The Chase

Having suffered defeat in their invasion of Earth, the Daleks have built a time machine of their own and are about to take the fight to the Doctor and company. The mission is clear: exterminate. Stopping on the planet Aridius, the Doctor and Barbara are separated from Ian and Vicki, and then see on the Doctor's new time space visualizer that the Daleks are on the way to find them. And when the Daleks do arrive, it starts an epic chase through time and space as the Doctor tries to escape the wrath of the Daleks.

It all sounds promising enough, but the reality is this: the six episode epic The Chase is the slowest and most tedious of all the Dalek serials. As the story unfolds the action goes from Aridius to the top of the Empire State Building in New York, then to the decks of the Marie Celeste at sea, to a haunted house and then finally to the jungle planet Mechanus. It's a lot to ask an audience to stay around for this as some of the stops are very short and others.. well, the fourth episode, called Journey into Terror, is just plain sloppy and painful to watch unless you are completely on your own with no chance of anyone knowing. Otherwise you might have to start explaining and asking them to ignore the fact that from time to time you can see over the tops of studio walls, or that someone has missed their cue but there's no edits to save it, or that you can see a TV camera or a boom mic here and there.

How about those Daleks, eh? The design has changed a bit this time and they have a mesh now wrapped around their "shoulder" portion of the machine, and not only do we get to meet the Supreme Dalek again but we see some of the Dalek machines from the colour movie versions of The Daleks and The Dalek Invasion of Earth pressed into duty to swell the ranks of the pursuing force, even if some of them do not move and they are noticeably taller than the rest. Dalek technology has come a long way if they are able to build a time machine capable of chasing down a TARDIS (and like the TARDIS it is also bigger on the inside) but it must have gone to their heads because they have become a hysterical bunch, screaming exterminate and destroy and obliterate and annihilate all the time. And there's even some "junior" Dalek on the set who when asked anything by his fellows has a moment of uncertainty and makes some embarassing "uhh... ummm.." noises while he checks his facts. Ian makes a point of saying that the Daleks have trouble with stairs but on board the Marie Celeste they do not seem to stop them from showing up on the upper levels of the ship. They can't swim, though. But they meet their match against the Mechanoids; machines built to terraform planets for colonists from Earth, and there's an... epic.... battle? Well, they shoot at each other a lot. As far as conversation goes the Mechanoids are even less chatty than the Daleks, but they are bigger and actually have flame thrower guns (easy when you move to a film studio to shoot the scene).

Despite being a bit tedious to watch, though, The Chase has a real moment to remember, which is at the very end when Ian and Barbara realize that they have a means to go home. By now as far as the televised episodes go they don't really seem to want to leave the Doctor; their last big yearn for home was around the same time Susan left in The Dalek Invasion of Earth. But the additional material since from Big Finish and Virgin Publishing and all has slipped that in here and there to keep it alive, as well as adding sequences of Ian and Barbara back on Earth, married, and with a son. The Doctor's fury at their request to leave him is obviously more about his hurt feelings than it is about them wanting to go home and feel human once again, and therein lies the biggest moment that even overshadows their departure: the Doctor has grown into someone new, and all because of them. Would he have cared if he got them home within the first series? He was almost ready to put them off the ship and leave them behind as it suited him but now, it's different. He admits he will miss them. Vicki stays with him, not wanting to be stuck in the 1960s, and waiting in the wings to join the TARDIS crew is Steven Taylor, space astronaut who was being held by the Mechanoids, and now that they're busy fighting the Daleks he can make his escape.

With the last of the original companions gone the show is truly starting to feel a little different, and the Doctor has some new perspective about his adventures as he travels on. But it's always tough for those who we leave behind, either by their choice or ours. A normal life after the TARDIS would be a struggle, and as we have seen in Companion Chronicles with Susan it is not easy to forget those times. Ian and Barbara may be home, but their time in the TARDIS will stay with them always; this point was illustrated by the specially recorded scenes of an aged Ian talking about their adventure in Jaffa at the start of The Crusades on VHS (and included as a DVD extra in the Lost in Time compilation) and is carried on now in a series of Big Finish tales...

NEXT EPISODE: TRANSIT OF VENUS