14. Daleks Vs Mechonoids
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4hLnj2hOH0 From The Planet of Decision: 26 June 1965 It was part of the classic series, The Chase. This moment was maybe a bit silly, because the BBC tried to do big screen action on those tiny TVs with their 405-line technology that everyone sat down to on Saturdays after Grandstand. They tried to do it using shots of what was very clearly a model city. For all that though, this was a very satisfying moment. Until I had revisited the scene shown here courtesy of You Tube, the battle was as fresh and realistic in my mind as ever it was. Small screen it may have been, but it was a great moment. It was a convincing outcome to an excellent series. The Chase was itself something new, coming as it did in only the second series of the show. It did something that we all now take for granted; the Doctor Who story arc. And as story arcs go there are few better than a simple, well thought-out chase anywhere in TV or literature. I mean, a chase says action. It says adventure and that sense that anything can happen just around the next bend in the river. That's not to say that The Chase wasn't also a thing of great discontinuity. We understood that there was a chase on, but each episode seemed somewhat disjointed when compared to the next. Doesn't matter, since the point of a chase is the chase and what people often miss is that during this series the travellers seem very much like people without a home. Lost in space, if you like. Daleks vs Mechonoids offered a satisfying finality to something that could easily have got out of hand.
Paul Hammans
Hello, I'm Paul Hammans, terminal 'Who' obsessive, F1 fan, reader of arcane literature about ideas and generalist scribbler. To paraphrase someone much better at aphorisms than I: I strive to write something worth reading and when I cannot do that I try to do something worth writing. I have my own Dr Who oriented blog at http://www.exanima.co.uk
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