Poor old space museum. No one likes the space museum very much. I quite like the space museum.
No one really wants it. It's sort of this cheap, unloved thing right in the middle of
the William Hartnell years. And it hasn't even got a decency to have been wiped, which
would mean it would have some sort of, you know, people would actually at least be wondering
what it was like. We can all see it and we don't want it. And yet it's actually, although
it doesn't quite work in many places, it's full of ideas and I think it's actually, I
think it's something which deserves a lot more attention. It does have its problems.
Well three problems really, which are episodes two, three and four, principally. But even
there you can see that there's actually something interesting going on. Episode one is pretty
much extraordinary because it's just so odd. It's a story in which the TARDIS jumps a time
track and they're not really where they're supposed to be at all. They leave no footprints
in the sand. Glasses of water will jump back up into people's hands for no real reason.
And it ends upon a genuinely chilling five minutes with a fantastic cliffhanger in which
they find themselves dead in a museum, stuffed and in a box, and waiting for time to catch
up with them so they actually can enter the story properly. It's actually superb. When
I first saw it with my sister, she said to me, only as a casual viewer, my word, this
is absolutely brilliant. Is it as good as this all the time? And I said, no, it goes
downhill now. Because even by that stage, fan repute was so bad that we knew it would
fall apart within seconds of episode two starting. And yet, and yet, there is such a strange
philosophy to it. It's a comedy, but it's done, I think it's directed as if it isn't.
And I think that that is its biggest failing. People don't realise it's actually funny.
It's a parody of what a William Hartnell, Doctor Who story at this stage is. We've already
seen several stories which are about the Doctor and his crew arriving, finding some rebels,
helping them against some aggressors and flying off again. You have these aggressors and they're
rubbish. They're called Morrocks. Morroc, it's, there's a clue in the word that the
Morrocks are morons. These are, these are people who, who like the Decaynum IV, the
Roman Empire, as the Doctor points out, had a civilisation once, were really good, attacked
planets and now pretty much have done it all and sit in a museum wishing that they were
once good again, but are never going to be. In a series which has already done the Darks
invading Earth and you go to the Earth seven years later and you see what it's like to
have Britain under the rule of the Nazis. Here we have an idea of colonisation as something
which actually is just sort of overstuffed, that you invade a planet and you turn it into
a museum of your past achievements. And that's really actually in some ways a rather more
accurate, I would say, analysis of where you go. It's, it's about decadence. It's about
the idea that if you invade somewhere, you've actually got nothing to do with it and you
end up just getting stale and sterile. The lead Morroc, Lobos, his first scene where
he talks in episode two is either brilliantly badly written or just brilliantly written.
It depends how you look at it. All he can do is talk in exposition about things everyone
already knows and moans a lot. I've got two more millions before I can go home. Yes, I
say it often enough, but it's still 2000 Xeron days. It sounds more in days. Yeah, I know.
I volunteered, you were ordered. Truth of the matter, I was just as bored on Morroc.
In the book, it becomes very obvious from the way that all the other Morrocs keep on
standing around looking at the ceiling whenever he talks, that that is a deliberate joke.
These are terrible alien aggressors. The only thing which is worse than the Morrocs are
the rebels who are trying to fight them, who are so rubbish, they can't even be bothered
to stop them. The rebels dress in black polo neck sweaters, stand around looking a bit
like students in a coffee bar, and their leader, Tor, is so awful that the only thing he actually
can do with any authority is put his hands on his hips, which he does for most of the
story. What's great about this is a story about inaction, and the rather deeper meaning
behind the tale is how can you prevent something, once you know the future, coming to pass?
By taking action in the story, are the TARDIS regulars making themselves end up in the box,
or are they going to prevent it? It means that for three episodes, Ian and Barbara and
Vicky and the Doctor spend their time arguing whether they should just stand around the
museum or not. That's quite funny. It means that ultimately, that certain scenes which
I think deliberately parody earlier scenes in the series, so for example, you've got
that wonderful scene in the Daleks, where Ian persuades the Tharls to go and attack
the Dalek city, selfishly, so they can get their TARDIS component back, is echoed again
when Vicky makes all the rebels start a revolution, just almost because she's quite bored and
wants something to happen. And it's done very, very amusingly. These are rebels so
naff, that they only think which starts a revolution is if they can get the armoury
door open. They don't really need Robespierre, they don't need some great revolutionary,
they need a locksmith. Do you understand that all questions are to be fully answered? Even
the computer sounds bored. The computer can't quite understand why no one's overthrown
it yet. Come on, pick up the guns and go to war. Very few Doctor Who stories ever tackle
time travel properly. This is one of the few ones that really does it. The problem with
the Space Museum, if you watch it, is it seems it does it so subtly in parts two, three and
four that you forget it and you think you're watching another bog standard running around
trying to beat some aliens in bad costumes. But because it's really a story about whether
doing anything really matters, it's almost quite nihilistic about it. Oh, it's a use.
And it ends up with a very, very new serious solution which is quite unusual, which is
that ultimately everything that Doctor and Vicky and Barbara and Ian do still gets them
into the same situation where they're going to be killed. But because they have taken
some action, other people around them have altered events for them so that as they're
about to be frozen, someone else bursts in and saves them. That is actually quite an
interesting little study about the way that time works in a way as well. It's quite
Brink-like. It's quite Stephen Moffat-like, I think. The future doesn't look too bad
after all, does it? The Doctor here is genuinely eccentric. He's a man who will take interest
in the trivial and dismiss the genuinely bizarre because it just doesn't really seem very,
very important to him. There's that great bit in episode one where they've changed all
their costumes and he utterly dismisses that as being important. Doctor, we've got our
clothes on. Well, I should hope so, dear boy, I should hope so. And yet in episode two,
he'll spend ages worrying about Ian having lost a button. Lost a button? Hmm, that's
interesting. Yes, it's very interesting. Doctor, why do you always show the greatest interest
in the least important things, eh? The least important things sometimes, my dear boy, lead
to the greatest discoveries. And you think watching the story that will be important
later, and it isn't. It's brilliant. It never gets mentioned again. Vicki is great in this
story. Maureen O'Brien seizes this. She's very, very funny. She becomes a revolutionary.
She's somebody who decides that she can be the most dynamic person on this entire planet
and she's great at that. Ian is terrific because he gets to fight a lot of people and yet angst
about it at the same time. And he has some great moments where he's actually approaching
all these Zerons and treating it, bless his heart, with great seriousness, which actually
makes the comedy work better. Barbara's left out a bit. She gets gassed. But you can't
have it all. But I think that the best idea about the Space Museum, really, is that there
is a Space Museum. But it isn't something full of lots of alien tourists. It isn't very
exciting. No one goes. It's just there because it represents something which was once better
for the civilisation and trading off past glories. You see a Dalek there from the planet
Skaro and you can hide inside it and it's already become a prop. We are now at the end
of the second series and actually it's already become part of a museum itself. It's a little
bit of a comment, I think, upon the fact that Doctor Who has now reached its hundredth episode
and it's already getting a little bit conscious of its own foibles and its faults.