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 Dr Who 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 jokey nod of the head to this as well). However the first ever 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, to cover all bases for all members of the audience, 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 - young enough to be taken by the younger children at home as ‘their’ character, hip enough to have a 1963 Vidal Sassoon haircut for the teenagers, 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, it was assumed by almost everyone working on it that Dr Who would be lucky to make it’s assumed thirteen weeks.

So it was a bit of a shock when, despite being in one of the biggest TV hits of the decade, Carole Ann Ford handed in her notice at the end of her first year. Though not necessarily a surprise: there she was, a twenty-three-year-old adult mum 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 and frustrated that they had never been used properly (bar a spot of telepathy in ‘The Sensorites’). Susan had gradually descended from being the mysterious focal point of the opening episode to being a bit of a sulky brat (it’s no coincidence that Carole made up her mind to leave round about the time of ‘Reign Of Terror’, her character’s lowest ebb in many ways). 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 Millie, then Tanni, then finally Vicki.

It took longer than you might think to come up with such a straightforward replacement. The first idea was to hire Jenni from ‘The Dalek Invasion Of Earth’: she was roughly the same age as Vicki ended up being and it was thought that The Doctor could ‘adopt’ her as a crossover with his grand-daughter. Pretty early on they realised they’d made a mistake though: ‘Dalek Invasion’ is a tough story, as brutal as any Dr Who adventure to date. The characters have all seen death, destruction and despair at the hands of the Daleks and poor Jenni is clearly traumatised, cynical untrusting and likely to attack any monster they met. Whisking her off into time and space wouldn’t do her or the audience any favours: she would have hated it.  So they changed their mind and wrote in Vicki, someone who’s basically a more fun-loving and enthusiastic version of Susan, someone who is also clearly a teenage girl who very much belongs in the 1960s (in this era of the Beatles explosion every actress that made the shortlist for the role came from Liverpool) but is also at times very alien (though rather than give the Doctor another relative they made her come from our far future in the 25^th century). 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, giving her all of Susan’s best bits but adding in a fun-loving happy-go-lucky streak that made her a far more agreeable companion and an imagination and romanticism that Ian and Barbara were too practical to enjoy. Back in ‘An Unearthly Child’ all the Tardis crew are unwilling passengers to some degree (even if The Doctor is ‘in charge’ the sense is that he’s on the run from something) but now Vicki is exploring the universe as a willing passenger ‘invited’ to come along who clearly loves her time in the Tardis.

Now all they had to do was write her a story. David Whittaker had just handed his notice in along with Carole Ann Ford, keen to go back to freelance work, but the show’s original script editor was still mighty fond of his old series and agreed that his ‘parting gift’ would be the new character’s debut story. Picking up where the production team started with Jenni (travelling in the Tardis because everyone else has died and she has nowhere else to go) he composed a quick ‘Dr Whodunnit’ (the show’s first), one where Vicki would be similarly orphaned and have no ties left to anyone by the end of the story. The production team sensibly decide to make 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). 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!) Notably though Vicki’s far less traumatised despite having gone through just as much: her mum died when she was a child back on their home (un-named) planet and her dad, needing to start again, was in the process of emigrating with her to the planet Astra when their spaceship instead crash-landed on the planet Dido. The locals apparently invited everyone to a meeting, where the humans were slaughtered, leaving behind one lone survivor/eyewitness Bennett (who became crippled) and Vicki (left back on the ship with a fever). However this apparently all happened a long time ago: Vicki has adjusted to her new life well, made a home out of the remnants of the spaceship, grown a sort-of garden adopted a local wild sand-beast. There have been no other visitors her whole life and no one is answering the radio, so this seems the way things are going to be until she dies – and she is, after all, merely a teenager (even if her age seems to vary from writer to writer between fifteen and seventeen). You wouldn’t blame Vicki for growing up xenophobic against the local alien race (who seem to have disappeared) or mad from the stress and panic and isolation of it all, but instead she stays sweet; no wonder, being so lonely, 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). Though her life is hard and Bennett is not the best company Vicki is an optimistic, resilient and likeable soul (in stark contrast to Susan) who has already made the most out of her lot in life. She’s not traumatised the way Jenni would have been but someone who’s life has been delayed, who’s ready to go out amongst the stars and explore. For Susan travelling through the stars often seemed like an unfortunate punishment on someone who’d far rather have stayed at home; for Vicki it’s a reward, for all those years of waiting and hoping and dreaming of better things, in true Dr Who fashion.  

‘The Rescue’ is the only Dr Who story to date that’s only really about the new companion, rather than simply adding someone to the Tardis who proved their worth during the plot, making ‘The Rescue’ one of Dr Who’s few two-part stories as a sort of breather after the intensity of ‘Invasion Earth’. It’s also notably the first ever Dr Who story with a pre-credits sequence (something that happens in most episodes nowadays), just to shift the emphasis from the regulars to the new girl. With such a small cast (two characters plus the three characters and a brief unspeaking appearance at the end of the story) Whittaker gives more room to Vicki than any new companion will ever get again. He cleverly writes so that she’s a slightly different person whoever she’s with too: low-key scared when alone with the growly grumpy Bennett, a daydreamer when she’s by herself, maternal when she’s with her ‘pet’ Sandy, suspicious when she fist meets Ian and Barbara (as anyone would be: she’s strained her eyes searching for ships and doesn’t know the Tardis can materialise the way it does), then slowly by turns friendly, funny and curious (plus briefly angry when Barbara shoots her pet – a little too briefly to be honest given sandy was her only real companion in all that time). 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 and Ian’s enthusiasm perks her up no end. It’s with The Doctor where she changes most though: while Ian and Barbara are ‘adults’, born to be sensible (there’s a very ‘Barbara’ scene when she interrupts doing the washing up to shoot at the sand beast, in a most unfortunate mixup) Vicki can be her playful self with the Doctor and she becomes close to him almost immediately, seeing him as a mischievous partner-in-crime. She’s used to stern-ness after living with Bennett but sees right past it to The Doctor’s playful side, something that leaves Ian and Barbara a little confused. The adopting ugly aliens and giving them cute pet names is all Vicki’s though, a fun character trait they really need to bring back and reminds us that she’s till the teenage girl she’s meant to be. Maureen O’Brien was herself all of 21 when she took this role, the youngest regular on the show till Jackie Lane’s Dodo after her old tutor and Who fan Henry Moore, knowing she was looking for work in London where her boyfriend and future husband Michael Moulds was based, dropped her a message telling her she’d be great (due to a small quirk of fate she also knew future Doctor Paul McGann, not yet an actor, who was close friends with her younger brother Bernard. Somebody get them together in a Big Finish audio please!) This was her first TV work after a career on the stage (she’s a co-founding of my local The Everyman Theatre in Liverpool in fact) 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 Doctor clearly takes a shine to her and recognises the same rebellious carefree spirit as his own. Despite her relative  inexperience Maureen is exceptional for such a TV newbie and the camera loves her from the first. By the end of two episodes it feels as if she’s always been there.

Yes carefree. We’re a long way from ‘An Unearthly Child’ now. The re-setting of The Doctor’s character, from unknowable taciturn alien to playful moral crusader, already in motion since Whittaker’s last story ‘The Edge Of Destruction’, really starts shifting from this story. It’s a great story for William Hartnell too, with Whittaker ‘getting’ him better than any other writer: he’s by turns sad (you so feel for him when he starts talking to Susan and realises she’s not there – even though he was the one that pushed her into leaving!), sly, cunning, funny, sweet and scary, panicking the baddy into falling off a cliff rather than face his ice-cold stare. The Doctor also shifts into the gap that Susan has left, the more friendly open-hearted alien who’s a bit weird rather than a bit scary. Hartnell really shines, especially during the showdown in the ‘hall of judgement’ in the second episode. The extra space from the small cast is great for William Russell and Jacqueline Hill, too, who go through their own stages of grief in missing Susan, Barbara knowing just the right things to say to the Doctor and Ian buoying him up. Once they meet Vicki, too, they act quite differently: we never really saw much of what they were like as teachers in their first story but this story alone suggests they’d have been great ones: they know just when to take charge and when to let the new girl be. They’re both their usual exceptional selves. One moment isn’t just good acting though: Barbara’s squeak of fright when the gun goes off is entirely natural, caused by the pop gun being overloaded with explosives (she picked up burns on her face, poor thing).
Of course a Whodunnit with such a small cast there can only really be one baddy and 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 (it’s 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 it’s not going to be her. You are drawn for half an episode into thinking that the fierce and spiky Koquillion is this weeks’ token monster but no, this is another story where yet again it’s the Humans to blame and it takes the Doctor about five minutes to work everything out. It’s not really a four pipe problem this one: Koquillion comes and goes through Bennett’s side of the spaceship, where Vicki isn’t ‘allowed’. He talks in a voice very like Bennett’s but higher with a cheap trick set up in his room involving a very 1960s tape recorder (even so, while this twist is obvious to modern viewers who can do it with their phones in a heartbeat this really did seem new back then, when not many people owned them – though thankfully a few did or we wouldn’t have the audio soundtracks of all the missing episodes). Vicki doesn’t know where he comes from or what he wants and there’s no backstory, while the Koquillion mask looks like it was cobbled together in minutes from leftovers. Even so, though, it’s a fun ‘joke’: you’ve been primed, in every single ‘futuristic’ story so far to think that aliens are the root cause of most evil and hot on the back of ‘The Sensorites’ (the previous futuristic story that didn’t feature Daleks) and here David Whittaker in his ‘goodbye’ story parodies his own show, having the baddy literally dress up as a Dr Who monster. Why Bennett does this is a bit more questionable: he is, so we find out, an escaped convict who crashed the ship deliberately to avoid the death penalty back on Earth and who slaughtered the native Didonians so that they didn’t shop him.

However that raises all sorts of questions. Like who transports prisoners with ordinary passengers, especially in the future when they’re like busses? What sort of a madman risks crash-landing on a planet and killing himself anyway? How was he ever allowed anywhere near the controls without anyone stopping him? And why, having done all that, did the fellow passengers not lynch/re-arrest him, rather than going out for an outing to the local hall? Why did Vicki’s father leave his only remaining family member alone, sick, rather than stay with her? Also, why does Bennett keep Vicki alive at all? Though not the smartest cookie Dr Who’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 to herself. It just seems an implausible plan. While I’ll buy she had a fever as she remembers it too, why did Bennett not slaughter her too on returning? She’s clearly a curious child likely to ask lots of questions (the hint is that she’s basically a servant, but better to keep someone older with more experience surely? Vicki does her best but she’s no Barbara in the household stakes). For someone who’s already killed it’s surely a quicker solution than dressing up every five minutes. Plus is a life exiled on a planet and unable to get home really better than the inside of a prison cell? Especially if Vicki’s vegetable garden is all they have to eat. Bennett really hasn’t thought this through. Somehow, though, you miss a lot of this first time around given Ray Barrett’s strong performance, which has just enough gentleness behind the stern-ness to make you wonder (he was another Gerry Anderson employee, probably nominated by new script editor Dennis Spooner and can in fact be heard using his ‘Koquillion’ voice as Stingray baddy Titan in the episodes ‘The Ghost Of The Sea’ ‘Rescue From The Skies’, both repeated on ITV on Saturday evenings overlapping with the two episodes of this story). To keep up the pretence we also get Dr Who’s first ever pseudonym in the credits of the Radio Times (something that will come in handy in the future every time Davros turns up), ‘Sydney Wilson’ (for Sydney Newman, head of the BBC drama department and Donald Wilson, head of BBC serials, generally considered the two ‘daddies’ of Dr Who. Though personally I’d have gone with David Verity, after the departing script editor and producer, the real parents of the show!)

Mind you, these Didonians don’t seem like the friendly and welcoming ones the Doctor talks about. Why would they set up a trap in a cave system unless they were afraid of predators? Especially one that they themselves would know wasn’t lethal at all (the poor victim of the cave fall might find his face licked by the local sand-beasts or find their shoelaces have been nibbled, but that’s about all). There’s a confusing ending too, when Bennett is shaken not just by The Doctor seeing through his plan but the return of two Didonians. Are they real, people who somehow survived Bennett’s massacre? At first you think they’re phantoms, caused by his panic, but then they start wrecking the ship’s radio so they must be ‘real’ beings (another weird thing to do as it happens: I can understand why they might not want any other visitors to their planet given what the last lot did, a smashed radio is only going to make the pilots more curious – plus they could have done that years ago). Where have they been hiding all this time? The Doctor, too, doesn’t interact with them at all, or worry for their welfare the way you’d expect him to: he has, after all, talked about how they were so kind to him in an ‘unseen adventure’ (another Whittaker trope: there were lots of them in ‘The Edge Of Destruction’ as well).  The story would work better without them there, as a rather odd denouement to the story. 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 Dr Who’s most complex and thorough plots (from ‘The Crusades’ to ‘Power Of The Daleks’ to ‘Evil Of The Daleks’). It’s a real shame, too, that Vicki –having found out she’s been betrayed – never gets a last scene with Bennett along the lines of ‘you killed my father!’

However what ‘The Rescue’ shares with Whittaker’s other works is some truly brilliant dialogue and a story that really makes the small budget and the claustrophobia of a ‘stage play’ like set up to its advantage. 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 Doctor would get to do, while part two might well be the best characterisation of the 1st 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. Just check out the opening jokey scene that shows how much these three former enemies are now best friends: Barbara comments that she’s ‘stopped trembling’ and The Doctor says he’s glad she’s better, though she obviously means the ship (is he teasing? Or pre-occupied? She can’t tell). 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 enjoyed working together, while the Doctor-Vicki relationship resembled Hartnell and O’Brien’s in real life (he liked the fact she backed him up when he complained about attention to detail; she liked the way he treated her like an equal despite her imexperience. Everyone loved their weekly picnic tradition between camera rehearsals and filming, each actor bringing in a different dish from home. One other sign of what a fun story this was to work on: Ray Barrett was so good at playing ‘dead’ that, rather than shout cut, the cast and crew backed away and turned the studio lights out, hiding so he’d think he’d fallen asleep and they’d all gone home. Something that had happened for real during the making of ‘The Reign Of Terror’!) You can also tell it’s a Whittaker story from the emphasise given over to the Tardis: for every other writer a quirky means of transport but to David the single most important character in the series. This is the first time we see it ‘materialise’ using the full prop rather than a model, indeed the first appearance of that word ‘materialise’, the first use of that famous sound effect heard from outside the Tardis rather than within and most importantly what we come to think of as a companion looking in awe at the inside of the Tardis (Ian and Barbara were understandably more scared than awed).    

In another sense, too, ‘The Rescue’  is Whittaker’s parting shot with the same theme he’s been either writing, commissioning or script-editing for most of the show’s first year: colonialism. Lots of these early shows are about alien powers coming in and taking what isn’t theirs: ‘The Daleks’ destroying The Thals, the Voord taking over Marinus, The Sensorites after a misfortunate incident with arriving Humans, The Aztecs (who are doomed to be destroyed by the Spanish after the Tardis leaves). It’s a theme that Who will take a long time to get out of its system in fact (‘The Web Planet’ ‘The Space Museum’ ‘The Ark’ ‘The Gunfighters’ ‘The Savages’ ‘The Tenth Planet’ and Whittaker’s own ‘The Crusade’ are all about what its like to be on the receiving end of injustice, while Vicki leaves in ‘The Myth Makers’, a fight between Ancient Greece and Ancient Troy with similarities to this story).However this is the one story (until as late as ‘Demons Of the Punjab’ in 2018 anyway) that comes out and says the British are at fault, rather than it just being a side effect of humans stretching their muscle into space. Notice that the spaceship that crash-lands on Dido is British, not just from Earth: they’re a colony ship. Given that ruthless prisoner Bennett is on board it reminds you of Britain sending it’s prisoners over to Australia out the way, to the harm of the local aborigines. Especially the way they are slaughtered wholesale for no greater crime than being alive and a potential threat that needs to be covered up. The Doctor talks about meeting the Didonians before, of how peaceful and friendly they were – implying that they’d have had no defences against the mad British.  That’s really quite something for a show broadcast in Britain maybe twenty years after the semi-official ‘end’ of the empire, Whittaker perhaps realising that it’s his last chance to talk about a pet favourite topic in science fiction terms, where he’s less likely to get into trouble.

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 fifty minute size, the default length of stories in Dr Who these days, also makes it seem very modern somehow, very much like Russell T Davies’ ‘companion entrance season openers’ in fact, the ‘jolly romps’ easily solved like ‘Rose’ ‘Smith and Jones’ ‘Partners In Crime’ or more recently ‘The Church On Ruby Road’ and ‘The Robot Revolution’: you pick up the plot inside five minutes then get to enjoy the new character solving it and bouncing off some old ones. Along the way everything does its job perfectly: not a sentence is wasted, not a scene goes on too long and it’s all about people driving the plot not the plot driving the people (if anything it’s even more like a Star Trek story original or any of the modern spin-offs than your traditional Who stories alongside it; notably we don’t explore this ‘world’ at all– the whole point of Dr Who in its earliest days – just the spaceship and two people in it; when the Dr and Ian try they get trapped in a rockfall). Though it might not have the instant epic power of a ‘Dalek Invasion Of Earth’ or the ambition of a ‘Web Planet’ nevertheless ‘The Rescue’ is a beautifully composed character piece from one of the greatest writers the series ever had.

After all it’s not about what made Vicki become trapped but how she is now free thanks to the magic of Dr Who; as the title demonstrates, this isn’t a story about the ‘problem’ but ‘the rescue’, of having Vicki escape and leave with The Doctor, as a Susan substitute. 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 1st 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. 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.  Nobody dresses up as a monster in that story, but it is a tale of trust and betrayal. Vicki too is very much a ‘British’ girl, for all that she feels like she dates from a more contemporary time, down to the bob-cut hair and big eyes and – in ‘The Chase’ – a love of the Beatles, for all that she comes from the 25th century.
‘The Rescue’ and indeed Vicki herself rescued Dr Who just at the moment when the series might have come toppling down without Susan there or worse with Jenni as the original plan, delivering a new breath of life and joy into the show in season two just when it was in danger of growing stale. It was entirely possible that Dr Who, so far on a lucky streak no one expected, would drop the ball with such a big move and there was much talk of the new companion – so much so that, with an extra Dalek boost from the previous week, ‘The rescue’ made it into the top ten programmes of the week with 12 and 13 million viewers for its two episodes, the highest average for a very long time (till ‘City Of Death’ in 1979, a story boosted by an ITV strike). Yes ‘The Rescue’ is small scale but it’s great that it’s there and done with so much love and care: it would have been awful if we’d just crashed into the next story and never mentioned Susan again, but this story gives fans time to mourn the old and get to know the new. What you think about this story really depends on what you think of the new companion and, while future stories never quite capitalised on the promise of this one and stopped giving Maureen so much to do, nevertheless I’m a big fan of Vicki, one of the series’ most undervalued companions. She’s more fun than any companion we’ll have again till Rose, is sweeter than anyone else until Harry, is brighter than anyone till Zoe, tougher than any female companion till Leela, sparks off The Doctor better than anyone else till Sarah Jane and will inspire more inadvertent youthful revolutions during her time on the Tardis than anyone else. 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, Mechonoids and giant ants by the time she leaves. But those are the problems with future stories that don’t make the most of what’s on offer here, in one of Dr Who’s greatest ever ‘character stories’. Much under-rated, especially if you like your Dr Who stories smaller scale rather than big budget.

POSITIVES + The Koquillion costume is impressive, strange and plausibly alien in the way that other contemporary Dr Who 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. It’s a credit to costume designer Daphne Dare, who apparently got the idea from seeing a fly close-up under a microscope. The Doctor is, apparently, terrified enough to start seeing Koquillion when The Master uses the ‘Keller’ machine on him in ‘The Mind Of Evil’ (although he could, of course, be terrified by how slow he was not to see through such a disguise from very first meeting!)

NEGATIVES - 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 don’t think so! Of all the optimistic far-fetched visions of the future in Dr Who this one is right up there with mankind making it to the year 5 billion without blowing itself up, setting up a successful (till it isn’t) colony on Mars, joining an intergalactic federation on Peladon that’s a little like the EU without being the automatic baddies and a future where there’s actually a political candidate worth voting for in Harriet Jones.  That said Ray Cusick (Dalek designer)’s model is a thing of beauty and one of the best of the 1960s. It even has a working antenna that revolves! Just to add to the atmosphere the model is shot at an angle, suspended on rocks and the TV cameras in the studio were tilted at the exact same angle to emphasise that they’re one and the same – a small detail but one that really sells the illusion.

BEST QUOTE: ‘We can travel anywhere and everywhere in that ‘old box’ as you call it. Regardless of space and time and if you like adventure my dear, I can promise you an abundance of it’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: If you’re asking yourself ‘what was Vicki’s life like before she met the Doctor’ then ‘The Crash Of The UK-201’ (2018) will answer some of your questions. Part of the fifth series of Big Finish’s ‘Early Adventures’ range it finds Vicki waking up back in her space shuttle cabin, her times with the Doctor and her future life in Ancient Greece apparently all a dream. She’s shocked to find that she’s woken up a few days before Bennett’s sabotage (he’s a shady stranger in the distance for most of the story) and has the chance to stop him and save her parents – but by doing so it means she will never meet the Doctor or her true love Trolius from ‘The Myth Makers’. What should she do? This is a fine character story, with Vicki effectively turning Target novel writer and adapting her adventures with The Doctor into books (‘Vicki and The Zarbi’ is a best-seller!)  Steven arrives, in hologram form, in an attempt to get her back to her life in the Tardis but (spoilers) she persuades him to help her instead, getting him to pilot the spaceship away from Dido before Bennett can alter the course of both the ship and everyone’s lives forever, something which causes a time paradox monster to latch onto them (sort of like The Reapers from ‘Father’s Day’, but not really). Which is quite a sacrifice for him too, because he knows that it will affect his timeline as well, perhaps meaning he’ll be stuck in the Mechonoid City for the rest of his life. Vicki, meanwhile, is so happy being back amongst her family, even when she knows to avoid a time paradox, and the moment she effectively has to kill them all over again is a real tearjerker moment. You really feel for both of them in Jonathan Morris’ fine story and the friendship between them where they would do anything for each other, no questions asked, whatever effect it has on them, alongside their perpetual sibling-like teasing. Both Maureen O’Brien and Peter Purves are superb. One of the best Big Finish releases of the lot. 

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