The Chase is the last serial that Ian and Barbara appear in. It first ran on the BBC May 22 to June 26 1965 and between 9-10 million people watched each episode. It's no wonder the series has become ingrained in the British consciousness with that many kids talking about it at school the following week. Besides Ian (William Russell) and Barbara (Jacqueline Hill) on board the Tardis there's the First Doctor (William Hartnell) and Vicki (Maureen O'Brien). The six part story is written by Terry Nation and directed by Richard Martin. I'm still not a fan of Terry Nation's scripts and this one has some of the same problems I have with his other scripts. In his defense who knows how much that script got changed by the producers. Some of the interviews and things I read online point to much "hands on" by the producers.
The Tardis crew land on a desert planet that has an underground city. There are tentacled monsters roaming the tunnels as well as the humanoid aliens that were once underwater dwellers. The once fish people have lost their water world to encroaching desert. Daleks are following the Tardis with their own time machine and they have murder on their mind. The Doctor and Barbara see the Daleks on their Visualiser and hear that the Daleks are sending an extermination squad after the Tardis. The Visualiser is only a one way device and the Daleks don't know that the Doctor has rumbled their game. The Daleks land on the planet and capture the empty Tardis. The Doc's gang are hiding out in the tunnels. They get caught a bit, escape a bit and giving the Daleks the slip they jump back into the Tardis and the chase is on. Their trip takes them to the Empire State Building in 1966, the Mary Celeste in 1872 and a mechanical monster filled haunted house in 1996 before they finally land on the planet Mechanus.
That's the Tardis crew with Daleks and once fish people on the left and the mechaDracula on the right. The costumes on the once fish people are pretty poor. Cringe worthy. The desert planet was a poorly built place on top of that, especially the outside parts, but the haunted house was kind of fun. The makeup and costumes on the robot monsters was pretty good. They built a bit of the Mary Celeste with a side of the ship and some water. One of the Daleks drops over the side of the ship. It just rolled off the deck, through a chain, and fall into the water. It's not like anyone was there to push it or anything. It's that lack of good story telling ability that bugs me about the series. The model of white city on Mechanus is pretty nice. That's it below right. The round robot guys below are the inhabitants of Mechanus. They fight the Daleks a bit later. It's a pretty goofy fight with lots of odd camera moves and superimposed images.
Of course the Doctor foils the Daleks hit squad and captures their time machine. That's when Ian and Barbara figure they can use it to get back to their own time and place. The Doctor gets all cranky but he goes along with their plan. In one of the interviews William Russell says it was the same way in real life. William Hartnell couldn't see why they would want to leave the show. The end of the show has a montage of the two of them bouncing around London, looking happy, glad to be home. Of course they are 2 years in the future of when they left. They have a lot of explaining to do. In some of the books Ian and Barbara marry and become professors at Cambridge.
There were some good number of extras, a whole disc full, that I watched. There several featurettes with cast and crew interviews on the serial. Doctor Who - Follow That Dalek is a collection of the Doctor Who Give-a-Show Slides toy. There's a nice featurette on Shawcraft. They were the hired company that made a lot of props and sets for the show. The BBC effects team was a couple of guys in a little room. The company wouldn't spring for more men and space so they went outside. Shawcraft mostly made industrial models. They show some in the video and they are pretty nice models. The stuff they built for Doctor Who ranged from pretty good to so-so. At times they seem like they just didn't have a good idea. I'm sure the low-budget didn't give them much time or money to complete their work well.
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