The Chase (Doctor Who) - Plot

Plot

In the TARDIS, the four travellers are huddling around the Time-Space Visualiser, a television-like souvenir from their recent adventure at the Space Museum, which can pick up on any past event in the whole of time and space. The TARDIS then lands, and the Doctor confirms that the conditions are hospitable. Ian and Vicki leave to explore the desert wilderness. They find an ancient trap door in the sand. Inside, they are trapped — and become haunted by hostile tentacle creatures called Mire Beasts.

Meanwhile, the Doctor and Barbara are sunbathing. But they see on the 'Visualiser' a "broadcast" of the Daleks preparing to give a report. The Daleks' plan to follow "the enemy time machine" (the TARDIS) to the Sagarro Desert on the planet Aridius. The Daleks plan to take the TARDIS, find the Doctor and his companions, and exterminate them. The Doctor and Barbara watch the Incursion Squad embark and dematerialise. The Doctor immediately realises that these events happened in the past — the Daleks may already be here. They must find Ian and Vicki and leave immediately.

After a sandstormy night the Doctor and Barbara see the Daleks emerging from the sands. The Daleks cannot find the time travellers, but they do locate the TARDIS under the sand and begin to have it dug out by a group of native Aridians, whom they have enslaved. The slave force is exterminated when they are of no further value. The Doctor and Barbara are saved by other amphibious humanoid Aridians. The Aridians also find Vicki and Ian, who were injured when a wall collapsed in an explosion used to kill the Mire Beasts that were threatening them. The Mire Beasts soon reappear, killing the Aridian Malsan who was holding the party prisoner in preparation for the handover. The Doctor and his friends flee in the confusion and manage to evade a Dalek scout and get back to the TARDIS.

There now follows a chase through time and space, with the Dalek vessel determined to track down and exterminate the Doctor and his friends. The Daleks are but fifteen minutes behind and the gap is closing. The first stop is the top of the Empire State Building in New York in 1966. The Doctor then reaches the Atlantic Ocean and boards the sailing ship Mary Celeste. The crew ventures outside and are mistaken for stowaways. They sneak away in the TARDIS as the crew searches the ship for them. Soon the Daleks arrive and the frightened crew abandons ship, all jumping overboard. The next point of landing is a mysterious old house where both Dracula and Frankenstein's monster have come alive. These terrors stalk the building but also attack the Incursion Squad when they arrive. In the confusion to depart, the Doctor, Ian and Barbara leave Vicki behind, never realising they have simply been visiting a futuristic theme attraction called the Festival of Ghana, in 1996. The Daleks are repelled back into their vessel by the monsters (who are in fact robots), and Vicki stows away aboard the Dalek ship. She travels in it to the jungle world of Mechanus, where the Doctor's TARDIS has already landed.

On the Dalek ship, Vicki witnesses the Daleks' Replicator machine in action: an android replica of the Doctor is produced and is programmed to kill the original Doctor and his companions. When the Dalek ship arrives on Mechanus, the robot killer is dispatched. The jungle is also hostile, with large fungoid plants, which attack humans and only retreat when exposed to light. After a while the four travellers are reunited and the real Doctor unmasks the robot counterpart, disabling it with his stick.

The next morning, the Doctor notices that there is a vast metal city over the jungle, and they all decide to venture into the structure. Within moments, robot Mechonoids arrive and capture rather than invite them into the city. There they are locked in a cage-like room with a dishevelled man named Steven Taylor, an astronaut from Earth who crash-landed on the planet two years earlier and has been kept as a prisoner by the Mechonoids since then. The Daleks now attack the city, so it is time for action. The Doctor and his party and Steven manage to escape from the city down some cables, while the Mechonoids and Daleks become involved in a pitched battle which devastates both sides as well as the building. The four companions flee to safety but are separated from Steven, whom they presume to have been killed.

They find the deserted Dalek time machine and persuade the Doctor to show Ian how to operate it. After a tearful farewell, Ian and Barbara return to their own planet at last — and almost to their own time, being two years out in London of 1965. The machine is destroyed using the auto-destruct mechanism once Barbara and Ian are out of it.