By Jessica Holmes

Well, it had to happen eventually. It’s impossible for a writer to knock it out of the park every time, and Terry Nation has batted his first foul ball. I think that’s the metaphor, anyway. But yes, his streak is over, giving us a rather tiresome story, The Chase, that I now bear the burden of talking about for a couple thousand words.

Let’s get on with it, shall we?

THE EXECUTIONERS

I was very excited going into this serial, as of course the Dalek stories we’ve had so far have also brought with them some societal commentary, and I am a big fan of that sort of thing. A bit of running around and zapping things is fun, but if you can give me food for thought at the same time I’ll fall madly in love.

This is not one of those stories.

The first half of the first episode is more or less dedicated to watching the companions watching television IN SPACE. Remember the Time And Space Visualiser the Doctor picked up from the museum? Yes, he gets it fixed so they all gather round to watch historical events across time and space. Because surely that’s much more fun than just using your time machine to visit these places in person. They snoop on the court of Queen Elizabeth I, watch Abraham Lincoln deliver the Gettysburg Address, and at Vicki’s request, they tune in to Top Of The Pops to watch The Beatles. Don’t get me wrong, I like the lads from Liverpool, but this is just pure filler. It serves no purpose whatsoever and honestly it’s quite boring.

Didn't your mothers ever warn you not to sit so close to the telly?

So after all that, the plot finally starts to move, as the TARDIS lands on a desert planet, sand dunes stretching far as the eye can see. The Doctor and Barbara stay by the TARDIS to catch some sun, while Ian and Vicki go exploring. Vicki finds some strange, bad smelling substance on the ground, and she and Ian follow the trail, not knowing that there’s something alive in the sand.

Back at the TARDIS, Barbara hears an awful noise. No, it’s not the Doctor’s singing. The Time And Space Visualiser (gosh, that’s a mouthful, isn’t it? Let’s just call it a Space Telly) has picked up the Daleks in pursuit.

Cue a rather awkward scene in which the Dalek explain their plans for assassinating the TARDIS crew to one another, for nobody’s benefit but the audience. It’s a terribly clumsy way to deliver exposition, and the scene doesn’t get any better as we watch them silently file into their time capsule one by one. There are loads of them and I aged five years in the time it took.

So now that I’m pushing thirty and the Daleks have finally got into their time capsule, the Doctor and Barbara realise it’s time to get going, and fast. However, Ian and Vicki have wandered far away by now.

Vicki finds the end of the trail, and though at first glance nothing seems to be there, Ian finds some sort of ring in the sand, not unlike a door handle. After some deliberation over whether it’s a good idea to be pulling on things without knowing what they are, Ian goes ahead and tugs it, yanking the ring out of the ground, and opening up a hidden passageway.

There's a monster in the shot, honest.

Ever the responsible adult, Ian lets Vicki go in first, and they almost immediately run into a big ugly monster. I give it five minutes before Vicki gives it a name and tries to adopt it as a pet.

Meanwhile, the Doctor and Barbara struggle through a sandstorm in a fruitless attempt to find the two, and once the storm has cleared, they realise to their horror that the landscape has changed entirely, and they can no longer find their way back to the TARDIS.

Worse, however, is the familiar shape rising from the sand…

Eh. It was a lot cooler when they had Daleks coming out of the Thames. So yes, that was a sequence of events. Calling it the beginning of a story feels a bit too generous. I call it a big load of nothing.

Let’s see where The Chase goes from here.

THE DEATH OF TIME

The music accompanying the episode titles in this serial is so ill-fitting it makes me cross. It’s just this weird jazzy sounding thing. I have no idea what tone it’s trying to set, but whatever it is it’s failing abysmally.

Spotting additional Daleks approaching over the dunes, the Doctor and Barbara flee, only to run into a bunch of humanoid fish people, because who else would you be expecting to find in a desert?

Ian and Vicki run away from the monster in the tunnels. I’m not sure it was really making much of an effort to get them.

The Daleks start murdering any local unfortunate enough to wander within shooting range, and identify the planet as Aridia (because it’s arid, get it?).

The Aridians, or fish people as I called them, seem to be a friendly sort (or at the very least not actively hostile), and they give the Doctor and Barbara the standard speech they get from just about every alien culture they come across. Or at least, that’s how it feels. You know the one, it’s about the world once being all lovely then something bad happened and now it’s rubbish so gee, it sure would be nice if someone were to drop in and help us right about now.

Also, they can’t act for toffee. You can’t argue that it’s some sort of artistic choice, like you could with the bee people who communicated through a mixture of weird sing-song voices and interpretive dance.

The Aridians are not like that. They are just plain bad. I’m talking drama-club-at-the-village-hall bad.

Through this haze of weird line delivery and overwrought emoting, the Aridians explain that this was once a watery world where they lived in cities beneath the sea, but the suns moved closer (oh, there are two suns) and the seas dried up, killing everything except the Aridians and the dreaded Mire Beasts.

The Aridians realise that Ian and Vicki must have found their way into one of the old airlocks leading to the city, which is very bad news as they’re about to blow up the tunnels to trap the Mire Beasts.

The group rushes to try to find them, but they’re too late. As a Mire Beast attacks Vicki, the charges go off, sending rubble crashing onto the Mire Beast, killing it stone dead, and knocking Ian unconscious. Vicki runs to look for help, as meanwhile the others arrive to the gates of the city. Though the Doctor is hesitant to involve the Aridians in his troubles with the Daleks, the friendly fish people assure him that they just want to help.

Daleks are keen detectorists.

Elsewhere, the Daleks find where the TARDIS is buried and continue to narrate their own actions. With this much padding, I have to ask if Nation originally wrote a three-or-four-episode serial and was asked by the BBC to stretch it out to six. It’s completely sucking all the tension out of the story.

In the city of the Aridians, the Doctor and Barbara get their first hot meal in a while, though Barbara is too anxious about the others to eat, and the Doctor notes that the food has an odd taste. Now, ordinarily I would take this as a hint that they’ve been given something horrific to eat and that the Aridians have some dark secret behind the friendly facade, but it appears to be a red herring, as nothing comes of it.

Still, I have to wonder what exactly the Aridians are eating if there’s no land suitable for farming and all the animals have died, and they said themselves that they can’t kill the Mire-Beasts, so they can’t be hunting them. So that just leaves…. Well, I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions.

However, the Daleks learn that the Aridians are sheltering the Doctor, and issue an ultimatum: either they hand over the Doctor, or the Daleks will destroy the city. The Aridians have no choice but to hold the Doctor and Barbara as prisoners while they decide what to do.

Vicki manages to find her way back to the TARDIS, discovering that the Daleks have dug it out of the sand with the unwilling help of some Aridians, who they promptly murder once the work is finished. I’ve heard of bad bosses, but that takes the cake.

The Daleks start bombarding the TARDIS, but to their frustration the little wooden box is impervious to their weapons. Appearances, after all, can be deceiving.

The Aridians come to the decision that they have to hand the Doctor and Barbara over, even though I wouldn’t trust a Dalek as far as I could throw one.

Ian wakes up from his little nap (being unconscious for that long, that man needs his head checking out) and gets up to search for Vicki, who has just been snatched in the tunnels by an Aridian.

In the city, Barbara notices dust coming from a bricked-up doorway. It’s apparently blocking off a section of the city that was lost to the Mire Beasts. It’s rather shoddy work considering it’s meant to keep literal monsters at bay. The Aridians drag Vicki in, and she tells them what she saw. However, before they can discuss plans of escape any further, the Aridians come to collect them for the handover to the Daleks.

It’s at this point the Aridians’ shoddy brickwork comes back to bite them. A tentacle bursts through the wall, ensnaring Barbara. In the ensuing struggle, she manages to break free. The companions flee the scene, leaving the Aridians to their fate at the tentacles of the Mire Beast. See, this is why you check reviews before hiring your builder.

Hm, maybe it should have stayed in the shadows.

The Daleks issue the Aridians a further ultimatum upon learning of the companions’ escape. They have one hour to recapture them, or the Daleks will destroy the city. For a Dalek, that’s a surprising display of patience.

The Doctor, Barbara and Vicki run into Ian in the tunnels. Ian comes up with a plan to evade the Daleks and get back into the TARDIS. He asks for Barbara’s cardigan (nicely, this time) and the Doctor’s coat, and uses them to construct a simple pitfall trap.

While the women wait for their chance to make a break for it, the Doctor and Ian catch the attention of the Dalek on guard. The stupid thing blunders into the trap, and the companions make a break for it, their ship dematerialising as the Daleks open fire.

This is actually a decent and fun scene. I have to call attention to it, because those are so very rare in this serial.

Other than that, all I can really say about this episode is…nothing, really. Not particularly bad, not particularly good, mostly dull with a good bit or two. It garners a shrug and a ‘eh’. It exists.

FLIGHT THROUGH ETERNITY

The TARDIS flees through time and space, while the Daleks waste a lot of time talking about their plans to follow them at once rather than just doing it. It’s an absolute tension killer.

Inside the TARDIS, the companions’ celebration of their escape gets cut short when the Space Telly detects another time machine pursuing them again.

Also, there’s a really obvious cardboard cutout on the Dalek ship. Look, I don’t mind being creative to stay in budget, but if you’re going to use a cardboard cutout, stick it in the background of a shot.

The TARDIS needs to land for…some reason, and the Doctor plonks it in the land of stock footage. Gee, I wonder which city this is?

Oh, of course, it’s New Amsterdam.

Silly me.

To the people of the United States of America: I apologise for the travesty that is to follow. I’m talking about the accents. Oh, boy. The accents. They are absolutely atrocious.

Well, at least we’re now even for Mary Poppins.

There’s yet! More! Padding! As a tour guide shows a bunch of tourists the famous New York landmarks from the top of the Empire State Building, which is where the TARDIS has just materialised.

'Maybe if we ignore him long enough, he'll go away.'

Upon emerging from their ship, they meet a man from Alabama who embodies just about every stereotype about American southerners you can imagine. It’s honestly embarrassing. He’s a friendly enough chap though, telling Barbara that the current year is 1966. He's very curious about how they appeared seemingly from nowhere. The companions manage to brush him off and depart, but the Daleks arrive moments later, demanding to know where they went.

In the greatest display of patience I have ever seen, the Daleks don’t just shoot him for being annoying. He thinks this is all some Hollywood lark.

That's not a microphone, buddy.

Back in the TARDIS, the companions learn the Daleks are still hot on their heels. They need to find a way to fight back.

The next landing spot is a nineteenth-century sailing ship somewhere off the Azores, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Barbara can’t resist having a look around, leading her into trouble when an officer accosts her. Luckily for Barbara, Vicki soon comes to give the officer a good whack on the head. Hearing someone else coming, Barbara tells Vicki to hide. Vicki gives the newcomer a good whack, before realising it was just Ian. Poor Ian. It’s a wonder he has any functioning brain cells left.

The women manhandle a dazed Ian back onto the TARDIS, which vanishes as the officer wakes up. He informs the captain of what he found, and the captain rallies the crew to search the ship. However, it’s not long before the Daleks show up, terrifying the sailors so much that they leap overboard, which strikes me as a bit of a silly thing to do.

The Daleks search the now-abandoned ship, finding no sign of the TARDIS, and continue the chase. We then have a long, long series of shots of the abandoned ship. It's the Mary Celeste.

The TARDIS whizzes off into time and space, but they’re losing their lead on the Daleks. They’d better hope that the Doctor manages to finish his secret weapon before the Daleks catch up.

Final Thoughts

Here we are. That was the first half of The Chase. Suffice to say, I am underwhelmed. There’s no interesting philosophical or social angle. It’s not even an exciting prolonged chase sequence. There are far too many lulls in the action and too much obvious padding.

The Daleks feel completely ineffective. They spend too much time dithering to seem like an unstoppable force of death.

The Aridians were just rubbish. Although we haven’t seen any real conclusion of what happens to them, frankly I just don’t care.

Even as an adventure, a romp, this serial doesn’t work. Let’s compare it to The Keys Of Marinus, for example. Both serials involve the companions travelling in rapid succession from one place to another. However, The Chase is more of a whistle-stop tour than a real adventure. In The Keys Of Marinus, the companions had some sort of obstacle to overcome at each destination. After Aridia, they bounced from one location to the next. There’s no real reason for them to have got out of the TARDIS at all in New York or on the ship, other than to trot out a few new sets and some dodgy accents. Then they just get back in again and leave. That’s not an adventure, that’s tourism.

I do hope that the serial improves from here. However, past experience would indicate that a serial which starts poorly ends poorly. I wouldn’t hold my breath.

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