Friday 14 January 2011

053 The Rescue Part 2: Desperate Measures

EPISODE: The Rescue Part 2: Desperate Measures
OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 053
STORY NUMBER: 011
TRANSMITTED: 09 January 1965
WRITER: David Whitaker
DIRECTOR: Christopher Barry
SCRIPT EDITOR: Dennis Spooner
PRODUCER: Verity Lambert
FORMAT: DVD: Doctor Who: The Rescue & The Romans

The Doctor helps Ian to escape the spikes. Vicki & Barbara are looking after Bennet who's collapsed. They want to set a trap for Koquillion but Bennet isn't keen (I wonder why ;-) ? ) Vicki fetches water for their meal leaving Barbara by herself. Seeing a beast on the monitor screen she attacks & kills it with a flare gun it but it turns out it was Vicki's native pet Sandy (ooops. D'oh!) The Doctor & Ian, as they escape the tunnel, hear the noise and find their way to the Spaceship, Vicki & Barbara. The Doctor goes to see Bennet, and is told, like Koquillion in the previous episode, that he can't come in. Vicki tells the travellers she left Earth in 2493: they tell her they came from 1963 and that The Doctor is a time traveller. The Doctor forces his way into Bennet's room and finds it empty: a tape recording provided the voice and equipment in their monitors Vicki's room. The Doctor finds a trapdoor in the floor and explores down the shaft underneath, closing the trapdoor behind him so that when the others follow him they can't find where he's gone. The Doctor finds himself in a temple like structure. Koquillion arrives in the "temple", which the Doctor remembers as being the Didonian People's Hall of Judgement. He unmasks Koquillion as Bennet. He had killed a crew member on the journey and was arrested, but when the arrived on Dido he killed the crew. Vicki knew none of this and would have supported the story that Bennet had made up. He and the Doctor fight but two figures, native Didonians, step out the shadows and walk towards Bennet. He flees falling down a chasm. The Doctor passes out, waking in the Tardis. Ian & Barbara found him outside where the Didonians left him. The Doctor explains what happened to Vicki who now feels as if she's got nobody. The Doctor invites her to travel with them. She, like Ian & Barbara before her, is astonished at the inside of the Tardis and leaves with them. The radio on the ship picks up a transmission from the rescue ship: seeking not to be disturbed the Didonians smash the radio. The Tardis materialises on a cliff top and falls over the edge.

A bit more oomph to this episode than the first part, but it's transparently obvious who Koquillion is quite early on in proceedings. As I indicated before the point of the story is to introduce a new young female companion, which they have in Vicki. She doesn't represent much of a risk by the production team and can in some ways be seen as something of a Susan clone adopting a very similar relationship with the Doctor to Susan. There again the Doctor, missing his Granddaughter, is perhaps likely to treat an alone orphaned girl of a similar age to his departed relative in a similar manner....

The Rescue was the last Doctor Who book to be written by Ian Marter, an actor (who we will hear more from later) turned writer, who died of a heart attack at the early age of 46. He wrote nine Target novels, second behind only Terrance Dicks.

No comments:

Post a Comment