“The Space Museum” is an adventure of the second season of “Doctor Who” classic series which aired in 1965. It’s a four parts adventure written by Glyn Jones and directed by Mervyn Pinfield. At that time the various episodes of each adventure had individual titles, in this case:

The Space Museum

The Dimensions of Time

The Search

Desperate Measures

The story

Inside the Tardis strange things happen because time isn’t following its normal flow but is erratic. The First Doctor (William Hartnell) thinks that nothing serious is happening and tries to reassure Ian (William Russell), Barbara (Jacqueline Hill) and especially Vicki (Maureen O’Brien).

However, when the Tardis arrives on the planet Xeros, near a space museum, the travelers starts having strange experiences, culminating when they find themselves exposed in the museum itself. The planet is part of the Morok empire and its rulers aren’t friendly.

Extras

This DVD contains a quite poor amount of extras. There are typical contents such as production subtitles, Radio Times Listings and a gallery of pictures from this adventure.

There are comments in the adventure alternative audio track moderated by Peter Purves by protagonists William Russell and Maureen O’Brien and writer Glyn Jones.

Defending the Museum. Writer Robert Shearman offers his defense of this overlooked adventure even if he ends up stressing its flaws.

My Grandfather, The Doctor. Jessica Carney, William Hartnell’s granddaughter, talks about her grandfather as an actor but also from a personal point of view.

A Holiday for the Doctor. A spoof that looks back to “Doctor Who” in the ’60s.

“The Space Museum” is a peculiar adventure because the first episode focuses on the temporal discontinuity experienced by the Doctor and his companions while from the second episode the adventure is rapidly oriented towards a completely different story.

The first episode contains elements that today we’d call “wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey”. Suddenly, time becomes discontinuous and when the travelers arrive on the planet Xeros initially find themselves out of phase with its inhabitants. When they find themselves exposed in the museum they must find a way to change their future.

This episode is intriguing because the travelers face temporal anomalies and especially the knowledge of a future far from positive with the need to change it. Until that moment, in “Doctor Who” time travel was used only to allow the characters to move among different eras. For the first time, in “The Space Museum” possible problems and paradoxes that time travelers may face are addressed.

In the second episode another story starts, in which the Doctor and his companions get in touch with the natives of the planet Xeros and the Moroks, who invaded them in the past. Unfortunately at that point the level of “The Space Museum” rapidly falls down.

The Morok empire is in decline and actually in this adventure you have the impression that the conquerors are able to maintain control of planet Xeros only because the natives seem unable to start a revolution by themselves.

It’s Vicki who gives the natives the decisive impulse to rebel in some ways mimicking what Ian did in the adventure “The Daleks” when he persuaded the Thals to fight the Daleks. Vicki is also the one who manages to gain access to a Morok armory, which obviously has a computer with ridiculous security systems that worked only because the natives were inepts.

On the other hand, the Moroks are the ones who use against the rebels a gas that’s supposed to be very toxic but when Barbara and Xeron breath it they cough, they temporarily faint perhaps more for the lack of oxygen, although there’s still gas they come to and recover very quickly as they exit the area filled with gas.

This part of “The Space Museum” might work as a comedy and it was originally written as such but most of the humorous elements were eliminated so that only some of them can be seen in the version they shot. Unfortunately it’s difficult to take seriously that story so in the end this is an adventure that started well with the story of the first episode but then lost its track.

For once we can’t say that the low budget was a problem. It’s true that in the production of “The Space Museum” many “recycled” props were used, including a Dalek, also to compensate for the expenses incurred for other adventures, but the flaws are really in the story, which works for one episode and then drags with occasional good moments.

Because this DVD is part of a box set together with the adventure “The Chase” – available on Amazon UK , Amazon Canada and Amazon USA – a global judgement must necessarily be given only at the end of the reviews of the adventures it contains.