The Chase

No, what is that other awful noise?

There is a small bit of irony in The Chase. Doctor Who is probably one of the best known shows to have episodes wiped from BBC archives. However, this story escaped wiping and contains a clip of the Beatles from their appearance on Top of the Pops. The irony is that the remainder of that episode of Top of the Pops was wiped and this little bit from The Chase is the only surviving footage.

That amusement aside, The Chase is fairly derided among fans as being a boring and rambling mess. At the very least, it was a bit of a jumble behind the scenes as Peter Purvis, who appears as Morton Dill in Episode Three, was subsequently recast as the new companion Steven in less than three weeks. That gives light to some of the other little problems that cropped up along the way.

Plot Summary
While relaxing on the TARDIS, the Doctor develops a time-space visualizer, allowing the crew to witness any event that has happened in the past. Ian observes the Gettysburg Address, Barbara observes Queen Elizabeth talking with Shakespeare and Vicki observes a performance by The Beatles.

They then land on the desert planet of Aridius. Barbara and the Doctor relax around the TARDIS while Ian and Vicki go exploring. Vicki and Ian discover a trail of what appears to be blood and follow it, unaware that something is starting to follow them.

Barbara overhears the visualizer and when she goes to turn it off, she observes a group of Daleks entering a time machine in pursuit of the Doctor. Realizing the danger, the Doctor and Barbara head out after Ian and Vicki so they can all leave before the Daleks arrive. However, night falls and they are forced to hunker down amid some rocks due to a sandstorm.

As night is falling, Ian and Vicki decide to turn around, but Ian finds a ring protruding out of the sand. He pulls it and opens a hatch in the sand. He and Vicki head down the hatch but turn to find that it has been closed behind them by a tentacled creature that had been pursing them.

As day breaks, Barbara and the Doctor emerge from the sand, unsure of where to go. They are forced to hunker down again as a Dalek also emerges from the sand. They overhear the Dalek plans to search for the TARDIS and it's occupants and begin to creep away. In doing so, they run into a small group of Aridians, a fish people with underground cities. The Aridians offer to take the Doctor and Barbra to their city to look for Ian and Vicki.

Vicki and Ian flee through the tunnels away from the various tentacled creatures, called Mire Beasts by the Aridians. They are nearly caught however above ground a Aridian sets off an explosion designed to trap the Mire Beasts in the abandoned parts of the city and the resulting rock fall, knocks Ian out and kills the attacking creature. Vicki continues through the tunnels to find help for Ian.

The Daleks discover the TARDIS buried in the sand. They capture a group of Aridians and force them to dig it out. Once finished, they kill the Aridians and attempt to destroy the TARDIS. However, it is immune to their weapons. They instead set guards over it. Vicki emerges from one tunnel near the TARDIS to see the Daleks guarding it and heads back for Ian.

Back in the main part of the city, the Doctor and Barbara are informed that the Aridians have been contacted by the Daleks and ordered to give the Doctor and his party over by sunset. The elders are forced to agree as they cannot fight the Daleks. Vicki is captured by an Aridian and brought into the chamber with the Doctor and Barbara to be handed over. She tells them that she found the TARDIS and that Ian had apparently woken up and was wandering in the tunnels.

As the Aridians prepare to hand the Doctor over, a Mire Beast breaks through one of the walled off sections and attacks the Aridians. In the confusion, the Doctor and his friends run though the tunnels to the exit Vicki told them about. There they find Ian, setting a trap for the Dalek guard. Using the Doctor's coat and Barbara's sweater, he creates a tiger trap and lures the Dalek guard over. The Dalek falls into the tunnel pit and the group runs to the TARDIS and take off. The Daleks, seeing their escape, move to pursue in their own timeship.

Temporarily elated at their escape, the crew soon realizes that the Daleks are pursuing. They rematerialize on the observation deck of the Empire State Building in 1966, hoping to replot and lose the Daleks. There, they meet a man from Alabama named Morton Dill who assumes they are Hollywood performers. They quickly leave and Dill then sees the arrival of the Daleks. Still amused, he tells the Daleks that the other performers have already left and the Daleks depart once more.

Trying again to replot, the TARDIS lands on the deck of an American cargo schooner. Barbara walks about and is mistaken for a stowaway by the mate. Before he can take her below, Vicki hits him on the back of the head with a club, knocking him out. She mistakenly does the same to Ian when he comes up to tell them they are ready to depart. The two women then assist a groggy Ian back to the TARDIS, which then departs.

The Daleks materialize on the ship just after the mate has woken up and set the alarm among the crew about a stowaway. Upon seeing the Daleks, the crew panics, screaming about the "white terror." The entire crew, including the captain's wife and child, jump overboard to escape the Daleks. In the pursuit, one Dalek also accidentally falls overboard. The Daleks realize the TARDIS has left again and depart, leaving the abandoned ship (shown to be the Mary Celeste).

Checking the instruments, the Doctor sees that the Daleks are still pursuing and are actually gaining on them each time they replot their course. He sets down with the intension of finding a place to fight the Daleks and the group finds themselves in a derelict mansion. The Doctor and Ian head upstairs to see about defenses while Barbara and Vicki remain downstairs with the TARDIS.

Ian and the Doctor discover a lab with a Frankenstein type monster, which begins to rise to pursue them. This causes them to double back and head back downstairs. Meanwhile Vicki and Barbara see someone claiming to be Count Dracula and get separated in different areas of the house. Ian and the Doctor come back downstairs but discover the Daleks have landed, causing them to run back upstairs. They once again enter the lab and arouse the Monster, who advances on the pursuing Dalek, unaffected by it's gun.

Doubling back downstairs, the Doctor and Ian are reunited with Vicki and Barbara who were merely lost. The remaining Daleks advance on them but they are distracted when Count Dracula appears again, immune to their guns. The Doctor, Ian and Barbara dart into the TARDIS and the Doctor takes off. Vicki however is overcome with fear and doesn't move. The Daleks move to kill her but are distracted once again as the Frankenstein Monster emerges and attacks another Dalek. Vicki finally runs and hides in the Dalek time machine. As the Daleks withdraw to pursue the Doctor, a sign shows that the place was an elaborate haunted fun house on Earth.

On the TARDIS, the crew suddenly realize that Vicki was left behind. Unable to direct the TARDIS back there, they decide to make a stand wherever they land, defeat the Daleks and use their time machine to go back and rescue Vicki. They land in a swamp on a planet identified as Mechanus.

In the Dalek ship, Vicki tries to signal the TARDIS but gets no response. The Daleks, frustrated with their failure, create a robot duplicate of the Doctor to act as an infiltrator and assassin. As they land, they send the robot out while they patrol the jungle looking for the Doctor and his team. Vicki also slips out in search of the TARDIS.

The Doctor and his team are accosted by giant mushrooms but the fungi retreat when a series of lights are activated. The lights form a path and the crew follows it to a cave in the cleft of the cliff face. They hunker down and prepare to fight the Daleks. Barbara also finds the control rod for the lights and she deactivates it. The extinguishing of the lights causes the mushrooms to move in and attack Vicki. They hear her scream and the Doctor and Ian go looking for her.

While they are gone, the robot Doctor enters the cave and convinces Barbara to follow him out to look for Ian, claiming they were separated. The real Doctor, Ian and Vicki come back and after a moment's disbelief, informs them of the robot Doctor. Ian heads out again and finds the robot Doctor as it is attacking Barbara. The robot flees and Ian takes Barbara back to the cave. The real Doctor had also slipped out to look for Barbara and as they approach the cave, both Doctors arrive, each accusing the other. Ian begins to attack the real Doctor but they soon realize that it is the wrong Doctor. The two Doctors engage each other but the real Doctor gets the upper hand and disables the robot. Exhausted, the group returns to the cave and falls asleep.

In the morning, the Doctor and Ian spy a city built high above the forest. However, the Daleks attack before they can move and the retreat in to the cave. The Doctor attempts to fool the Daleks by posing as the robot but the Daleks realize it is him and attack, forcing him to duck back in to the cave. As they prepare to make a last stand, an elevator door opens and a robot bids them enter. They quickly do so and are taken up into the city.

In the city, the robot places them in a large room with Steven Taylor, an astronaut who crashed on the planet two years ago. He tells them the robots are called Mechanoids and were sent to the planet to prepare it for colonization. However, the colonization never happened and without the trigger code, the Mechanoids treat all life as potentially hostile. If no defined threat is observed, they enclose it for study as Steven and the TARDIS crew now are. Showing them around, they get on to the roof and find a spool of power cable. With Ian to help, the group decides to try and escape.

The Daleks invade the cave but find it empty. They determine that their prey escaped up to the city and they pursue, summoning all Daleks from the time ship. The Daleks attack the Mechanoids and the Mechanoids fight back. The Doctor also contributes to the fight by leaving his bomb which destroys the lead Dalek. The fight escalates and the city begins to burn as both Mechanoids and Daleks are destroyed in the fighting.

The group begins to lower each one down to the ground but Steven runs back into the holding cell to rescue his stuffed panda Hi-Fi. Not knowing his fate, the group flees back to the TARDIS. Steven actually does escape but is behind the group and out of sight. The TARDIS crew find the Dalek time ship and discover that it is empty with all the Daleks killed in the battle. As they examine it, Ian and Barbara realize they can use the ship to get back home.

Their suggestion angers the Doctor and he initially refuses to help them but Vicki calms him down and reluctantly agrees, warning them of the risks. They accept that and disappear in the machine. They arrive back in London in 1965, nearly two years after they left. The Doctor observes them on the time-space visualizer, whispering how he will miss them. He and Vicki then take off, unaware that Steven has snuck aboard.

Analysis

There are two caveats required to enjoy The Chase. First, because each episode is so radically different from the last in both story and tone, it must be watched in episodic fashion. The mind needs time to process each episode and then compartmentalize it before moving on to the next part of the story. Second, do not apply any primary sense of logic. Much like Silver Nemesis, many parts of this story are built to be a fun thrill ride and will fall completely to pieces if you try to put any sense of either cohesion or intellectual thought into it. Many of the character's moods and behaviors will change from episode to episode as the situation warrants it. They aren't bad from an overall perspective, but it is another reason to put some space between each episode.

Looking back over the whole thing, I imagine that Terry Nation had a four-part story in mind with Episodes One and Two, then followed by Episodes Five and Six. These four seem to have a bit more flow together and use each location on a longer term. Whether it was his idea or the production team, the story was expanded to six episodes and it then gets very weird. I believe that Terry Nation was still looking to get a science fiction series of his own off the ground in the United States (either with or without the Daleks) and the radical change in tone and style shown in each of the episodes feels a bit like an audition of the various types of episodes he felt he could write.

Episode One is a happy jaunt showing the crew in a holiday like setting. Episode Two becomes bleak with Aridians murdered at will by the Daleks and only a bit of chance sparing the crew from being turned over by the helpless Aridians. Episode Three becomes light again with the cornpone Morton Dill and the silly reactions of the crew of the Mary Celeste. Episode Four is horror with a genuinely creepy haunted house, straight out of Scooby Doo. Episodes Five and Six veer back into the adventure tone with Five having a spy flavor and Six being an all out war, punctuated by Ian and Barbara's departure.

You would think, given the way I railed against the tone shifts of The Romans that these radical shifts would really bother me. However, in The Chase, the tone is consistent through the episode, unlike The Romans, which oscillated within the episode. I found that this made the changes much easier to digest, especially, as I mentioned earlier, if you watch and episode and then give a little time to digest it before jumping in to the next one. It is still jarring and doesn't make for a great overall story, but it at least doesn't produce whiplash while watching an episode.

The production values in this story were not great. Normally I don't have a problem with them in 1960's stories but were so many in this one that they just stood out to me. The Dalek emerging from the sand in Episode One is obviously evoking The Dalek Invasion of Earth Dalek emerging from the water. However, that doesn't do it any favors as in that story, it was a full Dalek that was submerged and this is obviously a little model placed in a sand box. In Episode Two, you can see the flap of the skull cap worn to give the Aridian's their top fin peeling up. There is little done to hide the obvious backdrops, giving the story a penned in feel. It doesn't help that in Episode Five there is a strong focus downward in several shots, clearly showing the crew walking on a stage floor rather than earth. There is also something that appears in the cave when Barbara finds the rod controlling the lights that looks suspiciously like a microphone of some kind. Perhaps it was supposed to be something of the Mechanoids, but it looked more like a busted shot to me.

However, I think the worst aspect of production error was in how Edmund Warwick was shot. Warwick played the robot version of the Doctor and while he did a serviceable job as a stand-in, it is painfully obvious that he is not William Hartnell. So why isn't Hartnell used for the face shots and Warwick kept for the rear and double shots? Hartnell's voice is used throughout, although it is very obviously prerecorded. But even in distance shots, like the closing of Episode Four, it is so obvious that that is not William Hartnell. It actually gets worse in the final confrontation when Ian fights the Doctor. He is clearly fighting William Hartnell while Edmund Warwick is shown in medium shot next to Vicki and Barbara. These are cut shots and there is no reason you couldn't have had William Hartnell in both places. If that was too difficult due to time constraints, then the robot plot needed to have been dropped or at the very least, reworked so that only William Hartnell's face was shown at any one time.

There was one subtlety in Episode Three that caught my eye and I'm not sure what to make of it. Near the beginning of the story, a New York stereotype is giving a tour and a large man in a white hat comes over to listen. As he walks into shot, he give an African-American woman standing nearby a hard elbow in the back to get her out of the way. I would love to know whether this was a motion suggested by the director or if it was something done by the actors independently. Morton Dill is such an "aw shucks" kind of Southerner that it is interesting that to contrast this, a shot of hard racism is thrown in as well. What's more that it is done with subtlety and not splashed as a hard point is also quite a contrast with the rest of the episode.

Earlier I mentioned needing to turn off the logical center of the brain to enjoy this story. I think that is at it's greatest point in Episode Four. The explanation offered for the haunted house just doesn't make any sense. Dracula was played as you would expect a fun house robot to be. Likewise the ghost that crossed Ian's path. However, neither the ghoulish woman nor Frankenstein's monster act as fun house robots. Both move independently and change direction based on stimuli. The monster goes one step beyond and actively attacks the Daleks, both in their entry in to the lab and then afterward in the main hall. No fun house robot is going to have that level of independent thought and action. Yet the sign outside make it clear that they are only robots. I would also like to know why these robots are immune to the Dalek lasers but the Mechanoid robots are not. Also, if there is a great entrance to the fun house just beyond the hall, why didn't Barbara or Vicki see it when they were in the hall by the TARDIS. Heck, why didn't Ian and the Doctor see it when they were coming back down the stairs. I would have much preferred it if Ian's suggestion that they had come to a region of space where thoughts were manifested were the real one. That that idea ended up being the basis for The Mind Robber demonstrated that it would have been a perfectly valid one.

Finally, there is the Ian and Barbara goodbye. It is pretty good and spends a good amount of time with them as deserved. I think the most interesting thing about it is the Doctor's actual reaction. With Susan, there was this sense of inevitability and letting go as a parent (or grandparent) would. Here, the Doctor is angry and his anger turns him back into a petulant child. That it takes Barbara getting angry in turn with him shows the emotional level the First Doctor still is at despite his seasoning through the show.

I think it is also reflective of the fact that with someone you are rearing, there is an expectation that they will grow up and leave eventually. You don't have that with someone you see as a friend. You expect friends to stay as long as possible. What's worse for the Doctor is that Ian and Barbara are leaving voluntarily. In a way, you can imagine the Doctor questioning whether they ever considered him a friend if their only hope was to get back to mid-60's London as soon as they were whisked away back in An Unearthly Child. That would make the wound the Doctor feels by their leaving so much worse. But it is fairly well done: staying with them for a bit but not overly sentimental. It is possibly the best part of the story.

So where to come down on this one. I'm not going to lie, I wouldn't watch this one again without good cause. It is too disjointed episode to episode to form a cohesive story. That being said, in each individual episode the story zips along fairly well and you never get a sense of boredom that you do in some stories. That's not enough to save it but if you do sit down with it, the story will keep you engaged. Given that's the same saving grace I gave to Silver Nemesis, I'd say it deserves the same score.

Overall personal score: 1.5 out 5