There’s a body of opinion that suggests that this story
is a virtual retread of “The Daleks” from the first season. In fact I wouldn’t
mind betting that this was the story that, when he asked the production team
what they thought about it, they replied – We love your story Terry – we loved
it every time you’ve sold it to us in the past. – Well, I cannot tell a lie, I
liked this one when I watched it as a kid. I like the escape from the city
where the Doctor and his Thal companions all made a sort of parachute/balloon
affair and used it to ascend the rising hot air in a ventilation shaft. Very
cool.
My recollection of that this story dovetailed out of
“Frontier in Space”, and that the two stories worked together more closely than
any two others since The Space Museum/ The Chase. We’ll see about that. A shout
out for Bernard Horsfall as well, who plays one of the Thals – always brings a
little bit of class to any role he plays does our Bernard.
After Watching
Right then. If you have watched every Dalek story so
far, as I have, and then you watch the first episode of “Planet of the Daleks”,
then maybe you’ll be struck by just how much of this seems familiar. It’s
almost a case of being ‘Now That’s What I Call Daleks” – even though one of the
Daleks themselves don’t appear until right at the end of this first episode,
and it’s disabled when it does. Look at what we have – a jungle planet (The
Daleks’ Master Plan) - Thals (the Daleks)- killer plants (Mission to the
Unknown) – the crew, who are about to die, saved by medicine/treatment provided
by the locals (The Daleks) – invisible aliens (The Daleks’ Master Plan).
Despite all of these familiar Dalek trappings, we are actually in an original
story – either the Doctor, or the Time Lords with whom he communicated at the
end of “Frontier in Space” has steered the increasingly reliable TARDIS to
Spiridon, the planet where the Daleks are massing their army for the attack on
Earth. So at least the first episode sets out what’s going to happen very
clearly. The Doctor must first of all recover, persuade the Thals into an
alliance, find out what the Daleks are actually up to, and put a spanner in the
works for them.
I had to laugh at the first cliffhanger. The Doctor and
the Thals discover a round dent in the ground. There is obviously an invisible
thing there. The Thals produce a couple of spray paint cans. “What’s that?”
asks the Doctor. Oh, for God’s sake, Doc, it’s a flippin’ spray can! -is not
what the Thals reply, sadly, - and they begin to spray the creature which –
shock horror – turns out to be a Dalek! This might be a shock to the Doctor,
although considering the last episode it shouldn’t – but why it would come as a
shock to viewers, when the story is called “Planet of the Daleks” is something
more of a mystery.
Speaking of Thals a moment before, there’s an interesting
juxtaposition between two of the actors who play them. Both recur in several
Doctor Who roles. On the one hand we have Bernard Horsfall – and on the other
we have Prentis Hancock. Now, my admiration for Bernard
Horsfall as a guest star is a matter of record in earlier volumes, so I won’t
go on too much about that. However, if I single him out, I probably should
probably single out Prentis Hancock as well. He made his first appearance in
the show in “Spearhead from Space” where he didn’t stand out one way or
another. However as Vaber the Thal in this he’s been giving a typical Prentis
Hancock performance – extremely intense, and that’s for every single line that
he’s given, right up to the point where you want to just give him a slap and
tell him to stop overacting and calm down. I watched “Planet of Evil” a few
weeks ago on The Horror Channel, and he was a main character in that, playing
it exactly the same way. We’ll look at that one in more detail when we get to
season 13. As I recall he did the same as Paul Morrow in “Space 1999” although
it’s such a long time ago that I watched this my memory may well be at fault
here.
You
know, a funny thing happened as I watched this story. With each successive
episode I found my cynicism subsiding, and a growing willingness to say, yes,
maybe this is rubbish, but it’s good rubbish. I’m guessing that this is partly
due to nostalgia. Thus, since I clearly remember being thrilled as a kid when
the Doctor and the Thals – who now included a woman, Rebec, from another
crashed Thal ship – rising to safety using a polythene chute as a parachute cum
hot air balloon in a dalek air vent, I took a guilty pleasure in watching it
again now. By the end of episode 4 I realized that I was actually enjoying it
quite a bit more than I had enjoyed “Frontier in Space”, and frankly I wasn’t
expecting that.
It
took a while, but eventually that old Dalek favourite, deadly plague/bacteria
designed to kill a huge section of the native population (Dalek Invasion of
Earth) eventually raised its head. Which actually made me start to wonder what
the invisibility thing was all about, apart from the fact that Terry Nation did
like his invisible monsters. After all, they’re on Spiridon because it’s a
convenient place to build a giant fridge to chill your Dalek army until you’re
ready to invade the next planet. So the invisibility thing really is a red
herring, although it does provide a scene whereby the ‘good’ Spiridonian who
saved Jo’s life earlier releases the deadly bacteria in a sealed room, so that
if the two Daleks inside the room open the doors, then the whole Dalek city
will be contaminated. After being shot, he turns visible, and we see that his
head looks just a tiny bit reminiscent of a Cardassian (that’s one from Deep
Space Nine, and not the awful Kim and her tribe).
Where’s
the swings there’s also roundabouts. Or to put it another way, while the story
had me on its side by about halfway through episode 4, it lost me again pretty
soon afterwards. Bernard rounds upon Rebec for coming on this ‘suicide’
mission. Why? Because he loves her. Ah, bless. Then we have the night on
Spiridon, which certainly seems to last a good 12 hours to me. It’s obvious
padding, I’m afraid, and generally episode 5 drags its heels towards its weary
conclusion. Old Prentis throws a major wobbly when Taron/Bernard says he has to
wait until later to play with his explosives, and so on and so forth. At last,
the Dalek Supreme having arrived, they get to attack the city, with the
obligatory splitting up of the Doctor and the companion. The Doctor goes off
with the Thals, while Jo goes off with a member of the New Seekers.
I
should say something about the Dalek Supreme here. My immediate thought when I
saw it was that this was very like one of the film Daleks, what with its rather
wide bumper, and much bigger headlights, and a check in The Television
Companion reveals that it was actually adapted from a film Dalek that Terry
Nation had in his possession. There you go. The Dalek Supreme looks quite
impressive in his black and gold livery, although in one scene his dome wobbles
up and down as he’s talking which is somewhat less impressive. Generally the
Dalek Supreme is an interesting addition to the Dalek mythos. We only really
started to get an explicit idea of the Dalek chain of command in The Evil of
the Daleks, where we met the impressive, though impotent, Dalek Emperor. Now he
was clearly different from the other Daleks. In this story, though, the Dalek
Supreme, when killing a Dalek who was responsible for not capturing the Doctor
and Thals, states that the Supreme Council will not tolerate failure. All of
which opens up some interesting questions, namely, what are the Daleks doing
having Supreme Councils? Who are on the Council? How did they get there? Who
voted them in? It just doesn’t quite sit right with our concept of the Daleks
as basically a Fascist dictatorship.
Well,
anyway, there we are. The Doctor and his Thal friends manage to set off an ice
volcano which buries the Dalek Army, and will take several centuries to melt
through. Handy that. The New Seeker, who turns out to be a Thal called Latex,
or something like that, clearly has the hots for Jo (ah – back to “The Daleks”)
and proposes to her, but she refuses, saying that she wants to go home. In case
we missed the point, when the Doctor is basically offering her the choice of
all the planets in the universe, she brings up an image of Earth on the
scanner, and tells him she wants to go home. A subtle way, I would say, of
preparing us for her farewell in the very next story.
What Have We Learned?
Daleks shut down a) when they are in
extreme cold – and b) when they’re invisible.
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