Who Reviews Galaxy 4 by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s other robot is a Chumbley.

It’s an odd affair from start to finish, Galaxy 4. The First Doctor, Steven and Vicki land on Planet Nameless and are having a traditional ‘let’s see who can capture us first’ walk about when they encounter a Chumbley. It’s not really a Chumbley of course, it’s possibly one of the most useless robots ever devised (although admittedly the Dominators might later have a thing or two to say about that). But Vicki, with the vaguely imperialistic tone of a space-time traveller, names it a Chumbley because, she says, it moves in a ‘chumbley’ way.

O…K then. In itself, it’s a nice little piece of characterisation – the young space adventurer naming what she sees in quite a twee and ‘sixties-girlish’ way, and her male companions going along with it in an indulgent, somewhat patronising style, as though she’s just announced that everyone knows Father Christmas is real.

Chumbley or not, the robot’s possibly threatening, so when it’s attacked by a posse of space vixens, there’s a certain debt of gratitude to be paid, and Steven is at first very…shall we say…’sixties-man’ eager to pay it. It emerges that these are the Drahvins, mostly-cloned warriors under the command of their uncloned and therefore ‘real’ leader, Maaga. They’re basically Sontarans with better hairstyles – and you’re more than welcome for the nightmares that concept brings you. The point of all of this is that the Drahvins, while they look appealingly humanoid on different levels, are actually a ruthless, not to say potentially murderous bunch.

As the story evolves beyond ‘let’s wander round a bit and get into trouble,’ writer William Emms does his duty by the science fiction audience – the Drahvins and the Tardis crew have landed on a planet with a lifespan measured in days, and the Doctor, by virtue of some fairly mysterious calculations, is able to radically shorten their estimation of how long they have until the world goes bang. That adds another dimension beyond the big ticking clock – because the Drahvins and the Tardis travellers are not alone on the planet. The Chumblies don’t belong to either party, but to the Rills – a reptilian race, feared and loathed by Maaga, and so by her crew. But are they as bad as everyone thinks?

That then is the heart of the drama of Galaxy 4. Beyond the ticking clock of the planetary explosion, and the occasional awkwardness of Steven left behind in a captive role on the Drahvin ship as a hostage against the Doctor and Vicki’s good behaviour, it’s a story of perception versus reality. Fake news, if you like, versus the truth. Because the Rills are gruesome-looking beggars who breathe differently to us. These fundamental differences feed both Maaga’s fear and her ability to see them inherently as ‘lesser’ creatures than the Drahvins – and therefore she feels justified in taking their ship to effect her escape from the exploding planet, while leaving them to die in the coming inferno.

Which is worse? The people who look and breathe differently to us, but appear to mean nobody any harm, or the people who are ‘like us,’ but want to negate and destroy ‘the other’ for their own benefit?

Galaxy 4, while including a good deal of sitting around in spaceships and trudging across a clock-ticking planet surface, actually delivers plenty of sci-fi for your viewing dollar – the cloned race of Drahvins, the reptilian Rills, a big ticking clock to keep the adventure running, but above all, it gives us a modern human dilemma: how do we treat people who are different from us in some superficial, or indeed fundamental ways? The remit of science-fiction is to ask the questions that apply to our world, in new, contextually divorced ways that make us think about them while we enjoy some technologically-enhanced adventure. And right there in 1965, William Emms delivered us that on a four-episode plate in Galaxy 4. You could argue it doesn’t matter who the ‘Rills’ are in our society – certainly, as time has moved on, the identity of the ‘other’ has changed. In the mid-sixties, the most potently newsworthy ‘other’ for a British science-fiction audience was likely to be immigrants of colour coming from across the Commonwealth. In 2019, the Rills are immigrants from Syria. The central dilemma of Galaxy 4 is simple, and therefore timeless – it’s the question of how we who have the bigger guns, the more engrained opportunities, choose to respond to people we’ve been told should frighten us. Will we follow Maaga into antagonism, rejection, thievery and destruction, or will we, like initially Vicki and ultimately the whole Tardis crew, accept the ‘other,’ work with them for the benefit of all, and ultimately realise that fundamental differences are actually immaterial when you’re all in the same boat – or indeed, on the same imminently-exploding planet.

It’s the timeless quality of that message that allows Galaxy 4 to still have an impact beyond its simple set-up today, and while the story is mostly missing in terms of its visuals, there are great audio renderings of the story that can still bring it wholly home to you. Hartnell’s Doctor here is semi-mystical in performance while being all about the science in the script. Peter Purves has said he wasn’t terribly happy with his as Steven Taylor role in the story – the role he took on in Galaxy 4 was initially written on the understanding that Ian and Barbara would still be in the Tardis, and his was the Barbara part (though it’s interesting to imagine Galaxy 4 with the strong and logical schoolteacher in play, rather than the headstrong space pilot, and it certainly would have made for more strongly obvious parallel with our own world to have a female 1960s schoolteacher in the mix of this particular story). And in any assessment of the story, you have to pay tribute to Stephanie Bidmead as Maaga, who gives the Drahvins their blueprint both physically and in their strength of conviction and warrior zeal, making them a species that live on in the DNA of Who-fans to this day as something beyond the ‘space vixen’ stereotype they could easily have become. Compared, say, to early Star Trek alien females, they’re not falling into trysts with the hunky space pilot – the Drahvins are actually the face of blunt-edged warlike authority, and you’d be a fool to treat them lightly. Ultimately though, the most wide-eyed, open-minded fun across the four episodes is brought by Maureen O’Brien as Vicki, who first properly questions the narrative of the Drahvins, and who bridges the gap between that narrative and her fellow Tardis travellers, allowing for a dialogue with the Rills, and ultimately a solution to the problem of the exploding planet – for everyone prepared to get on board. And of course, lest we forget, she gives us one of the most immortal robot-names in the history of Doctor Who. She gives us the Chumblies.

Galaxy 4 is a story which itself ‘chumbles’ along, sometimes slowly, sometimes at pace – but the ground it covers in its four episodes is impressive in the intensity of its sci-fi ideas, and timelessly relevant in terms of its message.