Galaxy 4 - The Exploding Planet

Back to the CD for the final part of this story and it seems like the time situation is back at the centre of the plot. Sadly as the episode is on CD I must admit that I wasn’t in the mood really to listen to this but if I am to stay on course then I would have to make the best of a bad situation. The Drahvins are still doing what they are doing which is trying to (badly) come up with their plan to steal the Chumblies ship. The Chumblies are trying to get their ship started ready to take off. The funny thing about that is they take off just before the planet is about to explode. It’s a trait in TV that is as old as storytelling.

There is a nice moment when the Drahvins see the Chumblies taking off and then they see the regulars running towards the TARDIS and try to get to them instead. Maaga is still a good character but sadly we don’t get to see if she pulls off the trick of making normal dialogue work brilliantly. There isn’t much to this story apart from getting the Chumblies ship to take off but as they only have 25 minutes they do what they need to do. When the planet does eventually blow up it would have been nice to see how this looks on TV because sadly the soundtrack doesn’t.

The end of the episode is great because it leads to the only episode in the shows history where non of the regulars appear. They are not even mentioned and it’s the prelude to the Dalek epic. Sadly that means that it’s the best thing in the episode which pretty much sums up my feelings about this episode and story. I would probably have had a different reaction to it had the entire four part run been on DVD but sadly its not the case. As a plot its

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.

Galaxy 4: Trap of Steel

There isn’t a great deal that I can write about this episode as nothing really happens in the episode. The problem with something existing on CD its hard to really get involved in the story, especially when everything that occurs in the episode is more visual than audio. From what I gather occurs in this episode there is more evidence that the leader of the Drahvins is a bit horrible and isn’t prepared to share a ship with the Chumblies. There seems to be a lot of walking around and after a while it all blurs into one.

Sadly the main problem with this story is that it lacks anything that comes close to exciting. Like the previous episode, we have one of the regulars left in the ship whilst the other two wander around and I think that its ok once but then gets slightly boring everytime after that. The only thing that seems to stand out is Steven who after having to spend four episodes refusing to believe what he is seeing, has finally got over that and embracing what he sees and in some cases fights with what he sees.

Despite the time running out for the planet, there doesn’t seem a great deal of rush in getting things done and we get to an episode that was lost until very recently and its time to see whether the story would have worked on tv better than it did on audio.

Galaxy 4 - Four Hundred Dawns

Galaxy 4 is the first story of the third series and its where the number of episodes that exist on video is worrying low. The 82^nd episode of Doctor Who starts off in quite a weird way with Vicki giving Steven a hair cut. It’s certainly a different TARDIS to the one that we saw at the beginning of the second season. It feels like a different show at times. However one thing that hasn’t changed much since that opening story of Season 2 and that is the Doctor.

The story doesn’t get off to the best of starts when the first ‘creature’ of the story appears. The Chumblies are named by Vicki and it’s a silly name. How are we supposed to see it as a menace when Vicki goes and gives it this name. She might as well have called a bunny rabbit. Their involvement in the story is quite important but they have the same problem as the Zarbi had in ‘The Web Planet’ and that is they only communicate in a weird high pitch tone. We also encounter the Drahvins who are a group of women who use men purely for reproduction. It’s the first time that the threat comes entirely from women. It’s quite easy to spot them as the baddies in this piece. They try their best to make themselves seem like the victims and the mere idea that they want to take someone else’s property instead of trying to see if they can both leave together shows the mentality of the Drahvins and why they are no good.

I like how the purpose of the story is spelt out so quickly. The planet that they are on is about to explode quite quickly. The Drahvins wants to get off and their space ship won’t start so they want to steal the Drahvins ship so that they can survive. It’s a simple plot that you see what the end point is going to be and so there is no need to try and figure out what the point of the story is. Just enjoy it and sigh when the Chumblies appear on screen. As for the episode, it loses a lot being on audio. The narration by Peter Purves helps a bit but I think that when we get to Air Lock we can see how they story works better when you can see it.