"I just know that the most dangerous moment is the moment of materialization."
This story exists in the BBC archives, but has yet to be released on DVD. So Ang and I are still watching this online. Don't worry Auntie Beeb, you'll get {more of our} our money soon enough.
This one may hold a special place in Ang's heart. It features gardening, a cat and an evil businessman. The first two she loves and the third she hates enough to (probably) be glad when she sees his comeuppance.
The TARDIS is in transit after leaving 18th century France. Barbara burns her hand on the over heating TARDIS console. Susan checks the Fault Locator and reads off the code to the Doctor. All of a sudden the fecal matter hits the fan, Susan is screaming and the TARDIS doors open while they're about to materialize. The Doctor has no idea what caused this and urges the others to push the doors closed while he steers the ship.
They do and things seem to return to normal. The Doctor is still in a state though. Ian and Barbara are unsure as to why. Did anything get out or into the TARDIS? The Doctor tells them no, they are thinking too much in 20th century terms, this is time travel.
They run checks on the ship only to find that everything is running nominal (a little shout out to my MST3K friends.) Everything outside the ship comes up safe for human life, but when they turn on the scanner it explodes. Almost as if it was trying to show something too big for it to contain.
The Doctor apologizes to Barbara for his temper getting the better of him when things were going pear shaped. When they decide to go exploring he teams up with Barbara. This isn't the first time that this has happened.
As a brief aside, I've been meaning to point out the fact that the Doctor has been getting Chesterton's name right for the past several episodes. I haven't been keeping proper track of it, but the last time that I can remember the Doctor mangling Ian's name was in The Brink of Destruction. It's possible that it happened again after that, but it didn't register.
The Doctor and Barbara encounter a giant earth worm. Barbara initially believes that it is a giant snake. They go on a little ways and discover a 12 foot long log that's burnt on one end. The Doctor comes to the obvious conclusion that opening the TARDIS doors during materialization somehow shrank the TARDIS and it's occupants. He estimates that they are about an inch tall.
Susan comes to the same conclusion after she and Ian encounter a dead ant the size of Ian's forearm, a seed package the size of a highway billboard and a matchbox the size of a ferrari.
On the plus side they did have Susan make the leap that they had shrunk. On the down side she got hysterical at the sight of a giant ant. Come on people, she's been on at least six alien worlds that we know of and seen some pretty weird crap along the way, she shouldn't scream at every thing that isn't "normal."
Ian ends up getting stuck inside the matchbox when it's owner comes to retrieve it. He gets carried to a nearby house where the aforementioned cat and evil businessman live.
The owner of the matchbox turns out to be a man from the ministry come to tell the evil businessman that he's made an evil insecticide (DN6) that will kill ALL insects including the helpful ones. He can't give authorization for it to be used even though Forrester (the evil businessman) has already invested his entire fortune getting everything set to go into production.
Forrester, being an evil businessman on the edge of financial ruin, takes out a revolver and kills the man with the matchbox. They don't actually show the shooting, they cut to the Doctor and the ladies. We hear the revolver through their ears. Something like a clap of thunder or a cannon.
Ian makes it out of the matchbox, sees the dead giant civil servant and manages to make it to the edge of the path where the others have gotten to. They take note of all of the dead insect life and are thankful that they didn't have to deal with these things alive. At that moment the cat shows up looking hungry.
This story works well. The premise is straight forward. The audience figures out what is going on a little before the TARDIS crew, but we have the advantage of having read the title of the episode and they only spend a few minutes gathering clues before the Doctor and Susan make their independent conclusions.
The ecological aspect of the story is a direct response to the Rachel Carson book Silent Spring which came out a couple years before this story.
An out of control pesticide had the additional benefit of helping the visuals of this story. It's a lot easier to make a semi-believable dead giant earthworm, ant and bee then to make the same creatures move around. We'll see a story with moving insects a little later in the season and it won't hold up as well as this one does.
The science of how the TARDIS got shrunk is a bit wonky and the part about the scanner exploding is pure bullshit, but that doesn't matter. We got to see giant bugs and that's worth the price of admission alone.
Next up: Dangerous Journey
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