The Final Phase (The Space Museum Episode 4)

The one where the Xerons finally rise up against their Morok oppressors...

The Doctor must have one hell of a constitution if he can recover from the Moroks' embalming machine as easily as he does. We've seen the Doctor exhausted by the gentlest of jogs in the past, but here he seems to recover from a majorly debilitating procedure with some ease. He is two-thirds of the way through what we're told may well be an irreversible process which plunges his body temperature to several hundred degrees below freezing - but all he suffers upon coming round is a spot of rheumatism!

His body might have been frozen but his thoughts never stopped ticking over: "My brain was working with the speed of a mechanical computer!" he boasts. The Doctor says that his conscience will not allow him to take revenge and place Lobos in the embalming machine, but William Hartnell delivers this with just enough fire to make it a regrettable mercy for the traveller.

As the tedious events of The Final Phase play out it seems that the best way for the Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Vicki to escape their glimpsed futures as museum exhibits is to do nothing. It is the actions of others which save the day, albeit the actions of others directly influenced by Vicki and her Che Guevara ways. The travellers are ultimately rescued by the rebellious Xerons, who use Morok weaponry against the invaders (and is it me or do the Morok guns sound like Bonnie Langford screaming?). Morok arms most definitely have fallen into Xeron hands...

The one action Ian takes to try and prevent their doom-laden futures is to destroy the embalming machine, but as the Doctor points out, there are probably others. And so yet again the Doctor is thanked for his help at the end of an adventure when in actual fact he did nothing at all to help. Just like in The Web Planet, where it is Barbara who saves the day by destroying the Animus, here it is Vicki who ultimately saves them from a frozen fate by inspiring the Xeron revolution. The Doctor does nothing whatsoever to bring this about, but he's still thanked for doing so. If I were Barbara or Vicki I'd be pretty annoyed by the Doctor's glory-hunting ways!

The shootout between the Xerons and the Moroks is predictably poorly directed and totally unconvincing, but at least it's in keeping with the rest of the story. This was the last work director Mervyn Pinfield did for Doctor Who, and he would be dead exactly one year and five days after the broadcast of The Final Phase, at the age of just 54.

"Doctor, what is that extraordinary thing you've got in the TARDIS?" chuckles Ian as he and Barbara leave the Ship. Well, judging by what we can glimpse over their shoulders, it's a huge roll of Bacofoil, but no, the Doctor insists it's something called a Time Space Visualiser, so maybe he's got access to this blog so he can read ahead and find out about future adventures?

And so our heroes say their goodbyes (Vicki and Tor waving at one another as if across a vast distance when it's actually only a few feet!) and the TARDIS makes its merry way back into the time vortex. But who is this watching? We zoom across the universe and home in on a mysterious planet... A familiar heartbeat humming sound tells us that the Daleks are back - and they're chasing the Doctor through time and space. "They will be exterminated! Exterminated! Exterminated!" Thank God they're back. It's been crushingly dull without them...

I watched the DVD extra Defending the Museum in which writer Robert Shearman valiantly tries to make The Space Museum sound cleverer than it is. He says Glyn Jones wrote it as a comedy, but that Pinfield did not direct it as one, and this is an interesting theory which does hold water. But Shearman's assertion that the story is a self-aware parody of Doctor Who up to that point doesn't wash with me at all. There's plenty of room in Doctor Who fandom for Space Museum apologists, but the day they convince me this serial isn't simply poorly made, poorly acted and poorly designed is very far way indeed.

After one of the most imaginative and promising opening episodes of the series so far, what follows counts as one of the dullest, most disappointing and least essential stories of the entire canon.

First broadcast: May 15th, 1965

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: There's very little that stands out positively about this episode. It's nice to have Hartnell back, I suppose, but it's mostly nice that the story's actually ending!
The Bad: "Have any arms fallen into Xeron hands?" Oh, and Richard Shaw again. When he delivers the line: "You'll all be together soon. Perhaps for centuries?", it's with all the nuance and talent of a broken pencil. And to think he's going to turn up in two more Doctor Who stories too...
Overall score for episode: ★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ (story average: 4.5 out of 10)

NEXT TIME: The Executioners...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: The Space Museum (episode 1); The Dimensions of Time (episode 2); The Search (episode 3)

Find out birth/death dates, career information, and facts and trivia about this story's cast and crew at the Doctor Who Cast & Crew site: http://doctorwhocastandcrew.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/the-space-museum.html

The Space Museum is available on DVD in a box set with The Chase. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Space-Museum-Chase/dp/B0033PRJWQ