The Chase
22ND MAY 1965 - 26TH JUNE
1965
(6 EPISODES)
1. THE EXECUTIONERS
2. THE DEATH OF TIME
3. FLIGHT THROUGH ETERNITY
4. JOURNEY INTO TERROR
5. THE DEATH OF DOCTOR WHO
6. THE PLANET OF DECISION
After the first
pioneering Dalek serial and its even better sequel, The Chase
is often
regarded as something of an embarrassment. A foolhardy foray into the daft
world of Dalek humour, Terry Nation’s fourth script for the series is one
of his most contentious, yet still not one that even the most ruthless of
reviewers could destroy without pity.
Aptly named, this six-parter tells of a chase through time and space, as
an execution squad of Daleks is despatched to pursue our four heroes
across the universe. The production itself is beautiful to behold, as
Nation’s affluent serial takes us to a number of differing alien vistas,
the top of the Empire State Building, the decks of the Mary Celeste,
a robotic theme park and even London’s White City. Sadly the storyline is
far less glossy, not quite able to make up its mind whether it wants to be
an outright comedy or a piece of serious drama. As a result, The Chase’s
few moments of dramatic tension feel synthetic and incongruent, whilst its
prevailing humour roams between asinine and absurd. Yet somehow, someway,
this six-part adventure still manages to entertain... just not in the
traditional Dalek way.
There are a lot of extraordinary elements to be found in this serial, some
of which could be considered groundbreaking. The retro ‘Space-Time
Visualiser’ is one such element; a charming little device that purportedly
allows the Doctor and his companions to view any event in history. Nation
uses this delightful contrivance to fulfil the programme’s educational
remit by showing the audience selected historical events (Abraham Lincoln
delivering the Gettysburg Address and William Shakespeare attending the
Court of Queen Elizabeth I) whilst also setting up his plot by having the
time travellers opportunely tune into the Daleks’ hatching their murderous
plot. The Beatles even make a wanton, but nonetheless welcome,
appearance on it, playing
“Ticket to Ride” whilst Ian “dances like an
embarrassing Dad” and Vicki voices her aversion to “classical music”,
foreshadowing more recent episodes such as The End of the World and
42, in which the likes of Elvis Presley, Soft Cell and Britney
Spears would all be tarred with the same “classical” brush.
The Chase
also marks some momentous developments in the evolution of the Dalek race;
perhaps more so than any other television serial, in fact. For the first
time we meet Daleks who aren’t reliant on the metal floors of their Skaro
city or cumbersome satellite dishes on their backs, but instead
are
powered by sleek solar panels around their midsections which would remain
a mainstay of Dalek design right up to the time of writing.
“Kill! Kill!
Kill! Kill!”
Furthermore, though the Daleks running rampant about on board the Mary
Celeste aren’t shown to levitate, their infiltration of more than one
deck implies that they must have done, subtly quelling that old familiar
(even back then) Dalek jibe “Daleks can’t climb stairs.” And most
importantly of all,
the Daleks of The Chase were the first (at least from the Doctor’s
perspective)
to demonstrate mastery of
time corridor technology, allowing them to target any
opponent and attack without fear. This was the first time in the series
that anyone other than the Doctor boasted time travel capability, an idea
so popular that it would be revisited not only in the next story, The
Time Meddler, but repeatedly throughout the history of the show,
culminating in the Time Wars fought just prior to the start of the revived
series.
However,
it isn’t until the second episode of the serial that the Daleks make their
presence felt in earnest, and even then the narrative gets rather bogged
down on Aridius before the proper chase can begin. The Daleks pursue our
heroes to the top of the Empire State Building in the mid-1960s, where
Peter Purves makes his first Doctor Who appearance, not as dashing
space pilot Steven Taylor, but as slack-jawed yokel Morton Dill. The
TARDIS then lands on the Mary Celeste, whose crew leap into the sea
at the sight of the Daleks, taking one Dalek grunt with them and splitting
him open in the process, only to reveal his discordantly empty innards.
Next the TARDIS lands in what seems to a haunted house populated with the
likes of Count Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster. Nation takes the
opportunity to gently mock the series here, having the Doctor dramatically
postulate that they must have landed in a place outside space and time,
somewhere inside the collective human unconsciousness where spectres and
monsters reside. In truth, however, they’ve just materialised inside a
futuristic version of an amusement park. I can’t help but wonder what the
proposed Aaru movie adaptation of this serial would have been like - its
plot seems much better to suited to the plasticky colour and spectacle of
the two Peter Cushing movies than those of the first two Dalek serials
did.
However, it isn’t long before The Chase starts to get a little
heavier, but still played against the backdrop of a ludicrously jolly
Carry On-style soundtrack it just doesn’t work well at all. Vicki is
traumatically separated from the TARDIS crew when the ship dematerialises,
the Doctor having mistakenly thought that she was on board. And of course,
at this point in his lives, the Time Lord isn’t able to steer his TARDIS
to go back. Such an alarming sequence should have been harrowing in the
extreme, but instead it just feels fluffy.
Worse
still is the Daleks creation of the series’ first Dalek duplicate. What
could have been an engrossing development is ruined by the preposterous
realisation of the two Doctors - sometimes William Hartnell plays both the
Doctor and the duplicate Doctor, whilst at others Edmund Warwick plays the
duplicate instead. This soon gets extremely baffling - no matter how many
times I’ve seen The Chase, I still can’t work out when I’m
supposed to be the looking at the duplicate and when I’m supposed
to be looking at the real thing. Warwick should have either always played
the duplicate (in which case the audience would have known that he was the
fake all along, and thus revel in his exploits) or they should have come
up with a way to allow Hartnell to play both parts (easier said than done,
I know). The icing on the cake comes in the form of the episode title:
“The Death of Doctor Who”. The Doctor isn’t called ‘Doctor Who’, nor
does he die; it’s a flagrant misnomer. One could argue that Nation was
using ‘Doctor Who’ to refer to the death-bound duplicate (much in the same
way that Steve Lyons uses the term in his novel Head Games to
differentiate his fictional Doctor from the real McCoy), but the duplicate
is never given that handle on screen, nor is there any even vaguely
credible reason posited why he would have been.
The final episode of The Chase is a marvellous improvement on the
preceding five. The eponymous
“Planet of Decision”
is Mechanus, a
planet that was originally intended to be turned into a human colony but
was forsaken and left to the Mechanoids - the human-built robots that had
been sent there to prepare the world for settlers that never came.
Director Richard Martin does a magnificent job of realising the planet,
its luminous citadel and its mechanical inhabitants. The film and
inventive model work conspire to create a look that, whilst not really
convincing by today’s standards, has a timeless splendour to it.
It is on Mechanus that the Doctor and his companions first meet Steven
Taylor, Peter Purves having grown a beard to separate Steven from his
yokel character that appeared earlier in the production. Steven is the
survivor of a spaceship crash who has been a prisoner of the Mechanoids
for years – a potentially rich back story that would remain woefully
unexplored throughout Purves’s tenure. After some initial erratic
behaviour, the stalwart space pilot would become a strong and dependable
ally of the Doctor; the spectre of his tortured past scarcely mentioned on
television, let alone explored satisfactorily.
As the Daleks and the Mechanoids destroy one another in a suitably blazing
fire fight (which is really quite ironic, given the Mechanoids’ origins as
explored in the later Big Finish audio drama, The Juggernauts) the
time travellers escape, with Steven stowing away aboard the TARDIS while
in a sudden twist, Ian and Barbara decide to use the Daleks’ abandoned
time machine to return to their native time and place.
The departure of the last of the Doctor’s original travelling companions
is sublimely handled by all concerned. The Doctor is furious with them;
ranting and raving, obviously not wanting them to leave his company.
William Hartnell’s performance is so very convincing both in its rage and
its tenderness (“Silly old fusspots. I shall miss them…”) that one wonders
just how much acting was required of him. In the DVD commentary, Ian actor
William Russell certainly suggests that the Doctor’s reaction to Ian and
Barbara’s hasty departure mirrored Hartnell’s to his and Jacqueline Hill’s
quite exactingly.
I particularly like how the parting of ways is handled almost as an
afterthought. Throughout the serial there is no clue that Ian and Barbara
might be leaving (and if one thinks about it pragmatically, rather than
dramatically, why would there be?), making their sudden, opportunistic
impulse to return home extremely credible and exceedingly effective. The
concluding montage of still photographs showing their mutual glee upon
their return marks a stunning end to both the serial and indeed all their
adventures in time and space.
Above: Author Simon Guerrier discusses Ian and Barbara’s
significance
One of the DVD release’s finest special features takes a look at Ian and
Barbara and their contribution to the series. The thirteen-minute Last
Stop White City is a beautifully-produced little featurette that sees
William Russell, Richard Martin, vision mixer Clive Doig and writer Simon
Guerrier collectively critique the pair of school teachers’ contributions
to their sixteen televised serials. Sandwiched between readings of
poignant passages from his novel The Time Travellers, Guerrier’s
observations are particularly incisive, especially when he points out that
when Ian and Barbara depart, they don’t need replacing; their job
is effectively done. When we first met the Doctor in An Unearthly Child,
he was an itinerant with questionable morals, content to live without
conscience, looking out only for himself and Susan. Ian and Babs changed
all that, leaving us at the end of The Chase with a proactive and
ethical Time Lord that doesn’t need constantly pushing and prompting. All
he needs is a strapping young fellow to handle the inevitable physicality.
Cue Steven Taylor…
However, the real highlight of the DVD’s bonus material is the two-part
Dalek documentary. Daleks Conquer and Destroy looks at the
interminable appeal of the Skarosian pepper pots, whilst Daleks Beyond
the Screen goes one better and appraises almost fifty years’ worth of
Dalek merchandise. The two twenty-minute programmes each feature input
from huge names in the Dalek world old and new, as interviews with
original designer Raymond Cusick and producer Verity Lambert are spliced
with those of contemporary writers such as Robert Shearman and Nicholas
Briggs, who is - of course - even more famous for being the modern voice
of the Daleks than he is for his scribblings. Everything is covered from
Dalek soap to Dalek Empire, excerpts from the seminal Big Finish
audio series being presented through a blend of stunning CG animation and
audio clips. Only the infamous Dalek porno is excluded, although on
balance that’s probably for the best. There are some things you should
never do with a sink-plunger.
Above: “Bill Strutton with
the Zarbi, didn’t find Zarbi cubes…?”
In keeping with the spirit of The Chase, the Dalek documentaries
have their tongues firmly planted in their cheeks. Whilst Robert Shearman
draws some rather droll inferences from Terry Nation and David Whitaker’s
bizarre Dalek Pocketbook claim to have obtained their knowledge of
the Daleks through their discovery of some “Dalek cubes” (“Bill Strutton
with the Zarbi, didn’t find Zarbi cubes…?”), Nicholas Briggs can barely
keep a straight face as he recites “the Dalekreed”, originally published
in the popular 1960s Dalek annuals.
The ten-minute Thrill of the Chase is the closest that the DVD
comes to a full-blown ‘making of’ documentary. In the absence of many of
the original cast and production crew, surviving director Richard Martin
takes us through his recollections of this serial’s production. Though
Martin’s reminiscences are less dynamic than the comic and colourful
documentaries that are referred to above, the serial’s director still has
many an interesting anecdotes to share, including his last-minute
acquisition of a few of Aaru’s movie Daleks, and William Hartnell’s
indignation at Sydney Newman’s “faint praise”.
Above:
Is the thrill in The Chase, or in the capture?
Director Richard
Martin recalls the making of the serial
Many of Martin’s anecdotes also make it into the serial’s
commentary, which he shares with performers Maureen O’Brien, William
Russell and Peter Purves. As they did on the Space Museum
commentary, the contemporaneous companions are fascinating to listen to,
even if they are far less charitable towards their work than those of us
still enjoying it today are. O’Brien and Purves’ candour proves
particularly interesting once again, as O’Brien reveals her relief at
being dropped from the series just a few serials post-Chase, and
Peter Purves announces that he doesn’t really understand the popularity of
the Daleks!
The release also features a short featurette entitled Cusick in
Cardiff, which sees Dalek designer Raymond Cusick meet up with new
series designers Edward Thomas and Peter McKinstry. It’s a bit of a bugger
to find, as the DVD booklet lists it as being on the second disc when it’s
actually on the first, but it’s a thoroughly enjoyable little feature once
you do. Besides, I shouldn’t complain too stridently – Doctor Who
DVDs seem to be the only ones I buy these days that still come with any
sort of insert booklet, never mind such a beautifully-presented and
edifying one.
The final brace of substantive special features revolve around the
work of Shawcraft Models, which I understand provided many props and
models for the series in the early 1960s. The Original Monster Makers
looks at the contributions that Shawcraft’s prolific workshop made before
being priced out of the market by the BBC’s in-house departments, whilst
Follow that Dalek presents some authentic 1960s cine film showing
many of Shawcraft’s original props in colour. Both features make for
interesting one-off watches, but they’re not something that I’m likely to
visit again.
All in all, The Chase’s DVD release is as lush and
extravagant as the serial that it clothes, albeit a little less
contentious. The abundance and high quality of bonus material betrays the
importance, if not the repute, of this landmark six-parter, which itself
has never looked better. For all its flaws, The Chase isn’t a
serial that you can eliminate without worry; its tone may be questionable,
but its significance is not.
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