Chris Baer

Oh, something else I forgot to tell you. I think I poisoned Nero.

Fresh off a literal cliffhanger of an ending in “The Rescue,” the tipping TARDIS lands on its side…and no one seems to care. After our time travellers flail about on the TARDIS, we find them lounging in ancient Rome, in a villa they’ve somehow managed to take over in its owner’s absence. They themselves have become “The Romans” (Story Production Code M).

Gradually it becomes obvious that a month has passed since the Doctor’s poor landing, and having for once not landed in a terrible situation that requires immediate action, everyone decides to take a holiday, leaving the TARDIS stuck on its side in a ditch. While the jump from the crashed TARDIS to our Roman revelers seems a bit jarring, the discontinuity allows for Vicki to have been integrated into the daily routine behind the scenes. She is at ease with everyone, particularly the Doctor, with whom she shares a blend of nonchalant curiosity and optimism. Throughout the story, Vicki will follow the Doctor around, accepting orders yet not allowing the Doctor to take himself too seriously. Where Susan had a certain reverence for her grandfather, Vicki respects the Doctor but retains a very real independent streak.

Still, we can’t have a Doctor Who story without something happening beyond character development (the thin plot of “The Rescue” notwithstanding), so the travellers split up (of course) and intrigues abound. All roads, indeed, lead to Rome.

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I think we have landed. But the Doctor’s never slept through a landing before!

After an epic story in which the Doctor and his companions save Earth from the Daleks (for the first of many times), our stalwart travellers move on to a thin wisp of a story designed, seemingly, for one purpose only: to replace Susan, who stayed behind with the human resistance to help rebuild a Dalek-ravaged Earth. “The Rescue” (Production Code L) introduces us to Vicki, a young woman who is one of two survivors of a spaceship crashed on the planet Dido.

From the first, Maureen O’Brien portrays Vicki as optimistic and independent, uncowed by the fate that has left her an orphan on a strange planet. And the fact that she is an orphan is key here, for it allows her to become the next companion, unencumbered by any emotional ties to her twenty-fifth century Earth (notably, an Earth in which there is still a United Kingdom, as the wrecked spaceship bears the markings “UK 201”).

As always, the TARDIS lands somewhere strange, the party gets split up, Ian and the Doctor eventually find Barbara—who has managed to kill Vicki’s giant monster pet in the interim—and the Doctor unravels the central narrative mystery (why the peaceful Dido people have apparently killed all the other human survivors of the spaceship crash).

But to focus overly much on the plot of this two episode story is to miss the character development that takes place over the story’s forty-five minute length. Both Howe and Walker and Wood and Miles (whose About Time series of Doctor Who guides I’ve only recently discovered) point out that while the story is perhaps not gripping stuff, it establishes Doctor Who as a series where continuity matters. It’s not planet- and time period-of-the-week; it’s an ongoing story with characters who grow and change and remember what happened the week before.

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