The Space Museum
(Season 2, Dr 1 with Ian Barbara and Vicki, 24/4/1965-15/5/1965, producer: Verity Lambert, script editor: Dennis Spooner, writer: Glyn Jones, director: Mervyn Pinfield)
Rank: 1
'Welcome to the Dr Who Museum. It's not like other museums. For a start, its a lot bigger on the inside. For another you can visit it at any part in its time stream and the same exhibits will always be there, in past present or future, from all possible timelines. And for another history is a real life living thing just a Tardis landing an a set of doors away, where everything you see can change in a nano-second. Cost: a twenty nog note or Asteroid Express. Time tots must be accompanied by an older regeneration. Tin robot dogs to be kept on a lead at all times, unless in the event of a revolution'.
Well we made it everyone,
congratulations – the
315th
and final review! In
that time we’ve gone back to the distant past and forward to the
far future and found both of them parables for the present day,
defeated endless power-hungry aliens who thought humans would be easy
prey, tutted while mankind fell into the exact same traps, witnessed
clever intricate plots that ask big intellectual questions, been on
huge character arcs that have put our characters through the
emotional wringer, asked big questions about karma, fate,
pre-destiny, rebellion, generation gaps and asked what it means to be
human in a universe that’s so often inhumane in
a series that’s also seen the Dr fancy Kylie Minogue on an
intergalactic Titanic, dodge a pantomime Myrka horse on a base
underground and seen Yartek The Alien Voord trip over his own
flippers. In between a
handful of the dumb scifi stories (and even a handful of dumb
historical ones)
DW has asked bigger, bolder, deeper, more probing questions than any
programme I can think of, teaching us lessons from the past offering
us hope for the future and holding up a mirror to our present, all
with a variety that no other series could even begin to match. Yes,
all those reviews in space and time end up here. And
where is our final
destination after 315
days and sixty years of
travelling in space and time? Future
or past? The future! But a future that’s filled with the past. For
we’re in a space museum,
an exhibition in the far future that the Tardis is
so excited to get to that it
arrives a whole episode early, leaving its crew as phantoms who
discover that they are an exhibit themselves.
A lot of fans are probably
flabbergasted that this tale
by one-off DW writer Glynn Jones is
my favourite story
– its far from the most popular or the most obvious. Most probably
can’t even remember it. Those
that do seem to talk about how boring it is and how it goes downhill
after a strong beginning.
There is, admittedly a lot
of talking, but that’s
alright when the dialogue is this good and the low points are more
than off-set by the
brilliant and daring first episode quite unlike anything ever seen in
the series before or since and a finale that ends with nothing short
of an armed revolution. I
put it to you too,
dear reader, that no other DW story (and therefore no other bit of
television) asks as many questions as this story or comes up with as
many fascinating answers, all
of which I’m going to have great fun getting into (this
bumper review ended up super long, sorry, but then its my favourite
story and on this site– it was never going to be short was it?!?)
Firstly, however, before the bigger picture, some of the details. The
first episode is my favourite bit of telly by anyone – not just DW,
of anything. It’s full of such mystery and intrigue, with the
utterly brilliant idea that the Tardis has arrived too early for the
usual story so the companions have a different one, trying to avoid
the sad ending and a fate where they get captured, frozen and put on
display, their adventures
across space and time ending as exhibits for aliens to gawp at. The
moment when they come face to face with themselves is one of the
greatest, scariest moments in the series, perfectly sold by the main
cast who are exemplary and one of the all-time great cliffhangers at
the end of part one as they realise they’ve now ‘arrived’ and
at any moment can do the wrong thing that puts them into those cases.
There are also two of the funniest scenes in all of DW, as the Dr
hides inside an empty Dalek
casing, giving his best
impression the way children were up and down the land and giggling,
before leading the local baddies on a merry dance by holding up their
interrogation with goofy
answers to their questions (imagining a penny farthing when asked
‘how did you come here?’ and a swimsuit when asked what his
companions are wearing). If the story goes downhill a little from
episode two like some fans say, with a third episode that does a lot
of procrastinating waiting for the Dr to wake up and William Hartnell
to come back off holiday, well its still never less than superb, with
a revolution to enjoy – and
revolution, doing things differently to shake up staid archaic
traditions, is exactly what this show is all about.
One of
the reasons I love it is that ‘The
Space Museum’ is kind of an amalgam of all the other 314 stories, a
parable about invasion and freedom that takes in colonialisation and
appropriation, eccentric youthful
rebellions against tired
authoritarian regimes, generational angst, pre-determinism karma and
fate, the concept of ghosts
and phantoms and the ripples
that all of our actions have on the people around us. Another is
that, for the first time properly, we see the Dr
and companions as a force for good, changing things for another
culture because its the right thing to do rather than to save their
own lives. On top there’s a delicious layer of postmodernism, with
the Daleks – the most evil race in the universe – relegated to a
dusty corner of the museum as a forgotten exhibit and with part of
the story taking place on a television screen. I love it because it
gives William Hartnell a chance to do the comedy he was born to play
in between some of his greatest and most serious speeches, with
strong parts for all the regulars. I love the way it goes back to
making the Tardis an equal character, a thinking sentient being full
of mysterious power that’s more than just a simple rocketship
moving
from A to Z. I love the
mixture of drama and comedy in a script that’s only a lurch away
from a big scary moment or a laugh out loud line. But most of all I
love it because it’s so imaginative, so wildly different to
anything else (not just in DW but in all of television) that plays
around with time the way many of the best DW stories do but in a
wholly original way.
I
also love the setting. You
would think that museums would be crucial to Dr Who. They are, after
all, the closest that any of us sitting in the audience will ever
come to living in another time-zone, with access to real life
artefacts from the days gone by that teach us how our ancestors spent
their days. Only in many ways DW is the antithesis of museums.
Far
from tidying history into neat little boxes with simple captions
invariably written by the victors of a particular battle and gawped
at by passing Moroks, in Dr Who all of the past, the present and the
future exist as a living, breathing and all-round messy state of
affairs, one
long line on which cause and effects are dotted, all connected.
For the Doctor
and his Tardis all periods are potentially the present and above all
alive, with the potential for change that will impact all the other
time periods he sees. The past, the present and future are all
the
same to time travellers,
jumbled together at the whim of the Tardis’
very random controls and
even the most smug, proud civilisation is only another jumping off
point in the past for those with a time machine.
Where others
record history as part of a closed sealed narrative the
doctor lives
it like an open book, experiencing events firsthand, seeing the
complicated ripples of our history that have led us to where we are
in the present day. A lot of DW, especially in the black and white
days when it used to travel in the past more frequently, is about
seeing history for what it was really like, without the glamour and
bias of the history books, a time when the past was still the present
and nobody quite knew
how things would turn out yet. The fearsome Kublai Khan becomes a
harmless old man playing backgammon, Saladin turns out to be more
honourable than Richard the Lionheart, The Meddling Monk sells
toasters to the Vikings and the Dr himself accidentally invents the
Trojan horse in Ancient Greece. In a museum, though, the past is all
sorted and settled, battles of antiquity that were real life and
death decisions relegated to a fusty corner of a forgotten exhibit.
The
idea of a museum is so very DW they’ve doe it again three times: Of
the three other museums we’ve had in the modern series all
of
them
view
history as being slightly ‘wrong’ - ‘The Pandorica Opens’
turns an ancient artefact that’s been preserved under great duress
for centuries into a present-day bit
of flirting
between the Dr and River Song, ‘Dalek’ has the 9th
Dr running around a sort-of museum of alien artefacts as curated by a
mad American whose only interested in weapons and doesn’t
understand the first thing about what the objects are, as if his own
culture is more important than all the things he’s ‘borrowed’
and
‘The Seeds Of Death’ took the cutting age technology of the year
of transmission
and put them in a far future when they’re obsolete, loved by
historians not pioneers. In
DW the times they are always a changin’ and future that are
ignorant about the past and yet dismiss it as stupid are fair game,
as are regimes so up themselves that they think they’re the be all
of civilisation, not a future exhibit themselves. ‘The Space
Museum’ still has the best comment for my money though: no one is
immune to becoming exhibits, fixed points in the past, unless you
actively adapt yourself to a changing world. In a series that’s
primarily about change, what greater lesson could there be? And its
one more pertinent than ever in an era of once venerated statues
being overthrown and showrunners re-writing the past to fit modern
changes in society.
In a series all about change and time travel museums are ‘wrong’ – even ones like the one on Xeros in the far future (when there’s less history to change). However, at least those museums celebrated some form of the past: in ‘The Space Museum’ the past has become irrelevant, the Moroks taking no pride in their collection and not exactly going out their way to get visitors (we don’t see any – maybe its an intergalactic Sunday?) This isn’t living, breathing history that feels ‘real’ the way ‘The Crusades’ did on Dr Who only the week before ‘The Space Museum’ aired; no, this is a messed up collection of forgotten nick-knacks stuck in a museum because they are too expensive to keep in a warehouse. There’s no love or regard for the past here, no understanding of what came before, no lessons learned in the present. The Moroks just take things that don’t belong to them as a sort of prize, all the great monsters of the past from Daleks down who also tried to conquer people and take away their freedoms turned into mere trophies, the Moroks who put them there not realising that one day too, they’ll be defeated in just the same way they are.
The
idea of the Tardis crew ending up in a museum (alongside a Dalek and
many props used in the series) is also a very
funny joke.
Back in 1965 the thought that one day people might enjoy Dr Who the
series with nostalgia, to share it with children and grandchildren
and great-grandchildren who hadn’t been born on the date of first
transmission or to own it on nice shiny discs with extras featuring
ageing cast and crew reminiscing would seem more outlandishly
science-fiction than any Dalek invasion or time machine. Heck, in
this period in time you didn’t ever get to see a Dr Who episode if
you happened to miss it, thanks to the complicated way that the BBC
drew up their contracts, with repeat
fees a
complicated affair that involved contacting everyone involved all
over again for permission. Television
was the most transient, temporary media going in 1965, treated more
like stage plays once seen always lost rather than film to be kept
and treasured. If
you missed it, that was it – the idea that you could go back and
re-visit something as transient as items from a television programme,
on the same level as great moments in history, was meant to be funny.
While in practice it was just an excuse for raiding the props
cupboard and getting the episode in on budget, there’s also
something triumphant
in
the idea of a ‘space museum’ that clearly covers many of the
worlds that have already been seen in Dr Who, as
if at last these are all props worth keeping in storage because DW is
likely to keep running for the foreseeable future.
This is, after all, a series celebrating eighteen almost continuous
months on the air with a still incredibly healthy average of
somewhere around ten million viewers – largely unheard of back in
1965 for anything that wasn’t news, soap or sports based. Though
the dialogue never mentions any of it, eagle-eyed viewers can spot
the distinctive chairs used by ‘The Sensorites’, the laser used
for a few things and most visibly later
in ‘The Wheel In Space’ and of course the infamous Dalek casing.
Notably there’s nothing here from Earth, which presumably wasn’t
considered an important planet by this point in the future (either
that or Sabalom Glitz had sold all the antiques already to some
passing megalomaniac Earthling ex-pat nostalgic for home; my guess is
Mavic Chen). Oddly, large swathes of past Tardis props and walls
appear, though none of the four seem to notice (as the original
Tardis interior seems a ‘standard’ model however perhaps various
parts in this museum are in fact pinched from Gallifrey?) This
is a real thrill for fans like me who have too much time on their
hands and love seeing items from the
show’s
past again
– it gives an extra layer
that DW is ‘real’ somehow, that these adventures all take place
in the same universe, a continuous tale that is still running without
re-set button at the end of each adventure and
when the TV cameras are no longer filming.
There
is another darker
aspect
to this story too:
back
in 1965, far
more than now, most museums here were records of the
decaying
British empire, full of items appropriated from other cultures much
the same way the Moroks do in
the story.
By
1965 it was becoming increasingly obvious that Britain was no longer
the super-power it once was, with an Empire that stretched across the
globe the way The Daleks’ did on TV. There was a general divide in
opinion on this past, depending on the age of the people you asked in
1965: to those who had grown up in Queen Victoria’s day the idea of
owning another population was a good thing, for them as much as you;
colonialists were the bringers of peace to barbaric nations, who gave
them law and order and structure as well as taking away their freedom
and increasing their amount of tax-paying subjects. To those of a
younger age who’d grown up after WWII, though, when superpowers
like America, Russia and China were competing for dominance on a cold
war stage, it seemed wrong and blooming well frightening that
another civilisation could invade yours and appropriate
your culture, absorbing it into some bigger whole you didn’t
approve of,
taking your things for themselves.
The fact that ‘The Space Museum’ has all the characters accepting
the Xerons’ right to live in peace and overthrow their masters
without a single comment (even from the Doctor, who at least looks
the right age for being Victorian/Edwardian despite being a
centuries’ old alien) is very telling I think and quite
a revolutionary idea for 1965. Writer
Glyn Jones had, after all, seen the effects of colonialism
first-hand. He had been born in South Africa and worked in their
National Theatre travelling the country putting on plays during
apartheid, before deciding that his only was of making acting a
career would be to hitch-hike to Europe, writing on the side to pay
his way (he is, indeed, the only person to ever write and act in two
separate Dr Who stories during the series’ original ‘classic era’
run; that’s him – funnily enough – being ‘colonised’ as
Krans, one of the humans in ‘The Sontaron Experiment’ in 1974).
Inevitably with his home accent Jones
was forever getting typecast as exotic foreigners and no
doubt getting increasingly annoyed at
the fact that there weren’t many decent parts written for people
who didn’t speak The Queen’s English. This led to him writing
good roles for actors of foreign descent in many of his own works,
including his most famous play ‘The ‘88’ about an uprising in
India and the last execution of a British soldier (bad timing meant
that a real uprising in Ireland rather overshadowed it’s opening
night, though). In short, out of all the writers for 1960s Dr Who, if
any of them were going to write a story sneakily getting in thoughts
about the horrors of colonialism onto the TV, then it was probably
going to be him. However,
rather
than make a serious point at a time when it might have been
dangerous, here he makes it a comedy, the joke being on the Moroks
(Jones
has said that
his original draft for the story included many more comedy moments
but that these were taken out when Dennis Spooner took over as
story-editor from David Whittaker, surprisingly
so actually given the large amount of jokes in Spooner’s own
scripts for the series).
The
Moroks are depicted here as being ruthless colonisers on a par with
the Daleks or Cybermen – indeed, what with a Dalek casing in their
museum, the suggestion is that the Moroks
themselves now rule Skaro with the Daleks and Thals extinct and as
such are even worse than they are. However, they have ruled the
universe for so long that they have become complacent, unsure what to
do with the planets they conquered and hit by a sense of malaise.
For, like many a baddy in Dr Who, what do they want to do with all
this power once they own it and
have put it away in a museum?
They
don’t know – because their own culture is so deadly dull they
have to steal from someone else’s.
For many colonial powers the difficult part wasn’t the invasion and
enslaving of races (which generally happened by surprise and stealth)
but staying in control of those colonies when the inhabitants decided
to fight back on all sides with a hunger for the freedom of their own
people conscripted soldiers in an often cold and wet foreign land
could never match. It’s also probably not a coincidence on the
writer’s part that the museum has been the size of a whole planet
for at least this length of time. For after you have filled a museum
that’s as big as it can be where do you go from there? You can’t
have new exhibits to show off to people once you have collected
everything. This sort of thing was also in the news a
lot
in the mid-1960s with
the first stirrings of debate over
the appropriation of the Elgin
Marbles
that dated
back to the days of ‘The Myth Makers’ (the
setting, not the DW
story)
and
yet which had
been sitting in The British Museum ever since a Victorian named
Thomas Bruce (the 7th
Earl of Elgin, hence the new name) appropriated them for his own
house in 1812. They
were part of his private collection; only
his own debts and cash-flow problems led to their being seen by the
public at all after Bruce sold them on to The British Museum. There
was an outcry about this even at the time when Greece was under the
control of The Ottoman Empire (Lord Byron called the idea ‘vandalism
and looting’), with the Greek government asking many times for
their return since their independence in the 1830s. The 1960s was one
of these times they
were asked after
a document used in court to demonstrate the removal of the stone was
finally translated into English but
while it agreed to the removal of many minor pieces didn’t mention
the Elgin Marbles by name or description so
as not to cause a fuss ‘just in case’ of rtaliation in the
present.
The Moroks have clearly done the same with all the exhibits in the
museum, cultural vandalism that might pale alongside enslaving a race
and killing all those of age but is nevertheless a crime as
heinous
as any in the DW universe worthy of them being
overthrown because in 1965 the idea of holding onto something that
wasn’t yours just because you could was an anachronism,something
your parents and grandparents did.
In short, the Moroks don’t deserve their museum and you like to
think the Xerons spent their time after the Tardis’ departure
sending all the exhibits back to their proper place (you have to feel
for the poor Xeron who had to go to Skaro to explain this
though.Especially if they
then had to get a Dalek to sign some paperwork for
them).
The
introduction of Governor
Lobos in
episode two is a gem of Dr Who humour: he
isn’t your obvious idea of a cold-blooded killer keeping control
through intimidation and power; he’s just an ambitious chap who
clearly hasn’t thought about his job much and has left one boring
role for another, clearly counting down the hours until he can go
home and/or
retire.
He isn’t a ruthless killer who
defeated all the foes in the museum,
just a bureaucrat with a headache who wants a long lie-down and whose
safest way out of all the headaches the Tardis foursome are giving
him is to get rid of them as quickly as possible. He’s not the sign
of an empire at its prideful healthy peak, but a sign of decay and
decadence, of shortcuts to an easy life taken too far. At this moment
in time Lobos would rather there wasn’t an empire to defend at all
because
it just means a lot of extra paperwork.
He’s
the start of a long line in DW of comedy baddies, following rules and
being unable to see the bigger picture, a creature to be pitied
rather than feared. No
wonder the Doctor starts quoting from Gibbon’s ‘Decline and Fall
of The Roman Empire’ later in the episode – Xeros is about at the
point where the Romans withdrew from Britain after hundreds of years
of rule more out of malaise than malice. As for the space museum
itself, we are told it stretches across the whole planet and should
be a thing of marvel; however visitors stopped coming to see the
exhibits ‘hundreds of minims’ ago. That’s not a good sign for
any civilization and suggests that its size and stature have been
taken for granted, rather like The Romans in the Middle Ages, The
British Empire in the Edwardian period or arguably America now. No
one in living memory has had to strive for anything, they’re just
the descendents
of the people who did, going through the motions while the anger and
injustice of the colonised builds up. All it takes, on a subjugated
planet full of Xerons full of resentment and frustration, to
kickstart a revolution is the right leader at the right time –
which Vicki is.
The
year 1965 is a particularly fascinating point in time, an
era that would be my first choice in any museum.
The middle year of the decade that’s arguably seen more societal
change and
upheaval
than any other in living memory, it also happens to be exactly twenty
years since the end of the Second World War. And the Second World War
started exactly twenty years after the end of The First World War.
For an entire generation, who’d grown up losing parents and
grandparents, war seemed inevitable and something that was a part and
parcel of being human. They had brought up their children with the
knowledge that there had been two wars to end all wars already and
that the end of the last one had brought deadlier weapons into play
than ever before so the world
might not live to see a fourth.
When most people imagined the future in
1965 they
probably came up with something similar to ‘The Dalek Invasion Of
Earth’, a
scarred broken world under military control, but
without the happy ending. The idea that there even
could
be a museum containing artefacts that hadn’t even been created yet
took
a whole leap of faith that there was going to be a future at all. As
we’ve seen in a few other 1960s stories DW was unique in having a
family audience, to be enjoyed by mums and dads alongside
their children and a rare platform where stories and the messages in
them had to appeal to both sensibilities.
All too often the series falls into the traps of dismissing youthful
ideals as a load of arrant nonsense (‘The Dominators’ is
particularly ‘wrong’, a story about how hippie idealism and
pacifism is stupid and weirdly enough sides with shouty men in togas)
but the most interesting stories are those that ask big questions
about how both sides of
the sofa can
come together and find common ground. The story after this ‘The
Chase’ is, I think, the pinnacle of this: in all of space and time
Vicki most wants to see The Beatles sing their
just-released single
‘Ticket To Ride’ and Ian and Barbara want to get back home to
swinging London, to the point of risking their lives, because
its the best place in the universe to be, while
the Daleks are the ‘old’ war-like generation who haven’t
noticed that the rules have changed. ‘The War Games’, too, ends
the 1960s by pointing out how all wars feel the same across history
and are all the fault of the (impossibly) old people who don’t have
to fight in them anyway. That feeling is in this story too, though,
but
one that’s
firmly on the side of the kids.
We’re
not quite at the ‘summer of love’ yet but there’s definitely a
feeling in the air in 1965 that the youth of the day won’t be like
their parents when they come of age and that war is something adults
do to each other while the children are giving out flowers and saving
the planet. DW
was, moreover, a youthful show made by an impressively young crew of
people – producer Verity Lambert was not-quite-thirty by the time
‘The Space Museum’ was broadcast and writer Glyn Jones was only
thirty-four. Compared to most programmes being made by The BBC it was
very much being made by near-children partly for children, with new
attitudes not seen anywhere else. When the Moroks took the planet
over they deported or killed all of the adults, leaving only the
youth as slaves, they
treat them like children and assume they won’t put up any
resistance because they’re too young, wet and inexperienced,
without realising the powder-keg that’s waiting to be set off.
Pacifism
is seen as weak, something to be exploited, not a strength of
character.
Here,
for the moment, they’re in stasis, a revolution on the cusp,
unwilling to fight back – so the Moroks assume that’s that and go
back to pushing paper around for a living. But these
proto-hippies still
talk
about and
whole heartedly believe in peace
and are
brave and committed and righteous, they
just
lack
a strong leader to
lead them on till
Vicki turns up crying ‘viva le revolution!’ (it might be
significant she comes from Liverpool and likes The Beatles), but
underneath
they’re
angry enough to fight for their freedom as fiercely as any race we
see in DW. By 1965 there was a growing feeling of fear amongst the
adults of the day about what might happen when the teenagers of the
day came of age and took over, of what long-standing institutions
they might dismantle (even the word teenager was itself ‘new’ –
till the 1950s people just went from being children to being younger
clones of their parents, but teenager implies a whole subculture with
its own rules and insider references).
This was an era of teenagers speaking out against everything that
came before that wasn’t working but adults were following blindly
anyway:
this
is the
era of ‘ban the bomb’, of draft dodging, of protests against wars
in Vietnam and Korea and while the youngsters haven’t quite got it
together enough to form into groups the way they will at ‘Monterey
Pop’ and ‘Woodstock’ in
a few years they’re
already gathering at smaller music festivals without an adult or
chaperone in sight. From the adult point of view all the liberties
that had been so hard fought for, across two world wars and more,
were going up in smoke, their
countries sitting ducks for others to invade, perhaps not realising
how after two generations most people in most countries
didn’t have the stomach
to fight.
There was surely something in the air at the time too as this is
basically the plot of ‘Logan’s Run’ here too, about the youth
only having a certain amount of time to make society ‘theirs’
before they run out of time and become adults like the Moroks to
be exterminated,
only
here the hint is that they’ll just end up standing
around being grumpy, filling in paperwork and moaning about how much
better it was in the olden days (how most children tend to see
adults).That celebrated novel won’t be published until 1967 though,
with ‘The Space Museum’ getting there first (notably the novel
sets the age of execution at twenty-one which is pretty much what we
see here, with Jeremy Bulloch for instance aged twenty; the film
adaptation of 1969 moves this age of death up to thirty to
accommodate more experienced actors and actresses). However,
as much as this story is filled with 1960s revolutinary zeal, it also
comes with a warning: that if the youth of the day make the ‘wrong’
change, if they give up on revolution they’ll just end up stuck in
time like their parents, their achievements gathering dust in a
future museum. Youth is a moving target with a limited time to have
an impact before they grow up to become an adult institution. As
Isaac Asimov once said ‘To your generation everything being created
around you is completely normal and part of everyday life. Everything
created the generation before you is a career opportunity. And
everything created two generations after you is the work of the devil
and should be abolished!’ Every
generation goes through it and even the 1960s aren’t immune. And so
it proved to be: I mean who in 1965 would have guessed at a Beatles
‘comeback’ single being released in DW’s 60th
anniversary being so awfully generic and for the money not the music?
This is the band who’ve just released ‘Ticket To
Ride’ and at the peak of their powers.
There
is no other way out of the museum except revolution. Just
watch what happens with the plot after all when every other way
except Vicki’s
comes
unstuck: The Doctor tries to do his normal thing in situations like
these and out-wit the Moroks but loses for one
of the first times ever (so the Dr is fallible after all! Quite a
shock if you’re watching these stories in order),
his body frozen for exhibition in a manner that would have killed
anyone but a timelord; Barbara tries to be diplomatic and cautious,
the
way she usually does,
but this only ends up with her being separated from the others and
gassed (and
in a series that uses so many WW2 references this is surely another
one);
Ian is his usual assertive self times ten in this story, but even his
pro-active plotting
just lands him in deeper
trouble
as
a sort-of prisoner of war–
it’s as if all the old ways that the Tardis crew used to use to get
them out of trouble in earlier stories aren’t working anymore. Only
Vicki’s method (a
very 1960s combination of wide-eyed
passion and chaos, with a touch of innocent flirting) seems to work
in this new dangerous world, a world that might
just be the future for real
for
the viewers one day. While
we never find out which actual decision saved the Tardis crew from
being turned into exhibits, most writers seem to agree that it’s
probably fifteen-year-old Vicki encouraging the teenagers to rebel
that saves them from their colonialists as they are the ones who
storm the prison cell the
Tardis crew are in after
all; it certainly seems fair to say that the writer is firmly on the
side of the teenagers.
Not enough people make enough of that fact in
my view because this thought was, for the day, pretty much unheard
of. When young people were seen on television in the 1960s it was
usually because they were on the news being arrested. Nobody gave
them screen time with programmes of their own and they certainly
didn’t show people who looked like they did with long hair and hope
(at least, not until The Monkees and perhaps Patrick Troughton’s
doctor both come along in 1966). They certainly weren’t told to
effectively rise up above their adult masters and make their own
world as they effectively are in this serial. It is, after all, Vicki
doing this – not the grandfatherly Doctor (who certainly seemed to
like this sort of thing by his 3rd and 4th
incarnations), not even the early-middle-aged Ian or Barbara, but the
young audience’s natural identification figure
(even
if Vicki is technically 500 years younger than any of the audience,
she looks and speaks the most like them.
Unfortunately
its the one black mark against this otherwise superb story that the
production team don’t quite get this right.
More by bad luck than mis-judgement,
this
story full of kiddie revolutionaries happened
to be assigned
to director Mervyn Pinfield, one of the oldest directors to ever work
on the show and more used to being Verity Lambert’s more
experienced sounding board as associate producer for the show than
a director(the
DVD commentary has Maureen so alarmed at how out-of-touch he was that
as a group the actors requested not to work with him again). Often in
this story decisions are taken that suggest a middle-aged man’s
idea of youth from perhaps a decade or so earlier. The Xerons, for
instance, are beatniks in black with slightly long hair, straight out
of 1955 and no actual real teenager in 1965 would have been seen dead
in such a thing (note too that one of the Xerons – the one who
seems to have his hands permanently stuck to his hips - is played by
Jeremy Bulloch, best known for his role in Cliff Richard film ‘Summer
Holiday’, which is also a wholesome 1960s adult idea of what
British teenagers got up to that
was nothing like the truth even then).
By
rights, for a story recorded in Spring 1965, the Xerons should be
looking like The Byrds, with granny specs and capes (the latest in
thing). That’s a shame because this, of all stories, needed to look
‘now’, the point being missed. But its a point that’s still
there, in the script. This
is still a revolution in waiting, that hasn’t quite arrived yet
(trust DW to get there early). And
that’s the whole point of this story: ‘DW is a ghost form of what
might happen for real in the future a practice run made by people who
get to inspire those at homes with ideas of a better world they still
have to deliver on. The
Space Museum’ is, perhaps, the first time we’ve really seen
‘time’ or ‘the fourth dimension’ as a ‘character’ in Dr
Who rather than just something the Tardis travels in, something
that’s so crucial to the show today that it turns up more weeks
than not (you could make the case for ‘Edge Of Destruction’ I
suppose, although it’s really more about the Tardis itself than
time as a concept). If ever there was a story that had time as
something non-linear and wibbly wobbly, it’s a story where the
Tardis jumps a time-track and arrives an episode early, something
even Steven Moffat never quite did. Officially, according to the
Doctor in the fourth episode, it’s all the fault of a part of the
Tardis that got stuck (though the writer’s original concept, a
black box that happened to end up in the museum that was taking the
Tardis off course, makes much more sense than anything we get on
screen).
Are
the Tardis crew actually there or not? There is a hint that the
Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Vicki are phantoms, people that have arrived
at their destination in all ways except for the physical. They are
able to walk across land and floors, but at first show no footprints
even in the dusty surface of Xeros. They are able to talk to each
other but cannot communicate with any outsiders, watching various
Xerons walk past talking without being able to hear their speech
(this has been put forward as a glitch of the Tardis and its apparent
ability to allow the Tardis crew to translate the language of
whatever species they encounter, except that they don’t hear the
Xerons use any language at all – in fact
they sound
mute, even
though their lips are moving).
When Vicki drops a glass of water it regenerates in her hand whole
again, as if the event cannot really happen because nothing has
physically taken place yet. The brilliant
and imaginative hint
is that this might be the explanation for spirits and phantoms on
Earth, that death is merely to be stuck in this timeless
dimension
and that all our ghosts are beings who after death have jumped a
‘time track’ and ended up in this world of limbo, able to see the
world they used to inhabit but unable to interact with it. Later DW
episodes
like 2013’s ’Hide’ agree
that ghosts
live in an entirely separate dimension,with ‘echoes’ that
occasionally pass through to the right psychic individuals and
might well be this dimension the Dr and co get stuck in.
Other episodes that
do similar sort of things tend
to refer to a timeless fourth dimension as a ‘white void’
(stories like ‘The Mind Robber’ ‘Warrior’s Gate’ or various
Sarah Jane Adventures), a literal place of ‘nothing’. However
‘The Space Museum’ is pretty much unique in having the world the
Tardis crew end up in running in parallel to the ‘real’ physical
world, so much so that it takes half the first episode for them to
realise that they aren’t in fact physical beings at all. Such
a great idea – and one in 1965, utterly unlike anything else on
television. Truly, Glynn Jones
never gets enough credit for all the things fans assume Steven Moffat
invented forty years later.
Really,
though, the idea of what happens to the Tardis crew by the end of
‘The Space Museum’ is deceptively simple; they just had to ‘think
outside the box’ (a
literal exhibit box in this case) and do something different to what
they would normally have done.
But
what is the right thing? How do you know which of the possible paths
is best, which one will lead to salvation and which to doom? For
the Tardis crew themselves, the existential threat they experience in
this story is one with much wider implications than a brush with
monsters. Every move they make, every single one, could get them
closer to their deaths or closer towards escape. This
isn’t a story the Dr can solve with a swish of the sonic
screwdriver (not least because he doesn’t have one yet) – this
story is more ambiguous and thoughtful
than that.
‘The
Space Museum’ is largely unique in terms of Dr Who plots because
the end result is something the Tardis crew are trying to avoid,
rather than work towards. Barbara talks in the last episode about
‘four separate journeys, four choices that led all the time closer
to here’, meaning the prison they are being held in and the
exhibition stands that await them for eternity (or at least until a
more interesting exhibit comes along and they get thrown away). From
episode two to episode four every action the Tardis crew takes could
put them further into danger or prove to be their salvation and for
once even The Doctor can’t think of what to do to put things right.
The
big question at the heart of ‘The Space Museum’ is that of
predestination and fate. Are our paths set out for us before we are
even born, to the point where whole empires (even Dalek ones) have
invisible best before dates, or is the future all up for grabs so
that quick-thinking and the right action here and there can prevent
catastrophe? Was their future guaranteed right up until the point
when they interacted with the Moroks and Xerons? Was the Tardis
always fated to land on this planet – and is that true of all the
adventures the Doctor has ever had?
Or
maybe its weirder than that? DW asks a lot in its episodes about
possible future and paths not taken (there are whole episodes of this
in ‘The Name Of the Doctor’ and ‘Turn Left’). It’s a series
that tells us we can be anyone and do anything, our futures hanging
in the balance in all the possible presents open to us (with only the
past set in stone), although on the other hand there are all of River
Song’s episodes lived in the wrong order complete with spoilers.
The most interesting comparison though is with ‘The watcher’
phantom in ‘Logopolis’ that knows something about the
inevitability of time
and
fate that
even time
travellers
can’t avoid (after
all it was only a year ago ‘The Aztecs’ had the Dr telling us
that they couldn’t change history ‘not one line’).
Is it the same here? Only this time did the Tardis not like the
version of history that was due to happen (the Tardis crew dying) so
it decided to intervene and, even if it couldn’t create the future,
at least gave its friends a sneak preview so
they could have a bash?
I’m not so sure the Tardis does develop a ‘fault’ as the Dr
says it does in part four: we’re in the early days when he hasn’t
stolen it long and doesn’t know how to work it and get it to where
its supposed to go, so for the most part he’s content to let the
Tardis choose where the Dr needs to be. The
universe, after all, would be very different without the doctor in
it. There’s a reason whole stars go out in the night sky in this
story’s 21st
century
cousin
‘Turn Left’ (the only other story in the fifty-six year run
predominantly concerned with pre-destination
and free will, only here it’s more about Donna Noble’s actions
than the Doctor’s) after it appears the doctor has died. This leads
to some fascinating questions about
fate:
was the Tardis always meant to land when it finally does? Given what
we now know (and knew a little then thanks to ‘Edge Of
Destruction’) is the Tardis a semi-sentient entity capable of
giving the Tardis crew a fighting chance of escaping a deadly fate?
If so, is the Tardis doing this for the crew’s protection or its
own? (We
do after all see the Tardis in the corner of one of the exhibition
rooms; stories like ‘The Doctor’s Wife’ hint that the Tardis is
as eager for adventures as The Doctor is and stories
like ‘The Name Of The Doctor’ further propose that the Tardis
‘chose’ him to run away with rather than the other way around).
Is
the Tardis ensuring its own safety by ensuring the crew’s safety?
Or is it trying to give the Dr a push into the hero he ends up being,
rather than just an explorer by
turning him into a moral figure here for pretty much the first time?
Had
The Tardis landed normally our
heroes
might possibly have had a quick look around, realised the Moroks
weren’t very nice and taken off again very quickly. In their haste
to escape becoming exhibits, however, they actually get involved in
Xeros’ politics and end up inspiring the Xerons to take control of
their planet back. Notably, it’s the first real time that the
Doctor and friends could have just run away – unlike earlier
stories they are all together until mid-way through the second
episode, not trying to escape the Daleks or rescuing Ian from a giant
matchbox or rescuing Barbara from whichever evil assassin from
history has taken a shine to her this week (the
early DW stories being more about the fear of being stranded from
home somewhere scary rather than the delight in exploring other
worlds and righting wrongs).
Maybe
the Tardis lands here – in the far far future where the Dr’s
interference cant change history too much (we don’t know quite when
but only ‘Frontios’ and ‘The Ark’ seem to match it) – to
show the Dr how much he can make the universe a better place in
other timezones, without causing the ripples he thinks it will,
because his intervention is fated.
In which case ‘The Space Museum’ might well end up being the most
important DW story of them all, the moment when the most crucial
thing in the universe isn’t getting home to safety again but being
brave and doing the right thing.
One
theory is that the Tardis crew themselves don’t actually change
anything. They do, after all, act entirely in character even
when they’re meant to be changing things,
even if in Vicki’s case the anarchic side of her personality is
something we
hadn’t seen before.
Based on adventures before and after it seems inevitable that the
first Doctor will end up interrogated by some alien baddie and will
try to outwit them; that Ian will be the assertive action-hero
looking to save his friends; that Barbara will keep a cool head in
trouble and appeal to the locals’ good nature; that Vicki will be
brave and impetuous and befriend any quirky-looking local to the
planet. And
yet all four of them do things that are completely unpredictable for
the Moroks and so far out their sphere of knowledge that they can’t
quash them the way they can the usual rebellions from local
subjugated planets. The Moroks are angered by the Doctor’s antics
and his refusal to give them the information they need to the point
of killing him (or so they think) – he doesn’t behave in the same
cowed way the Xerons do and they don’t quite know what to do with
him. This means they get careless and sloppy, less on their guard
than usual (particularly after they have ‘frozen’ him and assume
he is no longer a threat, not
realising that he’s a timelord with a different biology).
Ian does what leading men of the past tend to do but the Xerons have
forgotten – act aggressive and threaten, even if the audience at
home know its mostly an act (mind you, Ian seems unusually keen to
get his hands on one of the Moroks’ guns, to the point of risking
his life for one). By doing so the Moroks seem genuinely scared and
off-guard, clueless after years of looking after the rather aimless
and passive Xerons. Barbara, meanwhile, is uncharacteristically
old-fashioned in this story, alternating between trying to think and
try to hide, more like heroines of the past. She’s rather good at
finding hiding places the Moroks can’t discover, even though
they’ve lived on this planet for years and she’s a newcomer –
once again, its Barbara's imagination, her strongest quality, that
‘saves’ her. Her friendship with Vicki though causes the Xerons
to look for her and as Barbara so often does she risks her life to
protect a near-stranger almost without question – and the Moroks
don’t really understand that concept either.
It
is Vicki, though, who clearly does the most to influence her
environment, taking action and leading a revolution from the front
and giving the locals ideas they’ve never had before (after all,
it’s they not Vicki who have the means to re-programme the computer
so that it accepts any ‘truthful’ answers rather than merely the
‘right’ ones, they just didn’t have the belief and courage to
get there without her help and
inspiration).
At first it looks as if all their adventures have been in vain
(perhaps as the DW’s travels have failed to create a revolution all
on their own), the
fourth episode finding
the Tardis crew back together again and locked up, as close to being
in the cabinet cases as they ever come. Their fate sees doomed,
perhaps as a direct result of everything they have done (it would
have been interesting to know what would have happened if the four
had simply ‘done nothing’ as Barbara suggests; this would, after
all, have been the single most un-Dr Who thing they could have done).
However, like all good Dr Who, the Tardis crew have an impact on the
people that they meet on Xeros and it is they who come to their
rescue as either a direct or indirect result of what the Tardis crew
did and
its the Xerons that they’ve inspired who come to their rescue and
set them free.
It’s
a heartwarming ending to a brilliant story, one that asks all the
questions of ‘new Who’ about whether the Dr is a good man and
episodes like ‘Blink’ ‘Love and Monsters’ and ‘A Good Man
Goes To War’ about all the people he touches almost without knowing
it and inspired to be better. That,
surely, is the DW message right there. Even if this is a very 1960s
revolution coming at the end of a very 1960s story, its really
timeless in the way that ‘The Space Museum’ makes us want to go
out and live up to those ideals, to make the world a better place. We
all run the risk of ending up as museum exhibits, stuck in position
for the rest of our lives, but we also all have the power to change
the futures that have been laid out before us and make things better
for all of us. By the time the Tardis leaves Xeros a whole world has
been changed for the better and its our world as much as theirs.
A
lot of DW is fun escapism, re-creating worlds to get lost in and
having interesting characters have exciting adventures on them, but
the best stories are something more than that, asking questions about
the world we live in and the part we play in it. With its concept of
ripples, of cause and effect, of how what we do impacts the people
around us, ‘The Space Museum’ is one of those stories. More even
than all of that, though, its a really well made bit of television
that takes a brilliant complex script and runs with it, doing things
that no other TV series was even thinking of making in 1965 as if its
the easiest thing in the world and creating 100minutes of high drama
that’s as scary and as funny and as downright brilliant as anything
else ever made. If I ever end up in a space museum like this, whether
as ghost or exhibit frozen in time, a part of me will still be
talking about how wonderful, brilliant and life-changing this series
is and ‘The Space Museum’ will be my exhibit A when people ask me
why. Goodness knows why other fans don’t seem to like it as much as
I do: ‘The Space Museum’ is the most DWy DW story of them all,
despite telling a tale all of its own, and for me is the single
greatest story of the single greatest show in the galaxy, one that’s
inspired me like few other works of fiction. Of
all the DW stories where the ordinary becomes extraordinary, making a
humble dusty museum come alive and
making you question your own generation’s place in the corner of
some future museum might
well be one of the most extraordinary of them all. It made made
laugh, it made me cry, it made me scared, it made me angry at the
blind authority who try and clamp down on the inevitable to preserve
a society even they find boring, it saves the universe in a very
1960s way that gives me hope for the future while being very much a
product of the past, that also makes me want to go out and change the
present. Now,
what other work of art can possibly do all that simultaneously? This
is a story that has it all, in a show that breaks the mould of what
can be done and asks questions about who we are more than any I can
think of. Viva
le revolution!
+
For twenty minutes the Tardis crew have been aware that something
isn’t quite right but haven’t been able to work out what. Then
Vicki reaches out to touch an exhibit and finds her hand going
straight through it, realising that the four of them aren’t ‘real’.
Even now its quite an effect that takes you by surprise, with the
same ‘crossfade to an empty set’ technique as the Tardis, but way
ore
complex
than any effect
we’ve seen in the series outside the Dalek
stuck down the Thames, because a person’s reacting to it in a very
tight locked-off frame where a few inches either way would spell
disaster, in a time
period where
re-takes
were all
but impossible. All the regulars are
stunning
in this story but none more so than Maureen O’Brien’s mixture of
puzzlement, confusion and awe at this moment, which
completely sells something she can’t see and looks totally natural
despite the fact she’s having to stick so rigidly to her marks.
The 1st
Dr’s very 1st
Dry put down, that she shouldn’t be touching things anyway,
completely
missing
the bigger picture, is also brilliantly played, with the old William
Hartnell burst of anger but with a twinkle in his eye.
-
I do wish the Xerons were a little more, well, revolutionary, the way
the script wants them to be. It’s one thing for the Moroks to be
bored and lifeless – they’re meant to be, aliens that have lived
too long and stopped caring. But the Xerons should be full of life
and youthful energy, burning with unfocussed passion and enthusiasm.
The moment they finally get their freedom back ought to be one of the
single most thrilling moments in the series. Instead they stroll
around after Vicki nonchalantly, like little lost sheep, their
eyebrows perpetually raised as if in surprise (modern viewers
thinking of the Xeron’s ‘youngsters’ might be put in mind of
the strange things generation Z do to their eyebrows. Or maybe that’s
my Morok side turning grumpy because its part of a generation that’s
come after mine?)
