Galaxy 4 - Air Lock

Finally we get to the recently found episode and we get to see what Vicki was screaming at in the last episode. The Chumblies look even sillier when you can see them. Their base seems rather basic and it seems that whilst it’s a bigger area its not much better than the Drahvins. Sadly it looks like the budget is quite small even though it’s the first story of the series. It’s basically scaffolding with a few sheets of Perspex plastic.

As the leader, Maaga is the one that is the brains of the operation. She gets a wonderful scene where she seems to be talking to the other Drahvins but is looking directly at the camera and she gives a lovely speech which shows that she might be the only smart one there but she’s more than a match for the Chumblies.

We finally get to hear something resembling speech in this episode from the Chumblies as they capture a bit of something Vicki says and adopts then starts to speech English. It’s very much like the Judoon in the modern series. We learn how the ‘war’ between the Drahvins and we get to know that Maaga is slightly mad when she kills another Drahvin which she blames on the Chumblies. It’s another of the rather repetitive instances where we are told that the Drahvins are the bad guys and the Chumblies are the goodies. It seems like the repeated warnings about the Drahvins are a way of getting us through the episodes because otherwise its going to be a very short story.

Peter Purves seems to have drawn the short straw because for the first half of the story he just sleeps or pretends to sleep and then gets caught in the airlock. Vicki and the Doctor meanwhile get to interact with the Chumblies and their leader.  The Doctor does slightly more because he fiddles around with a machine.

Sadly whilst its nice to see an episode of this story. I cant say that it really makes the story any better. It’s a shame that the story doesn’t have much to it and it seems to have the same problem as The Web Planet where it just seems to jump from one set to the other. We are three quarters of the way through this episode and it doesn’t feel like the story has progressed very far in the two episodes.