Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...
Day Eighty-One: Journey into Terror (The Chase, Episode Four)
Dear diary,
There's a point in this episode, when the Doctor and Ian have discovered the laboratory, and Ian tells the Doctor he's rather not know that's laying in wait under the sheet on the table. “Where's your sense of adventure?” the Doctor asks him. “It died a slow and painful death,” Ian replies.
I've always cited Ian and Barbara as being among my favourite companions - and some of the best examples of companions that Doctor Who has ever produced. However, as anyone who's been following the blog along will have no doubt noticed, I've been less than impressed with the state of the show in its second season that I was with the first.
Sadly, Ian and Barbara have come to represent all that I'm not liking with the programme at the moment. They're the only real thing that's still there from the beginning (the Doctor is enough of a different character now that he may as well be brand new), and the longer they stick around for, the more I'm growing tired of them.
That's not a slight against William Russell or Jacqueline Hill at all, by the way. They both continue to be fantastic, though I'm starting to notice more and more instances of them just sort of coasting through scenes (or, to use another phrase I've been saying about Who this season, they're slipping into auto pilot). I think it started somewhere around The Web Planet, and it's been becoming more and more noticeable as we've gone on.
During Episode Two of The Space Museum, when the pair spent a lot of time arguing with each other - and with Vicki - I said that it felt like a relationship on the rocks, just sticking together out of habit. We get more of that here, when they argue with the Doctor about leaving Vicki behind, and not being able to go back for her. It just feels more-and-more that the time has come for Ian and Barbara to go. By the time they do leave the series, I'll have spent eighty-three days in their company: perhaps just a little too long.
Still, it's great to see their exit already being set up. It's been a good few years since I last saw The Chase, and enough time for me to have assumed that they simply decided to hijack the Daleks' time capsule to get them home in the closing moments of Episode Six. It's nice to see that actually, using the other time machine is an idea introduced here. As with Susan's exit earlier this season, a lot of thought is being given to departures at this stage.
Elsewhere, the haunted house set looks fantastic. I'm not sure how I feel about the idea that it all turns out to have been a fun house exhibit - I wonder if the Doctor's theory that it may be a product of the collective human imagination may be more interesting as a concept. Incidentally, this is the perfect type of story to utilise this setting for - it feels just right to see our regulars exploring a house like this, but I fear it would have grown tiresome after an episode. The appearance of Frankenstein's monster and Dracula are another one of those things that this story gets derided for (and another example of something I was dreading), but they're a great addition.
Plus, the Frankenstein make-up is great!
And then we're onto the robot replica of Doctor Who. You could *almost get away with the resemblance not being the best, if only they didn't cut to a close-up of Hartnell at the very end! Noooo!
Next Episode: The Death of Doctor Who
Shhh. For *this story, that's his name. 
