-
It is impossible not to start
out with that hair. It is either very clever costume design to parallel
the decadent and crumbling civilisation of the Moroks with the bewigged
aristocrats of 18th century Europe or it is very embarrassing.
-
Vicki is at her finest. Why
wasn't she always like this? Could you imagine Susan started a rebellion
single-handedly? Or Steven or Dodo? Or Ben, Polly, Jamie, Victoria or Zoë?
No. It is to the detriment of her legacy that her best performance was in
such a badly considered story.
-
Check out those Xeron eyebrows
- clearly they are embarrassed to be in Dr Who and are about to make a run
for it.
-
In one brief scene we are
reminded that Ian and Babs are nice, sensible, middle class people from
1960s England. "That's a good cardigan" says Babs shortly before Ian
produces a penknife on demand.
-
When the Doctor is defrosted,
Billy clearly misread the script and thought it say "the Doctor has an
orgasm".
-
The Morok with the permanent
sneer - as if he can't hide the fact that he can smell the script from the
studio floor.
-
The moment where a feeble
Morok tries to rush the armed Ian and flaps around like your Dad trying to
dance to Kylie Minogue at a wedding.
-
The rebels are dressed like
French intellectuals but with English hair cuts.
-
When the Governor orders the
gas to be released, he doesn't so much say the name of the gas as string
noises together and hope for the best.
-
The plot is derided but it's
actually quite good - the destiny premise isn't ignored and the whole
thing is tied together in the scene near the end of part 4 when they
discuss how they took four separate paths to end up in the same prison
cell (i.e. they had failed because they were destined to fail) but equally
that they had all encountered other people and that maybe the means of
their salvation was the one thing that had happened which didn't concern
their own predicament (Vicki didn't foster revolution to save her own
skin, she did it because she had a personality for one brief spell)
-
The serial's most famous line
- "Have any arms fallen into Xeron hands?" isn't on the same plateau of
the absurd as The Ark's "Take them to the security kitchen" so there.
-
The Doctor gets inside a Dalek.
One day a bored psychology student will write a paper on the Freudian
subtext in that little incident.
-
"Doctor - we've got our
clothes on" / "I should hope so, my boy!"
-
The Tardis scanner manages to
pan around a museum without Troughton to grapple with a very stiff
control. Indeed, Billy's mastery of the console is such that he can
operate it using his lapels.
-
Ian points out that they
aren't leaving any footprints at exactly the same time that Vicky's foot
clearly sinks a good centimetre into the stock BBC sand.
-
"Phosphorescence" would've
been a worse choice I suppose but "florescent" was still a bad word to put
in a Hartnell script.
-
Episode One features some of
the worst hiding ever seen on British television.
-
The presence of a Dalek in the
museum suggests the Moroks once defeated them in battle. Yeah, whatever.
-
No one suggests that they
would change the future by simply burning the clothes they were wearing in
the glass cases. Maybe the story editor had seen enough during Billy's
bathing suit photo shoot.
-
The armoury security system is
typically feeble - "Do you have the correct paperwork to get a gun?"
-
The Xerons appear to be eating
Oxo cubes for lunch.
-
The young Xerons claim they
were "hiding" from the Moroks despite wandering around openly in front of
them. Well, they're wooden enough to pass for trees so where better to
hide them than in a forest?
-
"Guerrilla" is another ill
chosen word. The snooty guard stumbles over it like a drunk attempting the
110 metre hurdles.
-
The title is pish too since
"space" is an empty void and therefore wouldn't be worth visiting a museum
to look at.
