The Search (The Space Museum Episode 3)

The one where Vicki becomes an unlikely revolutionary...

"It didn't take them long to find it," says Ian at the start of this episode when he sees the Moroks capture the TARDIS. Well, it doesn't exactly blend in, does it Ian? We're then treated to some more bickering and some more oohing and aaahing about how best to avoid their glass-fronted fates, and it's all so dull and repetitive. Never have Ian and Barbara been written so poorly. They've had their spats in the past, but they've rarely been as argumentative as this.

Got to commend Barbara for calling Ian out on his moaning though: "All we do is stand around saying 'this whole thing is a nightmare'. Why don't we do something?" Ask Glyn Jones, Babs! The prevaricating gets worse when a Morok guard happens across them and points a gun at them. Our heroes then spend ages chatting among themselves about fate-avoidance yet again while the morose Morok looks on like a goon, waiting for them to finish. A combination of poor writing and direction. "I've had enough of this," says Ian. I know the feeling.

The best thing to come out of this however, is that Ian, Barbara and Vicki are split up at last, something which usually (and should) happen in episode 1. Finally we ought to get three extra plot strands to follow and hopefully things will liven up. I love Ian's resolute facing down of the Morok guard, challenging his orders, which are not to kill, but just to capture. It feels like something straight out of a Seventh Doctor script. Once the regulars are split up, we get to see Ian revert to his Season 1 persona of lead hero, and he certainly gives those Morok guards a good pasting!

Ah, the Moroks. The Xerons depict them as terrifying, marauding aggressors who invaded Xeros without warning (very few invaders give prior warning, surely?) and have superior numbers and fire-power. But the Moroks we see here are nothing more than pen-pushing moaning minnies. The technician played by Peter Diamond is wetter than a Voord's flipper, and it's virtually impossible to match what we're told about the Moroks with what we're shown. Are we really supposed to believe that they invaded Xeros, murdered its elders and only kept the children alive to work as slaves? It must take them all their time to comb their badgery hair every morning!

While Ian's heroics lead him to Governor Lobos and ultimately the Doctor (he's being embalmed this week, probably in Majorca), Barbara gets locked in a storage room with a sinister dressmaker's dummy and a stick of balsa wood. I'm not sure her using this as a weapon against Dako is an act of misplaced optimism, or is a perfectly realistic threat for an ineffectual wimp such as him. Either way, the highlight of the episode for me is when Barbara tries to open the storage room door and her magnificently coiffured hair gets majorly messed up. I mean, Barbara's hair is legendary in the Doctor Who canon, and to see it in such a state here is both shocking and amusing.

Vicki's story strand is much more interesting and productive, and Maureen O'Brien really does show up the likes of Jeremy Bulloch, Peter Craze and Peter Sanders in her scenes with the Xerons. She's a damn good actor, and while they may have been destined to become good actors, they show little sign of blossoming talent here. Vicki, dressed in twee party dress and knee socks, takes control of the Xeron "movement" and shakes it by the scruff of its neck. She can see how pathetic these young men are as much as the viewer can. "You're supposed to be planning a revolution!" she says. "Sitting here planning and dreaming of a revolution isn't going to win your planet back!"

Vicki becomes the Che Guevara of Xeros, rallying her effete bunch of milksops and challenging them to raid the Morok armoury and obtain some weapons. After a lot of "but we can't" and "it's not possible", she finally gets them to act (as in do something, not perform well!) and overwhelm the armoury guard (he looks as bored as the viewer is).

The armoury computer looks like a prototype of Blake's 7's Orac. The rule is that you can't open the armoury door unless you answer the computer's series of questions both truthfully and accurately. The sheer number of questions the computer asks is gob-smacking. If there was ever an emergency need to get guns, by the time the Moroks had answered the computer's inquisition, they'd all be dead! Vicki suddenly turns from a revolutionary into a computer hacker, and manages to reprogramme the computer to only require truthful answers, not accurate ones. The computer asks two simple questions - Who? and Why? - and promptly lets them in! I don't buy it for a second. However stupid I think the Moroks are, would they really put such a vulnerable computer in charge of their weapons? Well, actually...

The Search manages to increase the dynamism of the story very slightly, but there's still very little going on, and you can almost see in the eyes of every single actor that they know how rubbish all this is!

First broadcast: May 8th, 1965

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: Vicki becoming some sort of Celia Sanchez revolutionary is both wonderful and faintly ridiculous, but then so is everything else, so why not?
The Bad: The Xerons. No, the Moroks. No, the Xerons! Argh, I can't decide which race is worst.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆

NEXT TIME: The Final Phase...

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