YMMV / Doctor Who S2 E8 "The Chase"

• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Morton Dill laughing at a Dalek and somehow always turning his back while the TARDIS materialises and dematerialises, followed by Daleks storming the Mary Celeste, followed by a slapstick moment where a Dalek falls into the sea for no reason.
• Bizarro Episode: A story where each episode takes the characters to a new location at a time where this was not the norm. There is a cameo from The Beatles. An obnoxious "Ugly American" Stereotype tourist spends half an episode laughing at a Dalek, and the actor playing him comes back playing a companion (!!) later in the story. They have what they assume is a Journey to the Center of the Mind which turns out to be a horror theme park, in which the Comic Trio Daleks fight Dracula (and lose). The Daleks make an Evil Knockoff of the Doctor said to be indistinguishable and treated as such by the characters, and he looks nothing like him. A Dalek falls off a boat for no reason. Giant killer mushrooms are involved. Robots with flamethrowers try to put Barbara in a robot zoo. It's the sort of thing that could only get made in 1965 - love it or hate it, they will never make a story like this again.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Some fans refer to the Daleks' time machine as a "DARDIS". It's alleged that this was actually how Terry Nation himself referred to it in his scripts, though this appears to be a myth.
  • The Dalek Ian traps in a hole is nicknamed Fred, thanks to him Waxing Lyrical to make a Bond One-Liner referencing the novelty song "Right, Said Fred" (incidentally, the vocalist on that song was one Bernard Cribbins, who go on to play Tom Campbell in Daleks' Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D. the following year as well as Wilfred Mott in the show proper during the Revival Series).
• Harsher in Hindsight: A meta example, as the original conception for The Beatles cameo would have had them in makeup as old men, doing a 21st-century reunion tour. When John Lennon was murdered in 1980, John, Paul, George, and Ringo were actually engaging in talks to possibly do a reunion tour in 1981 or '82. Also, even if John had not been killed, George Harrison only lived till 2001, making a tour in the 21st century with the original Beatles impossible.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Ian and Barbara wonder how they will explain their absence to Coal Hill School, clearly not expecting anyone there to believe that they had been kidnapped by a time-travelling alien and encountered murderous cyborg pepper-pot called Daleks. 23 years later, it was revealed that the Daleks had in fact invaded Coal Hill School while Ian and Barbara were away, and been foiled by the Doctor.
  • The TARDIS first lands on a desert planet with two suns.
  • The Doctor encounters Frankenstein's Monster. Flash-forward to "The Haunting of Villa Diodati", where the Thirteenth Doctor actually meets Mary Shelley on the night she writes Frankenstein.
  • Vicki, in response to hearing The Beatles Top of the Pops 1965 performance of "Ticket to Ride" says, "I didn't know they played classical music", to which Ian, bemused, remarks that styles change. The Beatles indeed did drastically shift styles starting later that same year with the release of Rubber Soul, followed by Revolver. Compared to their later experimental work, "Ticket to Ride" could be considered more classic pop.
• Ho Yay: This bit:
  Ian: You've done it again! You've beaten them!
  First Doctor: My dear boy, I could kiss you!
• Memetic Mutation: The 2018 Twitch stream of Classic Who led to many memes of this story based on the previews for Hartnell's era. The biggest meme was Ian's enthusiastic exclamation of "London 1965!" Even the official Doctor Who YouTube channel embraced the meme and changed the video of Ian and Barbara's departure to be called "London 1965!", turning it into an Ascended Meme.
• Not So Crazy Anymore: The story begins with Ian bopping to The Beatles on the timescanner. When he jokingly remarks that future girl Vicki has probably never heard of the Beatles she is indignant: "Of course I know about them. I've been to their Memorial Theatre in Liverpool. But I never knew they played classical music!" The idea of a memorial concert hall doesn't seem so silly in the 21st century, especially since Liverpool now has at least eight separate monuments to The Beatles.
• Older Than They Think:
  • Believe it or not, the Daleks were indicated (though not shown on-screen) to be able to fly up flights of stairs as early as this, their third adventure. Specifically, a Dalek is shown atop the wheel housing of the Marie Celeste, despite the Dalek time machine landing on the ship's deck.
  • This episode also established that it's possible for time travellers to communicate with their home base while in transit, because the Daleks contact Skaro to report on their progress. This was years before the Doctor and the Time Lords would communicate with one another that way, and decades before Nine adapted Rose's cell phone to let her call her Mum from anywhere in time and space.
• Padding: The first episode opens with a sequence of the characters using a machine to view various historical events. As a result, we are treated to a shot of someone who looks nothing like Abraham Lincoln reading out about seven or eight times more of the Gettysburg Address than necessary, a mildly funny sketch about Shakespeare dealing with Queen Elizabeth I's Executive Meddling, and a weird sequence where they all dance to The Beatles singing "Ticket to Ride", apparently under the assumption that It Will Never Catch On. The plot only starts about eighteen minutes in when Barbara accidentally leaves the machine on and picks up a transmission from the Daleks.
• Special Effects Failure:
  • There's a sequence of a long line of Daleks all exiting the door of their time machine. Unfortunately, only having a few Daleks means that we just see the same three Daleks going round and round in a circle to create the illusion of there being more. It's easy to see why they thought it wouldn't be obvious, since the Daleks don't look different to each other, but it somehow is.
  • The Dalek time machine is designed to produce an optical illusion to make it appear as if its a large, column-shaped craft, but is repeatedly filmed at angles where it's plainly obvious that the rear sides of it are flat plywood.
  • When the Dalek falls off the ship, it comes apart. Its head floats, and when the body separates from the skirt you can clearly see it's just an empty shell. This wasn't supposed to happen and really annoyed director Richard Martin, who says if he'd known the Dalek would fall apart like that he would have put something inside it to suggest the Dalek mutant and machine parts.
  • The Mechanoids have a really cool Robo Speak effect on their voices, but it's so hard to understand what they're saying as a result that the storyline dealing with them is almost incomprehensible. Mocked in a DVD Easter Egg where various Talking Heads laugh about how unthreatening they are: One person says that as a child he'd imagined them to be saying such deep and fascinating things, since he couldn't understand them, and then found out what they said was just boring Technobabble.
  • The vampire bat in the castle is very obviously on a wire, but it could be a deliberate or accidental Stylistic Suck since it is actually a prop within the story.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The first ever shots of the TARDIS travelling through the vortex. It's suitably dreamlike and gorgeous and all done with practical, 1960s effects, and the kaleidoscope look of the Vortex was actually brought back for the title sequence of Season 7B. And then there's the Daleks fighting the Mechanoids. With the Mechanoids' flamethrowers.

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