Confession time. Even though I did English Literature at A-level (and somehow got a B), I really don’t like Shakespeare. Loads of reasons and I expect I’ll go through more of them in future blogs but one, which is probably totally unfounded and more a gut instinct reason, is that there’s this weird idea that it’s fine to analyse every last syllable of Shakespeare’s output and read meaning where there isn’t any but heaven forbid you should apply that level of analysis to other forms of entertainment that were written for the masses and the groundlings. It also really irked me that, when I did the A-level, we were always expected to talk about the meaning of the dialogue, what themes there were etc but we didn’t ever really talk about the mechanics of the play or whether or not it actually made any sense. For me though, does something make sense is a much greater factor in how much I’m likely to enjoy something than is the dialogue in rhyming couplets or straightforward prose. I want to know if things make sense in a wider picture. I was always very interested in what was happening off the page, not just what was in the script. And if the tale relied on magic, what were the rules of that magic? Are the laws of magic consistent from one play to another or do things change, even though the plays are mostly set in the “real world”? I think that’s why “The Space Museum” is a story that will always fascinate me. Forget the utterly unnatural dialogue at the start of episode two, I’ve sat through enough staff meetings to know that painfully clunky exposition is actually pretty normal for certain levels of management, instead let me wander through the mysteries of time tracks, let me sit down with the story in the wider context of Doctor Who and, inevitably, let me change my mind every time I try and think of ways it could work. If I revisit this particular entry in a few years time I’ll probably have a dozen new ideas but, for today, this is the stuff that I can and can’t explain.
At its heart, “The Space Museum” has only two problems.
Problem 1: Episode one.
Problem 2: Episodes two through to four.
In the spirit of weirdness with time, we’ll deal with problem 2 first as it is a very standard Doctor Who / scifi problem. The whole set up we see is on a truly bizarre scale with what we see and hear about on screen not really matching up to the details of the plot. It’s actually a very similar problem to the “How did the daleks invade the earth” question asked in 02-02 as it’s categorically stated that the whole planet has been invaded. At least, with the Earth, we could gauge some sort of scale of numbers for that story, but here we have an unknown planet, an unknown society and unknown invaders. In episode two, we find out that three hundred “mimmians” ago, the planet was teeming with visitors. Difficult to work out what a mimmian is in terms of years but it’s probably quite some time. And just exactly how big is the Morok civilisation that it required a whole planet to be turned into a museum? To me, this vaguely suggests that Xeros is actually a pretty small, dense planet (quite like its population then) without too many habitable areas. We could even, theoretically, be situated on a small island for this story which would certainly make things a lot easier to justify. However, we also know that a large amount of the population has been taken away but there’s probably just about enough left to keep up the reproduction rate. So, we can now break the planet into two “areas”, there’s the bits of the planet that are required for the locals to actually live on, reproduce on and probably not do much else on and then there’s the bits that are the museum. We know the Xerons that we see are described as a “local” rabble (which suggests there are population centres that are further away as well) and that this particular museum is the one where the Governor rules the planet from. Except… either through getting the line wrong or an agreed change, Barbara clearly says “museum” singular at the end of part four, whereas the camera script says that she should have said the plural. Going purely by what’s actually on screen, rather than what’s in the script, we pretty much realise that the local rabble are possibly over-selling the scale of the occupation to Vicki when they start to give her the backstory. They are kids after all and, how to put this tactfully, they’re all male and probably very keen to show off to what seems to be the only female of their own age they’ve seen (Tor does seem VERY keen on Vicki) and, in part three, he even shares food with her (hence confirming that there are ways to grow food on Xeros, no matter what the Doctor thinks, as it’s hardly likely that the entire planet could survive off chocolate bars stolen from the museum shop). The fact that Vicki can re-wire the computer so that they can access the armoury suggests that either Morok technology is suspiciously similar to Earth technology or that they trade with humans. We’re probably very close in era to Vicki’s home era as well, unless computer technology stagnates and she can easily work on a machine that’s 100 years old. When we get to “The Myth Makers” we’ll spend a lot more time discussing what Vicki can and probably can’t do because it’s exceptionally strange that she knows what a dalek is but has no idea what they look like. This would also tie in with the idea that Vicki thinks that time travel is real/possible as the Doctor takes the Time Space Visualiser as a souvenir and that definitely requires knowledge of fourth dimensional physics to work.
Reading between the lines (well, the ones that Hartnell doesn’t fluff anyway) and it looks like this isn’t the large scale rebellion that the Xerons try and sell it as. It’s shutting down the very last dregs of a long since abandoned invasion and putting the Morox out of their misery. If it’s anything more than this, then we have to question the Doctor’s morals (as we will do many times) about basically toppling the rulers of a planet, leaving the planet in the control of teenagers and then wandering off. Can you really see the planet doing well if the Xerons we see on screen are the ones who end up in charge of it? I’m surprised Vicki didn’t stay and become queen within a year.
Was any of this actually in Glynn Jones’ mind when he wrote the story? I doubt it. Without meaning to though, he does give us a lot to consider about the mechanics of the world that we spend a day or so on (note, we get told about Xeron days which implies that they’re different to Morok days, so therefore we could, if we wanted, get into a whole other debate about language, time frames and the difference between the two planets). However, in part one we get a huge problem with how the story presents the mechanics of time. This is where things are going to get very VERY complicated indeed, even with the Doctor’s half hearted explanation at the end.
Part one, with its mysterious jumping of time tracks, simply doesn’t fully work but what “time weirdness” stories actually do? However, with a bit of imagination and squinting so things get a little fuzzy, we can probably get about 90% of it to work and that’s definitely more than enough to be going on with. It helps that, by total chance, many years down the line we get a very strong nudge from a 4th Doctor story and, in one of those weird coincidences that usually only happens in drama, it just so happens to be the one featuring Jacqueline Hill again. Yes, things are so weird in “The Space Museum” that we’re going to turn to “Meglos” for answers. In particular, we need to think about the very strange way the chronic hysteresis works. It would appear that “Meglos” doesn’t feature a run of the mill time loop as the trap in its first episode. We have a very weird scenario where there’s some sort of window at the end of the repeating section where time runs as normal for a few moments before everything repeats and the Doctor and Romana use this window to break the loop by starting it early. Okay, it’s definitely NOT a standard time loop but when we get to “Meglos” proper, we’ll get into diagrams and waffle that does just about make the scenario work. For “The Space Museum” to work, the exit path of the hysteresis is slightly different to that in “Meglos”. When I was younger, I had one of those toy stunt car things that did a loop the loop. You pulled it back, released it along a straight section of track and then (assuming it had enough speed) it went round a loop the loop before carrying along the straight track again. The key thing for “Meglos” is that it started on a straight track and ended on a straight track. If you didn’t know the loop was there and looked side on, you’d see the car going in a straight line, vanish for a fraction of a second as it went round the loop and then reappear going in a straight line as though nothing had happened. What if, however, it missed that second straight piece of track and ended up on a piece that was on a slight vertical diagonal? Look down on the setup from above (ooh look, we’ve got a new dimension introduced… let’s call it time) and what you’d see is the car going along the straight track to begin with at one speed, disappear for a fraction of a second whilst it did the loop but then (and here’s the cunning bit) it would reappear seemingly at a different speed whilst it did the diagonal section before getting back to its original speed once it was on the straight track again. This gives us a path it could have taken as well as the path that it does take before it rejoins the main path again.
In terms of what we see in the story, we can just about get this to work for a lot of it. The TARDIS has emerged onto the diagonal that’s eventually going to connect to the straight bit. It’s not until it’s on the straight bit that the “proper” timeline is in play and so (as we can’t see the fourth dimension) the events from that diagonal section can’t be confirmed to have happened until they merge with the main timeline. This would explain
– Why the footprints all appear at once
– Why they appear at the same time the museum exhibits vanish (they were only on the straight piece of track that should have been taken but as we took the diagonal we never actually got them)
– Why some exhibits are solid and others ghost like (the ones that appear on both tracks are solid and the others aren’t)
Really, the only thing that’s totally baffling is the glass of water. As that’s in the TARDIS, surely it should be on the same track as the crew, so there’s no real reason for it to reform after it’s broken the first time. And whatever you do, don’t even contemplate what happens to the water that the Doctor drank from it, I’m guessing it somehow leaves his body again to go back to the glass.
Then there’s the matter of the clothing. And this is where we can explain the difference between this story and “Meglos”. In “Meglos”, the Doctor and Romana almost get the sequence correct when they try to jump start it before the hysteresis begins again. In “The Space Museum”, there’s the very big issue of a total change of clothes. Could it be that this discrepancy is sufficient to mean they leave the hysteresis on the wrong track (and then that component that the Doctor holds up in part four takes a while to get them back onto the right one again)? Which does then raise one final question about the plot. When do they change their clothes? And here’s where I think we’ve all overlooked the obvious. At the end of “The Crusade” the lights go down, presumably as an effect of getting caught in some sort of hysteresis. We don’t actually know how long has REALLY passed before the lights come on again and everyone is in their regular outfits. I want to suggest that it’s not as instant as we think. I think the lights go down as they enter some sort of hysteresis or loop or sectioned off window of time and have quite a few adventures before they finally realise they’re in a loop and manage to escape it. It’s in this off screen series of adventures that they get into their 20th century gear and, quite possibly, the Doctor picks up a whole load more information that allows him to identify when spaceships are in a chronological order and all the other new information he has in his head for the next batch of stories, similar to how fandom has decided that the 2nd Doctor had a set of adventures after “The War Games”.
What to call this new mini set of stories though. I think it’s only fair to ask the person who made me want to analyse this story in such detail. So, Mr Shakespeare, what do you think. What sayeth thou about the name of these off stage dramatic events? What’s that… season 2b or not 2b? That is the question.