5️⃣🔼 = MIDDLING!

Thworping through time and space, one adventure at a time!

“IT’S TIME, AND TIME AGAIN!”

A year after teaching us not to meddle with time and in the same season where time is being meddled with on two occasions, Doctor Who went wibbly-wobbly and timey-wimey for the first time!

The haunting, experimental quality of Part 1. In another early experimental Doctor Who episode, much like The Edge of Destruction (1964) before it, Glyn Jones offers a fascinating take on alternate timelines and different dimensions, explained by "time and relativity!" as the Doctor puts it. These are classic sci-fi concepts given the Doctor Who treatment and make for an interesting mystery to open up the story with; it’s tense and thrilling, like a timey wimey space thriller.

The shocking Part 1 cliffhanger. "Yes, my dear. And we've arrived!". The moments leading up to another classic cliffhanger must have left viewers in 1965 scratching their heads, and it's still a very effective moment today. What we see here is a potential ending to the story, and we spend the remaining three episodes trying to work out how to avoid that ending. It's a pity the show didn't do more stories like this one during its original run.

Raises questions of whether you can alter your fate. The revived series would use a term such as "fixed point in time" to deal with similar events, but The Space Museum plays around with the idea that we never know where our actions take us—in trying to prevent a certain thing from happening to us, we might cause that exact thing to happen—or not.

The lousy "warring factions" plot. Here we have another story with two groups of aliens in conflict with each other, but Glyn Jones only half-heartedly develops this plot to justify the existence of a guest cast in the serial. It's so ineffective and forgettable on both sides that it feels like a distraction from the main plot, yet there's too much time devoted to it.

Three episodes of running and sneaking around corridors. A common complaint about (classic) Doctor Who is that it contains a lot of running up and down corridors. The Space Museum is one reason that complaint exists. After the brilliant first episode, we are given three episodes of the regulars worrying about their own future while hiding and sneaking around the same corridors and rooms. It sadly doesn't play around with the sci-fi ideas from the opening episode in the remaining three.

Glyn Jones can't write dialogue. The Moroks, in particular, speak clunky, exposition-filled dialogue that sounds so off that it almost gives me a headache.

The Doctor takes a superb lead in the story. He catches up with what is going on quicker than the others but refuses to openly tell the others in order to hopefully allow things to run smoothly. He's also both serious and funny while sounding very clever. Just look at his meeting with Lobos in Part 2; it's such a satisfying scene, or indeed the fun moment when he hides inside a Dalek shell. His return partway through Part 4, as he yet again faces Lobos, is a superb moment of triumph.

The regulars are really good! All four of the main cast members are at their A-game here. William Hartnell delivers his lines like a king and takes the well-deserved lead; William Russell (who is suddenly Doctor Who's version of James Bond; so excited about carrying around a prop gun) and Jacquline Hill still give their best despite departing the show soon, and Maureen O'Brien is finally beginning to find her footing as the newest companion, especially when allowed to raise a revolution by herself. It's also a joy to see the three companions spend a good chunk of the story together, allowing them to bounce off each other's strengths rather than having them take part in separate aspects of the adventure.

The alien races are laughable. We have the Moroks against the Xerons here, and both look and sound like second-rate Star Trek aliens. The Moroks are useless cowards who sound more threatening than they turn out to be. The Xerons are annoying, snotty-nosed kids whom I find it hard to root for (despite one of them, Dako, being played by Peter Craze, the younger brother of future Doctor Who companion Michael Craze, and another, Tor, being played by future Star Wars actor Jeremy Bulloch!).

The music is enjoyable. The incidental music sounds like something from a 60s thriller but also has more sci-fi-sounding elements that make it stand out.

The setting isn't all that interesting. Xeros is a pretty bland planet, and the model work used to bring it to life doesn't look very good. The museum set itself is barren and simple and doesn't have that alien quality over it that some of the better-realised planets have.

No real tension or escalation. The TARDIS crew is supposedly working against the clock, and the Xerons are planning a revolution, but the serial is in no hurry to develop its main plot strands, and it doesn't build up to anything before wrapping all up and taking the four time travellers into their next adventure.

RANDOM OBSERVATIONS:

I love how Ian uses Barbara’s cardigan here to help himself, Barbara, and Vicki find the way out, only for Barbara to get her revenge in the next story byusing Ian’s cardigan to escape the Daleks.