Review of The Space Museum (#15)
DVD Release Date: 06 Jul 10
Original Air Date: 24 Apr – 15 May 1965
Doctors/Companions: One, Ian Chesterton, Barbara Wright, Vicki
Stars: William Hartnell, William Russell, Jacqueline Hill, Maureen O’Brien
Preceding Story: The Crusade (One, Ian, Barbara, Vicki)
Succeeding Story: The Chase (One, Ian, Barbara, Vicki, Steven)
As Bad Reputation™ stories go, The Space Museum is not poorly thought of at all. Clocking in at #168 of 254 in io9’s Best-to-Worst ranking, it barely falls into the bottom third. In fact, it’s more than 30 places ahead of the next “stinkiest” entry I’ve had to date—itself another Hartnell adventure.
All that is to say, the Hartnell era is not as unpalatable as some might have you believe. It certainly has its quirks, as a product of its time—sets more suited to a stage than to modern television, one-chance filming that leaves the famous Hartnell line flubs intact, and so on—but especially when one considers how new science fiction television was, it’s actually quite innovative.
The Space Museum makes an excellent case in point. Only the fifteenth storyline of the nascent program’s history, it’s the show’s first real foray into what someday would be dubbed “wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.” Our heroes struggle with the mind-bending issue of having seen themselves displayed as exhibits in the Museum in what turns out to be their near future. How can they avoid that fate?
Every choice they make becomes an exercise in guesswork: “If we do X, does it lead inexorably to Y, or have we changed things to Z?” As the TARDIS crew’s minds bend around the implications of the ideas of predestination and self-fulfilling prophecy, so do the audience’s. I can only imagine what viewers thought when this story first went out; this kind of mental trickery had to be new for the vast majority of them.
It’s this element of temporal flux that really makes the story shine; outside of that, it’s pretty standard fare. We have two alien races fighting for dominance on a planet, one the colonizer and the other the indigenous people (though as another factor of the time and place it was filmed, every actor here is white). We have the TARDIS team coming in and adding fuel to the existing fires of rebellion. And we have endless identical corridors.
Interestingly enough, though, with the weight of another dozen Doctors’ experience behind us, we can see a few remarkable hints at things that wouldn’t appear explicitly for another five decades. To wit, at one point the Doctor notes that during a time of peril, he had in fact been thinking hard and quickly.
“My brain was working with the speed of a mechanical computer,” he tells Ian. “I was asking myself questions. And the answers were arriving with remarkable alacrity!” While I doubt he was using an image of one of his friends as a surrogate sounding board, the similarities to Heaven Sent can’t be ignored.
While The Space Museum is the lowest-ranked of the Hartnell-era stories I had left to review, I’m not sure how bad its reputation really is. At worst, I think it’s probably lost in the shuffle of the messy middle rankings. For those who tire easily of the black-and-white, stage-theater-esque episodes of this period, it’s definitely more of the same. But I think the timey-wimey component is interesting enough to make it worth visiting this particular Museum. Just don’t get stuck in a display case.