070 The Space Museum Episode 3: The Search

EPISODE: The Space Museum Episode 3: The Search
OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 070
STORY NUMBER: 015
TRANSMITTED: Saturday 08 May 1965
WRITER: Glyn Jones
DIRECTOR: Mervyn Pinfield
SCRIPT EDITOR: Dennis Spooner
PRODUCER: Verity Lambert
RATINGS: 8.5 million viewers
FORMAT: DVD: Doctor Who - The Space Museum/The Chase

"This whole thing is becoming a nightmare"

The Xerons examine the Tardis but are warned away by the Moroks. The Moroks can't get into the Tardis and think it looks strange and uncomfortable. Ian, Barbara and Vicki overhear the Doctor has been captured. One of the Moroks finds them and takes them prisoner. Ian attacks the guard allowing Vicki and Barbara escape, followed by himself after a tussle. Barbara gets locked in a store room while Vicki finds the Xeron rebels. Ian overpowers the guard at the Tardis and questions him finding out the location of the Doctor. Barbara is released by the Xeron Dako while Vicki accompanies Tor & Sita. Dako tells Barbara the history of the Morok invasion. The Moroks try to gas the Tardis traveller out of their hiding place. Vicki tries to incite the Xerons into action in order to avoid being trapped in the Tardis crew exhibit seen in the first episode. Vicki, Tor & Sita break into the armoury. Vicki works to override the computer keeping the weapons locked up. Barbara and Dako stumble through the gas but are eventually overpowered. Vicki is successful with the computer allowing the Xerons access to the weapons they need. Ian comes to see Lobos and threatens him demanding to be taken to the Doctor.

Help! I'm loosing the will to live.

This whole things is becoming a nightmare

all we do is stand around...

Nail, Hammer, hit on head. I thank you Mr Chesterton & Miss Wright.

I'd say the Moroks were the most useless invaders ever but I have seen the Dominators. They look more like a bunch of scientists than an army. Their uselessness is underlined when one of them, captures the Tardis crew but still lets them chat to each other for a few minutes - stupid and underlines the lack of urgency here.

By contrast the Moroks are pretty rubbish rebels. Still it's not long after that that some stuff finally happens with a bit of a chase and, 2 1/2 episodes in, a member of the Tardis crew finally making contact with the rebel Xerons. They need Vicki, a young girl, to put a rocket up their backside to get them doing anything!

Then we get the discussion between the Tardis crew about changing the future, which they've observed.

BARBARA: Don’t! He’ll fire that thing.
IAN: Well? Wouldn’t that change the shape of things to come?
BARBARA: Well, it would for you. You’d be dead.
IAN: They can’t kill us. We’re going to end up in those cases.
BARBARA: Not necessarily. Oh, you can change the future so that we don’t end up in those cases, but if we’re all dead, what’s the point?
IAN: But that means we can’t fight against anybody. We don’t know what we’re doing.
VICKI: We’ve just lost the Doctor. Has that already changed the future?
BARBARA: We don’t know Vicki. Maybe that’s the way it happened. We’ve no reason to suppose that we all ended up in the cases at exactly the same time.
VICKI: So we could be doing exactly what we’re supposed to do.

So it's OK to muck with a future you've observed but not OK to change the established past as we saw in the Aztecs?

William Hartnell is absent from this episode, save for a brief appearance during the reprise. So by 36 seconds in he's gone for the rest of the duration! Oddly, given his absence, this was one of the few Hartnell episodes found in the BBC film library during Ian Levine's initial visit with the other episodes being located at BBC Enterprises shortly after.

Ivor Salter makes his first appearance here as the Morok Commander. He'll be back as Odysseus in The Myth Makers and then, many years later, Sergeant Markham in Black Orchid: Part Two. One of his guards is Billy Cornelius who was the Man At Arms in the last episode of the previous story, The Crusade episode4: The Warlords.

One of the Xerons has a return appearance to his name: Edward Granville returns in the opening episode of The Massacre: War of God as an uncredited Tavern Customer. The other two Xerons who appear here, Michael Gordon & David Wolliscroft, won't trouble us further. But I suspect Wolliscroft's IMDB credit as an animator on Beast Wars and Action Man is incorrect!