MR 054: The Nowhere Place

This one certainly has a great atmosphere. A door appears in the middle of a military space station in the future. People hear a bell and get drawn into it. Only, there is nothing on the other side of it. They just vanish, gone forever into nothingness. The premise here is quite good, but the execution... well...

The Doctor initially hears this bell and is drawn to this space station. The first part is kind of superfluous. It takes awhile for the story to really get started. Like a lot of main range and classic serials with four parts, this one is a bit too long. There's a lot of fussing with the commander of the station over who the Doctor and Evelyn are and why they're there. It's all very standard overly long Doctor Who story stuff. When they finally do get to the story, though, it works quite well. The door is in the cargo hold and draws people in. Just a few at first, but then it draws in the executive officer. And then more and more people hear the bell and go into it. There's a sequence I liked where a space pilot heard the bell while piloting and crashed into that section of the ship to get to the door. The entire section got sucked into it and now the door is just standing in open space on its own.

On the other side of the door, the Doctor hears the sound a train and a ticket taker and they narrow down exactly which train it is. They leave the station with a promise to return, and the Doctor goes to that train. It turns out this was a trap, however. This is kind of where the story starts to fall apart, just a bit. Whatever is on the other side of the door possesses Evelyn and tries to take some sketches from one of the train passengers. It turns out these are sketches of that space station they were on, germs of an idea for space travel, like Leonardo Di Vinci's sketches of helicopters. It's a bit strange that this one random person is the only one with this idea and stealing it will shut down humanity's space ambitions, but sure. There's a lot of science fiction by this point in the 50s and certainly an explosion of it since then. We're literally talking about Doctor Who after all.

It's not entirely clear why whatever is beyond the door is trying to shut down humanity's space travel considering what it is eventually revealed to be. This part with the train is a much better idea and atmosphere than it is a realized story. For now, the Doctor sees what is happening and goes back to the space station, a month later after a lot more people have gone into the door. The Doctor goes and puts the TARDIS in front of the door and confronts what's inside.

Once again, with the rest of this story, the vibes are good, but the actual explanation is a bit off. These are beings from Earth's distant past, billions of years ago, and were the very first species to ever develop on that planet. They tried to go into space, but failed catastrophically. They made an error that resulted in not only their space ship getting blown up, but their entire species getting sucked into the collapse of time. The Doctor doesn't really know why this happened, just that they made the error that blew up their ship. Ever since they've been reaching out from their place where this is no time, putting up this doorway whenever a species on Earth gets space travel in an effort to destroy their species. It's just completely out of petty jealousy and for no other reason. I kind of like this, they're completely consumed by jealousy, there is nothing else. They're just a writhing mass of jealousy, in fact.

If this is the case, though, I don't really know what the point of that whole train sequence was. Why would they try to stop humanity from achieving space travel through time travel? They don't need the TARDIS, they can pop into any time. And they only really seem to be genociding species when they achieve space travel. So why bother to do all that?

The story seems to have been conceived with the imagery in mind first and then building the story around it. The image of the train and the sounds coming from within the door. The Doctor describes seeing a giant mass of faces inside of a gaping mouth. It feels like a metal album cover. The mass of faces are the countless trillions that have been slaughtered to prevent other species from achieving space travel. But the story doesn't quite coalesce around these images. They're good, haunting images, though, I'll give them that.

The commander of the space station sends a nuclear bomb through the door and that seems to wipe out the species that did this and all the species that they have sent through the door over billions of years. And that's that. There's a nice little outro where Evelyn asks what she really saw, having seen the writhing mass of faces inside of a mouth and the Doctor asks if she really wants to know. Because the truth is too horrific to contemplate.

It has lovecraftian vibes too, with its imagery and ideas. A horrible truth that drives you mad just to think of it. A bell that draws you in when you see what's beyond the door to nowhere. Ultimately, though, I think the story is a bit weak. It doesn't support the ideas it's trying to convey. Still, good vibes. Also why didn't they kill the Silurians? They clearly had space travel, smh.