The Rescue: Ranking - 80

          The Rescue

(Season 2, Dr 1 with Ian, Barbara and Vicki, 2-9/1/1965, producer: Verity Lambert, script editor: Dennis Spooner (uncredited), writer: David Whittaker, director: Christopher Barry)

Rank: 80

   'There once was a monster named Koquillion
He had spines all down his chinnigan

Until the Tardis came he thought he was winningham

But the Dr blew his plans in again

So he left the planet Dido to travel to Michigan
Got on a chat show with Richard and Judy Finnigan
That was the last anyone anyone saw of him again
Poor old Koquillion
Begin again!...

 

 There’s been a lot of fuss down the years, understandably, about what a sea-change the first DW regeneration in ‘The Tenth Planet’ was. After all, no other series had ever thought to try anything like it and traditionally in the 1960s, if a series was lucky enough to run for enough years for a cast member to leave they were simply replaced by a vague lookalike with no reference to the change at all (think Darrin in near-contemporary‘ Bewitched’; I like to think the casting of Richard Hurndall in ‘The Five Doctors’ was a nod of the hat to this as well). However the first change of companion in the series was, in many ways, every bit as big and scary for the production team. The original Tardis crew had been created after a lot of thought, with Susan simultaneously the audience identification figure for the elder children watching at home and an exotic alien who was open and friendly in ways that the Doctor wasn’t (yet). In the original pre-series paperwork Susan’s arguably a better thought out character than her grandfather: she’s all things to all demographics - hip enough to have a 1963 Vidal Sassoon haircut for the teenagers, young enough to be taken by the children at home as ‘their’ character, cute enough for elders to feel as protectively grandfatherly as the Doctor and intriguingly other-worldly enough to fascinate the adults. No one in the production office seems to have given any proper thought to what might happen if one of the cast decided to leave – after all, DW was long assumed by everybody not to last long enough for anyone to get to the end of their year contracts. So it was a shock when Carole Ann Ford handed in her notice. You can’t really blame her – there she was, a 23-year-old adult with a string of strong acting credits to her name, playing a 15-year-old who often acted younger (but is arguably older given what we now know about timelords and the ageing process; she could be anything up to a few hundred years old if this is her first regeneration). Carole also signed up on the back of Susan’s more interesting alien features as listed in the series notes sent to writers before filming that were never properly used on screen (bar a spot of telepathy in ‘The Sensorites’). Luckily the production team had the luxury of a rare break and two stories already recorded to come up with her replacement: a space-age girl named Valerie, then Lukki, then Tanni, then finally Vicki, after a false start trying to make Jenni from ‘Dalek Invasion Of Earth’ a much brusquer cynical type of companion. Vicki’s characterisation similarly went from following Susan’s alien side, to being a combination, to being another teenage identification figure who just happened to come from the future. It must have been a nightmare trying to work out what to make the new girl like (which might be why they took so many goes to get it right, far more than with any other companion for years): luckily they got it more right with Vicki than most. Though only a two parter in an era of fours and sixes, ‘The Rescue’ is the only story to date that’s only about the new companion, rather than simply adding someone to the Tardis who proved their worth during the plot and luckily Vicki shines from the first, already far more rounded than Susan ever was and my candidate as the best DW companion of them all – even if, like Susan, the writers never quite make the most of the promise in her early stories. Notably she’s a lot more rounded from the first; she has a different relationship with each member of the Tardis crew as she meets them: Barbara’s motherly tones brings out her tales of sadness and isolation, Ian’s enthusiasm perks her up no end and she’s more than a match for the Dr’s curiosity (s an aside its notable how much more like Susan the 1^st Dr becomes after she leaves, a far more ‘approachable’ alien than the darker grumpier soul of season one). The adopting ugly aliens and giving them cute pet names is all Vicki’s though, a character trait they really need to bring back. It’s worth saying too that, even though in time Vicki will become one of the more optimistic and in many ways daring of DW companions she experiences a lot more trauma than most. The DW production team sensibly decide to maker her an orphan (that’s ‘sensibly’ because nowadays we can’t go a story without a companion on the phone to someone and parents seem to end up part of the plot a lot these days) whose part of a rocket team that’s crash-landed on ‘Dido’,a planet that the Dr knows used to be inhabited but now seems to be empty – as a result she has nothing to lose when the Tardis comes a calling and has been desperate for adventure during her lonely years there (even if she probably didn’t bargain for quite this much adventure!) She already lost her mum before even leaving her home planet (never named) with her dad for the planet Astra – before he was killed, apparently by the local aliens (she was only spared the same fate, so she thinks, after developing a fever). She does have one other companion, but he makes even the 1^st Dr at his grumpiest seem friendly – apparently disabled in the crash he treats Vicki as his general slave, trapping her while pretending to be protective of her and keeping her safe from the evil aliens outside who, so he says, killed all the other members of the rocket crew. Vicki lost everyone in the crash and the rocket is beyond repair for getting home while there have been no other visitors, so this is so it seems the way things are going to be be until she dies – and she is, after all, merely a teenager (even if her age seems to vary from writer to writer between 15 and 17). You wouldn’t blame her for growing up xenophobic against the local alien race or mad from the stress and panic of it all but instead she stays sweet; no wonder she adopts a sand beast as a pet for company and will develop a habit of adopting anything that moves and/or doesn’t try to kill her during her time on the series (sometimes even when it does). First script editor David Whittaker wrote this all-important story and clearly had something of a ‘Cinderella’ tale in mind, only with the Tardis as the magical pumpkin-coach that takes Vicki away from her nightmare (and the 1^st Dr as an unlikely Fairy Godmother for her, rather than a grandfather!) The planet name of ‘Dido’ also suggests Nahum Tate’s ‘Dido and Aeneas’ of 1678 where, if she’s ‘Dido’, she represents Britain in the pre-Victorian pre-Empire comeback betrayed by the witches and demons of the people who should be keeping her safe (Vicki is very much a contemporary British 60s girl, down to the hair and big eyes and – in a future episode – a love of the Beatles, for all that she comes from the 25^th century). That’s exactly what happens in this story, where her adopted father-figure Bennett turns out to be a brute, lying to her and keeping her trapped. Maureen O’Brien was herself all of 21 when she took this role (her first TV after a career on the stage; she’s a co-founding of my local The Everyman Theatre in Liverpool) but you wouldn’t know it: this script asks a lot of her, with its lengthy scenes and big range of emotions but she nails them all, moving between them with ease. You cry with her when Barbara attacks and kills her pet (mistakenly), you cheer her on when she takes up action alongside Ian and you giggle with her when the Dr clearly takes a shine to her and recognises the same rebellious carefree spirit as his own. As many fans will tell you there’s no real plot to this story – it’s the first of an occasional run of Dr Whodunnits in the series working out who the mysterious monster Koquillion might be and on that score (its hardly worth a spoiler this revelation) it fails miserably given that we only meet two characters the whole story and one of them becomes a regular so its not going to be her. Despite being so comparatively minor the plot doesn’t make much sense anyway – how come Bennet bothers to go to the lengths of dressing up just to fool Vicki?, how come he keeps her around at all when he killed off all the others as she’s not a natural cook/cleaner/bottlewasher? (Though not the smartest cookie DW’s ever had Vicki’s sheltered and inexperienced rather than thick – she’s more than clever enough to see through the ruse when its pointed out to her, as if she’s secretly realised it but didn’t want to admit to it). What exactly is Bennet’s plan anyway? He’s on the run for a murder he wants to keep quiet, sure, but surely being stuck on a planet with no hope of escape is worse than a prison – especially if Vicki’s vegetable garden is all they have to eat. And how come the local Didonians that the Dr remembers only turn up at the end (where the heck have they been all these years?) Their damaging of the ship’s radio is strange too – that’s not the behaviour of the friendly creatures the Dr remembered and even if they’re afraid of humans who have the capacity to blow up their own, why only do this now, at the end of the story, not all the months the ship’s been there? It’s a surprise that Whittaker, especially, ended up with so many loose ends in this story – usually he’s a much smarter writer than that, coming up with some of DW’s most complex and thorough plots (from ‘The Crusades’ to ‘Power Of The Daleks’ to ‘Evil Of The Daleks’). However what ‘The Rescue’ shares with Whittaker’s other works is some truly brilliant dialogue. This is his first chance to write for the characters he helped create since he adjusted their personalities in the third story ‘Edge Of Destruction’ and he breathes new life into them here, so that they all become less cliched and noticeably more like each other: Barbara gets her intelligence and empathy back and gets to do Ian’s job shooting the sandbeast (albeit wrongly), Ian isn’t just brave but clever too doing the thinking you’d normally think the Dr would get to do, while part two might well be the best characterisation of the 1^st Dr of all: his cross-patchiness hides a warm heart, a twinkle in the eye and an eagerness to see the universe, which in turn hides a cold and very alien type of anger when he works out what’s really going on. His early scenes missing Susan are really sweet, but his delight when a ready-made replacement all but falls into his lap is even better. Judging by the viewpoints of those who were there at the time this seems like one of the happiest Tardis teams behind the scenes too and it shows – this is a real family unit who enjoy working together. Many fans chunter that the two parts of this story make it seem out of place, but its the perfect length for this tale – anymore and the plot would have to detract from the characterisation going on here while stretching that too thin to hold our interest. The 50 minute size, the default length of stories in DW these days, also makes it seem very modern somehow: not a sentence is wasted, not a scene goes on too long and its all about people driving the plot not the plot driving the people (if anything its even more like a Star Trek story original or any of the modern spin-offs than your traditional DW stories alongside it; notably we don’t explore this ‘world’ at all – the whole point of DW in its earliest days – just the spaceship and two people in it; when the Dr and Ian try they get trapped in a rockfall). In other words ‘The Rescue’ and indeed Vicki herself rescued DW just at the moment when the series might have come toppling down without Susan there, delivering a new breath of life into the show in season two just when it was in danger of growing stale. My only regret is that Sandy the sandbeast didn’t get to join the Tardis too as that would have been fun, a sort of bitier less logical K9. In fact its a surprise Vicki never fully adopts another pet: you’d think the Tardis would be knee-deep in chumbleys, mecchanoids and giant ants by the time she leaves. Another of those stories that’s much under-rated.

+ The Koquillion costume is impressive, strange and plausibly alien in the way that other contemporary DW monsters like the Voord and Sensorites are, but also equally plausible as a man in a suit cobbled together from odds and ends. The spines that make him look like a cross between a hedgehog and a lizard are a neat touch and still unlike anything else DW has given us to date.

- Apparently the UK has enough budget and scientific knowhow to run its own rocket programme to travel across the far reaches of the stars within the next 470 years. Ahahahahaha I doubt it. Of all the optimistic far-fetched visions of the future in DW this one is right up there with mankind making it to the year 5 billion, setting up a successful (till it isn’t) colony on Mars, Earth joining an intergalactic federation on Peladon that’s a little like the EU and a future where there’s actually a political candidate worth voting for in Harriet Jones.