Four Hundred Dawns

Three of the four episodes of "Galaxy 4" are currently missing; all four were wiped by the BBC in the late 1960s, but the third episode was recovered in 2011. All four episodes have now been reconstructed using animation and sound recordings.

The First Doctor and his companions Vicki and Steven arrive on an alien planet. The surface of the planet is an arid desert, and at first they believe it to be devoid of life, although it clearly has clumps of vegetation. Perhaps they meant "devoid of animal life". The script makes use of a plot line used in two serials of the second season, "The Web Planet" and "The Space Museum", namely two different alien races battling one another. Here the two races are the Drahvins, who have the appearance of beautiful women, and the ugly, vaguely reptilian Rills. In an original twist, the scriptwriter William Emms made the beautiful Drahvins evil and the ugly Rills good. The Drahvins have a vaguely fascist social system based upon unquestioning obedience to their leader, Maaga; the Rills are a philosophical race, generally peaceful and only resorting to the use of force in self-defence.

Whereas the Zarbi and the Menoptra in "The Web Planet" and the Xerons and the Moroks in "The Space Museum" were fighting one another for control of their respective planets, the planet in "Galaxy 4" is not worth fighting for because it is due to explode in two days time. (Exactly what will cause it to do so, and how the time of its destruction can be so precisely calculated, is never explained). Both the Drahvins and the Rills have crash-landed on the planet; the main question in the story is "Who will manage to escape before the planet self-destructs?" The Rills are unable to breathe the planet's atmosphere so must remain in their spaceship; they can only explore the surface by using robots which Vicki names "Chumblies".

The only other animated "Doctor Who" episodes I have seen were the two needed to complete the partly-missing serial "The Reign of Terror". Those were done in a very different style, one designed to match the look of the surviving four black-and-white episodes as closely as possible. With "Galaxy 4" the animators had a free hand. Although the original programme was broadcast in black and white, the animations are in colour, much more cartoonish than those for "The Reign of Terror". I must admit that I did not like them very much; they seemed crude and unconvincing, especially in their depiction of movement.

I never saw the original serial when first broadcast in the autumn of 1965; I was only a young child at the time. With a serial which now only exists in animated form, and where the original visuals can no longer be seen, it is difficult to comment on the quality of the acting. The storyline has points of interest, even if some of the cast, including William Hartnell, did not like it. The quality of the animation, however, meant that I did not really enjoy this story. 5/10, with the proviso that I reserve the right to revisit that mark in the unlikely event of the lost episodes resurfacing.