The Executioners (The Chase Episode 1)

The one where the TARDIS travellers watch time telly...

What exactly is going on with that model shot at the start of this episode? As the episode title and writer captions fade in and out, underneath we can see a model police box which appears to be placed on a plain black surface or table. The baffling thing is that you can vaguely see the edge of the table at the top of the screen, and as the camera zooms slowly out you can see faint writing to the left of the picture. It seems the TARDIS has materialised on a giant blackboard! I have to say, that's a pretty ropy effect to open the episode with, plus there's some wildly out-of-place jazz music too!

We first see our heroes relaxing in the TARDIS: the Doctor is fiddling with a new chunk of technology (and what a big chunk it is!), Ian is reading a science-fiction book ("it's a bit far-fetched") and Barbara is making a dress for Vicki, who flits between the three bored out of her head, like any right-minded teenager would be.

This opening scene is the pinnacle of what Doctor Who becomes in Season 2. As each story has passed, the tone of Doctor Who has changed from the danger and mystery of Season 1 to what amounts to a rather cosy British version of Lost in Space. Ever since Susan left, the TARDIS team has been much more relaxed, more than happy to simply enjoy their adventuring rather than fear every corner. They take a chilled-out holiday in Roman Britain, visit a space museum, and here we see them knocking around the Ship, busy doing nothing. Nice for them, but not exactly thrilling for the viewers.

In fact, nothing very much happens in most of The Executioners, which, especially when you're launching a brand new Dalek story, is kind of criminal. An additional 1.5 million people tuned in to The Executioners following the previous week's teaser, but if they were expecting some serious Doctor Who and the Daleks action, they'd be sorely disappointed. We do get a couple of scenes of the Daleks at their base, in which they seem increasingly highly-strung and are basically reduced to pointlessly spinning around in a tizz and repeating various words over and over... "Annihilate! Annihilate! Annihilate!"; "Exterminate! Exterminate! Exterminate!"; and "TARDIS! TARDIS! TARDIS!" (Barbara: "Doctor, he said the TARDIS!" Yes, many, many times!). I get the impression writer Terry Nation wasn't taking his creations 100% seriously by this point.

The Time Space Visualiser may be as big as a van but the whole concept behind it is pretty wonderful. It's also a wry reflection of how 21st century society has developed, with people happy to sit at home and watch the world happen on their TV sets rather than go out there and be part of it. I mean, here they all are watching history on a TV while standing inside a time machine which could actually take them to these places! Why don't they pay a visit in person to Pennsylvania in 1863, or Queen Elizabeth's court, or the Top of the Pops studio, rather than watch it on the gogglebox?

Although controlling the TSV seems rather hit-and-miss in a wonderfully Doctor Who way (are they circuit boards you have to slot into it?), the science behind it is quite exciting. Basically, as Vicki says, everything that ever happened anywhere in the universe is recorded in light neutrons, so as long as you can tune into those neutrons, you should be able to see any event in history. It gives us hope that one day we'll be able to tune into the lost episodes of Marco Polo or Fury from the Deep using a Time Space Visualiser, although we may have to wait a while - Vicki says the scientists of her time (the 25th century) were trying to perfect the technology.

I am puzzled by one thing though - the Doctor says the TSV can only see events that happened in the past, but surely that's relative? Whose past? If the past is defined as everything that happened before the TSV was invented, then that includes - from my point of view, in 2017 - the future (the 21st to 25th centuries). But if the past is defined according to wherever the TSV is, then it becomes variable. If the TARDIS takes the TSV to the end of time, then it could theoretically see the entire history of the universe, but if it goes back to the dawn of creation, it could see nothing. So when the Doctor and Barbara spy on the Daleks on the TSV, the Doctor's assertion that it must be in the past is rather confusing - their current past perhaps, but that could be the future! D'you see? Hmmm?

Anyway, this is getting boring now, and The Chase is anything but that. After we're treated to actor Robert Marsden making the Gettysburg Address as eye-wateringly monotonous as possible (and to think Marsden specialised in portraying Lincoln!), and a rather effete Shakespeare inspired by his monarch to write Hamlet, we get an exhilarating moment where two 1960s pop culture phenomena clash - the Beatles appear in Doctor Who! Well, sort of. The original plan was for the Fab Four to cameo made up as old men, but when their manager Brian Epstein vetoed the idea, Doctor Who had to make do with footage of them singing Ticket to Ride on Top of the Pops. The performance was from April 1965, the best part of 18 months after Ian and Barbara left Earth, so quite how Ian knows the song well enough to "dance" to I'm not sure. Everyone chortles about Ian's awful "dad-dancing" at this point, but have you ever noticed William Hartnell pretending to conduct the music, just visible behind Barbara's head in the top left corner of the screen? "Now you've squashed my favourite Beatles!"

Much of the rest of The Executioners consists of the regulars doing very little, but this time outside. We get a lovely arty camera angle of the Doctor operating the TARDIS controls (they're not really there, of course) which also affords us a blatant shot of the studio lights, and there's some atmospheric location shooting at Camber Sands with Vicki and Ian running about on the dunes in silhouette, but other than that, it's all quite humdrum. It's amusing to see the Doctor and Barbara sunbathing together (and the exchange about the "awful noise" is endearing), but when it boils down to it, this is supposed to be an adventure in space and time, not The Grove Family.

A rising tendril here, a genuinely eerie squid creature in the murk there, and a buried Dalek spluttering its way to the surface as the cliffhanger. As cliffhangers go, it's suitably memorable, but scores low for originality. Nation is simply copying his cliffhanger to World's End from six months previously, only swapping the Thames for the desert. Let's hope things get more interesting now the Daleks have actually caught up with the Doctor in their brand new time machine...

First broadcast: May 22nd, 1965

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: I do like the camera angle looking up at the Doctor as he operates the TARDIS controls. It's obviously done to save them having to construct the full console room set, but it's so unusual that it really works.
The Bad: Nothing really happens, does it? We go a full 11 minutes of watching the travellers watching telly and arsing around before anything actually happens. Up your game, Nation!
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆

NEXT TIME: The Death of Time...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: The Death of Time (episode 2); Flight Through Eternity (episode 3); Journey into Terror (episode 4); The Death of Doctor Who (episode 5); The Planet of Decision (episode 6)

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-chase.html

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