A museum is no place to set an adventure story. They are places of scholarship, conservation and learning, characterised by quiet, respectful contemplation. There’s a reason why Indiana Jones, intrepid collector of museum pieces, has his adventures in jungles, deserts and other far flung locales: museums themselves are inherently dull. Unless the exhibits are going to come to life and exterminate you, there’s not much to set the heart racing.

It’s a theory borne out by The Space Museum, which is set in a space museum, run by a bunch of uninterested guards called the Moroks. They’re an odd lot. Their name is perilously close to “morons”, they dress like power dentists and they have hairdos which appear to have been blown into a permanent state of alarm with industrial strength driers. Plus they have a predilection for declamatory speeches about how hard done by they are. Despite these handicaps, they are, we are told, ruthless conquerors of worlds. Beware! They will land on your planet, kick your arse and… set up a museum.

This is exactly what they do on the planet Xeros. There they establish a museum which looks like a chocolate gateau on the outside, but on the inside features a dazzling array of featureless corridors. The museum’s collection consists of the spoils of war, which it must be said, are scant: a few random spaceships, some unlikely looking props, one Dalek casing and some stools they found on the Sense Sphere. I don’t know who the target audience is for this museum – no-one, if current visitor numbers are any indication – but perhaps it hints at a new battle strategy by these fearsome maurauders. Instead of fighting and killing other races, the Moroks will just wait until their victims come to their space museum and let them bore to death.

The Doctor (William Hartnell), Barbara (Jacqueline Hill), Ian (William Russell) and Vicki (Maureen O’Brien) arrive at the museum early – in fact, in spectral form before their real selves actually get there (the TARDIS having tripped over some technobabble). They have a premonition of their future selves as immobile exhibits, like stuffed animals in perspex boxes. Once the timelines are back in sync, it does indeed transpire that the monotonous Moroks do want to embalm our heroes… which is a novel threat, but also strange seeing that the museum isn’t actually full of other unwary travellers who have strayed within its stultifying walls.

(It’s never made clear why the Moroks want to start their collection of frozen alien beings with our heroes. But imagine a museum filled with frozen people, like Narnia’s statue garden of various creatures whom the White Witch turned to stone. And imagine the museum as a dark, gothic mausoleum. Now that might actually be suspenseful.)

Having been confronted with the vision of a future spent frozen in display cases, our four heroes debate what it will take to change the future. They stage an interesting debate about whether any action on their part is going to help or hinder their chances. Well, it’s interesting the first time. The problem is they keep having that same debate over and over throughout the next three episodes. But at least it’s an interesting reversal of their usual mantra about not being able to change history. This time, in order to survive, they need to mess with future events.

They never get to the bottom of it, though. At the end, it seems the future has been changed because Vicki has encouraged the mousy Xerons to stage a revolution. (If Vicki seems like the least likely of the TARDIS crew to stage such a rebellion, it is at least a pleasing development in her character, from being a line feed for the Doctor).

Who are these Xerons? Well, they are the oppressed indigenous species and an equally odd bunch. Their name is perilously close to “zeros”, they all dress like sinister Wiggles and they each have four eyebrows. They’re also all weedy teenage boys, the type you’d think would be super tech savvy, but unfortunately they can’t work out how to hack the computer which is guarding the armoury (because, y’know, museums totally have armouries). This is preventing them from overthrowing the Moroks, so instead they sit around, drink coffee and wish they’d taken more STEM subjects at Xeros Elementary. Luckily Vicki’s on hand to hack the armoury’s computer and generally do all the thinking for them.

As it happens, it must have been Vicki’s rabble rousing which does the trick because none of her companions do anything effectual. Barbara gets locked in a cupboard with a Xeron. The Doctor goes on holiday for a week. And Ian finds a gun and reimagines himself as the series tough guy, getting into fights, menacing some Moroks, but not actually achieving anything. If The Space Museum does nothing else, it at least shows Vicki to be an intelligent, proactive force in the program. It may even be a subtle suggestion that the future can only be changed by the young.

The story falls so quickly from being innovative and spooky to being a generic good guys vs bad guys shoot ‘em up, that you can’t help wonder if it was deliberate; an early meta-commentary on the show itself. But surely that gives The Space Museum too much credit. There’s no subtext here. The battle between the Moroks and the Xerons seems like generic sci-fi tosh because that’s what it is.

That in itself is peculiar, because the Hartnell era is so much about the weird and the wonderful of alien cultures; that a world ruled by insects is as strange and adventurous as the rival courts of Richard I and Saladin. To suddenly veer into pulp sci-fi seems uncharacteristic. It’s like writer Glyn Jones, having set up an intriguing premise in the first episode, has to cobble together another plot to contain it in for three episodes.

The whole thing staggers to an ending when the hammy revolution, full of ray gun shots and extras falling extravagantly to the floor reaches the Moroks’ headquarters. Our heroes congratulate themselves on a job unwittingly done and head for the TARDIS, leaving the teenage boys in charge. Though really, if our heroes had stopped to think about it for as long as they worried about whether or not they were changing the future, they’ve have realised that both parties of antagonists on Xeros are doomed to die out within a generation. Because although they have guns and freezing machines and Sensorite furniture to fight over, what neither the Moroks or the Xerons have amongst them, is any women.

LINK TO The Shakespeare Code: both feature callbacks to The Crusade.

NEXT TIME… nothing’s quite as it seems to be at The Greatest Show in the Galaxy.