I’ve always had a very soft spot for “The Rescue”. It’s charmingly daft (the world’s easiest whodunnit), has the touchingly real aspect of a character “adopting a pet”, has an ending out of nowhere and feels a very natural way for someone to join the TARDIS crew. Beneath this though there’s some odd lack of character moments, a backstory that seems to defy explanation and the next hints that not all is as it seems with the Doctor. We see 45 minutes or so of the 17 hours spent on Dido and, within that time, we’ve got about three hundred years of history to catch up on…
Although they’ve changed outfits, there’s every indication that this is either the landing directly after “The Dalek Invasion of Earth” or maybe the second (but probably no more). Ian and Barbara wonder what Susan is up to now they’ve left her behind on the Earth and the Doctor’s clearly feeling her absence. For ages I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was wrong with the various comments made on screen but, as part of this re-watch, I finally twigged that I wasn’t bugged by what was said, I was more bugged by what wasn’t. Now I know my brain doesn’t always quite work the same way as other people’s do BUT, if I were either Ian or Barbara, I would have found the events of the previous story pretty harrowing. It was a physically arduous time (probably the most physical of their adventures since “The Dead Planet”, with its trek through mountains etc), which would have taken some time to recover from but also it would have been quite a mental challenge to survive. This wasn’t some strange world inhabited by flat footed, bald headed aliens, this was the Earth. Their home. And, if you take all the dialogue from the story at face value, it’s pretty clear that the Earth was still in a VERY bad shape at the end of the tale, even with the Daleks apparently defeated. You say goodbye to someone you’ve spent pretty much every day of the last year or so with and you see a lot of good people suffer and/or die. I’m not saying that Ian and Barbara should be wallowing in self pity or anything BUT if I then jump forward to near the year 2400 and meet a human, one of my own first feelings would be that of sheer relief in discovering that the Earth had a future that looked good. I would absolutely bombard poor Vicki with questions about how long it took the Earth to recover, how humanity rebuilt itself and also, quite probably, if the name Susan Foreman was in the history books. Okay, as I said earlier, we only see a small amount of the time spent on Dido but, as a viewer, I would genuinely like to have been given some of this information as well. Along with serving to introduce Vicki, I would have loved for this story to act as a coda to the previous epic, to give me closure and reassurance that it had all worked out or even a hint that Barbara and Vicki had discussed it whilst hiding from Koquillion. To me it seems that not only did the Earth survive, it positively flourished and humanity was out among the stars pretty quickly given how routine and casual Vicki seems to find space travel. Weirdly, on television at least, there aren’t that many stories set in the window between “The Dalek Invasion of Earth” and the three centuries before “The Rescue” but there’s definitely bits and pieces which we will need to discuss when we get to them.
Also, on the Susan front, there’s a definite feel that there’s more to the Doctor not talking about her than just missing her. “The Rescue” is our first encounter with a planet that the Doctor has already visited “off screen”. This, in itself, isn’t particularly surprising. Throughout season one (and many times ahead of us as well), the Doctor will talk about “all my years of travelling” or words to that effect. In “An Unearthly Child” we get information from Susan about some of the places they visited before we met the Doctor and in “The Edge of Destruction” we get the information about Quinnis. Now we get to add Dido to the ever lengthening list and, what’s more, the Doctor is returning there “after all these years”. This gives us two possibilities. If Susan really was only 16 in the first story, then she was exceptionally young when the Doctor first visited Dido and you end up wondering just how moral it was to race off into the universe with someone that young. Not that I want to really get into nuWho just yet, but this also doesn’t really tie in with the Gallifrey based flashbacks we get in “The Name of the Doctor” either. Option two also delves into nuWho but in a far more interesting way. Moreso than in season one, we’re about to go through a run of stories where the Doctor has a lot of weirdly specific knowledge that you have to wonder how he picked up. “The Web Planet” is going to be packed with it, “The Space Museum” drops hints about it and by the time we get to season three, the Doctor will have weird knowledge about pretty much everything. I’ve suggested before that the Doctor travelled on his own before returning to Gallifrey to pick up Susan and do the runner so it’s time to be truly wicked. How much of what he remembers was actually gained in his William Hartnell body? Between now and the arrival of Jon Pertwee we don’t see every moment of his life but there don’t appear to be huge gaps where he could have learned lots of new skills. Therefore there must have been a massive amount of information gained prior to “An Unearthly Child”. Does he consciously remember gathering this information or has it bled through from some sort of past life. Thanks to the 13th Doctor’s era, we know that there are regenerations before Hartnell… so is this massive library of information left over from the time as the Fugitive Doctor and it just sort of bleeds through into his conscious mind as and when he needs it? Given his slip over Susan in episode one, I find it strange to believe that he wouldn’t have mentioned that she was with him when he visited Dido previously. (NOTE: The expanded universe of books and audios and comics will try and fill in a few of the issues about Susan…. but as they’re not out for another 35/40 years or so, I’ll address those when we get to them 😉 )
Whatever the truth about which body he was in when he was there last, the planet must have made an impression on him. Episode one has what is probably the biggest leap of science the show ever has (which, as it turns out, he’ll almost repeat twice more in this season), or it could tie in with “Robot” and hint at hidden properties of the TARDIS. The ship lands, there’s the bit in the control room where the Doctor teaches Barbara how to open the doors and they all go outside. There’s some sort of smell in the caves. The Doctor goes back into the ship and then sticks his head out, asking Ian to pass him a rock from the cave floor. There’s then the short sequence of Ian and Barbara spotting the crashed ship and then Barbara has a conversation with Koquillion, before he blows the tunnel up. In this short period of time (two conversations) the Doctor, whilst in the TARDIS, has time to do some sort of analysis on the rock AND make notes about it (and then complain about the quality of his handwriting) from which he correctly deduces which planet they’re on. So just what exactly is this mystery smell that’s in the caves that absolutely definitely only occurs on Dido and just how does the Doctor perform any kind of chemical test on the rock in such a short period of time that narrows its place of origin down to one planet. Come to think of it, just what sort of chemical test is going to give such a weirdly precise result? As we’ll see through the rest of the 60 or so years, there seem to be an awful lot of very rare minerals, elements and compounds in the universe, does one of them absolutely only appear on Dido and just so happens to be in a random rock in a random cave? Or, and this is the throw forward to “Robot”, is there a way to make time pass more slowly inside the TARDIS than outside? This would, at least, give the Doctor time to carry out tests of whatever nature he needs to do, write them up and analyse the results, before returning time to normal and going back into the outside world.
By chance, time and the passing thereof, is the final mystery of “The Rescue”. In “The Space Museum” we will learn that Vicki has read up on Earth history and here, when Barbara tells Vicki that she’s from 1963, Vicki doesn’t only say “they didn’t know anything then” (which, given it’s many centuries back is, to be honest, pretty accurate if you compare 2024 to, say 1524), she makes it clear they didn’t have time machines then. Does this mean that, in Vicki’s time, they DO have time machines of some sort? Notice that Vicki doesn’t claim time travel is impossible, nor does she assume Barbara has been in something like cryogenic suspension, she happily accepts the notion of travelling in time. Combine this with her upcoming knowledge of the fourth dimension and it would appear that Vicki comes from a very enlightened time indeed. Except the rest of the next 60 years has some very definite thoughts about who gets time travel and when. More importantly, it has some strong ideas about which particular race sees themselves as time travel police. Not only is there a good chance that Susan got left in a timeline that’s going to vanish one day, it’s now looking like Vicki has come from a similarly non-definitive timeline too. Looks like there’s going to be a lot of explanations needed over the next few dozen seasons and no I won’t just go “time war did it all” and ignore it.
Whatever the truth is about Vicki’s version of Earth, this isn’t the last time we’ll be in the Earth’s future and it won’t be the last time we have to question the statement from “The Aztecs” about rewriting history. For now though, we’ve got far more certainty about time ahead of us. “The Romans” awaits and logic is about to take a tumble.