting off the Koquillion, and WHY did two of them turn up just at the moment when Bennett was, not only unmasked as the murderer, but standing in a precarious place from where he could accidentally fall, frightened by the sight of the enemy he thought he had destroyed. All the critics agree, however, Maureen O'Brien, playing Vicki, made use of the episodes to develop her new character. She comes across as a brave young girl, terrified of everything around her but doing her best to survive, an ideal candidate for the Doctor Who fellow traveller. And since that was the main purpose of the story, then it succeeded even if it was unlikely to become a classic Doctor Who moment.
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