s02 e16: The Chase

In which the Daleks pursue the TARDIS through time and space and have a series of mindbogglingly hilarious misadventures.

Review: 
I really don't want to spoil anything before you read on, but suffice to say that this episode makes me feel very good.


Important Firsts:

• First time the Daleks recognize The Doctor
• First Dalek time travel
• First episode to take place partially in New York.
• First episode to reference the Dalek's aversion to stairs.
• First appearance of Steven
• LAST appearance of Ian and Barbara.

Musings:

• This episode was originally burned, but negatives were recovered in 1978.
• After a recap of the awesome cliffhanger, we get some really stupid-sounding elevator music as the TARDIS materializes.
• This is revealed to be a result of Vicki's terrible taste in music, and the Doctor gets pissed off.
• Vicki hovers over Ian, who reads a sci-fi book called "Monsters of Outer Space" he notes that it is "a bit far-fetched"  He shoos Vicki away because she is being annoying. 
• "I am a useless person!" declares Vicki.
• Then she basically drop-kicks an expensive china set and wreaks havoc.
• The Doctor fixes the Time and Space Visualizer and uses it to spy on Abe Lincoln, Queen Elizabeth the First, Shakespeare, and the Beatles.
• If this entire episode involves the Doctor and his companions essentially watching television, I will flip a shit.
• Although the Beatles part is pretty to fun, especially when Ian rocks out to "Ticket to Ride"
• Vicki is offended when Ian is surprised that she knows about The Beatles.  "I've been to their memorial theater!  Of course I have!  Only thing is--I didn't know they played classical music."
• The TARDIS lands on a desert planet.  The Doctor and Barbara go to sleep while Ian and Vicki wander off to get menaced by creepy sand tentacles.
• OH SHIT BARBARA SEES SOME DALEKS ON TV.
• The Daleks chant "Annihilate!" in addition to "Exterminate!"  
• It appears the Daleks have constructed a time machine and are pursuing the TARDIS across time and space.
• Vicki has been taking hits off the Doctor's pipe: "If you look at the sun through your fingers, you have twenty instead of ten!" she declares.
• "I have the directional instincts of a homing pidgeon," the Doctor declares as he and Barbara wander aimlessly and lost through the desert.
• Ian and Vicki find a trap door in the middle of the desert.  Inside, they are menaced by a giant octopus testicle.
• The Doctor casts a shadow on a vertical backdrop painted to look like a flat stretch of desert. 
• A sandstorm buries the TARDIS, and pretty much every other fucking thing on the planet, including one very pissed-off dalek.
• The second segment of the episode is titled "The Death of Time." This sounds suspiciously like the title of an RTD season finale.
• The Daleks have no trouble running on sand, even without stupid-looking backpacks.
• At least the Daleks are the only threat on this planet. 
• Oh wait.
• Oh double-wait.  The Daleks and the creepy fish-people get into a fight.  This goes about how you would expect.
• The fish people turn out to be pretty dumb.
• My second favorite Dalek catchphrase after "Exterminate" is definitely "I obey."
• The Daleks capture some fish people and force them to dig up the TARDIS.
• The Daleks fire upon the TARDIS in an attempt to destroy it.  Fail.
• The TARDIS crew tricks the Dalek guarding the TARDIS into a pit by playing a sort of perverted game of whack-a-mole.
• Reinforcements arrive, but the crew escapes in the TARDIS.
• The Daleks give chase in their own time machine. 
• Note to Doctor Who producers:  60s elevator music is not appropriate for a chase scene through time and space. 
• There is a mentally handicapped Dalek who is unable to perform simple arithmetic. I think this is supposed to be comic relief or something.
• The TARDIS lands in New York.  This is the first time an episode takes place in the US. Incidentally, the only other episode to take place in New York also involves the Daleks. 
• People talk with terrible fake New York accents.
• Ooh, the TARDIS materializes in the top of the Empire State Building.  
• "You're from Earth!" Barbara exclaims to the first tourist she meets. "No ma'am, I'm from Alabama," he replies with a brilliant southern drawl.
• "I just bet you folks are from Hollywood! I bet you be making some sort of movie-picture!" exclaims the southerner. 
• The TARDIS crew flees his stupidity by dematerializing.  Moments later, the Dalek time machine appears.
• The Dalek and the excitable southerner have an epic showdown.  Ironically, the southerner emerges victorious using his formidable powers of stupidity. 
• Actually, the southerner in played by Peter Purves, who also plays the next companion, Steven. 
• Next stop: some sort of boat, where Barbara has a Titanic moment.
• Attempting to bash in the head of an unruly sailor, Vicki clobbers the hell out of Ian with a lead pipe.  This means that Ian has now been knocked out as many times by his own companions as by his enemies.
• The TARDIS crew dematerializes, once again only moments before the Daleks appear.
• The sailors do not take too kindly to the new "stowaway" and treat it accordingly.
• This is rapidly becoming my favorite segment of any episode in history.  Basically it involves the Daleks bumbling through history and getting their asses punked by locals.
• No but actually the sailors get punked also.  They all end up in the water fleeing the Daleks. 
• HAHA ON SNAP!  Turns out the boat was actually the Marie Celeste!  Next time there is an unexplained plane crash, I am going to put forth a Dalek theory to compete with the various Canadian goose explanations.  I assume Daleks were also responsible for the lost colony of Roanoke.
• Next stop is some sort of ancient European temple. Ian notices some stairs and gets excited, assuming (correctly), that the Daleks will have a bitch of a time dealing with them.
• The Doctor and Ian head to the creepy basement, where they encounter a historically accurate Frankenstein's Monster. 
• Vicki and Barbara have a similar run-in with a dopey version of Count Dracula.
• "I think there might be something strange going on here," observes Barbara.  Oh really?
• The Doctor posits that they have landed inside their own minds. Some sort of nightmare. Trippy shit.
• Ian rejoices, since obviously the Daleks can't follow them into their own heads.
• I REALLY hope he's wrong, since a Dalek vs. Dracula fight would tip this over the edge to "greatest episode ever" status.
• YES THE DALEK TIME MACHINE APPEARS! 
• The Doctor and Ian take refuge in Frankenstein's chamber.
• They are cornered. 
• Ian throws a switch and....
• OH MY GOD DALEK VS FRANKENSTEIN.
• FRANKENSTEIN IS IMMUNE TO DALEK WEAPONRY
• HOLY SHIT NOW HERE COMES DRACULA.
• FRANKENSTEIN CURBSTOMPS A DALEK
• COUNT DRACULA EATS THEM WITH BATS!
• EVERYTHING GOES HORRIBLY AWESOME!
• FUCKING YES THIS IS THE GREATEST EPISODE EVER!!!
• In the hilarious confusion, the Doctor takes off without Vicki, leaving her in the middle of the biggest clusterfuck in Doctor Who history.
• Vicki sneaks in to the Dalek time machine just as it takes off.
• The Daleks make a robot clone of the Doctor, because this episode needed to be even more awesome. I hope the Doctor and his clone end up smacking the hell out of each other with their walking sticks.  Normally I would be joking about this, but so far this episode has delivered on all my hopes and then some.
• This time, the TARDIS lands on some jungle planet.  Ten bucks says the plants come alive and attack the crew.
• Twenty bucks says the plants fight the Daleks.
• Well, that's ten bucks for me already.
• A mushroom swallows Vicki. Yum.
• The Daleks arrive and start shooting the shit out of jungle flora.
• Incidentally, you can see a BBC camera in the upper right of the screencap above.
• Robot Doctor begins stalking Barbara and Ian.
• Barbara gets separated and runs into Robot Doctor who tells her than Ian is dead.  She cries, since this throws a monkey wrench into her plan to get laid.
• Robot Doctor goes apeshit and starts bashing Barbara with his cane.  Ian arrives just in time to rescue her.
• Both Doctors arrive and Ian grapples with one.
• Just as Ian is about to bash its head in with a rock, the other Doctor tells "Susan" to avert her eyes.
• This reveals the impostor to everyone since the Daleks did not know that Susan had been replaced by Vicki.
• OH SHIT FTW!
• The crew finds a somewhat impractical local city.
• The Doctor pretends to be the robot double, but the Daleks don't buy it.
• as they flee, the crew encounters some sort of giant robot sphere thing called a Mechanoid that has a voice even more warbly than the Daleks.  I sense another fight coming on.
• Wow it really sucks that Terry Nation died.  Now BBC needs to pay his estate trillions of dollars every time they churn out a terrible Dalek episode.  But he really wrote some good ones back in the day. 
• The Mechanoids are too fat to pass each other in hallways.  This leads to some awkward moments.
• A random human dude appears and identifies himself as Steven Taylor.  He's sort of a handsome strapping dude with a beard.
• He appears to be stranded alone on the mechanoid-fungus planet.
• It's cute that Ian, Barbara, and Steven get to share one adventure together before Ian and Barbara leave the crew.  Usually it's out with the old before in with the new.  Imagine if Amy Pond had overlapped with Donna Noble for one episode.  Donna would have drop-kicked Amy's annoying ass back to the seventeenth century.
• The Daleks bust down a door, and an all-out bitch-fest ensues between the Daleks and the Mechanoids.
• This goes extremely poorly for the Daleks, especially since the Doctor leaves a random bomb lying around.  Also the mechanoids have flamethrowers.
• "AM EXTERMINATED! AM EXTERMINATED! AM EXTERMINATED!" a Dalek screams after its ass gets blown up.
• The building catches on fire and Steven freaks out and runs back inside to grab a stuffed panda-bear. I am not making this up.
• The Mechanoids are also getting punked.  Really everything is going poorly for everyone.  
• Some pretty awesome pyrotechnics and special effects as pretty much everything on the planet blows up.
• All the Daleks are slain. The TARDIS crew recovers the Dalek time machine.
• Ian and Barbara realize they can use the Dalek time machine to get home since it doens't suck ass like the TARDIS. 
• The Doctor flips a shit, pretending to be cranky. But really he is secretly just sad that Ian and Barbara are leaving. Awwwww.
• Everyone parts ways, not exactly on the happiest of terms.  Sad day.
• Ian and Barbara arrive home!
• This give Ian and Barbara time to consummate their relationship. 
• A montage of Ian and Barbara dicking around London.
• The Doctor watches them on the time and space visualizer.  He is very sad :-(
• And here's the video.
• The TARDIS drifts through space, lonely. 
• Last we saw Steven, it appeared he died in a fire.  We know better, though :-)
• Well, that was fucking phenomenal.  Next episode is also pretty important to the Doctor Who cannon--we get to see a Time Lord other than the Doctor or Susan. 
• Said Time Lord does turn out to be a huge ween, however.