Galaxy 4: Ranking - 89

                                 Galaxy 4

(Season 3, Dr 1 with Vicki and Steven, 11/9/1965-2/10/1965, producer: Verity Lambert, writer: William Emms, director:Derek Martinus) 

Rank: 89

   'Kill Rill: Speak loudly and carry a large gun' or 'Revenge is a dish best served with Chumbleys'

Poor ‘Galaxy 4’, it must be situated in the unlucky end of the cosmos. There it sits towards the end of the Hartnell oeuvre, just trying to get on with the basics of being a basic good versus evil tale at the start of a season that spends its time jumping up and down going ‘look at me, I’m different I am!’ There it sits nestled amongst bigger, shoutier stories like ‘The Time Meddler’ and ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’, quietly getting on with its planetary destruction and doing what Dr Who stories are meant to do (a morality tale that makes you think twice about your natural Earth prejudices) and what thanks does it get? Where is the Big Finish sequel featuring a future Doctor re-treading their steps and ending up having as close to the same story all over again as close as copyright will allow? Where are the boyfriend and girlfriend fans cos-playing as Rills and Drahvins at conventions? Where, for the love of Gallifrey, is the cuddly Rill toy I’ve always wanted? If ever a story was overlooked it was this one: the novelisation is one of the harder to come by, the soundtrack was one of the last to be released on CD and until as late as 2011 none of the episodes existed at all (bar a lengthy extract from episode one, used – for some odd reason because it’s not exactly the most gripping scene ever – in the 1977 Lively Arts documentary on the series). Even when episode 3 did return from certain death there was a delay of two years so it could be released as part of the 50th anniversary – when it was promptly upstaged by the rediscovery and fast-track issue of all of ‘Enemy Of the World’ and most of ‘Web Of Fear’ (you can find that extract and episode three alongside a brief rundown of the rest on the special edition of ‘The Aztecs’ DVD. Yes that’s right ‘The Aztecs’. No I have no idea why: I mean a special edition of ‘The Time Meddler’ would have made so much more sense. Even on its own DVD this poor story doesn’t get top billing). Heck, for most of the story’s lifetime we didn’t even have photographic evidence of what a Rill even looked like until a blurry fan photo came to light: new producer John Wiles, whose with the series for this and the following six stories, didn’t believe in Verity Lambert’s practice of paying for telesnaps for actors, set and costume designers to use as proof of what they’d done, so no official ones were taken (and while usually there’s a generous portion of media coverage given to Who monster designs for this story the media were too busy ogling the Drahvins and playing with Chumblies to care about alien warthogs in glass cases). 

 What’s weirder than all of this though is how few of the fans watching the first time round remember anything about this story at all even though its highly striking imagery seems tailor made for the sort of fans who swear they can remember the ice soldiers from ‘Keys Of Marinus’ in such great detail they had to have more screen time than the ten minutes we got or the fans whose memories of their first Dalek encounter are more ingrained in their memory than the birth of their children. I mean, a ‘Beauty and the Beast’ story with a twist about who is who that’s very, well, Who, with killer gun-toting women (in an era of TV when most girls on screen were considered feminist if they only screamed once an episode and sprained their ankle every other story), cute Daleks and warthogs who can only survive by breathing ammonia seem tailor-made to be imprinted onto the nations’ psyche if only in an ‘I’m sure I’m making this up but I remember…’ type way. It’s not as if this is one of those stories that nobody saw either: while the viewing figures will drop alarmingly across season three here, in its eagerly anticipated first story, a full 11.3 million views watched episode three, a figure that won’t be beaten for eight years, until the final episode of anniversary story ‘The Three Doctors’ amidst a blaze of publicity. 

 In many ways though this is the sort of unlucky story born to be overlooked, that never caught a decent break even when it was being made. Due to a curious tradition, though it was the first story shown in the third series it was actually the last recorded at the end of season two and held back to make sure the production team had a little bit of breathing room, something which meant that it was recorded when spirits were flagging, studio times and budgets were tight and writers still weren’t fully sure who was in the Tardis and who wasn’t (Vicki and Steven alternate between recently departed Ian’s lines and which one gets Barbara’s, much to Peter Purves’ obvious discomfort when he’s called upon to be all girly, beaten up by women and acting like he doesn’t know what an airlock is or what jeopardy he might be in if trapped in one. Despite, um, working as an astronaut for a living). The returned episode revealed that the background of this alien world was even more obviously a blow-up painting than normal, while Hartnell is running on fumes after seven more or less continuous moths of heavy filming, visibly tired and fluffing more lines than ever before. The actors all hated their lines and were protective enough of their characters to insist on rewriting them up to the last minute, something that didn’t go down at all well with Wiles the new producer in his first Who job (technically Verity was in charge and got the sole credit, but she was off planning the Dalek’s Masterplan’ finale) and future Who mainstay Derek Martinus the new director fresh out of drama school and on his first job (replacing a poorly Mervyn Pinfield at the last minute), bursting with enthusiasm and ideas but not much actual knowhow. Wiles got so sick of the constant complaints that his next move as producer was to have Maureen O’Brien (Vicki) written out and tried to do the same with Hartnell until the BBC directors over-ruled him; Peter Purves seems to have been just as angry but still a bit too new to the role to be quite as argumentative as his co-stars; even so all three are on borrowed time from now on. Hartnell’s grievances went deeper: he blamed Wiles for pushing out his friend and biggest champion Verity before she was ready (as Wiles was a bigger name within the BBC) and resented him for that; ironic, really, that it should be a story about girl power where the Beeb’s first female producer is ousted. The result was a lot of bad blood and a frosty wall that built up between the studio floor and the control room. You can see why, on a production with such tight deadlines and constant momentum, the last thing the people making it needed was the cast picking holes in what they’d been given, when it was ‘only’ a children’s TV show. At the same time, though, the regulars did have a point: of all the Dr Who stories there have ever been across sixty odd years now this is one of the most simple and once you’ve worked out the ‘twist’ (something the Doctor gets suspicious about as early as halfway through episode one) that’s pretty much all there is to ‘Galaxy 4’. Some of the writing is also pretty clumsy in the way that plot threads are raised then dropped without being mentioned again and the rewrites mean that the three regulars don’t always act to type, even after the actors have taken scissors to their words. For all that, though, I love this story which is a unique but very Dr Whoy blend of cute and scary in equal. It’s a story with a very 1960s message which is no bad thing, that it’s what you have in your heart that counts, not what you look like on the outside (the ‘beautiful people’ nickname given to hippies was for their character not their looks). 

To an extent this is the first piece of Dr Who fan fiction: this wasn’t the first telly writer William Emms had ever done but it was close and certainly this is the first time (of four) when a writer was such a fan of the show they sent in a script to the production offices unsolicited and had it commissioned. ‘Galaxy 4’ is perfect to launch a new series because it so sums up what Dr Who is for and the morality that makes Who more than just another scifi runaround. This is a world where villains are really villainous and some alien monsters (and their robots) are really sweet, but where your own Earthly prejudices and standards in beauty can fool you to which is which. It’s like an inversion of that already legendary first Dalek story where the metallic robots turn out to be childlike and friendly, talking in radiophonic workshop pings and the blonde-haired blue-eyed humanoids are truly evil, combined with the message in ‘The Sensorites’ that not all aliens are scary and that to some life-forms Humans are the species to fear. Indeed something that’s lost now most people know the plot synopsis of this story or can read the back of the book long before seeing it: there’s a point when fans would have been expecting Daleks: it was a natural ploy to put the series’ biggest stars in the first serial of the new season and the ‘Dalek city’ heartbeat sound effect is used for the Rill’s home. ‘Galaxy 4’ also features that age-old Who plot already featured in a tone of stories: a race against time to stop a countdown to destruction, even if that deadline seems to change episode by episode. It’s like a modern day AI robot watched all the Hartnell stories so far and stuck them together in a blender and came out with the ultimate Dr Who story that summed up everything the series was about in it’s early days (something which might also account for the way the regulars act so out of character on occasion). Many reviewers don’t like this and think this story shamelessly recycles past ideas, but the fact is no story out all these elements together in quite the same way before and in this era there was no such thing as a ‘Dr Who template’ yet; the fact that a fan managed to spot what was so cohesive about so many disparate stories and turn that into a workable plot about the value of co-operation and how travel broadens the mind (the Rills are far better travelled than the Drahvins) is still impressive in my eyes.

 Plus in 1965, even in simplistic form, no series was making scifi like this. For in this story the Tardis lands on a planet about to blow up and they’re befriended by the Drahvins – blonde beauties who turn out to be clones of their leader (although one thing that was a surprise when the episode was rediscovered is that they’re played by actresses who look nothing like their leader Maaga, so I can only guess that the cloning machine is slightly defective).The Drahvins are all woman, in every meaning of the phrase – they’re the first matriarch alien species in Who and there’s even a, by 1965 standards, controversial speech about how they only keep males for breeding and that they’re a secondary gender without rights on their home world in a statement that’s actually a lot more groundbreaking than anything the Chibnall era gets praised for (although, again, this claim for girl power has long been overshadowed by the similar but unmade story ‘Prison In Space’ that builds an entire plot around a matriarchal system that locks men up, even though its ‘everything is put right by the end with men in charge’ and climax where Zoe is spanked back to normal by Jamie – no, really – who stays behind because the women can’t possibly look after themselves makes it the antithesis of ‘Galaxy 4’ and uncomfortably misogynistic even for 1969). Had they been male all the posturing and the rather phallic guns might have become a bit too much but in the context of the other 1960s Dr Who stories, about using the series as a discussion for what might happen next when the youth of the day become the establishment of tomorrow, making the female characters so stereotypically male, is a smart move and gives them an edge other male villains don’t possess. The story also turns the ‘stereotypical dumb blonde’ trope on it’s head: Maaga is many things but one of them is clever, as bright as male protagonist in the series, with a ruthless streak that makes her quite the threat. The fact that she’s fighting for her own survival, rather than to grab power, with a series of clones that she can send on suicide missions without a second thought, only makes her all the scarier (though the fact that Maaga has so many disagreements and loses her temper with them quite frequently raises an interesting issue this story doesn’t really answer: is she really angry at her own weaknesses and shortcomings?) The Drahvins even look male, with their matching green warrior tunics and pinned back hair, although there are a few feminine touches along the way, such as the actually very gen Z eyebrow style (a series of green dots). The credit for this early feminism, incidentally, belongs to Verity who, in her last major contribution to the series she’d helped create, swapped the genders in the script around to make it more ‘interesting’. What people often overlook about this, however, is the way that everyone let her: Wiles as the new de facto boss could have over-ruled her but recognised it as a smart decision, while rather than resenting the changes and being told what to do by a ‘girl’ writer five years younger than him, Emms eagerly embraced the idea and even embellished it in his rather good Target novelisation of this story. 

 The Drahvins try to get the Tardis crew and us at home on their side, by telling us that their enemies on the other side of the planet are evil, that they caused their spaceship to crash onto this planet knowing it was about to blow up and that their pleas for help have been spurned. They point to their ‘disgusting’ features and the ‘clearly hostile’ robots that the Rills send after them. On the surface they seem to have a point – and yet it’s obvious straight away that’s not what happened. The robots are the epitome of cute, so much so that Vicki – ever one for giving monsters cute nicknames – immediately takes to them and names them ‘Chumblies’, a word she says she made up but which the writer said in interviews comes from sticking the word ‘chum’ and ‘friendly’ together. They’re the latest attempt to create another Daleks and a lot better than most, a rotund robot that comes in three parts that acts as the Rill’s arms, eyes voice and wheels, exploring this (un-named) planet’s surface, trying to communicate that they mean no harm and offer the rod attachment arm of friendship. Far from being threatening they’re only around three feet tall (and powered by actors of short stature), ‘hide’ in their shell every time they’re attacked and which makes cute noises just like a cute toddler (Brian Hodgson and the radiophonic workshop at their finest – I have the ‘chumbley moving/at rest’ FX from the ‘Dr Who 30th anniversary CD’ on my mp3 player and it still makes me smile whenever it comes round on the shuffle button. Well I have to have something Dr Whoy on there besides the theme tune and no, neither Roberta Tovey and Frazer Hines’ singles nor the ‘Doctorin’ The Tardis number one cut it somehow, although there is an honorary mention for the Human League B-side ‘Tom Baker’ which sounds much like a piece of 1970s Dr Who incidental music). I still can’t believe in this day and age when you can buy every creation in Dr Who going that there still hasn’t been a remote controlled Chumbley – they would definitely be top of my Christmas list. Dr Who doesn’t normally do ‘cute’ but it should: part of the Who ethos, after all, is that the universe might be big and alien but it’s only very occasionally scary and there are aliens out there who are just like us (only cuter!) 

 Their masters, The Rills, aren’t far behind despite being – to human eyes – hideous, warthogs with teeth and googly eyes and a face only a mother could love (and then only when blindfolded) hidden behind toxic fumes of ammonia. If you come to ‘Galaxy 4’ from other more hardened scifi or 1980s video nasties (‘Alien’ or ‘Predator’) then they seem obviously the baddies, as gruesome outside as in. Only – and this is the biggest clue to being civilised in all of 1960s Dr Who – they talk proper, in received pronunciation. Their attempts to communicate with the Tardis crew behind glass (which makes them seem threatening at first, but turns out to be because they know the gasses they need would kill the Tardis crew and Drahvins) is a key and rather clever plot point, with the thing the Drahvins hold up as a sign of hostility actually one of kindness. It’s also ahead of its time, so close to the plot of the better-than-most 2016 alien contact film ‘Arrival’ that Who should arguably sue (the Hollywood blockbuster does much the same thing without the charm, despite a quadzillions higher budget). With episode three returned so we can see them properly, rather than in a murky fan photo off the telly that didn’t do even this ugly a race any favours, we can also see that they’re a really impressive design for the day, quite unlike anything the show had done before. One odd thing though: despite the name they have no rills, or frills (or quills for that matter), just leathery warthog-like skin. 

 The Doctor’s been through enough by now to know not to take a story at face value and soon works out that the Rills have been trying to help the Drahvins all this time and that the chumbleys were sent to help them out of mercy, not murder them out of spite. A simple misunderstanding? Not this time – more a deadly ruse to make the regulars take over the Rill spaceship on their behalf and strand them instead. In other words, despite appearances its the rooting tooting blonde beauties who are the dangerous ones, not the ugly alien-looking Rills. What would have worked well would have been if the tardis crew took everything at face value at first: after all they meet the Drahvins and hear their side of the story long before The Rills’. Only Emms can’t decide what to do: he loves the Doctor as a character and knows he’d be sharp enough to see through the Drahvins’ obvious lies, while Vicki is too kind and Steven too gullible to fall for such a ruse. What he really needs is a Susan, someone whose easily frightened and gullible (or, even better, an Adric or Turlough who would naturally fall in with the lot of the baddies without thinking too much about it). So Emms fudges the plot rather, having all of the Tardis crew be suspicious of the Drahvins, then change their minds to the point where the Doctor is actively trying to destroy their ammonia equipment and kill them (a scene I suspect was written for Ian) while having Vicki captured and terrified, before everyone learns the truth. This inconsistency is a shame: had even one of the trio believed the Drahvins we would have had the launchpad for lots of dramatic tension; instead the audience knows which side to be on as early as the first scene with the Drahvins. If nothing else it would have made the cliffhanger at the end of episode 3, when the Drahvins start to get nasty and try to dispose of Steven by shutting him in an airlock (a part clearly written for Barbara) and sucking out the Oxygen more of a surprise (in a mirror of the Rills, who know that oxygen would kill them but recognise that the Doctor and Vicki need it to live so stay trapped behind glass to protect them). There are a few other things that are unclear too: just what does the title mean? Maaga mentions that her home planet Drahva is in ‘Galaxy 4’ – given how far she says she’s flown it’s clear this planet is not in the same galaxy, so why name the story after it? (That’s like calling ‘The Time Meddler’ set in medieval England ‘Sontar’ because that’s where the baddy comes from or all Dalek stories set on Earth ‘Skaro’). And why does the Doctor lie to Maaga at how much time she has left before the planet is destroyed: surely it’s in his best interests to make her think that co-operation is her only hope of survival? Even the Doctor seems to change his mind how long is left till doomsday (and not because of a Billy fluff either, it’s scripted that way). Also the Drahvins are stuck on this planet because they crashed, yet the Rills are stuck because they’ve run out of energy to power their ship. Which works on solar power. On a planet that has three suns. I mean, if that wasn’t enough power how much can they possibly need? (And while the Drahvins, Rills and even the Doctor might not feel the heat how come Steven and Vicki aren’t sweating buckets in this story?) 

 ‘Galaxy 4’ is, however, a great one for at least two of the regulars, despite or perhaps because of the changes the actors made. Poor Steven doesn’t get much to do in his second full story and is sidelined early on, but it’s a great story for the Doctor and Vicki. William Hartnell has more opportunities to be Doctory than he’s had in a while lately and though he’s visibly struggling with all the extra lines he has to learn (with the others helping him out, a lot) he still shines when the script needs him to. The following run of stories get dark quickly so this is pretty much the last time we see him be a kindly grandfather (as opposed to a desperate crusader or an outright alien) and his alien mixture of unpredictable anger and giggling at the most inappropriate of times is delightful. I do wonder, too, if Emms wrote his script after seeing the peter Cushing model of the Doctor as seen at the cinema as the Doctor here is much closer to the dotty professor type in the films than the razor-sharp Doctor we had on TV and yet Hartnell’s great at portraying that character too. This is a particularly strong story for Vicki too who for one story only reverts back completely to how we saw her in ‘The Rescue’ – she spends her time in grave peril giving robot aliens cute names and finding what would terrify other people as rather sweet, cutting through the layers of conditioning and prejudice other companions would have and taking up the cause of the oppressed without a second thought of danger (she’s the perfect companion for this story, even if weirdly enough the Rills cause her to give her one and only scream at the end of part two – it’s a particularly atmospheric cliffhanger though so I can’t say I blame her). The scene where the Doctor tells her off for being hasty and how she should ‘note, observe, collate, conclude, then act’ which she does – before just bunging a rock at the Chumbley which she was about to do anyway – is surely her best moment in the series, the Doctor’s pupil by following what he does rather than what he says in a way none of the other companions will be till Ace, a dependent child whose also a rebel at least as big as he is underneath it all. 

 The script is never less than thoughtful and despite the padding (particularly at the beginning and end) and lack of sub-plots does more than a tale this simple needs to, a story that feels so much like an allegory that it surely is one, even if the writer never admitted it and reviewers continue to debate whether it’s just a ‘lucky accident’ that this script so closely matches the cold war backdrop against which all of original Who was made. In many ways this is a closer parallel than even the most blatant one (1983’s ‘Warriors Of The Deep’): here we have two power blocks who are everything the other side hates but who are really, deep down, both more interested in surviving than being in a war. Blaming each other for their problems is an easy way out though, even though the mutual hatred blinds the Drahvins to the fact the Rills really are trying to help them out (this has been a party political broadcast on behalf of capitalism…) Notably the Drahvins are all alike (and so are obviously shifty communists in the Stalin idea of the word, all subservient to their leader), with a leader who does all the thinking and takes all the best food while pretending to be an equal and tolerant society, although the Rills don’t really act like capitalists either (not unless they’re secretly charging for ammonia use and tusk toothbrushes on the quiet anyway). It is, though, very much how the Western world likes to see itself, as the diplomat coming to spread peace and wisdom throughout the cosmos with their superior equipment…whether the natives like it or not. Dare I say it there’s something rather smug about The Rills, even though they are clearly the good guys and do all the right things, which is American foreign policy of the 1960s to a tee.

 It’s very of its time this story, and yet simultaneously timeless too – they could put this story on the air tomorrow without too many changes as it’s so very Dr Who, with ideas that are true for every age and generation (though the lines about the Drahvins coming from a matriarchal society would actually get more raised eyebrows than it got in 1965). In truth there isn’t a lot to ‘Galaxy 4’ and it’s a few twists and turns short of a classic, but what there is is most charming: the chumbleys are a great creation much under-rated in Who folklore, the Rills aren’t far behind, the ‘be careful who to trust’ theme is well done, the regulars are on top form, director Derek Martinus throws in some striking camera shots that make the sometimes drab sets feel really spooky and alien and there’s just the right balance of action and talking to keep things moving. Emms worked as a teacher before becoming a professional writer shortly before writing this story and he would surely have been a good one, worthy of Ian and Barbara: this story teaches and moralises, but not in a cruel and condescending way (like a lot of the Chris Chibnall stories): this is a story that leaves you to make your own mind up which side to trust, while making it obvious which view of the world he prefers. ‘Galaxy 4’ isn’t ambitious enough to be amongst Dr Who’s very very best and there’s nothing specific it does that other stories don’t do better, but it is a very very good example of the sort of story this show can do that few others would even think of trying. I mean, warthogs in space versus killer warrior women sounds like the sort of thing you’d come up with on the much missed Dr Who website ‘comic creator’ not in an actual story – and yet, thanks to the costume designs, the sincerity of the acting and the central idea it seems like a very real story you can get lost in, despite the often fluffed lines, the plotholes and the rather worn down set design. In other words ‘Galaxy 4’ is the sort of story whose heart is very much in the right place – even when it’s tusks aren’t. Goodness knows why so many fans seem to have forgotten it or why so many people making this story (the cast and director especially, while the BBC director general Huw Wheldon was worried about the female baddies with guns and the episode three cliffhanger scaring children with nightmares about suffocation: seemingly John Wiles was the only person happy with it, to the point where he looked into using the Drahvins in a sequel) seemed to hate it: this is a story hard to dislike because it all means so well. I mean where are you ever going to get a story like this ever again? 

 POSITIVES + Robert Cartland is a last minute replacement for actor Anthony Paul who dropped out just before filming but he sounds as if he’s been voicing alien warthogs his whole life, so excellent is he in the thankless voiceover part of providing the voice for the only rill that speaks, once the Dr finally finds a means to communicate with it. Against all odds the warthog with tusks sounds like he’s from the RSC (The Rilliam Shakespeare Company?) and is one of the grandest and most erudite aliens we ever have the pleasure to listen to. What could have just been stupid (I mean, he’s a boar who sounds a bit like a bore) actually works really well, thanks to Cartland really getting into character, embodying the rills with pitying self despair and frustration that everyone could be saved if only the Drahvins would listen when they extend the tusks of friendship to them. Once he starts speaking like your favourite drama teacher you’re instantly on the Rills’ side. Stephanie Bidmead is pretty good as Maaga too I think, even though I’ve seen some pretty grumpy reviews of her performance. She is, after all, a gun-toting warrior obsessed with survival; she’s meant to be cold, one-note and fixated on one emotion, shallow in comparison to the Rills (it’s actually very close to Jean Marsh’s well received part as Sara Kingdom in three stories’ time). On that score she nails the part, making Maaga unpleasant and untrustworthy without being another ranting psychopath. 

 NEGATIVES - Why is the planet disintegrating exactly? What feels like it should be an important plot point that’s the driving force of both aliens’ desperate attempts to get back into space again is never quite explained. There’s not really the feeling of any threat or urgency either – the moment the Doctor sombrely tells everyone that he’s investigated the Drahvins’ claims and they’ve actually got less time than they realise is a chilling moment, but I doesn’t really change how anyone acts and just seems to be there purely because they can’t think what else to do for a cliffhanger. Also, as unpredictable as it is, how come the Dr doesn’t simply offer to take both sides away in the Tardis? This is one of the few Hartnell stories that doesn’t cut the regulars away from their portable home and while he still can’t control the Tardis’ flight-path in this era surely any planet is better than one about to blow up? I’m sure fixing up an ammonia room wouldn’t be beyond him too and he’s had plenty of odder and uglier companions than the Rills over the years (who said Adric?!) 

BEST QUOTE: Big Rill: ‘It is easy to help others when they are so willing to help you. Though we are beings of separate planets, you fro the solar system and we from another space, our ways of thoughts at tines do not seem all that different. It has been an honour to know and serve you’. 

 PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Not exactly a prequel, but the first episode of this story went out a fortnight before William Hartnell appeared on Desert Island Discs, as a ‘castaway’ just like the Chumblies, Drahvins and Rills here. Only rather than choose the record ‘Chum Chum Chiree Chumbley’, a book on big guns and tusk cream he took with him as his favourite disc music from the Charlie Chaplin film ‘A King In New York’, a Trevaleyn tome on social history and cigarettes. 

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