Why I like the infamous Cricket Ball Scene

[cameca]

The episode "Four to Doomsday" is primarily known for two things: Tegan knocking out Adric for being a twerp and then victory strutting her way off the spaceship, and the Doctor messing about with Cricket Balls in space. These moments are not unrelated: Tegan's righteous wrath and desperation has left her and the TARDIS stranded some several

Comments

[ext_4142758]

I love this scene - a visual highlight in a very good-looking story (not unlike "The Mutants", visually rather ahead of most of its contemporary stories, and right up to the Seventh Doctor seasons when the BBC finally started to get the hang of this CGI thing). The science always seemed quite reasonable to me, bearing in mind explosive decompression in hard vacuum is largely a myth and if we allow for a certain amount of extra physical resistance in Time Lords (and since, according to the aforementioned "The Mutants", the Doctor is practically a walking Hazmat suit when occasion demands, one can hardly accuse Terence Dudley of playing fast and loose). Though I do have trouble with the bit where Enlightenment stalls him by untying his mooring line. Surely in a frictionless environment he should still have momentum from his previous pulls on the line. A minor quibble, though, for such a cheekily British set-piece of science-fiction, and depicted quite stunningly (The scale of the external model shot looks pretty amazing even these days

[cameca]

You know, I hadn't considered it from an effects perspective, but well said!

Yeah, it should have been impossible for him to get stuck in the first place, but oh well...