Galaxy Four

Season three opens with the TARDIS taking the Doctor, Vicki and Steven to an unknown world in its dying days. They meet the survivors of a crashed spaceship, the all-female Drahvin race, who tell them that they were shot down by a race of monstrous creatures known as the Rills, but the Rills have also crashed on this planet in the exchange of fire, and now both parties are desperate to escape the planet before it blows up. The Rills are hideous tusked monsters who do not come outside their space craft as they can only breathe an atmosphere laced with ammoina, and they send parties of small worker robots that Vicki nicknames "Chumblies" to do the repair work for them. Of course all is not what it seems here, and someone is lying to the Doctor to try and gain his confidence and his help, and before the planet explodes he must figure out who he should help and who he should be wary of.

Science fiction has long had this obsession with the all-female alien regime. I suppose historically it has been all male on our own planet's space exploration missions, but here when we see the all-female Drahvins it is taken to an extreme. The Drahvin society has no use for men, and they keep enough alive to serve some purposes (I expect this has something to do with sperm) and the rest are done away with to conserve resources. Even within the female elite there is a division; Maaga, the leader of the stranded group, is a real person with autonomy, and her crew (Drahvins One, Two, and Three) are essentially clones grown to perform all the work Maaga gives them. The drone Drahvins are not the most stimulating company and do only what they are told, which probably makes life tedious for Maaga and her sort when they are sent on missions with only them for company. But into this feminist species there is an incredible spirit of agression, and a lot of hostility, which will probably irritate the feminists in fandom; it seems so far that if women are allowed into space they are either weak and easily frightened like Carol in The Sensorites or they are vicious and warlike as we see here. The same level of criticism has been levelled at the show's treatment of the female companions, keeping them strong-willed but only when there is no danger for them to face, and having that resolve collapse into screams when a Dalek comes down a corridor, or when a Rill peeks out through a window (that scream of Vicki's nearly deafened me - I had my headphones on when I listened to this one).

Yes, listened. Galaxy Four marks the beginning of the most severely depleted era of the show, when the BBC maniacs got rid of so much material to clear space. This adventure was put onto a CD with guest narration by Peter Purves, who played Steven Taylor in the program. A short clip a few minutes long does exist from episode 1, so enough can be seen of the Drahvins and their spaceship and the Chumbly robots to provide reference for the rest of the serial (the clip was attached to the Lost in Time DVD that was released in 2004). I had also read the Target paperback novel version of the show many years back, and as it was penned by the original scriptwriter, Williams Emms, all the attention to detail was included, and all the dialogue was presented so if there is any muttering on the CD version there is a way to go back and find out exactly what was said.

So in the end the planet explodes, and the people who deserve to escape make their exit. The Doctor says it would be nice to go somewhere and rest for a change rather than be surrounded by danger everywhere they go. Vicki looks at the scanner screen and sees a planet they are passing and wonders what is going on down there.

What's going on down there is going to set the stage for a mammoth adventure, but no-one is going to know about it for a while...

NEXT EPISODE : MISSION TO THE UNKNOWN