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.