Beauty and the Beast - but where is the true enemy? What are the Chumblies? And what happened to Galaxies 1, 2 and 3?
Season 3 begins and TV Club is on a planet in danger of imminent destruction which, if you actually listen to the dialogue, isn’t actually in Galaxy 4…
Watch the existing episode Air Lock on BBC iPlayer
Or the entire serial as a colour animation:
Or buy it on DVD or BluRay:
Rate and review below:
As I mentioned, I quite enjoyed Maaga when watching this recently. Her performance was fun, even if I couldn’t see half of it.
“Oh, we have a small number of men, as many as we need. The rest we kill. They consume valuable food and fulfill no particular function.”
I also quite liked the Rills.
OK, so it’s rather wonky, but I do find plenty to enjoy anput this serial. Is it good? No, I wouldn’t go that far, and yet…
…typical of the Hartnell era, it is bold and inventive in its portrayal of aliens and alien worlds. The Rills are different to anything else we’ve seen. They are an ambitious concept and what little we see of them really triggers the imagination. They even breathe a different atmosphere.
It’ll never be a favourite of mine, but I get a lot from it. I applaud the general concept and the ambition of the thing.
It’d be nice to revisit them sometime in Modern Who, maybe visit their home planet.
I agree, especially now they could be realised more fully. Genuinely interesting, different and truly alien!
Yayyy the Chumblies!!! I actually don’t remember this serial too well but I am fond of those daft things
This is one where the animation really helps. The story itself is fine, put could probably been presented as two episodes rather than four. There is quite a bit of wheel spinning in this story, which does not translate well in a recon.
I miss Babs and Ian…
3/5 
3,5/5 for the animation
I really enjoy this serial. While it’s not the most original story, it is told rather well.
The animated version is great, and the little peak at live action shows that it was a well-made serial.
4/5 from me.
It may be a little problematic but its fun and charming and quaint.
Also, is it controversial to say I really don’t like the animation for this episode? I think, for the most part, a lot of the recent animations have dropped in quality and the one surviving episode of Galaxy 4 we have is leagues above the others.
Yeah, I found the animation a little lacking. I think it might be to do with the choice to make these enormous vistas which are then populated by a cast of no more than 10. It makes everything look very empty. I also wasn’t taken by the design of the Rill ship - although the original TV version is decidedly odd in itself.
As for the story itself, it’s a very middling affair for me but I do like the fact that there were some attempts to try different things such as the flashbacks to when the Drahvins originally arrived and the deception Maaga has been perpetuating about the Rills to her own soldiers.
Not a fan of this one. I get what they’re going for of not judging by appearances, but there are far better stories that do similar ideas. Everyone likes the Chumblies, but I find that when they’re supposed to be portrayed as a threat early on, I don’t buy it. See also the Quarks. Maaga was a decent villain, even if it was pretty obvious that she was the villain even when they’re supposedly trying to show them as the good and beautiful ones and the Rills as the evil and ugly ones. It’s a rather uneventful story aside from Steven in the airlock, and one that I think doesn’t quite achieve its goals in execution. The animation did very few of the characters justice, especially Vicki. 4/10, or 2 Stars out of 5 by TG rating.
This is one of the weaker Hartnell-era stories.
I don’t fancy watching the LC reconstruction again, because it’s dull.
I watched the animation earlier this year, which improved the story slightly for me.
I also read the Target novelisation earlier, and it’s a word-for-word adaptation.
So I decided to listen to the Tarwht audiobook release for the club. I listened to the first two chapters (representing the first two episodes) today. Maureen O’Brien makes it nice to listen.
I uploaded my review for the LC reconstruction, originally written in 2022, on the site and will share it here for you.
Galaxy Four (LC) = 3/10
Galaxy Four (animated) = 5/10
In short, it’s four episodes of a small cast walking back and forth between two locations while waiting for the world to blow up. It’s slow, dull, and uninspired, despite its important theme of not judging a book by its cover. Steven isn’t given anything to do, Vicki is pointless, and the Chumblies are unbearable (especially during the many scenes with bad dialogue where we have to listen to their endless beeping). Most scenes are lengthy and don’t achieve a lot, and the twists are pretty predictable. There’s a lack of urgency and tension despite the situation. Maaga is a pretty effective character, though, and I’m impressed to see an (almost) all-female supporting cast in the 60s Who.
It’s a perfectly average story - nothing particularly bad about but nothing outstandingly good either. The animation does do a lot to enhance the story for me. Previously I’d listened to the soundtrack CDs and it is a very difficult listen with those tedious Chumbly scenes. The returned episode 3 does help but being able to watch the whole thing definitely elevates the story.
This one is a tricky one for me to rate. I don’t hate it nor do I like it.
It’s quite a simple one and one I’d argue with some great elements but also a lot of “whatever” aspect to it. I like the Chumblies, but the sounds here get on your nerves really quickly. I like Maaga here, she has a great performance in the only surviving Episode and overall for most of the Serial. I think we have some lovely Vicki Doctor Moments (in particular the one with the rock). But overall it doesn’t do much for me.
The Animation is okay and does its job well, it doesn’t really give the story a new life (like the macra one did for its story) nor does it make the story any more interesting, but ehh it has some very nice aspect to it. I like the sets in the Animation, despite the scale maybe being a bit too much at the end.
Overall this is just meh story, not particular amazing nor bad, some standout moments here and there but definitely one of the weaker Hartnell Tales
Galaxy Four (Target audiobook) = 5/10
I finished the audiobook today. It’s pretty much a word-for-word adaptation of the four scripts, written by William Emms himself. Nothing added, nothing removed (well, we get some inner dialogue for Maaga, fleshing her out a bit, but that’s it). Maureen O’Brien makes it a fine listen though, and her Maaga voice is nice. I think I prefer this version to the telesnap reconstruction at least, but it’s still far from being my favourite story.
I remember not particularly enjoying this one as an animation, I thought it was kind of boring. I think it lacked a bit of life, which is very hard to do with animation. I enjoyed the surviving episode a lot more. In total, there’s just not much to this story, it’s not bad but it’s not particularly good either.
Watched the animated reconstruction in black and white, as well as the one surviving clip from episode 1 and the surviving episode 3.
To put my conclusion up front: it’s a perfect example of many interesting and clever parts not automatically leading to a good serial. At the same time, all the clever parts prevent it from being bad. Even hampered by the loss of three-quarters of the original material and said material being replaced by very bad animation, it’s still a 3/5 for me. Watching the surviving original stuff, I guess it would be 3.5/5 with better animation or if all original episodes were still available. So, on a scale from 1 to 10, a solid 7/10.
The depiction of the all-women Drahvins is interesting. At first, I thought ‘militaristic/fascist,’ but later on, I got more of a vibe of a society structured in a beehive kind of way: the males not really counting for anything (drones), most of the people being quite simple-minded and ‘bred’ that way (worker bees), with a few individuals who are actually unique. In bees, a main factor for becoming a queen is the food. In the serial, the ‘Soldier-Drahvins’ get different food than their leader, the ‘queen’ of that little hive.
So, that’s my headcanon for now. 
Maybe I’ll read up on the intentions of the creators of this story later on.
In the serial, it is mentioned that ‘the Drahvins kill,’ etc. I guess most viewers will take this as all the Drahvins being like Maaga and her little crew. Starting to think about Drahvin society, I became aware that that’s not necessarily true. Not even the Rills saying that necessarily think that way. Because it’s just not usual to say things like ‘the Drahvins we encountered’ or ‘the Drahvins stranded on this planet.’ It is usual to shorten such things to ‘the Drahvins’ when the context is clear for all. Who else but the Drahvins they encountered and are now stranded on the planet and as they have only one ‘fully thinking individual,’ more precisely their leader Maaga should be meant? Not necessary to spell that out when talking about ‘the Drahvins’ in the context they were talked about.
So, again headcanon kicking in, I think probably not all “Queen Drahvins” have the same sadistic character as Maaga. Brilliantly portrayed by Stephanie Bidmead, her facial expression when doing cruel things like fantasizing about letting the Rills and the TARDIS team die on the planet was top performance and sadly missed in the animated reconstruction.
The animated reconstruction has really beautiful backgrounds but is massively lacking in character design. Comparing the surviving original material with the reconstructed one, I noticed a big difference in how I interpreted the story. For example, having not watched ‘The Chase’ and ‘The Time Meddler’ for quite some time, this episode served as a reintroduction to Steven for me. My first impression? I have to say, I did not like him. What a tool.
But then I watched the surviving clip from episode one: astonishing how much more sympathetic Steven came across when played by a real actor with all the facial expressions and body language that brings with it.
But not only does the way the characters were animated remove facial expressions and body language, but the character design is also clearly a botched job. I mean, not even the relative height of the characters is correct. It did not impact my viewing experience at the beginning, but as the serial went on, this hampered it more and more. This was not helped by the circumstance that this is a serial where the audio track really, really depends on the visuals accompanying it to form a good whole, in my opinion.
I really liked the Doctor in this serial. He remains level-headed, calmly assessing the situation and not just taking things at face value. This is afforded by the character of Steven being as he is. As bad as my first impression of Steven (mainly because of the animation) was, I really like the dynamic this character brings to the table.
The idea of the Rills being—from a human point of view—monstrous-looking, toxic gas-breathing but also very wise and friendly beings is very interesting. As an avid reader and watcher of sci-fi, it’s not really an astonishing concept for me in the here and now. But when I try to imagine the impact that serial would have had on me when I was a child, I have to applaud the creators of the serial. It would have really blown my mind (just as other stories I actually read as a child did back then).
Speaking of the Rills: I really liked the design for the Chumblies. And astonishingly enough, it worked not only in the animated version but also in the live-action version. Respect.
Absolute genius, the short dialogue between the Doctor and Vicki when she threw the stone. 
There is probably more I liked, stuff I am just not thinking of at the moment. So why did the serial not quite land with me?
Besides the problem with the missing episodes reconstructed in a way that makes the serial probably worse than it originally was, there are just too many micro-incongruencies in it. The parts do not quite fit together. For example, should Vicki’s reaction regarding the alien Rills have been as negative as it was, seeing that she is from the future when mankind had already gone to the stars (and she had a ‘monstrous’ creature as a pet)?
But accepting that, shouldn’t it have then taken a little longer or needed an explicit transition to the 180° change of attitude to trusting and liking the Rills? In my opinion, there were just too many of these—oftentimes micro, but the amount does it—jumps in the story.
A great post about the story.
If I remember correctly, this was originally written for Ian, Barbara and Vicki, so in the finished product, Steven got a lot of Barbara’s lines.
This topic also exists: