The Dimensions of Time (The Space Museum Episode 2)

The one where Ian tries to unravel a cardigan with his teeth...

Plinky-plonky sci-fi B-movie music accompanies the opening scenes of this episode, which introduces us to the Morok race... and boy, are they dull! No wonder the space museum decor is so tediously drab if these guys designed it. Their leader, Governor Lobos, even admits he's bored, and furthermore that he's just as bored here on Xeros as he was on their home planet, Morok. This man, played with about as much enthusiasm as a breeze block by Richard Shaw, is the sort who insists people knock when they enter his office, which is about as much characterisation as we get for him.

It's a poor start after such a promising opening, but it's sadly indicative of the entire 25 minutes. After presenting such a tantalising and potentially exciting premise for our heroes to get mixed up in last week (time tracks etc), writer Glyn Jones falls into a crushingly dull runaround with one-dimensional characters and virtually no plot development. After blowing his load in episode 1, it seems Jones has little else to give except Flash Gordon Saturday serial cliche (but without the flash).

The only plot development we get is mostly from the mouths of three eye-wateringly dull and effete teenagers, who are apparently Xeron rebels. It seems the Moroks have subjugated the indigenous Xerons in order to build their dreary space museum, and it's not hard to see how such wet lettuces would be overcome if these chaps are the most dynamic their youth can offer (and where are all the other Xerons?). These young men (played by actors aged either 20 or younger) dress all in black, have enormous arched eyebrows, and talk to one another like they're characters in the pre-school series Rainbow. Tor (Jeremy Bulloch) is the only one with any get-up-and-go; the other two (especially Peter Craze's pusillanimous Dako) just need a good slap. When the Doctor apparently overpowers Dako and ties him up, it'd be amusing if Dako was actually even remotely formidable, but no - a hamster with a blunt pen-knife could beat him!

I wonder why the Xerons are presented this way? The only Xerons we see are young, naive and ineffectual, and seem to be in awe of the undemonstrated power of their alien subjugators, the Moroks. Meanwhile, Glyn Jones writes Ian and Barbara as bickering parent figures who Vicki (quite rightly) finds frustrating. Jones was in his early 30s when he wrote The Space Museum and would've grown up in the 1940s, just prior to the advent of the very first "teenagers" in the 1950s. That decade was one of youthful rebellion and angst (James Dean, Marlon Brando, Mods and Rockers etc), so perhaps Jones depicted youths as he thought of them from his own background. However, the truth is that by 1965, young men of this age were generally ballsier than these Xerons, so it must have felt pretty lame even at the time.

The writing in this episode really does take a tumble. I mean, I cannot fathom the point behind the conversation between the TARDIS travellers when they try to work out what's best to do next in order to avoid their incarcerated fates. Barbara says they shouldn't leave the museum because that might be exactly what they shouldn't do if they want to avoid that particular future. Vicki says they should find the TARDIS and simply leave, but the Doctor maintains that's a bad idea, and that perhaps what needs to happen is that they are taken out of the museum by somebody else. I mean, WHAT?! What are they talking about? Anything and everything they do could lead to that particular fate, so how can you argue against any one path? And most frustrating of all, after more tetchy deliberations, the Doctor opts for Vicki's original idea all along - to find the TARDIS and leave!

Regular readers will know how much I admire the charming relationship between the Doctor and Vicki in these stories, demonstrated once more by the Doctor trusting Vicki's sense of direction over and above Ian's and Barbara's (and his own!), and a bit later on it's lovely to see Vicki subtly help the Doctor in his pretense that he knows which way to go to get out of the museum. I've said it before, but there must have been a real natural chemistry between O'Brien and Hartnell to make this relationship work so convincingly.

Much of the episode is taken up with Ian, Barbara and Vicki wandering around lost, getting nowhere and doing nothing. They bicker terribly (much to Vicki's annoyance) like a married couple, and despite the comedy value in the scene where Ian and Vicki try to tear apart Barbara's cardigan, it's still, when it comes down to it, childish. If the non-events of The Web Planet convinced William Russell to leave, then this bunkum will have made him grateful he made the right decision!

William Hartnell is as rewarding as ever though, gleefully hiding inside a Dalek casing and barking: "I fooled them all! I am the master!" (not just yet, Doctor). After he is captured by the Moroks he is subjected to the most unthreatening interrogation in Doctor Who history by Governor Lobos, who sits the Doctor in a Perspex chair which can read his thoughts. This scene (well lit by Howard King) does carry a little weight thanks to Hartnell's gravitas - he's most amused by Lobos's rubbish inquisition, and treats the governor with bemused disrespect in a way I'd imagine the Fourth or Seventh Doctors might - but Richard Shaw gives such a staggeringly remote performance that he might as well have written it in a letter and posted it in.

There's much comedy to be had in the Doctor's manipulation of the thought-reading chair, projecting an image of a penny farthing as his mode of transport, a herd of walruses as his species, and him dressed in a stripy bathing suit and straw hat to show that he is indeed amphibian! But his teasing backfires, because soon he is being taken off to fulfill the future's prophecy - to become an exhibit in the dullest museum in the galaxy!

By the way, Vicki speaks so much sense in this episode, despite being surrounded by fools. Why does the space museum not have any exit signs, for example?

First broadcast: May 1 1965

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: Vicki is a paragon of common sense amid an ocean of fatuousness.
The Bad: The writing is poor, the direction is pedestrian, the performances are cardboard (particularly Richard Shaw's - it's a surprise to learn he was a good friend of Hartnell's as I'd have expected some sharper chemistry between them).
Overall score for episode: ★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

NEXT TIME: The Search...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: The Space Museum (episode 1); The Search (episode 3); The Final Phase (episode 4)

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