Doctor Who A-Z #18 – Galaxy 4 (1965)

As Doctor Who started to define itself and learn what it was good at, it was inevitable that a few writers would fall by the wayside. They may have seemed like good fits for the programme when they were commissioned, but by the time their episodes were broadcast the show would have developed in a different direction. William Emms, the author of Galaxy 4, is the last of the Hartnell era’s one-and-done writers, some of whom – like The Sensorites‘s Peter R Newman – turned in perfectly good stories. Some of them didn’t. While Galaxy 4 isn’t the most reviled of these orphan scripts, it is perhaps the one with the biggest target painted on its back. It’s a story set on a matriarchal planet, a plot device which recurs in two of the later series’ most notorious unmade scripts (Mission to Magnus and Prison in Space, the tone of the latter of which can be judged by the fact that it had a villain called “Chairman Babs”). It is remembered among fans for two things: the clonking obviousness of its never-judge-a-book-by-its-cover moral, and the desperate attempt to create a new Dalek craze with its robot monsters, the Chumblies. 

Fan memory, though, is not always reliable, particularly with a story that’s as poorly represented in the archives as Galaxy 4. Until the rediscovery of its third episode in 2011, it survived as nothing more than an off-air recording and a set of publicity stills. Getting the chance to see that third episode didn’t turn the story’s reputation around as completely as the rediscovery of The Enemy of the World did, but it did contain its share of pleasant surprises, not least Stephanie Bidmead’s excellent performance as the Drahvin leader Maaga. So, with the caveat that episodes 1, 2 and 4 might turn up one day and cause us to reassess it yet again, let’s demolish those two fan myths about Galaxy 4. 

The easiest one to knock down is the idea that the Chumblies were meant to be the new Daleks. While I’m sure the BBC wouldn’t have objected to a merchandising bonanza based around the little squat bots, they’re nowhere near as brazen an effort to damage Terry Nation’s income stream as the Quarks would be a few years later. They simply don’t fill the same space in the story as the Daleks would. They occasionally threaten people, but only in self-defence, they get a nice cute nickname courtesy of Vicki, and they prove to be a benign presence overall. They might have been intended as a recurring monster, inasmuch as “monster” can be used to describe any non-humanoid alien. But turning them into a recurring villain would require the mother of all retcons.

It’s quite funny that some fans mock the Chumblies for not being scary, apparently failing to realise they were never intended to be, since the other common criticism of Galaxy 4 is that it’s painfully obvious which races are good and which races are evil. While Emms’s script will never be held up as one of Doctor Who‘s most complex, this is a bit unfair. The central rug-pull, that this week’s ugly aliens are actually nice, is sturdy enough to still work well in 21st-century episodes like The Doctor’s Daughter and Demons of the Punjab. Moreover, it’s not a simple reversal of sympathies: whereas the true nature of the monstrous-looking Rills is played as a twist, the Drahvins are treated with suspicion from the start. It’s not just that they’re beautiful, it’s that their cloned perfection is genuinely eerie. If anything in Galaxy 4 is in conversation with Terry Nation’s version of Doctor Who, it’s not the Chumblies, it’s this: here we have a version of The Daleks where the Thals turn out to be the bad guys.

It helps that Emms wrote the Drahvins as an all-male race, before changing them to female on the advice of producer Verity Lambert. It means that the script never descends to the sexist “can you imagine if women gave the orders?” farce of Prison in Space, although there is a gender angle: Maaga’s unshakeable, binary certainty about what women are good for and what men are good for means she is probably a terf. There’s also a bit of gender-switching behind the scenes; Emms’s script was hastily rewritten after Jacqueline Hill and William Russell left the series, resulting in Steven getting most of Barbara’s dialogue. Peter Purves wasn’t happy about this, and it’s true that Galaxy 4 isn’t much of a showcase for any of the leads. But it is certainly a showcase for Bidmead, as well as the essential, endearing innocence of the show’s concept of science fiction at this early stage.

That last element is particularly cherishable, because it’s about to change. The show’s slow drift towards science fiction, which arguably reached its tipping point at the end of the last season with The Time Meddler, is about to make the Doctor Who production team do something they’ve never done before: two back-to-back stories set on alien planets. From here on, the science fiction aspects of Doctor Who will be taken far more seriously than they have been previously. And if the Chumblies weren’t exactly the new Daleks – and they weren’t meant to be! – that doesn’t matter. We are about to have more of the old Daleks than anyone ever thought possible.

Next: Mission to the Unknown (1965)

Graham’s Archive – Galaxy 4

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