The Doctor reluctantly helps Ian and Barbara to use the Daleks' time machine to return home.Īs the Daleks place the Doctor's position in time and space, the Doctor and his companions are busy in the TARDIS. The Doctor's party seizes this opportunity to escape. The Daleks and the Mechanoids engage in a fierce battle which ends in their mutual destruction. The travellers are taken prisoner by the Mechanoids - robots sent some fifty years earlier to prepare landing sites for human colonists who never arrived - and meet Steven Taylor, a stranded astronaut who has been the Mechanoids' captive for the past two years. The chase begins on the desert planet Aridius and takes in a number of stopping-off points, including a spooky haunted house which is actually a futuristic fun-fair attraction.Įventually, both time machines arrive on the jungle planet Mechanus, where the Daleks try to infiltrate and kill the Doctor's party with a robotic double of him.
The travellers learn from the Time-Space Visualiser (taken from the Moroks' museum) that Daleks, equipped with their own time machine, are on their trail with orders to exterminate them. It also saw the program's take on the mystery of the Mary Celeste, a story that would be contradicted by other media. Similar appearances would occur elsewhere in the programme's history.
The Chase also saw characters from other works of fiction-making appearances, albeit as robotic duplicates in this story. A similar style would later be used in The Daleks' Master Plan and The Infinite Quest. It saw the same story style as Nation's The Keys of Marinus, with the TARDIS crew in different locations nearly every episode. The story also featured the first instance where a doppelgänger of the Doctor appears. Peter Purves further did "double-duty" in this story by appearing earlier in the serial as an incidental character. It also featured the first appearance of new companion Steven Taylor, portrayed by Peter Purves. As well as featuring the first use of time travel by the Daleks, it was the final regular appearances of William Russell as Ian Chesterton and Jacqueline Hill as Barbara Wright respectively. The Chase was the eighth and penultimate serial of season 2 of Doctor Who. You may wish to consult The Chase (disambiguation) for other, similarly-named pages.