As the Tardis leaves Xeros after the events of the Space Museum, the Doctor reveals a new gadget that he picked up from the Space Museum. The gadget, called a Space-Time Visualizer, allows one to view any event throughout space and time. The Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Vicki play around with the visualizer a bit, watching Abraham Lincoln give the Gettysburg address, William Shakespeare meeting Queen Elizabeth and The Beatles performing Ticket to Ride on Top of the Pops.
The Beatles clip is the main reason that I own the British DVD of this particular story. The American Region 1 DVD does not include the Beatles clip due to the music rights being too expensive. Normally, I buy the American DVDs, since I live in the US and they're simply easier to acquire. However, I also don't like edited DVDs and I would have been rather unsatisfied with the edited American DVD.
I also think that while I do support music artists and rights holders to receive the money that they are due, they also need to be realistic about how much they charge for the rights to use their music. Remember the furor about them changing all the music on WKRP in Cincinnati for the first season DVD release? Remember how it didn't sell very well? The cost of the music rights doomed the DVD release of WKRP, and it's unlikely that we'll see the rest of the series released on DVD. The music rights holders simply want too much money for the studios to make money on the DVD project. In the case of The Chase, the entire scene is excised because buying the rights to the Beatles song would have been cost-prohibitive and the BBC would not have been able to make a profit on the DVD. In the end, the only real people hurt by these decisions are the fans, who would rather have unedited DVDs of their favorite shows.
Rant over, now back to my review of The Chase.
The Daleks have begun tracking the Tardis, and begin following it in their own time machine. After playing around with the visualizer, the Tardis has landed on the planet Aridius. Ian and Vicki go off to explore, while The Doctor and Barbara remain near the ship. They later see the Daleks traveling to Aridius to intercept and exterminate them. Barbara and The Doctor go off to look for Ian and Vicki, who have fallen into the hands of the native Aridians. The Daleks, who have since arrived on Aridius demand the handover of the time travelers or they will exterminate the Aridians. The Aridians, who have also found Barbara and The Doctor as well, agree to the Daleks demands.
The Aridians are attacked by the native Mire Beasts just prior to the handover of the time travelers, which allows them to escape. The Daleks, who have in the meantime found the Tardis and are guarding it, fall for a trick devised by Ian and The Doctor, which allows them to enter the Tardis and escape Aridius.
The next couple of episodes feature the Tardis and the Dalek's timeship chasing one another through various locations around the universe. Locations visited include the Empire State Building, the Mary Celeste and most humorously, a sideshow horror house featuring robots of Dracula and Frankenstein's monster. Vicki gets separated from the rest at the horror house, and stows away on the Dalek's timeship.
The final two episodes take place on Mechanus, a jungle planet that features a large city on pillars above the jungle. Vicki is reunited with her fellow time travelers on Mechanus, and warns her fellow time travelers that the Daleks have built a duplicate robot Doctor to eliminate them. The Doctor is able to disable the robot duplicate, but the travelers them find themselves trapped inside a cave with the Daleks just outside. At this point, the inhabitants of the city above, the Mechanoids, arrive to help the travelers escape the Daleks. The Mechanoids are not all that benign, however as they plan on keeping the time travelers as exhibits in a zoo. Inside their cage, they meet Steven Taylor, an earth astronaut who's been held by the Mechanoids for quite a while.
The Daleks attack the Mechanoids in order to retrieve the time travelers, and both the Mechanoids and the Daleks are wiped out. Meanwhile, the Doctor and his companions escape the city by means of a cable strung down from the city to the ground below. Ian and Barbara, using the Dalek timeship, return home to Earth. The Doctor and Vicki watch the return of Ian and Barbara to Earth, and then resume their travels, unbeknownst to them that they have a stowaway Steven Taylor onboard as well.
The Chase, while perhaps not as epic as the earlier Dalek stories, is quite fun. The humor, most unusual in Dalek stories, works quite well. The depature of Ian and Barbara is quite classy, and it's nice to see the montage of them running around London after their adventures with The Doctor. All in all, I found the Chase to be quite entertaining.
