The Space Museum

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.

“The least important things, sometimes, my dear boy, lead to the greatest discoveries.”

A strong and unique first episode that utilises time travel and paradoxes really nicely, before descending in a rather boring and mundane series of episodes. It’s predictable and dull for most of its runtime, with a boring side cast, and a generic rebels versus dictators type story.

Hartnell is brilliant here however. Even though he’s not in the third episode, his fun performance in the first two and final episode make up for it. He’s play against Lorbo in the second episode is really strong as well, a darker and more strong willed side to this version who has now become more soft.

The sets are rather generic, and the museum never as impressive as you want. With dull side characters. It’s not bad, but forgettable, though does have a really strong first episode.

The Space Museum: 9/10 - This story was so much fun. The first part was an amazing mystery with some of the most interesting storytelling so far. The next three parts was an interesting tale of the Tardis team trying to change their predetermined futures and being able to. I thought Vicki especially was great with her interactions with the Xerons. Ian was also awesome as per usual and had some insane fighting skills

I had a decent enough time with The Space Museum. It's hardly exceptional - while I find it a pretty fun set-up and an interesting exploration of time travel ideas the series would be exploring for a very long time, and I found the setting fun, too, it does lose steam after a bit. I definitely find part one is a great start while the rest largely flounders and struggles to live up to that, but nothing about the rest of the parts are entirely objectionable, either.

What can be said about the space museum that hasn’t already been said it’s camp yet slow it peaks at the first 15 mins but forgets it has like 3.5 parts left to go

This episode is an absolute blast! Great concept! Great character work!

The party experiences what can best be described as a “hiccup in time”. They’ve arrived at the end of an adventure they haven’t had yet. One where they end up as exhibitions in a space museum. They now get a chance to redo their adventure. It’s up to them to change their timeline, so that this exhibition future does not come to pass. But how do you change your timeline if you don’t know what you did before?

This type of story is hard to explain, but it is shown well on screen. The concept is clear. Prevent the future from happening. It’s kind of baffling to me that Doctor Who is already trying deep, complicated time travel shenanigans in its second TV season. This feels on par with something the 11th doctor would go through, for example.

Aside from the premise, this story is great fun. The setting is unique and our main cast is having all kinds of fun. The doctor is running around like giggly child and I’m almost giggling along with him.

It also contains something we don’t see with these characters all that often. This might even be the first: There’s a full blown argument within the group (except doctor). It’s kind of unique, and while it isn’t necessarily plot related, it makes them all feel so human. They just had a bad moment, but it’s all good. I could watch these people for days.

Other highlights of character are sprinkled through the story. The Doctor gets interrogated by a machine that can look into his mind, and it made me laugh out loud. That hasn’t happened before.

Vicki also gets some strong moments, by showing some knowledge that only someone from the future could know. She even has some hackers skills. I feel this is earned for her. She has always acted a little haughty towards the other for being “primitive”, and this shows she can back up what she says. She also gets to incite the revolution this time, and her hype for it all is really contagious. Makes me wanna protest something.

Apart from the argument, Barbara and Ian get less stuff to do, and I’m starting to see a pattern. Maybe we’re winding down on them a bit. I know we don’t have much time left. And I feel that there are still some developments (Ian still has that new sternness, like he’s a bit disillusioned with it all). But I don’t think we’re going to get much more new stuff from them. A shame, but that’s not purely on this episode.

Plotwise, the stuff on display is fine. All the non-party characters feel a little wimpy, but I feel like that’s intentional. The characters are very much the strongest force on this planet, which is good. If other forces were totally overpowering them, it would be hard to change their own future. The Moroks are speed bumps in this challenge, but they serve their purpose. The only problem I see is that the bump section can feel a little long.

Other than that, I really can’t find many flaws with this story. It’s a story that pits our characters against time itself, and does so quite well. Character moments are there in spades and it all just works great. Even the next time teaser is cool! Maybe it could be a bit shorter, but honestly, I wasn’t ready to leave yet anyway.

Quite a good story with some shakiness in the first 2 parts, certain scenes work quite well, like the exploration in the first part, the interrogation in the second, and the fight scene in the third, and others don't work at all, like some of the companions-bickering scenes, and some stilted expository dialogue in the first 2 parts.

The story itself is a classic take on colonization, with the Moroks standing in for the British and the Xerons standing in for people from really any British colony (which is possibly why the Moroks are dressed in white and the Xerons are dressed in black). So while the setup is good and classic Doctor Who, the execution leaves something to be desired, and lacks much of anything new to say really, this whole dynamic is done much better in other stories, but it works fine here. The story's real strength is the writing itself, the allegory might be simple and not explored as well as it could have been, but all the rest work really well, quite a relief after the slog that was The Web Planet and The Crusade back to back, imo.

I am a big fan of the set design, not that it's really that difficult, but they sell a "space museum" quite well, and I like the costuming, the Morok uniforms are quite snazzy and very 60s.

Part 3 has a very good fight scene for the time with energy and quite good choreography, that manages to stay fun and is clear throughout.
I quite like Lobos as an above-it-all colonizer who's driven by logic and science.
It's moments like these I wish there were more granularity in the review scores, cause in my opinion this is better than a 7 but not quite good enough to be an 8.
7.5/10