3 out of 5

Directed by: Mervyn Pinfield

I was sorta’ hoping against the negative hype of ‘Space Museum,’ – that it drops off drastically halfway through – but I guess I should trust the 50 years of time bigger fans than I have had to watch and respond to the serial.  Parts 3 and 4 aren’t particularly boring or poorly committed, they’re just a change in direction that settles the latter half of the serial into more standard Who fare, versus writer Glyn Jones creative pitch for the setup.

The Who crew land on planet Xeros and discover several oddities – that their voices don’t seem to echo, that they make no footprints upon the dusty planet surface, and that the locals don’t seem to notice them at all.  They stumble across a vast building and, venturing inside, find what would appear to be a museum of items culled from around the universe – including a Dalek.  The Doctor muses that it’s something of a space museum.  And then… our four travelers discover themselves on display, dunt dunt dunnn… or however we spell that.  All sci-fi script like, the Doctor quickly figures out that the TARDIS ‘jumped a time track,’ and so our leads are something of ‘ghosts’ in the current present they’re witnessing, and they should be able to wait for the past to catch up with them and then find those oddities (the echoes, the footprints) disappear.  Once this occurs, they should see their bodies vanish from display, and, indeed, do.  The question, then, is what can be done to prevent this version of the future they’d inadvertently glimpsed.  The group splits for exploration (as they’re ought to do), the Doctor getting captured and subjected to some future mind-probing, which he defeats with his usual giddy boasts.  Oh well, let’s just make him into a display then.  And episode 2 ends on a nice closeup of the Doc realizing he doesn’t know how to counter that.

So this is all pretty grand.  Unlike ‘The Web Planets’ initial wanderings, director Pinfield doesn’t try to throw all the weird at us at once, and keeps things relatively focused by having the team stick together for a bit for their discoveries.  The first half is also fueled by a sense of continual discovery and forward momentum – exploration, understanding, planning.

But the latter half switches so suddenly it’s almost as though you missed an episode.  The rest of the team stumbles between two races which are warring over the planet – museum curators The Moroks and the local, Converse-wearing Xerons.  Ian does his usual rogue hero bit, Barbara her usual mediator bit.  Vicki, admittedly, continues to be awesome and solidify her superiority over Susan, helping – without prompting – to rewire a security system to allow the Xerons access to a Morok-uh, -ian weapon cache.  Again, nothing about this is bad – and there’s actually been a pretty awesome improvement in the shooting special effects, syncing the sound / results more directly with the on-screen antics and localizing the camera effects to the gun (instead of flashing across the whole screen) – but we’ve been down this path before, whereas the quirky opening – though maybe white-washed of sense by sci-fi logic – had a fresh feel to it, where you really couldn’t predict what would happen next.

The kids reunite with Doc, un-museum him, and then Doc kicks the wheels of the TARDIS and says something about a time-switch being broken and that’s what caused the initial floobadoo.  What I appreciate about this is that the time-flub didn’t cause their predicament, but did, indeed, give them reason to be more cautious about their actions.  And then some Daleks.  On to ‘The Chase’…