Galaxy 4

 

Chapter The 167th, which features a blonde leader who is callous and aggressive, trying to stir up conflict between their followers and a race who look different: MAGA! No, sorry, it's actually spelt Maaga.

Plot:

The Doctor, Vicki and Steven land on a barren planet which is imminently going to explode. As they leave the TARDIS they are harassed by cute robots that Vicki dubs Chumblies. A couple of clone female soldiers from the planet Drahva rescue them from the robots, and take the trio to their leader Maaga in a grounded spaceship. The Drahvins are clearly untrustworthy and war-like, and tell them that they had a space battle with a ship belonging to the "disgusting" Rills (who control the Chumblies). Both ships were brought down onto the surface of this planet; the walrus-like Rills are repairing theirs but the Drahvin ship is kaput. Maaga wants the Doctor to help steal the Rills' spaceship so the Drahvins can escape. She takes Steven as a hostage to ensure good behaviour. The Doctor and Vicki visit the Rills' ship, and find them to be intelligent, polite and noble despite looking a bit monstrous. The Doctor helps the Rills power their ship for take off. The Rills tell him the truth, that Maaga turned down any offers of help from the Rills and killed one of her own soldiers, blaming it on them to stir up conflict. Steven escapes. With seconds to spare before the planet explodes, the Rills and the TARDIS team leave, and the Drahvins all get blown up.

Context:

First, I put the BBC Audio release (with narration by Peter Purves) onto my phone and listened to the episodes while on walks or doing chores over a couple of days. Then, I dug out the 'revisited' special edition of another William Hartnell story, the Aztecs. On disc 2, this DVD set has as one of its extras episode 3 of Galaxy 4 presented within the context of a cut-down Derek Handley reconstruction of the surrounding episodes, using surviving photos and clips, and newly made CGI sequences, all matched to the soundtrack (minus the narration). The episode was found in 2011, and this was the first available release that came out on which to place it. Taken together, this gave me as complete a picture as possible as to visuals while still getting to experience 100% of the action in audio form. There's a lot of padding clearly, as the cut-down version tells the story very well in 65 minutes (and - whisper it - could even have lost a little bit more).

First time round:

My initial experiences of the story would have been the novelisation in the late 1980s, then the audio release on CD in the summer of 2000, but neither left a lasting impression. In between them, towards the end of 1998, was a documentary collecting together surviving 1960s Who clips included alongside The Ice Warriors VHS release. This included a lengthy clip from episode 1 of Galaxy 4, which was fascinating to see. A more complete visual presentation of the story, though, was a much more exciting proposition. As mentioned above, episode 3 had been rediscovered for over a year by the time the Aztecs DVD came out on the 11th March 2013. I had by then built up a bit of anticipation to see some new old Who, and had pre-ordered the release from the BBC Shop when it had first been announced (as was my favoured approach at the time). I started the 11th March far from the DVD player, in Hamburg; I had been working over the weekend for the day job in that vibrant port city. I finished work and travelled to the airport by early evening, and was looking forward to a quick flight back to the UK, and a trouble-free journey home in a cab that had been booked in advance. If the DVD had arrived on schedule, I should have got in with more than enough time to watch Galaxy 4 before I had to turn in that night. Then, snow began to fall in Hamburg, dusting the planes and the runway. It didn't delay the flight by long, but by the time I got back to London and was getting in the car to take me home, it was thick on the ground and thick in the air. It usually takes just over an hour to get home from Heathrow. Two hours into my journey and I'd ceased to worry about whether I'd get home in time to watch Galaxy 4, and started to worry if I'd get home at all.

I was lucky in that the cabbie lived down South as well, so was motivated to make it through rather than to dump me somewhere and turn around. I was also lucky that he was quite experienced at driving in the snow, or so he told me. I believed him after passing many abandoned cars, or people pushing cars, on the way. We wiggled round small roads as the main A-road was closed. There was also a lot of backtracking as those small roads were travelled down with hope only to be discovered to be impassable. Finally, we were able to join the A-road for a final stretch - it must have just opened up, as for a long while we were the only car on it - this was very eerie, being the lone car on an empty, silent and white dual carriageway, travelling through the gloom. It took the best part of four hours in all to get to my front door, and it was then something like 1am. The cabbie got a hefty tip, and made his way back to his own home. I got in and flopped down exhausted and slept. Next day, the Better Half turned out to be exhausted too - the children had been challenging over the long weekend she'd been on her own with them. There was no sign of the DVD when I got in, so I consoled myself with the notion that even had I got home earlier, I wouldn't have been able to see it anyway. After a couple of day's wondering where the disc had got to, and thinking about emailing to chase it up, I found the package from the BBC shop in the laundry basket, where one of the kids had decided to hide it on the Monday. I finally then watched Galaxy 4. It was okay, but not as interesting as my journey home had been.

Reaction:

This was the opening story of the third season of Doctor Who, and was original Who producer Verity Lambert's last proper story (the Doctorless single-episode curio Mission to the Unknown immediately following this was her last Who credit). But it doesn't feel big enough to be either an "opening night" or a send-off. It's not that it isn't functional and competent, but it feels like it belongs in the middle of a season, a little bit thrown away, not drawing too much attention. As mentioned above, the story could be comfortably told in much less time than the four whole episodes it takes up - there's quite a lot of walking between the three ship locations, Drahvin, Rill and TARDIS, not a huge amount of what one would call action, and certainly no major plot reversals. It boils down to the following template: Doctor lands on a planet, there are some goodies and some baddies, the Doctor helps the goodies win and the baddies lose. The End. It couldn't really get more generic. It has got a visual hook, though, and that is that the "monsters" are the goodies, and the blonde attractive humanoids are the baddies. Don't judge by appearances, kids. That's it. It seems a bit slight written out like that, I realise, but it's most of what Galaxy 4's got going for it (though there are other plus points).

I'm still not 100% sure after many watches of this story over the years whether the intention was that the nature of the Drahvins would be a late-story shock reveal, and it's just been bodged in the execution, or whether it's supposed to be as obvious as it is from the off. From Maaga's first scene, it's clear that the Drahvins are bad. They talk bad, and they act bad; if they could but grow moustaches, you can bet they would be twirling 'em. Perhaps this was intentional, and the mystery is supposed to be whether the Rills are baddies too. It would be slightly more original, and still fit within the simple morality tale of Galaxy 4's structure if they were, but a big clue that they aren't is that their robot slaves are not called Robo-cyber-kill-a-trons or something of that ilk, and are instead branded Chumblies. These bots also chirrup and twirl cutely, and are powered by performers with names like Pepe Poupee. They are adorable, and are another overall tick in the plus column for Galaxy 4. As well as that, those beeps and bloops created by special sound designer Brian Hodgson, and the tubular tunes of Les Structures Sonores used for incidentals, give Galaxy 4 a unique and evocative soundscape. I'd only ever need a blast of a few seconds duration, Name That Tune style, to be able to identify it.

The ticking clock of the planet approaching its destruction is good too, and makes the final sequences seem a bit more brisk, but they still feel light on the jeopardy side; no one feels like the are in any real danger, though the actors try their best to make it work. The cast is the final big plus point of Galaxy 4, with key members performing well above the level of the basic script. The guest cast are mostly hidden in creature outfits, or in the case of the Drahvins are playing (literal) drones, so it's only Stephanie Bidmead who stands out. On the page, Maaga is a pretty thankless cardboard-thin villain part, but Bidmead brings a certain restraint that makes the character more interesting. There's a nice quiet moment where she bemoans her lot, surrounded by mindless soldiers - it's only slightly undercut by being a bit of a retread of a similar character's griping in The Space Museum, a few serials earlier. There's also echoes of the Drahvins, like the Moroks in that previous adventure, being a threadbare past-its-prime imperial race; this, coupled with a sulky leader in both, and the callback mention early on in Galaxy 4 of the Doctor and Vicki's adventure on Xeros, makes one wonder whether that particular story was the one on TV when writer William Emms was working on his Galaxy 4 scripts. 

Of the regular cast, Maureen O'Brien as Vicki, in her penultimate story, has unfortunately the least opportunity to shine, but manages to keep up the perky enthusiasm throughout; Peter Purves, who's only recently joined the cast, has always moaned about how his character was written in this story. His situations of peril, particularly the cliffhanger ending to episode 3 where he is stuck in an airlock with the oxygen running out were - he contended - a hasty rewrite of scenes meant for original and recently departed companion Barbara. Still, he makes the best of it that he can, though it does stretch credibility that he'd be less scared of certain death in the airlock than taking a chance outside with the Chumblies, because they are adorable, chirrup and twirl cutely, and are powered by performers with names like Pepe Poupee. Anyway, best of all performance-wise is Hartnell who is having a ball, particularly with the opportunities for light humour. After patiently listening to the fascistic Drahvin philosophy spouted by Maaga in their first scene together, his dead-pan delivery of the sarcastic line "Yours must be a very interesting civilisation" is a joy to behold.

Connectivity: 

Galaxy 4 and Empress of Mars both involve a TARDIS trio arriving on a barren planet where there are two different factions poised on the edge of conflict. In both, the Doctor helps at least one of those factions to escape by the end. This is the third story covered for the blog in a row which does not start with a definitive article, and the second that doesn't feature a definitive article at all. This is rarer that you might think: Galaxy 4 is the last story title for the remainder of the 1960s not to feature a 'the' in there somewhere, usually at the beginning. 

Deeper Thoughts:

Closing the gaps. As run-of-the-mill as episode 3 of Galaxy 4 is, it's still great to have it back. Doctor Who has, at the time of writing, 97 missing episodes from the archives, all from its first six black-and-white years. Every find has been rewarding over the 40-ish years since it was first uncovered just how bad the archive holdings were, and people started searching in earnest. Since around the same time the episode of Galaxy 4 was found, another method of closing the gaps got going too. Of those 97, if I've added up right, 32 have now had commercial release on disc in newly created formats, either photo reconstructions or animations using the extant soundtracks. That doesn't even include the cut-down versions of Marco Polo, Galaxy 4's other parts, and the first episode of The Wheel in Space, which have also found their way onto DVDs or Blu-rays as extras. A couple of recent releases that further plugged a hole, or re-plugged one with a new an improved bung, were stories that I'd already covered by the blog in previous years, so I couldn't write a whole post about them anew; but I will take this opportunity to do a couple of capsule reviews here.

The first was a re-released special edition of Power of the Daleks that came out in July this year. My thoughts about the story and the original take on the animation are in my post from 2016 here. I haven't watched that version in the few years since. The triumph of the new version presented is best illustrated by my not noticing anything different. Having got used to the improvements in the animations done since then, by members the same core team, this just looked like more of the same or better, and all that I was noticing was the story itself. It was only when I dug out the old disc for comparison that the changes in the new version stood out for being superior (except in one way - the Doctor's trousers were checked throughout the 2016 but are plain now, I assume to allow more options for easier animation). The really big selling point of this disc is the major payload of extras. There are three discs in the set, one for the black and white animation (no colour version is included this time out), one for a photographic reconstruction (with or without narration from the audio CD by Anneke Wills) and another disc of additional material. Of this stuff, one of the biggest draws is some additional recently-found excerpts of moving image material from the original production added to the clips already in existence, which have been cleaned up and restored to the point where it looks like they were filmed yesterday. There's a lot of other great archive material and new features too. Additionally, the very first BBC-produced home version of Power of the Daleks is included - a recording with bridging narration read by Tom Baker, which has previously only been available on a cassette tape released in the 1990s. The word exhaustive was made for these recent sets, with multiple different ways to experience the story.

The next release was the eagerly anticipated animated version of Fury From the Deep, which came out a few weeks later in September. This was the first animation since the original 2016 Power handled by a new team, part of Big Finish and overseen by Gary Russell. It's another big success; we lucky fans have been blessed with not one but two brand new animations in a year (The Faceless Ones in March was the previous one), and - sales willing - this might be the case in subsequent years too, perhaps, with both the teams available to work on stories in parallel. The new team have brought in a new style, with characters based on drawings by different artists; this is refreshing too - both the Doctor of The Power of the Daleks Special Edition and of Fury from the Deep are comic book in style, but Fury has a very slightly more stylised look, with minimal lines and shading. It works well. The animation didn't change my reaction to the story that much (for my impressions of it after a watch of the recon - a new spruced-up version of which is also included in the set - see this blog post, also from 2016 ) but what did surprise me was how effective the new visuals are at conveying emotion. The subplot running through the story of Victoria's disillusionment with their fearful TARDIS travels could easily have fallen flat with the limited expressions possible in the 2D cartoon medium, but it does not here, far from it. This is testament to the continuing improvements in the technology, and the skill and talent of those who wield it to bring these stories to life.

Extras are similarly exhaustive on this set too. It is again three discs, and the episodes are available in both black-and-white and colour. Cleaned-up surviving clips are present, as are the reconstructed episodes mentioned earlier, and a couple of entertaining Making-Ofs (one for the animation, one for the original story featuring a lot of impressive shots of the abandoned sea forts used in the show to represent the rigs at sea). One thing that was missing was the audio of the 1990s tape version narrated by Tom Baker, but I'm sure it will be included when this story is eventually gathered up into a Blu-Ray season box set. In lieu of this, another audio version of the story is present, sort-of, in the form of The Slide, a radio drama by Victor Pemberton from earlier in the 1960s that he borrowed liberally from to make Fury. Roger Delgado, almost a decade before taking on the role of the Master opposite Jon Pertwee, plays the hero, the threat is mud rather than seaweed, and it's - dare I say it - clearer and a bit better structured than the six-part Doctor Who serial that came after it. Still, whatever extras we got or didn't get pale next to the sheer existence of these stories on shiny disc in shiny boxes. There are now only five Patrick Troughton stories that haven't had an individual release on DVD or Blu-ray or both. If the rumours circulating a while back were correct, two of those five are planned as the next animation releases and could be available in 2021. It wouldn't have seemed possible even a couple of years ago, but now I feel comfortable in predicting that one day every story in Who's long history will be available to buy and to keep.

In Summary:

Don't judge by appearances, except with blonde fascists - they're exactly what they seem.