Ep. 24 The Snows of Death

As a countdown to the 50^th anniversary of Doctor Who I and my wife will be watching an episode a day until we are caught up to whatever the Beeb has planned. This is a record of my initial reaction to each day's episode published with minimal editing and crappy synopsis.

"You don't kill anyone in this country; the cold and the wolves do that."

   This may be the worst single episode of the first series.
   It starts out promising.  Ian and Barbara are stranded in the barren frozen wastes.  Exhausted, they collapse into the snow only to be rescued by the trapper Vasor.
   They awaken in Vasor's shack.  Vasor is one of the more despicable characters in Doctor Who.  In the one episode that he's in he lies, steals, attempts rape, leaves multiple people to die multiple times and stashes raw meat in Ian's pack to draw the wolves down on him.
    There are two times where the Ian and/or Barbara are handed the idiot ball simply to pad out the episode and move the plot along.
    They uncover Vasor's treachery.  Fine.  They find the travel dials and Consciousness Machine keys that he stole from the others.  Fine.  They force him to take them to the place where he left Susan and Sabetha.  Fine.  So why don't they reclaim their equipment?
   The only answer that I can come up with is this.  If they didn't leave the dials and keys at his shack they would have been able to easily escape from the threat that they later encounter and they would not have been able to lead said threat back to the shack to give Vasor his comeuppance. 
    They then get to the cliched suspension bridge over a chasm inside a mountain.  Ian has been strong arming Vasor this entire trip through the mountain, but all of a sudden leaves him alone on the side of the bridge that leads to the way out.  Vasor promptly cuts the bridge and strands the strangers on the other side.
    Why did Ian do this?  Because the script said so.
    This is lazy writing Terry.
    The pressure on the designers really shows in this episode.  The rope bridge is maybe four feet across.  Ian and Barbara jumped a bigger chasm in The Ordeal (another Terry Nation script btw.)  The script specifies that this is an ice cave so they decided to light the set so that the white of the ice walls would be very visible to the audience.  Unfortunately this meant that the ice walls were very visible to the audience.  The underground scenes in the Daleks works, in part, because they went with dim lighting.  A brightly lit white set didn't work.
   Poor Ray Cusick.

Next up: Sentence of Death

PS: Hartnell actually had two weeks off.  Lucky him.