2x08. The Chase
Writer: Terry Nation
Director: Richard Martin
Script Editor: Dennis Spooner
Producer: Verity Lambert
Synopsis: The Doctor discovers,
by use of the Time-Space Visualizer from Xeros, that the Daleks have
built their own time machine and are pursuing the TARDIS. A series of
confrontations ensue, taking place first on the planet Aridius, then on
top of the Empire State Building, on board the Mary Celeste,
inside a haunted house exhibition, and finally on the planet Mechanus
where the Daleks and the native Mechanoids, a robotic race, destroy
each other. With the Daleks' time machine at their disposal, Ian and
Barbara use it to return to Britain in 1965.
Review: "This started out as a
perfectly reasonable premise about mutant aliens inside giant
pepperpots. Now, it's just got silly." (With apologies to Graham
Chapman.)
Perhaps "The Chase" is a reflection of the origins of Doctor Who as
a children's program, or perhaps the Daleks' potential for camp would
have inevitably proven too tempting to the writers in any scenario, but either
way, the result is a serial in which the series' trademark villains (a
status they'd achieved even at this early date) come off looking like
inept buffoons. Some might argue that it's unwise to take the Daleks
too seriously under any circumstances, and it's easy to treat them as a
joke given their cheap design and shrill voices. But the background to
their seemingly senseless aggresion proved intriguing in "The Daleks,"
and they were an effective menace in "The Dalek Invasion of Earth."
One might expect them to be even more dangerous now that they've built
their own time machine, but for most of "The Chase," they're about as
threatening as the Three Stooges, as they variously get sand up their
plungers (one of them appears to be coughing or clearing its throat
after a
sandstorm), dive into the water after fleeing Mary Celeste
crewmembers, and fight losing battles with animatronic zombies and
vampires. They're also way over the top with their repetitive
proclamations of total destruction for just about everybody (in
addition to "exterminate," they've now added "eradicate," "obliterate,"
"annihilate," and "Attack! Attack! Attack!" to their vocabulary), and
their most MST3K-able moment comes when one of them announces
that they're going to destroy the TARDIS, prompting the others to break
out into a chorus of "TARDIS! TARDIS! TARDIS! TARDIS!"
Writer Terry Nation has returned to his "Keys of Marinus" formula of
continually shifting the action to new locations, and he runs into the
same problem that he did with that serial: the little
vignettes tend to be rather superficial and perfunctory. The Aridians and the
Mire Beasts are thoroughly uninteresting creations, and the "siege"
situation in which the Aridians are forced to surrender the time
travelers to the Daleks is just standard capture-and-escape formula
with no new twists. The Empire State Building and Mary Celeste
sequences serve entirely as extended jokes, which might be okay if they
offered some actual effective comedy. But the stereotypical Alabama
tourist of the
former segment is just a dull caricature, and the humor of the latter
segment seems bizarrely (and I suspect unintentionally) grim when one
considers that the crew members who leap overboard to escape the Daleks
are all going to drown, including Captain Briggs' wife and their young
child.
The haunted house sequence is a little more palatable, in that the cast
and crew are clearly having fun with the B-movie horror atmosphere, but
the Daleks' incompetence is perhaps at its most startling when they
appear unable to distinguish between real life forms and the facsimiles
of Dracula and the Frankenstein monster. The Doctor also seems way out
of character here: he's supposedly a man of science, but he insists
that the TARDIS has materialized inside some sort of collective
unconscious of human fears, prompting Ian to react with understandable
skepticism. The last two episodes, which take place on the planet
Mechanus, are at least somewhat suspenseful, and the the Daleks'
duplicate Doctor actually turns out to be a clever and
humorous concept when it addresses the Daleks with the same
crotchetiness and whimsical condescension that we're used to seeing
from the genuine article. Still, the attacking giant mushrooms have to
rank among the series' worst monsters ever: they add nothing to the
proceedings, and they look unbelievably ridiculous. I realize that the
series was on a low budget, but why include something like this at all
when it's so pointless and irrelevant? There's also an ill-advised
scene in which Barbara imagines shooting at Daleks and makes "Pkkhh!
Pkkhh! Pkkhh!" noises -- I could understand this sort of silly behavior
from Vicki, perhaps, but for Barbara it's just embarrassing.
It's clear that Terry Nation intends all this to be taken as little more than
light comedy, but one must ask, is it really the right time for light
comedy when the Daleks, having been established as capable of the
conquest of Earth and the nuclear devastation of their home planet,
have actually built their own time machine? Full-blown comedy episodes of otherwise dramatic series are a tricky thing to
pull off, and they usually work best when they avoid important recurring plot and
character threads. (The only exception I can think of is the X-Files episode "Jose Chung's From Outer Space,"
and even there, the humorous take on the alien conspiracy was filtered
through unreliable, skewed points of view.) If Nation had created a new
alien race to serve as the bumbling villains, "The Chase" might have
turned out at least somewhat better. As it is, we're left to wonder how
it is that the
previously-threatening Daleks can achieve time travel and the robotic
replica of the Doctor, but can't hold their own in battle against
fairground attractions and are dumb enough to jump into the ocean.
That's not to say that "The Chase" is all bad. Despite the occasional
out-of-character moment, the quartet of the Doctor, Ian, Barbara, and
Vicki remain an engaging bunch. The scene at the beginning when they
use the Time-Space Visualizer to look in on the life of Shakespeare and
a Beatles concert may not be essential to the plot, but it achieves the
fun, upbeat tone that much of the episode attempted and failed to
establish, and the bit on the Mary Celeste
when Vicki accidentally knocks Ian out is well-timed physical comedy.
And, of course, the episode wraps up with one of the most significant
character moments of the series to date: Ian and Barbara, given what
might be their one chance to return to their own time, decide to take
it. While it's unfortunate that we didn't get a parting scene per se
(the Doctor eventually agrees to their plan, and in the very next scene
they're arriving back on Earth), Nation gets the Doctor's reaction
exactly right. He reacts at first with anger and skepticism, insisting
that the plan will fail, refusing to get sentimental, and relenting
only when Vicki convinces him that he should allow them to do as they
choose. Not until after they've left, when he and Vicki watch their
return home on the Visualizer, does he finally drop his guard and admit
that he will miss them. I'd wager he's in good company with plenty of Who
fans on that point: Ian and Barbara were well-written characters and
valuable allies for the Doctor, who not only provided a human point of
view to which the audience could easily relate, but brought their own
skills and intelligence to the table rather than falling into the
obvious "What's that, Doctor?" formula.
Unfortunately, the bad ultimately outweighs the good in "The Chase." It
provides some minimal entertainment value and it gives Ian and Barbara
a nice send-off, but both they and the Daleks deserved a better story
than this ill-conceived attempt at comedy that too often verges on
self-parody.
Other notes:
- At one point, the Doctor warns Ian and Barbara that if something goes
wrong with the Daleks' time machine, they'll end up "floating around
like cinders in Spain." Can anyone explain just what that could
possibly mean? Or, if it was a case of Hartnell blowing his line, as
has been suggested elsewhere, what the line was supposed to be? I'm
afraid I'm puzzled either way.
- The robotic nature of the Mechanoids might have been an interesting
idea to explore if the writers had decided to bring them back again
later, particularly with their odd manners of expression. If I'm not
mistaken, one of them issued a refusal to a Dalek demand with the word
"Zero."
Rating: *1/2 (out of four)
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