DOCTOR WHO, SEASON 3 SERIAL 1:

GALAXY 4

Doctor: First (William Hartnell)

Companions: Vicki, Steven

April 2023

Screencap from Galaxy 4 (animated): In an orange scrubland landscape, the Doctor, Vicki, Steven, and two Drahvins (women in blue outfits) run towards a decrepit landed spaceship.

Galaxy 4 is an odd one.

But first — welcome to Doctor Who’s third season!! Can you believe it? THREE seasons? It’s almost too much for the mind to consider. Surely they’ve got to be ending this thing soon.

Season 3 is also where we start to really encounter Doctor Who’s missing episodes, also. In case you weren’t aware, the BBC had a policy through the 1970s of overwriting old tapes. While most episodes of Doctor Who still exist in their original format, a significant chunk from 1963-1969 are straight up gone, excepting their audio. We’ve experienced this a little so far—a missing serial here, two episodes gone there—but we’re about to hit the motherlode. Seasons 3, 4, and 5 were hit especially hard: season 5 in particular doesn’t have a single complete story remaining.

Galaxy 4 is (or was) a four-part story. Of it, only episode 3 (Air Lock) still exists. Fortunately, I’m watching it in 2023, which means that an animated DVD of it matched to the original audio track has been released, allowing me to see video for all four episodes (all four were animated, but I watched the original episode three). And how does it hold up?

Well, it’s...fine? It’s fine.

Galaxy 4 is a very by-the-numbers episode of Doctor Who. I imagine watching the original would be a slightly worse experience than the animation—while the animated format allows for things that simply weren’t possible on the 1965 budget, like sweeping shots of the alien landscape, small-scale space battles, or even (gasp!) color, it suffers when it has to animate the human characters, who all move in slightly odd and stilted ways. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to have the animated version over nothing, but there’s no doubt that a lot was lost in translation. Still, it’s an improvement over the chronologically-earlier animation of The Reign of Terror in my book.

But I’ll be honest, I’m still wondering why Galaxy 4 was chosen to be animated when it’s such a comparatively bland story. That sounds too harsh—it’s not bad! But nothing in it strikes me, really. It’s a perfect 5 out of 10. I mean, in the same season, there’s the epic Daleks’ Master Plan, the companion-changeover story The Myth Makers, the historical The Massacre...While Galaxy 4 has a much cooler name, it feels like all it has above those is the (admittedly great) combo of Vicki and Steven, who barely spend any time together this episode anyways. There’s also the fact that the cast were outspoken about disliking this story at original filming, and apparently those arguments are what led to Maureen O’Brian (Vicki)’s contract not being renewed. I dunno.

Okay, let’s actually break this down. The core conceit of the beautiful yet evil species and the ugly but kind species is fine? It’s a solid moral, nothing revolutionary for certain. It doesn’t help that several monologues are devoted to explaining it in the fourth episode. Actually, you know what, let’s break this down into the good and the bad.

Screencap from Galaxy 4 (animated): In an orange scrubland landscape, the Doctor stands some distance from Vicki, waiting for her to follow.

THE GOOD:

  • As I mentioned, the animated format lets the creators go wild with cinematography and special effects. While nothing revolutionary happens, it’s a welcome break from soundstages and foam. Not to mention the color.
  • Steven trapped in the airlock at the end of episode three is a very compelling sequence that I like a lot. No notes, although okay, one note, I suppose the fact that we know at this point that the Chumbley outside is not a threat does somewhat defang the tension. But since Steven doesn’t know this, it works for me.
  • Steven throughout has some rather lovely moments! Peter Purves, his actor, apparently complained that Steven was out of character in the story because he was given a lot of Barbara’s part when the script was altered from being an Ian-and-Barbara-and-Vicki script to a Steven-and-Vicki script. I disagree, and think it’s great that he gets to do some less fighty stuff!
  • I quite like the Chumblies in general, weird little onion dome robots that they are! Seeing the travelers be frightened by these things that come up to their knees is really funny in the animation and I enjoy it quite a bit.
  • The interior of the Rills’ ship is very cool, frankly (at least in the animation). Big ups.
  • While Vicki and Steven don’t have a lot of interactions with each other, they both get a lot of time with the Doctor one on one, and Vicki in particular has a lovely scene about the scientific method (“observe, note, collate, and conclude”) which is a minor highlight.

THE BAD

  • Again as I mentioned, as a side effect of the animated format, everyone is weirdly stilted in their movements.
  • The moral is rather boringly discussed ad nauseum in episode 4.
  • In fact, the whole of episode 4 tends to drag on in its conclusion: we’ve practically resolved everything by the start of it, and five minutes in we’ve basically resolved everything else except for the Drahvins chasing down the travelers and the Rills.
  • Actually, let’s talk about the Drahvins and the Rills, because this is kind of weird.
Spoiler thoughts:

Okay, out of the list format. So the concept, right, is the beautiful Drahvins are evil, and the ugly Rills are good? Fine, I guess, for an inoffensive but milquetoast moral of not judging by appearances. We start to reach some trouble when we think about these as species rather than as parables: are all Drahvins just evil? We only really meet one Drahvin, Maaga, who’s admittedly depicted as very bloodthirsty (not necessarily bad in a story) and who is flanked by three other Drahvins (clones?) who...don’t really get a lot to do. Maaga calls them unintelligent and incapable of learning, which feels very at odds with the little conversation Steven gets with them early on. He teaches one of the clones a concept in a fairly short amount of time, actually. Throughout the serial we really only see them doing “evil” things when Maaga orders them to, which makes it feel a little harsh when two of them end up killed on the exploding planet.

There’s also the matter of the Drahvins being characterized as an all-woman man-hating race—it’s a throwaway line from Maaga about Drahvins throwing away men that they don’t need, but it sticks in my craw as perhaps uncomfortably representative of a mainstream perspective on feminism at the time (1965). It’s a small detail, but not a welcome one. Also, Steven is weirdly...I don’t want to say “lecherous,” because that’s too harsh and untrue, but he makes more comments than necessary about how beautiful the Drahvins are when they first encounter them. It’s a wee bit uncomfortable.

Overall Thoughts:

Galaxy 4 is fine. It’s fine! The animation is perfectly serviceable, the story has its moments, and it’s nice to be able to watch it in full. I’d struggle to recommend this to anyone, however, simply because it’s not as exciting or interesting as those stories around it? If you want a good Vicki-and-Steven story, I’d opt for The Time Meddler; if you want a solid sci-fi story from this region of the show, I’d vote The Space Museum (or even The Chase). I suppose it’s interesting to see a First Doctor story represented in animation and color, so you could watch it for that reason (though I continue to be slightly disappointed that they chose this one. Oh well, maybe the other ones are worse). As this is the first story of Season 3, it climbs to the top by default, but comparing it to its contemporaries I don’t think it’s nearly as good as The Space Museum or The Time Meddler.

Next up is one I’ve been excited about for years, because it’s finally time to watch the 2019 live recreation of Mission to the Unknown, a one-episode story lead-in that doesn’t have the Doctor or any companions. Can’t wait!