The Space Museum

The TARDIS jumps a time track and arrives on the planet Xeros, but as the machine has not yet synced with real time the travellers are in effect wandering the planet in their own future. Yes, another drab planet covered in sand, but on this planet there is a touist attraction: a space museum run my the Moroks, who are an agressive apparantly all-male race with very bad hair. The oppressed Xerons are nothing more than children, all in mod-ish black, with an extra set of eyebrows and odd high-top sneakers (and led by Tor, played by Jeremy Bulloch, who would go on to great things as Boba Fett in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi). The Morok museum is a testament to all the Moroks have achieved, but to their great dismay the TARDIS crew discover that they are to become exhibits in the museum and see themselves in glass display cases. Having glimpsed their future, the Doctor, Vicki, Ian and Barbara have to try and do everything possible to change it, contrary to what the Doctor insisted could not be achieved back in The Aztecs.

Most of the story takes place within the museum, so as I said last time, there are a lot of corridors for the cast to wander around in. Most of the exhibits are just bits of machinery or rusted out space ships, but there is an interesting specimen in the form of a Dalek. I'm not sure if this is to say that the Daleks have died out by this time in the series, or if we are supposed to believe that the Moroks were capable of conquering them. If it's the latter, I don't buy it; the Moroks, or at least the ones running the museum, are not very good at their jobs and can't even keep a heap of noisy teenage boys under control, I can't see them winning a war against the Daleks. Unless only the stupid Moroks got sent to Xeros.

How does our crew fare? Well of course they win. The Doctor toys with a truth machine under interrogation. Ian beats up some gaurds. Barbara drags a half-dead Xeron boy around when the museum is fumigated. And Vicki surprises us all by knowing how to raid an armoury and start a revolution. She's spunky, that girl, even totes a gun herself. And of course, the future can be changed if one is forwarned of it, which goes against the dogma of the last few adventures in history.

And then it turns out that the Daleks are not dead and gone. They're back, and this time it's personal...

NEXT EPISODE : THE CHASE