By Jessica Holmes

Hello, dear readers! Summer’s passed, there’s a cold snap in the air, and Doctor Who is back on our television sets, which means that I get to waffle on to you about it at great length. Did you miss me?

We’re kicking things off with a strange new world and a new writer. I don’t believe we’ve had William Emms pen an episode before, so shall we see how he got on?

FOUR HUNDRED DAWNS

The TARDIS materialises in a rather barren landscape, with a great big load of nothing as far as the eye can see. Well, as far as I can see, anyway, as my television set is malfunctioning. I managed to hear the audio just fine, but I did end up losing the picture quite often, so please do bear that in mind.

Aboard the TARDIS, Vicki’s giving Steven a haircut as the Doctor surveys the outside environment. He notices that the conditions are perfectly conducive to life, but there don’t seem to be any signs of it outside.

Not at first, anyway. Before long, a strange little thing scoots along. It looks a bit like a beehive on wheels, and it’s feeling its way around the TARDIS.

Leave it to Vicki to call it cute and nickname it a ‘Chumbley’.

It doesn’t stick around for long, enabling them to emerge from the TARDIS and spot the three suns in the sky. However, another arrives, this time toting what appears to be a gun. After witnessing it set a bush on fire with a single blast, the group allow the Chumbley to escort them off.

Two women watch as the Chumbley leads them away from the TARDIS. As it comes close to them, they throw a metal mesh over it, deactivating the device.

The explorers are glad of the rescue, and Steven in particular is pleased to see it comes in so fair a form. The women introduce themselves as Drahvins, sent by their leader to rescue the newcomers. They say that the Chumblies are under the control of the ‘Rills’, who sound jolly unpleasant. However, they don’t explain why their leader took an interest in them in the first place, and Vicki doesn’t trust that they have good intentions. Steven, however, is all too happy to trust a pretty face. For his part, the Doctor isn’t sure either way, and opts to be compliant, but cautious.

More Chumbleys arrive, and the group have to flee. The Drahvin women escort the travellers to their ship, a beat-up old rustbucket that isn’t flying anywhere any time soon.

I can’t help but roll my eyes as the men seem rather giggly as the women order them to be silent for the arrival of their leader, Maaga. Fellas, they might be women, pretty ones at that, but they have guns and look like they mean business.

Maaga arrives on the scene, and after debriefing her troops, informs the travellers that the Drahvins are at a state of war with the Rills, with total obliteration of the other side being the only possible outcome. They themselves may end up obliterated.

Why are they at war? The planet will explode in two weeks’ time according to the Rills, who have the only working spaceship.

Maaga doesn’t seem the type to try asking nicely.

As for why the planet’s about to explode, your guess is as good as mine. I’m no physicist, but I’d imagine the three suns exert enormous tidal forces on the planet, so perhaps it’s more accurate to say that it’s about to be torn apart.

The reason they’re on this doomed world in the first place is that their planet is overpopulated, and they were looking for suitable planets for colonisation. Steven asks if the population of Drahvin are all women, prompting another eye-roll from me. I can’t imagine he’d ask the same of an all-male crew, would he?

For the record, there are indeed men on Drahvin– just the few they need to breed the next generation. The rest are killed for being a waste of resources.

It’s an interesting society for sure, made even more so by the revelation that Maaga’s soldiers were grown in test tubes for the purpose of fighting and killing. She insists they aren’t real people, and they certainly act more like robots than sentient creatures, but that in my opinion could be more a matter of conditioning than anything else, which makes their poor treatment far more sinister.

Maaga finishes off the dump of exposition by telling the Doctor that the Drahvins and Rills shot one another down, the Rills having opened fire first, and then the Rills murdered one of her soldiers shortly after crash-landing.

A Chumbley approaches and attempts to send a message, but Maaga opens fire on it before it can, scaring it away.

It’s at this point the Doctor raises a pertinent question: why did the Rills tell the Drahvins that the planet was going to explode?

Maaga’s assumption is that they were trying to get the Drahvin to come aboard their ship so they can kill them.

Well, if that’s what she thinks, then who’s to say if the planet is actually in any danger at all?

Lucky for them that the Doctor is a scientist. He can find out one way or the other.

Vicki volunteers to stay behind while the men go back to the ship, ostensibly to make sure that the whole crew aren’t putting themselves in danger, but everyone including the audience knows that in actuality she’s a hostage.

The Doctor and Steven find a Chumbley trying to break into the TARDIS when they get back, but it gives up before long, and they get inside and the Doctor gets to work. He soon learns to his horror that the planet is indeed going to be destroyed– but the timing is way off! This planet doesn’t have fourteen dawns left… it has two.

Tomorrow is the last day this planet will ever see.

TRAP OF STEEL

Talking of things going BOOM, the fellas had better watch out for the Chumbley outside the TARDIS. It’s got a bomb!

The blast knocks the pair off their feet, but the ship itself is unharmed, surviving a second blast unscathed. The Chumbley leaves in defeat, and the men leg it before it can come back with an even bigger bomb.

On arriving back at the Drahvin ship, the Doctor tells Maaga that the planet is indeed going to explode, but he doesn’t share his knowledge of how little time they truly have left.

If the Drahvins are going to escape, they’ll need the Doctor’s help. Rather than ask for something reasonable, like a lift in the TARDIS, Maaga insists that the travellers help to capture the Rills’ ship. The Doctor refuses, as he’s not in the business of killing people, and he’s not about to start now.

The gang are starting to get suspicious of her version of the story and her insistence that they can’t possibly work together with the Rills, and it seems they’re right, as when asking nicely doesn’t work, Maaga threatens them with a gun. Steven tries to subdue her, but he’s no match for all her soldiers.

Left with no choice, the Doctor reluctantly agrees to help. However, his initial hesitance has made Maaga suspicious of him, and she threatens to kill Vicki unless he admits what he’s not telling her. He tells her how little time they really have, and she orders the men to go out immediately to capture the ship, intending to hold Vicki hostage. However, Steven insists on taking her place, and the Doctor and Vicki set off alone to try and capture a spaceship.

It doesn’t make sense to me. Surely it’d be better if they had the soldiers with them? There must be somewhere that Maaga could safely hold a hostage.

How about the air lock?

While awaiting the return of the others, Steven gets chatting to one of the soldiers, pointing out that it doesn’t seem very fair that Maaga gets better food and weapons than them, despite them being on the front lines and taking all the actual risks. He suggests to her that if she were to give him her gun, and she took Maaga’s, they could go out together and kill Chumbleys, and Maaga would be pleased with her. The soldier, being both naive and not terribly bright, which is presumably by design, is very nearly taken in, before Maaga shows up and puts an end to Steven’s short-lived escape attempt.

Maaga suggests to Steven that he could leave in the TARDIS and take her and her soldiers with him.

Why didn’t you ask that in the first place?!

Steven echoes my sentiments, and Maaga more or less tells him to shut up.

Charming. It’s a bit late now, though. Without the Doctor, Steven couldn’t take them off the planet even if he were so inclined.

Near the Rills’ base of operations, Vicki and the Doctor observe the movements of the Chumbleys, and Vicki realises that aside from being blind, the Chumbleys can’t detect sounds directly behind them. A suspiciously convenient design flaw, if you ask me. By exploiting this they manage to tail a Chumbley all the way to the Rills’ base, where they find a drill rig, and some sort of air purifier.

In summarising this, I am editing out the many, many pauses in the action in which a Chumbley rolls past agonisingly slowly, making a deeply irritating noise, while the Doctor and Vicki wait for it to pass. The pacing of this episode, and indeed the whole serial, would be a lot tighter without all these lulls, though I suspect it might end up a whole episode shorter.

Oh, and we finally get a glimpse of the Rills, observing them through a viewport inside their ship. I was half-expecting the Rills to turn out to be ordinary men, as it seemed to me that as Maaga was likely stretching the truth about their villainy, she might also be fibbing about them being monsters. Plus with her distaste for men to the point of absurdity, it would have been funny.

To give her credit, she was telling the truth– to a certain extent.

See, there’s one thing we can confirm about the Rills: they are most certainly NOT men. Not even close, appearing less like a person and more like a rotting whale carcass with lamprey mouths for eyes.

But are they as scary as they look?

AIR LOCK

A Chumbley arrives on scene, and the pair make a run for it. However, Vicki isn’t quite fast enough, and ends up trapped inside the Rills’ base. The Doctor quickly comes up with a plan to flush the Rills out of hiding, which will hopefully force them to open the doors, by messing with their air converter. However, it’ll take time, so he counsels Vicki to be brave and try to stay out of trouble, and go with the Chumbley.

Back at the Drahvin ship, Maaga’s finding that lab-grown soldiers with hardly any minds of their own make for poor conversation partners, as she tries to get through to them that the situation has changed, so no, they can’t go out on patrol. The soldiers are confused by the loyalty Steven shows to his friends, and Maaga, too, finds it confusing. She knows on an intellectual level that such creatures exist, but it would appear that Drahvin culture doesn’t share this concept with our own. Perhaps it’s her society, or just how she’s wired.

Still, inspirational speeches seem pretty universal, as Maaga gives her soldiers a lovely pep talk about stealing the Rills’ ship, and looking back on the exploding planet and imagining the horrible deaths the Rills are experiencing.

Nice lady.

As for the Rills, well, it turns out they’re rather polite. Using a Chumbley to translate his thoughts into speech that Vicki can understand, the Rill at the porthole apologises to her for separating her from the Doctor, and asks her who she is and what she’s doing here. When she explains that the Drahvins are forcing her to help steal the Rills’ ship, the Rill within is quite perplexed, as they had offered to take the Drahvins with them.

This Rill’s side of the story is that they encountered the Drahvins in space, and had halted their flight for fear of provoking an attack. He claims that the Drahvins fired first, so the Rills retaliated. Interesting.

Unable to breathe the local atmosphere, they nevertheless set out to help the Drahvins, finding one badly injured. However, before they could help her, Maaga intervened and drove them off, and as they left they witnessed her kill the injured soldier.

Curious, Vicki wants to properly know what the Rill looks like. However, he can’t come outside, as he can’t breathe oxygen at all.

That seems inconsistent with them having attempted to help an injured Drahvin, but it’s not terribly important.

Vicki realises with horror that the Doctor’s plan to flush them out will actually kill them.

Meanwhile, a dozy Drahvin provides Steven with another opportunity to escape, as he manages to sneakily subdue her and take her gun. However, on reaching the airlock, he finds himself stuck. On one side is Maaga, demanding he come back in. On the other is a Chumbley, which as far as he knows is unfriendly. He’s trapped.

Vicki manages to stop the Doctor from accidentally killing the Rills, and the Rill at the porthole explains to the Doctor that they’re drilling for oil to refuel their ship. The Doctor warns them that they don’t have as much time as they think. However, he can help.

Before he can elaborate much further, a Chumbley gets a message, and the group learn that Steven is trapped in the Drahvin airlock.

It’s worse than that, though. Tired of Steven’s misbehaviour, Maaga gives him three options: he can come inside and surrender, he can go out and face death by Chumbley, or she can depressurise the airlock with him inside.

Realising that Steven is in big trouble, the others rush off to help, taking a couple of Chumbleys for backup.

Struggling to breathe as the airlock depressurises, Steven decides to try his luck with the Chumbley. However, now that it’s depressurised, the outer door doesn’t work any more. His three options are down to two: surrender or suffocate.

THE EXPLODING PLANET

Arriving in the nick of time, one of the Chumbleys accompanying the Doctor and Vicki manages to blast the airlock open, and Steven staggers out gasping for breath. As the other two help him recover, a smoke bomb sends the Drahvins coughing and spluttering out of their ship. However, they find themselves outgunned by Chumbleys. As the travellers retreat with a Chumbley in tow, the Rills tell the Drahvins that though they’ve tried to be friendly, they won’t tolerate their new friends being attacked. They order the Drahvins to go back into their ship and stay there.

Maaga and her soldiers retreat and regroup, but they certainly don’t intend to stay put. With only one night remaining to capture the Rills’ ship, Maaga comes up with a plan to sneak out and destroy the Rills’ air converter.

The Doctor meanwhile offers the Rills a jump-start, heading off to hook up his ship to the Rills’ ship. Steven stays behind alone with the Rills, and it’s a bit awkward at first, made even more so when he asks if the Rills will actually let them go if they can’t power the ship in time. However, the Rills are not the Drahvins. If time runs out, so be it. Having seen the code the Doctor lives by, it would be a terrible waste if he were to die here for no reason.

Steven sheepishly apologises for mistrusting them, and tells them that the Drahvins will still be planning to steal their ship, and he gets to work on fixing the power cable.

Vicki and the Doctor arrive back at the TARDIS and connect the power line. It’s not very important, but there is a pretty line of dialogue in response to Vicki’s musings about this all soon exploding into nothingness. Not nothingness, the Doctor corrects her, but hydrogen gas spreading out among the stars like molten silver. It interests me how the Doctor finds the beauty even in destruction.

The first foreshocks of the planet’s destruction hit the Drahvin ship, and they begin to panic. Maaga may be about to reap what she’s sown, but I feel bad for her soldiers, because they don’t really understand their situation or how they’ve been manipulated. One of the Drahvins sneaks out of the ship and manages to smash the sentry chumbley with a pipe, enabling the others to escape.

The Rills usher the travellers to shelter inside their ship, which doesn’t sound very safe. I’m pretty sure ammonia and humans don’t mix. A Chumbley paralyses the first Drahvin to attempt entry into the Rills’ base, and more emerge to confront the Drahvins outside.

Finally coming face to face, the travellers, though initially a little taken aback by the Rills’ appearance, reckon that they probably look just as strange from the Rills’ perspective, so why treat them any different? It’s not the most subtle delivery of the moral of the story, as I’d have thought even a child could have gathered the ‘don’t judge people by how they look’ message, but there you go.

They can’t stay inside for long, as the ammonia starts to make Vicki feel ill, and the ship is almost fully powered. The Doctor insists that they don’t hang around to make sure that the travellers get back to the TARDIS safely, and they prepare to take off.

The Drahvins notice the sudden absence of Chumbleys, and see the Rill ship leaving. Their only hope now is the TARDIS, and they chase after the travellers. However, they aren’t fast enough, and the gang slam the doors shut and dematerialise as fast as they can, abandoning the Drahvins to their fate.

Maaga and her soldiers watch in terror as they realise they have no means of escape, and moments later the planet explodes in a flash of blinding light. Maaga may have made her own bed, but I’m not sure how I feel about abandoning her soldiers, as they really didn’t seem to have the capacity to go against Maaga. They might have had a limited degree of free will, but they could still feel pain and fear.

Safely away, the Doctor remarks that just once, he would like to land somewhere where he isn’t immediately surrounded by danger. They spot a likely planet, and we get to see a vibrant jungle, where a man sits with his gun, chanting under his breath ‘I must kill’. So it doesn’t look like the Doctor’s getting a break any time soon.

Final Thoughts

Honestly, there’s not that much to say about Galaxy 4. It doesn’t feel like anything particularly new, given we’ve had multiple stories in which the travellers find themselves in the midst of a conflict between two races on some other planet, one side being the baddies and the other the goodies.

As for tension, there’s really not much. The Chumbleys were too cute to be a threat in the first place, and as we learn they weren’t actually a threat at all. The Drahvins are just too incompentant to feel threatening, and the Rills immediately turn out to be nice. The whole thing has quite a plodding pace that doesn’t make me feel the urgency of the situation.

As a minor note, I feel like there was a point being made with the Drahvins, but I’m not sure what that point was. It could be taken as pro- or anti- feminist, depending on your outlook. On the one hand it’s a female-led society and a bunch of powerful warrior women. On the other, the society is misandrist to the point of absurdity, only one of the Drahvins actually has a name, the others being portrayed and described in-story as woman-shaped objects, Maaga’s leadership is deeply questionable and founded in manipulation, and the warrior women can’t even defend themselves from an unarmed teenage girl, as happens in one moment in the story where Vicki disarms a lone Drahvin.

If the intention was pro-feminist, the writer severely undermined his own message. And if it wasn’t, that doesn’t surprise me. Other than that it’s just not a terribly interesting serial to me. It’s not terrible or anything, but you’re not missing much.

Next time we’re going on a very brief trip, so hopefully there will be plenty of action packed into the next adventure.

Until next time!

2 out of 5 stars