Sunday 17 November 2019

What's Wrong With... The Rescue


Only two episodes in length, so not a lot to go wrong with this one.
The Rescue opens with Vicki seeing something register on the scanner in the crashed spaceship which she currently calls home. She thinks that this might be the rescue ship from Earth which is due any day now. It turns out that it is actually the TARDIS which the scanner has picked up. But the TARDIS has materialised inside a cave, deep inside the mountain - so that's some scanner the spaceship has. And why isn't it trained on local space, from where the rescue ship is coming?
You can see the cave wall through the TARDIS doors.
It's a David Whitaker script, so we have spaceships that can only find planets if there is a radio beacon transmitting, even when they're a mere 72 hours away.
Just how many people were travelling in this spaceship? It seems to comprise of just two rooms and a corridor.
The Doctor describes the people of this planet as a peace-loving race, yet they have built death traps in their tunnels, need a Hall of Justice, and like to dress up as grotesque insect monsters despite being humanoid in form themselves.
It is suggested that the spikes which emerge from the wall will cause the unwary traveller to plummet to their doom - and yet we later see that the drop is only a couple of metres. The monster which lurks at the bottom turns out to be a herbivore. It is also rather easy to get round the trap - as we see Ian manage to do by simply draping his jacket over the spikes.
When we cut from the cavern to the exterior, as the Sandbeast emerges, you can spot William Hartnell and William Russell in the background, moving to their next mark.
Vicki's backstory is odd. She tells the Doctor and his companions that her father basically abandoned her whilst seriously ill to attend a party. The implication is that this feast took place not long after the spaceship crashed, so her father was leaving his sick child all alone on a potentially hostile world.
There is a trap door in the floor of Bennett's room, which enables him to sneak out and dress up as Koquillion. It would appear that Vicki has never stuck around to see Koquillion leave after any on his visits to Bennett, otherwise she would surely have spotted that something wasn't quite right - with Bennett in bed and Koquillion nowhere to be seen.
How on earth did William Russell get away with calling the villain 'Cockylickin'?
There's one mangled line from Hartnell: "You must believe what Barbara did. Try and understand, my dear, and why she did it, just for me, eh?".

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