There has been a lot written about the ever so slightly troubled behind the scenes production on the third season of Doctor Who. Even now, nearly 60 years after it aired, people are still uncovering documents and other bits of evidence that reveal that most of what we thought we knew wasn’t true and the reality was even more complicated than we thought. Inevitably this had huge amounts of impact on what made it to the screen (for example certain sections of “The Celestial Toymaker” make a lot more sense when you know that Dodo wasn’t originally the companion for the story) but make it to the screen it did and that’s what these blogs are concerned with. “Galaxy 4” started out as a story with male villains and Ian and Barbara as companions, so only ever so slightly different to Steven and Vicki and the bottle blonde army as the opposition. With these changes though comes a bizarre set of implications, both for a universal timeline and also updates to already complicated ideas from the previous two seasons, not helped by so much existing only as audio. The opening TARDIS scene alone is going to raise questions that impact stories as far back as “Marco Polo” and will haunt the show to this very day. The first, and most important of all, is… who cuts the Doctor’s hair?
Okay, so on the surface it seems to be a very frivolous question but it’s actually one that the books that would evolve into the Target range deal with from the word go, but the TV series manages to confuse. The very opening scene of “Galaxy 4” has Vicki cutting Steven’s hair and, if the existing photos from the story are anything to go by, she makes a reasonable job of it (certainly up to the standard of, oh I don’t know, a BBC makeup artist). Implication number one is that Vicki knows how to cut hair. In “The Web Planet” we got a few details of her rather strange education (almost an hour a week using some weird teaching machine) and it would now seem that along with learning a good deal about five dimensional physics, there were also NVQ style modules on hairdressing. It’s a very strange way to open the story as it’s one of those sci-fi tropes that hair doesn’t seem to grow with time, beards/stubble aren’t an issue and, well, there’s probably a huge long list of biological functions that are never mentioned. Yet here we are with Vicki on hairdressing duties. This does raise a few awkward questions. Does the Doctor’s hair grow? It’ll be a long time before we see them with any kind of facial hair (namely the speed-aged Doctor in “The Leisure Hive”) so does the Doctor’s hair grow just very slowly? And putting the Doctor to one side, does this mean that Steven has been doing Vicki’s hair? Clearly enough time has passed since “The Time Meddler” for Steven’s hair to grow so what about Vicki’s? In the books, there’s a gizmo in the TARDIS that Ian can program a hair style into and it does it for him, so is that in the TARDIS of the TV show and just broken or, like the luxury shower that’s in the novels, is that for the written word only? I’m deliberately bringing Ian up because “Marco Polo” took place over about four months across its seven episodes, does this mean there was a hairdresser in Polo’s caravan who could keep his 60’s cut neat and tidy? Across her time in the TARDIS, Barbara’s hair probably deserves several blog entries of its own, so who maintained her style? The other option that I had gone for, before I started this over thinking blog, was that there were occasional rest stops off screen (such as between “The Aztecs” and “The Sensorites”) where they just happened to find a barber and the Doctor had the right currency laying around to get it done professionally. Implication two of the sequence is that there are scissors on the ship that are suitable for hairdressing. Last time we saw scissors they were being used to hack away at the TARDIS beds in “The Edge of Destruction” so the suggestion is that, at some point, the Doctor just happened to pick up a hairdressing set (maybe it was a choice between this and a new bottle of mercury and he didn’t foresee Ian and Barbara pushing their way in). The third and final implication (for which I really wish there was visual evidence) is that either there’s a dustpan and brush in the control room to clear up the trimmed hair (actually, why do it in the control room where it’s probably not a good idea to have too much mess?) or the TARDIS has some sort of automated cleaning system. Sadly our only chance of seeing this would be at the end of episode one when Steven and the Doctor are back in the ship and we don’t have any photos or video for that scene. There’s another question about the TARDIS crew’s appearance but that’s being held back for a few stories as it’s part of one of the great unsolved season three mysteries anyway…
Moving on to the start of the plot itself, we get a whole new layer of confusion over the relationship between the inside of the TARDIS and the outside Police Box. This is definitely one of the sequences that suffers from being on audio only (yes there’s the animation but that will only ever be an approximation of what the episode actually looked like) as we have the rather charming sequence of the Chumbley trying to work out what the Police Box is by bumping its way around the outside. If we stick to things that have been established so far then the TARDIS is big on the inside but not necessarily infinite. If the interior of the TARDIS is in a separate dimension (sort of implied in “The Sensorites”) then why would bumping into the Police Box exterior be audible inside the control room? If, somehow, the implication is that the interior is literally inside the Police Box shell (conveniently invisible from the outside until the revival worked out how to get around that) as is implied in “The Web Planet” then fine, sounds could get inside BUT where would you hear them coming from. Suppose that you are standing in the control room facing the doors to the outside world. The Chumbley bumps into the corner of the Police Box that’s next to the door that usually opens (so front left). That’s going to be easy to locate as it’s theoretically likely to be in the corner of the control room in front of you and to your left. The Chumbley then bumps into the left hand side of the ship, half way between front and back. This is where it gets strange. Depending on how many other rooms there are in the ship and how they’re laid out, that half way between front and back of the Police Box side might not even correspond to a point in the control room. If the point of impact outside is a couple of cm long then that could somehow correspond to several metres of wall on the inside, resulting in a sound almost impossible to pin point. As for when the Chumbley hits the back of the Police Box… well, your guess is as good as mine when it comes to where that’s going to sound as though it’s coming from. The other, remote possibility is that the scanner eye has microphones all around the outside of the ship and what the people inside hear is some sort of best guess done using surround sound speakers. Side note: the presence of the Chumbley prevents Steven from going swimming, thus we have no idea what swimwear is on board. I’ll let you decide if this is a good thing or not.
There are two other bits of weirdness that I think really deserve mention from this story (other than wondering if the Drahvin spots are natural marks on their skin or some sort of tribal war paint) and both are things that crop up routinely through the show’s history (especially the original run). First off, what does “Galaxy Four” mean? When Steven meets the Drahvins for the first time, they claim to come from the planet Drahva in Galaxy Four. This does sort of suggest that somewhere out there there’s a Galaxy One, Two and Three (not to mention Five, Six, Seven and Eight, or is that step too far?) and also potentially a Galaxy Zero. As the name of the species and the name of their home planet match up, you’d surely think that they would name their home galaxy, Galaxy One (or Zero/Prime). There’s also a potential built in implication that if you say you’re from Galaxy Four then you’re actually in one of the other ones. To resolve this, I’m going to suggest a slightly different meaning to the line, highlight one of the other lines of dialogue in the story and then bring in some astrophysics (and if a certain astrophysicist is reading this, please do feel free to correct any details I’ve got wrong). Suppose, when they say “We’re from Drahva, in Galaxy Four” what they’re really saying is “You look a bit weird, you’re clearly not from around here…. This is OUR Galaxy, you’ve no rights here”. Think of it in a similar way to how some people see a foreigner in the city centre and want them to go away by boasting how they’re from Ingerlund and actually belong here. This is a local Galaxy for local people sort of thing. That gets around one problem. We can set the story in Galaxy Four and thus giving it the overall title of “Galaxy Four” makes sense. This also then clears up a line later on. When describing the incident in space, Maaga says that they were investigating this particular section of THE galaxy. Not this (which would imply one different to their own) but the definite article of “the galaxy”. This still leaves us with the mystery of the word “Four”. This is going to haunt us again in a few stories’ time (Daleks’ Master Plan to be precise) so I’m thinking that a little bit of cunningness with the terminology might help us out massively. For those who think that tweaking/modifying definitions is cheating, I’m going to tactfully point out that this is a show that routinely talks about Gallifrey being in the constellation of Kasterborous which shows just how fluid these terms are in the show’s “rule book”.
Galaxies are very large and if you google what our one, The Milky Way, looks like then you’ll get a nice pretty picture of something that looks like a catherine wheel type affair with three or more bits spiralling out from the centre. These pictures are all completely fictitious and there isn’t a single real picture of our galaxy looking like this (think it’s hard trying to get a group shot with more than a few people in? Now imagine how far away the camera would have to be to get a few billion stars in shot). Whilst this is our best scientific guestimate of what it looks like, it isn’t the complete picture. Vaguely “linked” to galaxies are small groups of stars called globular clusters. Well, small in that they’re maybe a million stars at most, perhaps even as few as tens of thousands. Currently we think there’s about 150 of these clusters around the Milky Way so I’m going to suggest that, at some point in the future, we simply say that whichever the closest or largest globular cluster is, it gets called Galaxy 1, then the next nearest/largest gets called Galaxy 2 and so on. This then irons out three other wrinkles in the story. Globular clusters are dense, so having three suns in the sky is more likely than if this planet were somehow trying to orbit three suns in a regular galaxy. It would tie in with the Doctor’s line in the control room at the end about how they’ve dematerialised from “that” galaxy (and are now back in the Milky Way) and, more importantly, it really helps explain the plot. We currently think that, because of the density of stars and other bits in globular clusters, any planets that do form are not going to last very long or be particularly stable. In the story we never get told exactly why the planet is destined to explode and it seems a vaguely random thing for the planet to do. If it’s in a globular cluster then we can just about put it down to hitting a patch of gravitational instability which tears it apart. No, it’s not perfect, but it really it going to help later on.
That just leaves another random irritation I have with scifi and one that I considered putting into “The Space Museum” piece. In episode two, both the Doctor and Steven consider the Drahvin’s spaceship to look “old fashioned”. Other episode guides (of which there are plenty) have tried to use this line to work out what date “Galaxy Four” takes place in. One, which shall remain nameless, confidently places this story about 500 years after Steven was born which is, shall we say, taking “old fashioned” to extremes. Another, similarly anonymous, book claims that Steven must have encountered a huge number of very advanced spaceships between seasons two and three as humans don’t manage intergalactic travel till many thousands of years in the future (ie seemingly beyond Steven’s time) but that still doesn’t really tie in with their description of it. This blog, not so anonymously, is going to thrown down the gauntlet and point out that IF the Drahvins have come from a different galaxy to Steven, how on earth is he supposed to be able to date a spaceship just by looking at it when he presumably has no idea of how the civilisations in that galaxy developed. It might look retro to him, but this might be the year three million and the Drahvins have only just got to that stage of technology/artistic design. This is something that is going to crop up over and over. There’s a strange idea that humanity is humanity no matter where it is in the universe and that we all develop at the same rate no matter where we are. What’s more, once one bit of humanity develops some sort of starship, it’s seemingly assumed that the whole of humanity will be using them. This just doesn’t make sense to me. Once we leave the planet and go off to all spirals of the galaxy (and eventually beyond), that’s it. We’re not going to be all nice and share absolutely everything with everyone. I can also see this causing all kinds of problems in the future patent office. Is there a central human authority ensuring that something invented on one side of the galaxy can’t be copied unfairly by an entirely different colony on the other side of the galaxy?
“Galaxy Four”, naturally, doesn’t give us any answers to questions. The best we can do is make some wild leaps of logic and hope they don’t fall apart when they land on a different story. Mind you, three stories back, our hero decided that an entire planet must be utterly devoid of life based on the evidence of one rock that was laying around, so if anyone complains, I’m just following in the footsteps of the Doctor!