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Season 02 / Story 016 / Production code R
The Chase
The Doctors?: William Hartnell
The Companions: Barbara Wright | Ian Chesterton | Vicki Pallister | Steven Taylor
Other Main Characters: Daleks
Terry Nation: Writer
Richard Martin: Director
Verity Lambert: Producer
The Daleks have constructed a time machine, and an execution squad is despatched to pursue and kill the Doctor.
The chase begins on the desert planet Aridius, where the travellers encounter ferocious Mire Beasts and narrowly avoid being handed over to the Daleks by the native Aridians, led by Malsan, Rynian and Prondyn. It then takes in such stopping-off points as the top of the Empire State Building, the 19th-century sailing ship Mary Celeste - the Daleks' appearance causing all the crew and passengers to jump overboard - and a spooky haunted house which, although the Doctor and his friends do not realise it, is actually a futuristic funfair attraction, Frankenstein's House of Horrors, at the Festival of Ghana in 1996.
Eventually the action moves to the planet Mechanus, where the travellers are taken prisoner by the Mechanoids. A fellow prisoner, Steven Taylor, tells them that the Mechanoids are a group of robots sent some 50 years earlier to prepare landing sites for human colonists who, in the event, never arrived. At the story's climax, the Daleks and the Mechanoids engage in a fierce battle which ultimately results in their mutual destruction. As the city burns behind them, the Doctor's party seize this opportunity to escape and return to the TARDIS. Steven Taylor also manages to get away.
Ian and Barbara realise that they can use the Daleks' now-abandoned time machine to return to 20th-century Earth and, once his initial objections have died down, the Doctor helps them to do so. The two friends are delighted to be back home, although they quickly realise that they have arrived in 1965, two years later than when they left, leaving them with the difficulty of explaining their long absence!
6 episodes:
- The Executioners - 22 May 1965
- The The Death Of Time - 29 May 1965
- Flight Into Eternity - 05 June 1965
- Journey Into Terror - 12 June 1965
- The Death Of Doctor Who - 19 June 1965
- The Planet Of Decision - 26 June 1965
Script available in print from Titan Books.
