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First Transmitted:
CAST CREW
Plot Outline from Wikipedia In the TARDIS the four travellers are huddling around the Time-Space Visualiser, a television-like souvenir from their recent adventure at the Space Museum which can pick up on any event in the whole of time and space. They each choose an event to witness: Ian picks Abraham Lincoln giving his Gettysburg Address, Barbara elects to look into Elizabeth I's court, and sees the genesis of Shakespeare's play, Hamlet; and Vicki sees the Beatles performing "Ticket To Ride", but is surprised that they should play "classical music"! The TARDIS then lands, and the Doctor confirms that the conditions are hospitable. Ian and Vicki leave into the desert wilderness, the former entrusted with the "TARDIS magnet" in case they should get lost. Vicki investigates some formations which appear to similar to seaweed, which Ian knows is impossible. They then find a trail of what appears to be blood in the sand, which Vicki runs off to follow. As they move off, they do not notice a tentacle rise up from the sand where they were. Meanwhile, the Doctor and Barbara start sunbathing. Barbara is distracted by the sound of the Visualizer, which has not been shut off. She sees on it a "broadcast" of the Daleks preparing to give a report. The Doctor enters and hears to his horror the Daleks' plan to follow "the enemy time machine" (the TARDIS) to the Sagarro Desert on the planet Aridius. Dalek assassins will take their time machine, find the Doctor and his companions, and exterminate them. The Doctor and Barbara watch a group of Daleks embark and dematerialize. The Doctor immediately realizes that these events happened in the past - the Daleks may already be here. They must find Ian and Vicki and leave immediately. Tiring from their walk, Ian and Vicki take a rest as the "blood" trail ends. In the sand, they find a large metal ring. At first, Vicki is reluctant to disturb it for fear of what might happen (due in no small part to a similar ring from her childhood). However, they decide they should pull it loose, and Ian duly does just that. At first, nothing happens and they prepare to leave, but then an ancient trap door creaks open in the sand. Vicki and Ian go inside the newly-opened cavern to have a look. Once they are inside the trap door close behind them: they are trapped - and another tentacle looms out of the darkness. It seems the creatures are everywhere. Meanwhile, the Doctor and Barbara have had no luck finding their friends, night has fallen and the wind has begun to pick up, covering all tracks including their own. They decide to return to the TARDIS, not entirely certain of the direction; as it may have been covered by the sand. A sandstorm breaks out which lasts all night. When they awake they see a Dalek, buried by the sandstorm, emerging from the sand. Two other Daleks soon arrive but cannot find the time travellers but do locate the TARDIS under the sand and begin to have it dug out by a group of native Aridians, whom they have enslaved. The slave force is exterminated when they are of no further value. The Doctor and Barbara are saved by other amphibious humanoid Aridians, who explain that Aridius was not always a desert, but that the suns have got nearer the planet and destroyed the seas. Only themselves and the hideous Mire Beasts are left, and the Mire Beasts can only be contained by destroying sections of the Aridian city that have become over-run. The Daleks soon contact the Aridians in the underground city and tell them they will leave Aridius if the Doctor and his party are handed over, and the elders agree to this. The Aridians also find Vicki and Ian, who was injured when a wall collapsed in an explosion to kill the Mire Beasts that were threatening them. The Mire Beasts soon reappear, killing the Aridian Malsan who was holding the party prisoner in preparation for the handover. The Doctor and his friends flee in the confusion and manage to evade a Dalek scout and get back to the TARDIS. There now follows a chase through time and space, with the Dalek vessel determined to track down and exterminate the Doctor and his friends. They are but fifteen minutes behind and the gap is closing. The first stop is the top of the Empire State Building in New York, where a young man from Alabama, Morton Dill, tells them it is 1966. Fortunately for him neither the TARDIS nor the Dalek time vessel stays long and his life is not imperilled. The Doctor next reaches the Atlantic Ocean and boards a sailing ship. The crew venture outside and see the Daleks arrive and either exterminate the sailing crew or force them into the sea. As the Doctor’s TARDIS departs it is revealed the ship is the mystical Marie Celeste. The next point of landing is a mysterious old house where both Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster have come alive. These terrors stalk the building but also attack the Daleks when they arrive. In the confusion to depart, the Doctor, Ian and Barbara leave Vicki behind, never realising they have simply been visiting a futuristic theme attraction called the Festival of Ghana in 1996. The Daleks are repelled back into their vessel by the monsters (who are in fact robots), and Vicki stows away aboard the Dalek ship. She travels in it to the jungle world of Mechanus, where the Doctor’s TARDIS has already landed. The Doctor, Ian and Barbara are very sad about Vicki’s possible fate at the hands of the Daleks and blame themselves. They decide their only course to rescue her is to try and take control of the Daleks’ own time vessel. On that ship Vicki witnesses the Daleks’ Replicator machine in action: an android replica of the Doctor is produced and is programmed to kill the original and his companions. When the Dalek ship arrives on Mechanus the robot killer is dispatched. The jungle is also hostile, with large fungoid plants which attack humans, and only retreat when exposed to light. The time travellers now split up and Barbara stays to protect a machine the Doctor has built to defend them from the Daleks. She encounters the robot Doctor, while and Ian and the Doctor are reunited with Vicki, who is hiding in the jungle. After a while the four travellers are reunited and the real Doctor unmasks the robot counterpart, disabling it with his stick. The Daleks too have fallen victim to the fungoid creatures and call off their search until the morning, letting the Doctor and his party sleep freely in a nearby cave. In the morning the Doctor notices that there is vast metal city over the jungle and they all decide to venture into the structure. Within moments a robot Mechanoid arrives and invites them into the city. It is obviously armed, but says it means them no harm so they do as they are bidden and enter the Mechanoid city. Other Mechanoids are there too as is a dishevelled man named Steven Taylor. He is an astronaut from Earth who crash-landed on the planet two years earlier and has been kept as a prisoner by the Mechanoids since then. They are colonising robots built to make the city for human colonisers that never arrived, and so their current guests will be kept in the city permanently: Steven has not been permitted to leave. The Daleks now attack the city so it is time for action. The Doctor and his party and Steven manage to escape from the city down some cables while the Mechanoids and Daleks become involved in a pitched battle which devastates both sides and the building. They flee to safety but are separated from Steven, whom they presume to have been killed. For Ian and Barbara it is decision time. The navigable time machine gives them a chance to get back to modern day Earth. They find the deserted Dalek time machine and persuade the Doctor to show Ian how to operate it. After a tearful farewell, Ian and Barbara return to their own planet at last – and almost to their own time, being two years out in London of 1965. The machine is destroyed using the auto-destruct mechanism once Barbara and Ian are out of it. The Doctor and Vicki oversee their farewell on the Time/Space Visualizer, glad they made it, but the Doctor is very sad at the loss. Neither of them notice that a new traveller has sneaked aboard the TARDIS…
Although a Dalek episode had been awaited eagerly, both critics and public felt themselves short-changed by this story in several ways, not the least by the frankly daft plots of some of the sequences, in particular the Empire State Building and the Marie Celeste scenes. More sophisticated ‘modern’ screenwriters would be appalled at the use of an extended scene in the first episode which was no more than the Daleks in their time machine talking to each other, quite obviously to fill the viewers in with the plot. Rule number one of good, dynamic screen writing, is NO EXTENDED exposition. SHOW don’t TELL the audience. Even Daleks talking to each other is not very interesting. The audience want to see Daleks exterminating people. This was immediately followed by the worst special effect in the history of special effects, a scene of the TARDIS flying through space which was no more than a two dimensional photograph of the TARDIS being moved across a starry background in stop-motion animation that would have shamed the makers of a contemporaneous children’s programme like the Clangers, let alone something that was expected to be cutting edge programming. Even worse, this sequence was used as a link between each of the individual chase episodes, further insulting the intelligence of viewers and offering ammunition to Doctor Who haters. The episodic nature of the story also came in for criticism, far more even than The Keys of Marinus which also followed such a structure. The Empire State Building scene was so obviously contrived using stock footage of the New York skyline, and the characters involved in that scene were just embarassing. The Marie Celeste scenes struck many critics as too hard to swallow. Although setting a Doctor Who scene on board and presenting a solution to the unexplained disappearances was not a bad idea, this one just was not plausible. It is well known in the list of difficulties about the Marie Celeste mystery that there was no signs at all of any kind of struggle or panic, and so any kind of invaders or hijackers – human or otherwise – had long ago been ruled out. And why, for heaven sake would people just jump into the water away from the Daleks? Not one single person put up even a futile fight. The haunted house was panned because the set was just TOO fake, although of course that was the point. There was less problem with the main denouement storyline as such. The mechanoids were acclaimed as a worthy adversary to the Daleks, but professional critics and viewers alike were starting to tire of the usual plot devices of time travellers split up, find each other, fight to the finish, and the fact that both sets of enemies killed each other while the travellers were mere bystanders seemed a bit too easy for some. On the other hand, many critics loved the episodic format and the different scenarios, and the battle scene was acclaimed for its model work and camera angles. Finally, of course, the critics waited with bated breath to find
out if the series would run out of steam without two of the central
characters that had been with it from the start. But Ian and Barbara
had always been reluctant travellers and if they had not taken advantage
of a reliable way home, it would have been a tremendous faux pax on
the part of the scriptwriters, and, also, leaving such a machine where
it could be used by any potential enemy was not a good idea. Strangely,
Steven, the only human on the planet, and presumably the only sentient
being now that the mechanoids were destroyed, was not invited to join
either party, but stowed away on board the TARDIS, only discovered
once it was in flight. As the new TARDIS team go off into the unknown – as demonstrated
by the sub-Clanger’s animation, Ian and Barbara are seen returning
to 1965 London by means of a sequence of still photographs, and we
are given to believe that they would marry and return to normal earth
life. Well, fans who had become fond of them would be glad to know
that, but there were better ways of showing it than that. |
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