My Top Twenty Favourite
Doctor Who Stories
The Chase
I like The Chase and think it is about time the orthodox view that it is too silly, too long or set on too many locations is challenged.
The Chase is a superb story about a chase through space and time as the Doctor and his companions are pursued by Daleks intent on exterminating their greatest enemies. The pace of this story is fast and the frantic travelling through time is made to feel real by the numerous different locations the characters visit.
First it is the planet Aridius, then the Mary Celeste, then the Empire State Building, a house of horrors and finally the planet Mechanus.
In this story, the third Dalek serial and the sixteenth Doctor Who, William Hartnell gives a terrific performance as the Doctor. He has a screen presence very few could match and he is totally spellbinding to watch. It is no wonder that Hartnell had such a huge fan following when he played the Doctor.
The scenes involving a robot Doctor are one of the highlights of this story. It is lovely to see Edmund Warwick imitating the Doctor's mannerisms faultlessly.
This story is significant in the development of Doctor Who in a number of ways. Ian and Barbara leave the TARDIS at the end of the story marking the departure of the last of the original TARDIS companions. There is more than a hint of William Hartnell's true emotion in the sequence when Ian and Barbara depart. Hartnell was unsettled at losing his remaining original co-stars when this story was made.
For the first time in "The Chase", the Daleks sport the vertical struts around their middle. This set the mould for future Dalek appearances in the series and they remained virtually unchanged until their last appearance in 1988. John Scott Martin made his first appearance inside a Dalek in this story and he would go on to become the most famous Dalek operator of them all.
This story sparked one of the greatest controversies amongst fans over the name of the inhabitants of the planet Mechanus. Are they Mechanoids or Mechonoids???
A fast exciting yarn, albeit with some light relief here and there, "The Chase" deserves to be remembered as one of the finest stories of the Hartnell era.