(Note: A Review Of All Four Episodes Of The Serial)
The more time I spend looking at it, the more I've come to realize how strange a beast Doctor Who's second season was. Instead of consolidating on the lessons learned from its first year, the show remained experimental, toying with its format in serial after serial. Or perhaps even experimenting within the space of a single story with story structure. That experimentation, and its effects, can be seen writ large on the mid-season four-parter The Space Museum.
Take that first episode, let's say. The opening installment is pretty high concept, with the TARDIS crew arriving at the titular space museum but realizing that something has gone wrong with time. The twenty-odd minutes that follow are atmospheric and tense, featuring them wandering around the museum until they discover a most troubling exhibit: themselves. Messing around with time isn't something that Classic Who often did, which makes how well this first part of the serial works all the more remarkable. It's also full of some great chemistry between the four leads as together they try to figure out what they've gotten themselves into and then watching the realization dawn on them in a genre twist on the questions of predestination explored in The Aztecs. Finally, it all builds up to a classic cliffhanger ending, if ever there was one. It's a great example of 1960s Doctor Who at its best and one of the single strongest episodes made throughout Classic Who's entire quarter-century run.
Unfortunately, The Space Museum goes downhill from there at the speed of an Olympic skier. With time having caught up with the TARDIS crew, you might have expected the three episodes that followed to be a tension-filled exercise in escaping fate. Instead, to the shame of writer Glyn Jones and script editor Dennis Spooner, the whole thing turns into a runaround. One that, even by this early point in the show's history, already feels tired and old hat involving a rebellion that merely needs the Doctor and co to kick it into high gear. A serial that tries to use the opening episode as a thematic Sword of Damocles, but instead leaves the impression its opening episode came from another story altogether.
Worse, it's a runaround that feels almost like a parody. Jones' script feels like a parody of science fiction on the whole, with talk of ray guns and (for the 1960s) high technology and an older "oppressive" group of bureaucratic aliens facing off against a literal group of young rebels. Something which might have worked in a different context, as Douglas Adams would later prove, but which utterly failed to catch fire here. In part because everyone involved plays with the utmost seriousness, despite the absurdity of the lines. That is until it isn't, such as Ian trying to rip Barbara's cardigan with his teeth or a guard late in the serial trying to jump the travelers holding him at gunpoint, leading to a jarring change of tone even within single scenes. It's an example of how to take a good opening episode, with its promise of a science-fiction turn at the "You can't change history, not one line!" pronouncement of the previous season, and utterly let it down.
It's sometimes easy to call Classic Who stories a tale of two halves. In the case of The Space Museum, it's more one of a quarter followed by three lesser ones. Despite the dull, runaround nature of much of what follows in its wake, The Space Museum's opening installment remains a remarkable piece of work. If this story is worth seeing for any reason, it's for those twenty-minutes or so. And to mourn afterward for the serial that should have been.
9/10 for the opening episode, 3/10 for the remaining episodes.
The more time I spend looking at it, the more I've come to realize how strange a beast Doctor Who's second season was. Instead of consolidating on the lessons learned from its first year, the show remained experimental, toying with its format in serial after serial. Or perhaps even experimenting within the space of a single story with story structure. That experimentation, and its effects, can be seen writ large on the mid-season four-parter The Space Museum.
Take that first episode, let's say. The opening installment is pretty high concept, with the TARDIS crew arriving at the titular space museum but realizing that something has gone wrong with time. The twenty-odd minutes that follow are atmospheric and tense, featuring them wandering around the museum until they discover a most troubling exhibit: themselves. Messing around with time isn't something that Classic Who often did, which makes how well this first part of the serial works all the more remarkable. It's also full of some great chemistry between the four leads as together they try to figure out what they've gotten themselves into and then watching the realization dawn on them in a genre twist on the questions of predestination explored in The Aztecs. Finally, it all builds up to a classic cliffhanger ending, if ever there was one. It's a great example of 1960s Doctor Who at its best and one of the single strongest episodes made throughout Classic Who's entire quarter-century run.
Unfortunately, The Space Museum goes downhill from there at the speed of an Olympic skier. With time having caught up with the TARDIS crew, you might have expected the three episodes that followed to be a tension-filled exercise in escaping fate. Instead, to the shame of writer Glyn Jones and script editor Dennis Spooner, the whole thing turns into a runaround. One that, even by this early point in the show's history, already feels tired and old hat involving a rebellion that merely needs the Doctor and co to kick it into high gear. A serial that tries to use the opening episode as a thematic Sword of Damocles, but instead leaves the impression its opening episode came from another story altogether.
Worse, it's a runaround that feels almost like a parody. Jones' script feels like a parody of science fiction on the whole, with talk of ray guns and (for the 1960s) high technology and an older "oppressive" group of bureaucratic aliens facing off against a literal group of young rebels. Something which might have worked in a different context, as Douglas Adams would later prove, but which utterly failed to catch fire here. In part because everyone involved plays with the utmost seriousness, despite the absurdity of the lines. That is until it isn't, such as Ian trying to rip Barbara's cardigan with his teeth or a guard late in the serial trying to jump the travelers holding him at gunpoint, leading to a jarring change of tone even within single scenes. It's an example of how to take a good opening episode, with its promise of a science-fiction turn at the "You can't change history, not one line!" pronouncement of the previous season, and utterly let it down.
It's sometimes easy to call Classic Who stories a tale of two halves. In the case of The Space Museum, it's more one of a quarter followed by three lesser ones. Despite the dull, runaround nature of much of what follows in its wake, The Space Museum's opening installment remains a remarkable piece of work. If this story is worth seeing for any reason, it's for those twenty-minutes or so. And to mourn afterward for the serial that should have been.
9/10 for the opening episode, 3/10 for the remaining episodes.