The Brigadier runs in and shoots at the alien, then another UNIT manny runs in. Guess which one of them gets electriced?
The alien leaves, taking the time to close the door behind it on its way out and then electric it locked so that the Doctor and the Brigadier can't follow it. They get rescued in time for their next scene by...
...Benton. Benton! Oh Jesus Christ, Benton. (etc.)
Regan boasts to Liz and Lennox about what he has been doing with the alien:
"Bullets just bounce off them. With these three you can do anything - walk into Fort Knox and help yourself."He really does fancy himself as a James Bond baddy, doesn't he?
Carrington doesn't want the Doctor to go into space, and says their spaceship should carry "a nuclear warhead" instead of the Doctor. Maybe he'd get his way if this was Nuclear Warhead Who instead? But Professor Cornish is on the Doctor's side and intends to "blast off in two hours time."
Liz and Lennox bluff Regan's henchmanny into letting Lennox go from their base, not knowing that he is secretly on Liz's side now. Lennox meets with Sergeant Benton and gets put in prison until the Brigadier can come to speak to him, since he won't tell anybody else about what he knows. I'm sure he's definitely not going to get murdered before that happens, mew.
The Doctor is now dressed up as an astronaut and says goodbye to the Brigadier.
Regan finds out that Lennox has escaped and gets angry. Things look scary for Liz who is still a prisoner, but she manages to defuse some of the scariness by saying to Regan's henchmanny
"It's all right, I won't hurt you."This sort of quip gets tiresome when a character says things like it all the time, but in this case the seriousness with which the scene is otherwise played makes it more effective, not less.
Regan telephones his mysterious boss, and then he goes off to the Space Centre to try to kill the Doctor in disguise. I mean Regan is in disguise, not the Doctor, although the Doctor is still dressed up as an astronaut which is a sort of disguise for him. Mew.
Regan goes around attacking UNIT mannys and getting them to do gratuitous HAVOC stunts until he finds a pipe or a valve or somesuch thing to sabotage. He somehow seems to know all the right ladders to climb and the right wheels to turn, or maybe he's just climbing and turning all of them in the hope of getting one that will somehow kill the Doctor?
Carrington (also in disguise) comes in and gives Lennox some radiation to nom, but radiation is alien noms, not Lennox noms, so he is scared. We are not meant to know this was Carrington because we don't see his face, but it was obviously a baddy who we would recognise if we did see, but not Regan.
The Brigadier is driving around when he sees one of his mannys that Lennox attacked, so the Brigadier immediately runs off to investigate - by himself, or at least with only the incidental music to back him up. He sees that something is wrong, and runs into the Space Centre studio to tell Professor Cornish to
"Stop the countdown!"but of course he is too late - he never uses the telephone when it's important, does he?
The Doctor makes a face while there is a lot of talk about all the things going wrong because of Regan's sabotage. This would have seemed very topical in 1970 with all the real space missions going on around that time, and it is a creditable recreation of a NASA space launch (scaled down to a BBC budget, naturally), but even streamlined to try and keep things dramatic these scenes are very slow-moving - and not just by today's standards! Still, I expect this would have been very exciting for cats and little mannys in 1970 to see the Doctor actually going into space... er, except not in the TARDIS.
The Doctor makes it to space and gets to do lots of model shots as his spaceship links up with Mars Probe 7. An "unidentified object" appears and flies towards the Doctor's ship - I'd say send for Commander Straker but we're 10 years too early for him and SHADO.
The Doctor looks out of the window and sees an alien spaceship - cliffhanger!
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