The Chase - Journey into Terror

We’ve reached the episode where they land at the haunted house. It does seem in the grand scheme of things, rather odd to include this in a Dalek story but actually it’s a nice bit of fun. It feels like this is the episode where the build up to the end starts to speed up. The title obviously refers to the haunted house but might also subtley refer to Vicki’s situation so what might seem like a throwaway title actually has two meanings.

This first part of the story takes place in what might look at first like a haunted house but its never really made clear whether it’s real or in the human mind. Are the people that the regulars encounter actors or monsters. There’s a moment when the Doctor and Ian encounter Frankenstein’s monster and you can clearly see a Dalek which isn’t suppose to be there. Now when I first saw this I thought (rather naively) that it was a stealth Dalek but in more recent times the obvious has come to light.

The light hearted-ness is somewhat cut short when the TARDIS leaves without Vicki and whilst the Daleks are being knocked about by Count Dracula (there’s a line I never thought I would write), she manages to get into the Daleks time machine. It’s sometime before the regulars even notice that Vicki isn’t with them. If I were Vicki I would be really hurt by that (and a bit miffed). We learn about a Dalek plan when we learn that they are planning on duplicating the Doctor (thus leading to one of the silliest ideas in Doctor Who).

The regulars (minus Vicki) come up with a  good plan of stealing the Daleks time machine so that they can go back to the haunted house and get Vicki back, obviously not knowing that she is on the Daleks machine. So they decide that the next planet is where they will fight the Daleks. At the same as they arrive, the Daleks duplicate is ready to operate. Sadly it looks nothing like William Hartnell and even  someone with bad eye sight would be able to tell the difference. It’s only the last shot that is of Hartnell. I cant understand why they could have come up with a better way of getting William Hartnell to play the duplicate. It ruins what is otherwise an ok plan. It’s a this stage that I started to lose a bit enthusiasm for this story but I still maintain that it’s a good story overall.