72: Death to the Daleks

Before Watching

Now, there’s a title to get your pulse racing. I’m going to have to be careful not to say too much before we get to the after watching section of this review, since I’m afraid that this is another of those shown in its entirety on the Horror Channel within the last couple of years, which I found the time to sit down and enjoy. Terry Nation, then returned to the fold as it were with season 10’s “Planet of the Daleks”. That essentially was something of a remake of his own “The Daleks” from season 1. In fact, Terry Nation did develop a reputation for rehashing his own material. There is a lovely story, possibly apocryphal, in which Terry Nation is having a meeting with the Producer and Script Writer du jour, discussing a script, and he is supposed to have asked whether they liked it. The producer then replied, “We love your script, Terry, just as we loved it every time you sold it to us in the past.”

So, bearing in mind I only last watched it about a year ago, can I reasonably expect to derive anything new from this story? Well, yes, maybe I can. For when I watched it last week I had not seen every Dalek story before Death to the Daleks. Now I have, and so you never know, this in itself may mean that I come to view it in a different light. Let’s see, shall we?

After Watching

Unless I’m imagining it there’s quite a famous publicity shot from the 4^th Doctor’s time which shows Sarah, clad in beach wear, emerging from the TARDIS with the Doctor, expecting to be in some exotic location, but finding that snow is falling all around her. She should have known better by then, since in the start of this story he has clearly promised to show her a good time in some exotic location, as she starts off dressed in blue beachwear this time. The Doctor is always doing this in the classic series, taking his companions off for a promised holiday in a beauty spot which never materializes, should you pardon the pun. Only a couple of stories ago he kept trying to drag poor old Jo off to Metebelis 3 – no wonder she went off with the Welshman.

We know pretty much what we’re going to get with a Jon Pertwee story now. It’s never going to blow your mind, with the sheer brilliance of a “Mind Robber” or “Deadly Assassin”, but it’s never going to plum the depths of “The Twin Dilemma” either. Seriously, write down a list of the worst Jon Pertwee stories, and then see how many of them would be in your bottom 10. Not many, I’ll be bound. So then, since it’s Jon, the Doctor is going to be dashing around, being heroic, throwing out expositions, barking at idiots, and saving the day – because that’s what the Third Doctor does, without fail. There’s plenty of that in this story.

The TARDIS lands off course, on the planet of the Exxilons. Something is draining power out of the TARDIS. The Doctor meets a group of people from Earth, who are trying to get a supply of Parrinium, (and when you pronounce this on the telly it sounds uncomfortably like perineum) which is essential to fight a terrible space plague. Their ship has been drained of power. So has a ship belonging to the Daleks, who have come for the same reason. Even their guns fail. This is an interesting idea – after all, a Dalek is almost defined by its gun. So what does one do when the gun doesn’t work? Simple – make an alliance with the humans – who can be as evil as Daleks when they want to be – and make sure that you bump them off as soon as you get the opportunity. Fix a different kind of gun to your redundant gun, and hey presto, you’re hot to trot.

So the Earthlings and Daleks strike up a fragile alliance, and put the indigenous Exxilons to work, getting the parrinium for them. See how I told you that humans could act just as evilly as Daleks. This is a point that we are obviously meant to make for ourselves, and the Doctor’s opposition to what is happening really does him some credit.

Meanwhile Sarah has in her own inimitable fashion stumbled up to the great city of the ancient Exxilons. Now, at this stage we get some serious echoes of “Colony in Space”. In both stories an ancient civilization has decayed, and the native in habitants, have descended to ‘primitivism’ over many generations. They have left behind their great city generations ago, but worship it. To enter is forbidden, and just as Jo did in “Colony in Space”, so does Sarah in this story and when the Exxilons find Sarah there they duly take her away for sacrifice.

The resolution to the plot involves the Doctor discovering that it is the city draining power from the TARDIS and the ships. With the help of Bellal, a ‘good’ Exxilon, he enters the city, beating booby traps and facing challenges, with the Daleks hot on his heels.  Now, cards on the table, I like the trope of finding your way into an ancient city, facing challenges and overcoming them to reach the treasure that lies within. It was used to great effect in 3 of the Indiana Jones movies, and is far older than Doctor Who – going back to Rider Haggard’s “King Solomon’s Mines” and arguably back as far as the mythological story of Jason and the Argonauts. Classic Doctor Who used a slight variation on this theme in “Pyramids of Mars” and again in “The Five Doctors”, but this was the first.

I don’t know whether this had anything to do with it, but this story would have been in the planning stage right about, or just after the time of the great Tutankhamen exhibition in the British Museum in 1972. Now, my parents didn’t actually take me to see the exhibition, which was a shame. I can’t complain too much because they did take me to see the BBC Special Effects exhibition in the Science Museum. I did get to see the 2007 Tutankhamen Exhibition at the O2 Arena, which had more exhibits than the 1972 exhibition, but sadly not the gold death mask. However, I digress. At the time of the 1972 exhibition there were a lot of books and a lot of TV shows about Tutankhamen and the discovery of his tomb. Now, I can’t say for certain that this was the catalyst for my love of this particular archaeologically based adventure genre, but then I wouldn’t say that it wasn’t either. Who knows, it may even have been the inspiration for this aspect of the story. Admittedly this only uses some of the trappings of the genre. There’s no great prize, no enlightenment awaiting the Doctor at the heart of the ‘tomb’, only the opportunity to hopefully destroy the city.

The City itself, even more than the Daleks, is the great enemy in this story, and it’s an interesting idea, one that takes this story some way beyond “Colony in Space”. In short, the Exxilons built the city to be capable of repairing and maintaining itself. Hence we have the huge and tentacular roots that attack the Doctor when they believe him to be a threat to the city. The ancient Exxilons fitted the city with a gigantic supercomputer for a brain, and the city instantly realized that it could function much better on its own, and cleared itself of its infestation of Exxilons. The only remaining descendants are the ‘primitive’ Exxilons on the surface, and the small band living under the city, like Bellal. The idea is a different slant on the dangers of technology. The City’s purpose was originally to provide a home to living organisms. When  it becomes seemingly sentient it destroys the organisms it was built to serve, thus losing its’ purpose at the same time. The City’s purpose then becomes its’ own continued existence and nothing more,  which essentially is a warning to us all , since its’ existence is at best, sterile, and at worst, malign. The message would seem to be then, that to simply be is not a good enough purpose for existence. Self-perpetuation is a means, but it should never be an end in itself.

The City and its’ history give us a clue to another source or influence upon the story. When he is shown some of the markings which are on the City wall by Bellal, the Doctor realizes that he has seen the same markings on a temple wall in Peru. Really? When? It wasn’t during the Aztecs, since anyone knows that they lived in Mexico. Leaving that to one side, this looks again like another nod to human development being guided and aided by aliens, as we saw in “The Daemons”, which ties in with “Chariots of the Gods” and by Erich Von Daniken, and its many sequels and imitators. Not for the last time in Doctor Who, either. This ‘Shaggy God story’ was first published in 1968, and its’ enjoyably crackpot theories became hugely popular in the early 1970s, partly due to a 1970 documentary, and a number of TV shows. Without wanting to spend too much time paraphrasing the text of the book, Von Daniken and his imitators and successors claim that they believe that human civilization developed through the intercession of technologically advanced alien beings, who were worshipped as Gods, and that there is ample proof available if you know what you are looking for.

This is the third of four Dalek stories which have appeared once a season since season 9. Yes, I know that they appear in the end of Frontier in Space – but that acts more of a lead in to this story, not unlike the Daleks’ appearance in “The Space Museum” paving the way for “The Chase”).You’ve got the intelligent story which reintroduces the Daleks (Day of the Daleks), then the Daleks’ Greatest Hits story (Planet of the Daleks), and after this the epic story which introduces the origins of the Daleks – and so I always think that this is the ugly duckling of the four. Which is a shame considering that it’s certainly more original than the preceding Dalek story.  An enemy (in this case the City) more powerful than the Daleks are is an interesting departure.

The Daleks have had another makeover for this show. The Daleks in “Planet of the Daleks” were dark, matt coloured daleks, which gave them a more military,’ this means business’ feel. The Daleks in this story are certainly brighter than we’ve ever seen them before. Their bodies are painted silver, and a bright silver at that, while all of their lumps and bumps are black. This does make them stand out far more against the dull, sandy and grey background of the quarry which stood in for the planet Exxilon (which was presumably unavailable due to prior commitments). It does also make the scene where the Dalek bursts into flames after an attack by the Exxilons more vivid as well.

In fact, destruction is something of a keynote in this story, certainly in the last episode. There’s the destruction of the city itself. The city hasn’t been a bad model up to this point. There is a tendency to only go a couple of ways when you’re designing an alien city of the future. Domes, spires and aerial walkways is one – like the city of the Mechanoids in “The Chase”, and the other is mega-ziggurat. This city is the latter. All in all its’ destruction scene is a little bit of a letdown. Presumably it was made from a block of something like polystyrene, and acetone or something similar was poured over it. So the city just sort of subsides, liquefies and congeals, and the overall effect is not the most effective.  Likewise, the classic TV series, as opposed to the film, has always had a bit of a problem with Dalek ships. We recall the flying saucer in “The Dalek Invasion of Earth” and the ‘Dardis’ in “The Chase”.  In the climax of this story, after the Doctor has given the City’s brain insoluble problems to deal with to give it the equivalent of a stroke, the Daleks, in time honoured fashion, decide to do a runner with the loot.  All of which allows grizzled Scottish space marine, Dan Galloway, to smuggle himself and a bomb aboard the Dalek saucer – result? – Mit der bang, mit der boom, mit der bing bang, bing bang boom. A little simplistic, but then this is the Pertwee era, and if the denouement doesn’t actually involve reversing any polarity, then that’s sophistication enough.

Compare this story with next season’s “Genesis of the Daleks” and you can learn a lot about the differences between the Pertwee era and the series with Tom Baker. Which we will do. What we mustn’t do though, is forget that this is maybe not the greatest of all Dalek stories – there’s no maybe, it isn’t – but it rattles along well enough, and that’ll do for me.

What Have We Learned?

When Apple finally get around to inventing the iCity we should probably give it a miss. 

68: Planet of the Daleks

Before Watching

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. 

67: Frontier In Space

Before Watching

It must have been about 1972 or 1973 that there was a BBC Special Effects Exhibition at the Science Museum in London, which featured an excellent display of costumes and props from Doctor Who. Now, we didn’t have a lot of money as a family (cue violins in background) and never went away on holiday, but what my Mum did try to do to make up for it was to provide us with as many interesting days out as she could, Growing up in the West London suburbs there was usually something interesting waiting at the end of a tube journey, and this wonderful exhibition was one of them.

I mean it was actually really great. I can remember going into a room which had a full sized TARDIS console, and Tardis panels on the walls. That was amazing. There were Daleks, an Invasion Cyberman costume, and some of the best costumes from recent years. Now, you have to remember that the early 70s right through to about Terror of the Zygons was a golden age of alien design for Doctor Who, unsurpassed until the 2005 revival in my opinion. There was an Ogron, a Sea Devil, and a Draconian, and I fancy that “Frontier In Space” may even have been the story broadcasting at the time we went to the exhibition. So you can imagine they made quite an impression on me, and are still one of my favourite Doctor Aliens after all these years.

Off the point a little, if we fast forward to 1982, nine years later, my brother and I decided it was high time that we paid a visit to the Doctor Who Exhibition on the Golden Mile in Blackpool. The 18 year old me frankly couldn’t quite match the sense of wonder the 8 and a half year old me had felt at the earlier exhibition. Well, we’d had a very long train journey which was made none the better by the price I had to pay for a slice of British Rail coffee. In fact the one lasting memory I have of the Exhibition is of looking at the Omega Mark II costume, to be seen in the next season’s opener “The Arc of Infinity” and asking what the hell they thought they were doing if they were bringing Omega back. When I actually got to see “Arc of Infinity” some 5 months later, I realised just how right I was to be sceptical, but we’ll come to that story in due course. Meanwhile, “Frontier in Space”. This was another of those stories whose titles were changed by Target for the novelisation, and so if you’re looking for this one you need to look for “Doctor Who and The Space War”. Malcolm Hulke, as he usually did, novelised his own scripts. He usually made a good job of it too, and this one was no different as I recall, however there was one particular passage which always made my brother and I chuckle. At one point Jo has been captured by the Ogrons, and her captor obviously has designs upon her, and brings her food, while uttering these sweet nothings, “Eat good, get big, become Ogron wife.” Ah, sweet. I can’t wait to find out if that line ever was said on screen.

After Watching

Well, we had to wait until episode 6, but then the answer to the great question was found. The Ogron who brings Jo her food when she’s in captivity on the Ogron home planet does not say “Eat good, get big, become Ogron wife” – so that’s purely an invention for the Target novelisation.

How, then, do we arrive at a fair assessment of “Frontier in Space”? In some ways it’s the archetypal space opera from the Pertwee years, and yet in other ways it is very much a one of a kind. It’s the last Master story for one thing. It was shortly after this was filmed that Roger Delgado was tragically killed in a car accident, and so the mooted last confrontation story between the Doctor and the Master never actually came to pass.

The plot is rather thin, but not difficult to follow. The TARDIS materialises upon an Earth cargo spaceship. There is a strange noise, and the ship is attacked. The crew, and Jo, believe that it is Draconians who attack the ship. The Doctor, though, with his resistance to the sound, can see that it is in fact Ogrons who do so. The Draconians control a rival space empire to that of Earth. The two empires have been at war in the past, but there exists an uneasy peace between them at this moment in time. Now, if you’re thinking that this sounds rather like the situation between the Federation and the Klingon Empire in the original series of Star Trek, then you’re not the only person to think so. We’ll look at similarities between the Klingons and the Draconians a little later.

Someone or something is using the Ogrons to try to foment war between the two empires. Now, we’ve seen the Ogrons before in “Day of the Daleks”, and so we know that they’re too dumb to come up with this kind of plan for themselves. The natural assumption is that it’s the Daleks who are behind this plan, and so when they do get round to turning up, at the dog end of episode 6, it really doesn’t come as much of a surprise. Now, my memory may well be at fault here, but I’m sure that the BBC had already showed them turning up in a trailer before episode 6 was even broadcast as well, so again, it wasn’t exactly a shock to see them.

Not that it’s the Daleks who are actually carrying out the plan to manipulate the two empires to war. This is the doing of the Master, who doesn’t actually turn up until episode three. Once the Master does appear we do get into a swings and roundabouts situation. Yes, Roger Delgado is as watchable and as enjoyable as ever. The problem is that once the Master arrives, the action becomes as predictable as ever. Prior to his arrival, there’s a lot of toing and froing between the Earth president, who is being urged towards war by her meathead advisor General Williams, and the Draconian embassy. The Doctor is passed around from pillar to post with nobody believing him, until the Earth president tires of him and sends him off to life imprisonment on the penal colony on the moon.

So, the Master poses as the leader of an Earth Colony. He has manipulated Earth records to show the Doctor and Jo as master criminals on his planet, and has the president agree to them being handed over into his custody. They are space jacked by the Draconians, and in an audience with the Emperor, the Doctor reveals that he was made an honorary Draconian nobleman 500 years ago for services rendered. A party of Ogrons rescues the Master, but crucially leaves one of their number behind, which finally convinces the Draconians of what is happening. The Doctor and the crown prince take the Ogron to convince the Earth President, but the Master attacks, and when they repel him, he has taken the Ogron and Jo back to the Ogron home planet. The Draconian prince wins the meathead Williams over to his side, and they mount a covert mission to said Ogron home planet. The Master reveals that the Daleks are behind his plan. The Doctor frees himself, Jo, Williams and the Draconian, and sends them back to their respective empires to muster forces to resist the Daleks. He is grazed by a shot from the Master’s gun, and after returning to the TARDIS, which the Master had brought to the Ogron planet, sends a telepathic message to the Time Lords, and collapses. Phew.

This story manages the remarkable feat of being at the same time too short for 6 episodes, and also too long for 6 episodes. There’s not really enough story in the first 5 episodes to sustain 5 episodes. On the other hand, there’s really too much in episode 6, and it means that the ending is rather unsatisfactory. Apart from anything else, there really isn’t a proper ending. We think that Williams and the Draconian crown prince will get home safely and warn Earth and Draconia about the Dalek threat. But we don’t actually know, and what’s more, we will never find out. And so although “Frontier in Space” and “Planet of the Daleks” are not the first pair of stories to dovetail together, for me they are the first pair that dovetail without the first story being properly resolved. If we take “The Space Museum” and “The Chase”, the situation on the planet of the Xerons has clearly been resolved. Partly this sense of dislocation is caused by the abrupt way that we saw the last of Roger Delgado’s Master. That’s nobody’s fault other than a cruel and untimely death on a car crash, but it is a terrible shame that there was no great and final showdown, which many people connected with the show have said was being planned. In the end of episode 6 the Master does what he has always done so far – watched his schemes begin to collapse around him, and done a runner while the going was good, although this time he took a pot shot at the Doctor as he was running, which caused the injury which is carried forward into the next story.

That’s the manic 6^th episode. In the 5 episodes prior to that it was a particularly good story if you like prison scenes. The Doctor and/or Jo were locked up in several different locations including more than one spaceship, an Earth prison cell, a penal colony on the Moon, and a cell on the Ogron planet, and that’s just the ones I can remember. Which does smack a little of a lack of imagination. For me this is what stopped “Frontier in Space” actually being the classic that I maybe thought it was when I watched it back in 1973. The concept, of an agent provocateur deliberately and covertly trying to provoke war between two great powers is an interesting one, and it means that the story is constantly watchable, but never really becomes what it could have been. For example, General Williams’ sudden conversion to the cause of peace would be a lot more believable had we but heard a little more about his past history with the Draconians, which might have made his conversion seem just a little less Damascene and a little more believable. Then there’s the Earth president. You now, I can’t really make up my mind whether Malcolm was making a stand against the prevailing tone of the Pertwee era so far, which is certainly chauvinistic, even if it isn’t misogynistic, by having a woman President. On the other hand, he might just be using this as a sign of how far in the future we are – President of the Earth? A woman? This can only be the future. The way that the President is continually browbeaten by the meathead Williams, and the fact that in one of the scenes she is lying on a couch, having a head massage from her female PA kind of makes me think it’s the latter rather than the former.

Right, let’s get back to the Draconians. I made the point earlier that it’s possible to draw comparisons between them and the Klingons from Star Trek. Of course, when you say the Klingons you need to define exactly which Klingons you’re talking about. The Klingons that appeared in the original series, that is the only Klingons we had experienced by the time that “Frontier in Space” was broadcast were essentially humanoids with funny eyebrows, played by blacked up actors. There was maybe a suggestion of something Asiatic about them, but that was about it. To a ‘man’ they were pretty aggressive meatheads obsessed with warfare. Which isn’t really like the Draconians. Now, some 6 years after “Frontier in Space” a Klingon ship appeared in the beginning of the film, and everything had changed. This wasn’t an exploration of Klingon culture by any stretch of the imagination, but now the Klingons had their strange, ridged, inhuman foreheads, and their peculiar facial hair. In “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and films such as “The Undiscovered Country” we gradually learned a lot more about Klingon culture. They lose their role as out and out villains, and instead come across as a noble race, obsessed with honour, their concept of which seems to be at least suggested by the Samurai code of Bushido. Which also sounds like the Draconians. It’s worth stressing again, though, that the Draconians came before this version of the Klingons. I think that the Draconians were an interestingly conceived alien race, and their design, and appearance was as good as it gets in classic Doctor Who, and it’s maybe a little surprising that they were never to reappear in classic Doctor Who. If I was asked I’d hazard the opinion that this comes down to two things. Firstly, that the Draconians, despite their alien appearance, are not monsters, and it’s probably easier to write stories about out and out monsters, and secondly, that it seems to me that something happened to alienate Malcolm Hulke from Doctor Who. Having co-written “The Faceless Ones” and “The War Games” for Patrick Troughton he wrote at least one story for each of the 5 seasons of Jon Pertwee. He would write “Invasion of the Dinosaurs” for season 11, Jon Pertwee’s last season, and then that would be it and he would never contribute again. A great pity.

All in all, then, it’s a curious piece of work is “Frontier in Space”. It strives for something of the epic style and sweep of “The Daleks’ Master Plan”, with the Master in the Mavic Chen position, and the Daleks pushed almost totally into the background. At times it almost makes it as well – it’s certainly a more convincing ‘space opera’ than we’ve seen for a long time in the show. As a stand-alone story, though, it falls some way short of the gold standard for me. Which is a shame, because I loved it when I first saw it.

What have we learned?

The Doctor is an honorary noble of Draconia – and The Master isn’t. 

60: Day of the Daleks

Before Watching

Question:  In classic Who, which writers went the longest amount of time between having their stories produced? Answer – I have no idea, but I wouldn’t mind betting that Louis Marks is right up there. John Lucarotti must have come close, but his original version of “The Ark In Space” wasn’t really what Robert Holmes and Philip Hinchcliffe were looking for, and so they opted for a page one rewrite, and so “The Massacre of St. Bartholemew’s Eve in Series 3 remained his last writing credit for the series. Louis Marks’ previous Doctor Who story was “Planet of Giants” way back in series 2, so that’s a gap of 7 series between stories. Before we leave this digression behind, while I think of it, Terry Nation went from Season 3’s “The Daleks’ Master Plan” until season 10’s “Planet of the Daleks”, also a gap of 7 series. Then Gerry Davis went from season 5’s “Tomb of the Cybermen” to season 12’s “Revenge of the Cybermen” – again a gap of 7 series.

Coming back to Louis Marks, it’s no great chore recalling this story considering that I bought the DVD a year or two ago, and have watched it a couple of times since. In fact, I’ve watched all of the extras as well, so going into the marathon watch, I probably know this Pertwee story pretty much as well as I know any of them. In fact, of the four stories he wrote for the series, none of them are duds. If you’ve read my review of “Planet of Giants” you’ll know that I thought that particular story was something of a neglected gem, although that’s more to do with some frankly fantastic model work than the brilliance of the script. He wrote the underrated “Planet of Evil” for season 13, and then his last story for the series was the very palatable “Masque of Mandragora” from season 14 (Tom Baker’s 3^rd). All of which is a long winded way of saying that I already know that I liked this one a lot, and this was such a short time ago that I last watched it that I can’t see my opinion changing drastically in the interim.

After Watching

In my review of Season 8 I did mention that it is worth discussing whether the show had been dumbed down at all. Here we had a story which actually took a unique look at some of the implications of time travel, and managed to do it intelligently, while still being a good action story as well.

The story, like season 8’s “The Mind of Evil”, has a world peace conference as its background, and again it’s the Chinese who are proving the real obstacle to progress. I wonder if it was just too politically sensitive to use the Soviet Union in the 70s?

In real terms it seems like a very long time since the series engaged in any kind of debate about Time Travel, and how it affects History. If we recap: -

In “The Aztecs” the Doctor thunders at Barbara that you can’t change History, not one line of it. In one sense the story bears him out, since Barbara is unable to achieve her stated aim of turning the Aztecs away from their rituals involving blood sacrifice. Whether or not this would have made that much difference to the Conquistadores later on is a moot point. However, Barbara does change the destiny of one man, Autloc, who leaves all his worldly goods behind him and wanders off into the desert. Now, maybe, just maybe he might have done so anyway, but there is no reason for him to have done so without Barbara’s intervention in the Society in which he lives.

The first hint that we get that this hardline towards the changing of History is softening is in the climax of “The Romans” when it appears that it is the Doctor who has given Nero the idea of burning down Rome. Now, okay, we might brush that one under the carpet by saying that Nero would have done it anyway, therefore nothing has really changed QED. Realistically we might also say that this was a Dennis Spooner scripted romp, which didn’t take itself seriously enough not to have a little fun by bending the rules and maybe hoping nobody minded that much.

So then Dennis Spooner went and muddied the waters again with “The Time Meddler”. In this joyous story the Monk, clearly a member of the Doctor’s own race, equipped with a slightly newer time machine, and presumably as well versed in the laws of Time as the Doctor is, decides that he will lend a helping hand to the Saxons facing Harald Hardrada’s fleet, to enable Harold Godwinsson to forego having to defeat them at Stamford Bridge and therefore win the Battle of Hastings. The Doctor’s reaction to the Monk’s meddling is telling. If what he said to Barbara in “The Aztecs” was true, then what he should say to the Monk is,

“Go ahead, do your worst, but you’re wasting your time and energy because you can’t change History, not one line of it.”

He says no such thing. The gist of what he does say to the Monk is not – you CAN not do this – but – you MUST not do this – and there’s a whole universe of difference between those two concepts.

In the context of “Doctor Who”, the ‘you must not change time’ approach makes much more sense than the previous stance. If you cannot change History, then the Doctor and his companions can only ever be observers, unable to influence any of the events going on around them. Yet they have already done just that on several occasions. In fact, it’s worse than that, for if History has been preordained in this fashion, then none of what anyone does is either good or evil, for everyone is just a puppet, dancing to a sequence of strings being pulled which had been written down long before they were even made. That’s actually a very bleak way of looking at the world, and one which I don’t believe for one minute that the show ever shared.

In “The Massacre”, which is the last, real, old style Historical in my opinion, the Doctor of necessity returns to the – this has happened, and so we can’t change it however horrible it is – line of argument of “The Aztecs”, which causes Steven to lose all sympathy with him, and leave the TARDIS as soon as it stops. This is actually the last gasp of the Doctor’s non-intervention policy. Only a few stories later, in “The Gunfighters”, the Doctor shows no such scruples, which is just as well since the story does take a few liberties with what actually happened.

In Patrick Troughton’s era the whole vexed question was never really examined at all. The only historical was “The Highlanders”, and this neatly avoided the whole question of changing the course of History by having the TARDIS arrive after the battle of Culloden. From then on stories would be set either in the future, or on alien worlds, or on contemporary Earth. Stories on contemporary Earth, ever since “The War Machines” show that the Doctor feels he has a free hand to do what’s right. Why? Because it isn’t that the Doctor at any time couldn’t rewrite any history, it is just OUR History he can’t rewrite. And our History works back from where we are now, the moment that the story was first broadcast.

And so to “Day of the Daleks”. The main thrust of the story concerns a group of time travelling assassins from the future, who travel back to contemporary England, to find and assassinate the diplomat, Sir Reginald Styles. Sir Reginald is chairing the International Peace Conference, and has been the only man able to bring the recalcitrant Chinese delegation to the table.

The clever thing about it is that at first it seems as if the assassins want to kill Sir Reginald to scupper the peace process. Actually, though it turns out that they want to kill Sir Reginald to save the peace process. In the future from which they arrived, the world has been successfully invaded and is now controlled by the Daleks. It began when a bomb exploded in Sir Reginald’s country estate where the peace conference is taking place, killing the delegates and leading to World War III. In the aftermath the Daleks found the Earth easy pickings. They believe that by killing Sir Reginald they can save the delegates and the peace progress, and engineer a different, Dalek-less future for themselves. Phew! And we thought that Doctor Who had been dumbed down in this stage of the Pertwee era!

There’s actually more than one aspect of changing history to consider here. On the one hand there’s the idea of being able to retro-engineer History, to change the present by changing the past. That’s foregrounded as the Big Idea of this story and that’s what we’ll come back to momentarily. However there’s also the fact that this is not the Dalek Invasion of 2164 featured in “The Dalek Invasion of Earth”. This seems to be an alternate future, another vision of future History. It is not explored in the script in any depth at all – which is probably just as well or we could easily have had another six parter on our hands – but it does suggest a background in which History changes, and time streams shift. Later on in “Genesis of the Daleks” the Time Lord ( who looks like something out of an Ingmar Bergman movie) who tells the fourth Doctor of his mission explains that a time stream has come into being in which the Daleks succeed in becoming the dominant life form of the Universe. Which is not actually that far fetched a concept when you know that the Daleks did develop their own Time Travel Technology, and have presumably been monkeying away with Time themselves. However, I digress.

Now, at the climax of the story we find that the great irony is that the explosion wasn’t caused by Styles or anyone else at home in the 20^th century. It was caused by one of the assassins themselves, isolated from the others, who sees no other way of destroying Styles. The Daleks and their henchmen have followed the assassins back to the 20^th century, and the bomb which would have been used to kill the delegates is actually used against Daleks and Ogrons. Now, this isn’t just a simple matter of a basic time paradox. I’ll explain what I mean.

A time paradox would mean, for example, you use a time machine to go back in time. Your time machine materializes on top of your father when he was a little boy, sadly crushing the life out of him and killing him. Which means that you would never have been born. Which means that you would never have used the time machine. Which means that it wouldn’t have crushed your father to death. Which means that you would have been born. Which means that you would have used the time machine which means that you would have crushed your father to death and so on ad infinitum.

Now, this is different, because in this story the chain of recurring events can simply be broken by preventing the assassination. No bomb goes off – no successful Dalek invasion – no assassins go back to kill Styles – chain broken. What it doesn’t explain is how the chain started. This isn’t a chicken and egg situation. The peace conference must have been blown up originally BEFORE the assassins went back in time. There is no start to it, you have to say that it looks pre-ordained that the assassin would come back to set off the bomb. However, if it was preordained – then the Doctor wouldn’t have been able to change events and break the chain! Which probably explains why the classic series avoided such complex ideas in the first place.

One thing we should consider when discussing this story is that it wasn’t actually a Dalek story at all when it was first mooted, and when Louis Marks began working on it. Messrs Letts and Dicks decided that they wanted to bring them back, and saw this story as a good vehicle for them. You have to agree with that. It’s very difficult to imagine them being slotted comfortably into any of the other 4 stories of season 9. This story is the first Dalek story since “Evil of the Daleks” and it represents something of a reboot for them. I wonder how the conversation with Terry Nation went when they asked him about using the Daleks?

“No, no of course you don’t have to write it yourself, Terry, we’ve already got a story, God bless you. No, now, we’d LOVE you to write one, only we’ve already got one.”

Who knows? The fact is that Terry Nation would write a Dalek story for each of the next three seasons. Robert Holmes once related a story about his time as Script Editor when he was having a chat with Terry Nation, who suggested that he should write a Dalek story for every season, to which Robert Holmes replied non-committally. Days later there was a call from Terry Nation’s agent, ready to draw up a contract to that effect. For season 13, Holmes steered Terry Nation away from writing another Dalek story to writing something different, and this is how we ended up with “The Android Invasion”. Let’s get back to “Day of the Daleks”, though.

This is the first time that they have appeared in colour, and I’m not that sure that I like it that much. There’s a gold one, and a couple of darker ones, and while darker Daleks are okay, the gold one just doesn’t quite gel with me. I know that I liked the colourful Daleks in the films, but that has to be seen in context. The Amicus films were live action comic strips, while a complex TV story such as “Day of the Daleks” is a lot more than that. There’s not a lot of them either – I think that they only had three Daleks to use for this production, and while you could get away with using blow up cut outs in grainy black and white, you wouldn’t have been able to in garish 1970s colour TV.

The Ogrons made their first appearance in this story as well, and they’re an interesting addition to the Dalek mythos, fulfilling the role of the Robomen from “The Dalek Invasion of Earth”. I do wonder whether they were subconsciously inspired by the gorillas in “Planet of the Apes” – their faces do have a certain simian appearance. They don’t actually do a lot, but they’re a threatening presence which is really the point, and it’s a bit of a shame that we only get to see them again in “Frontier in Space”.

A serial story, with a little time to develop plot and character, has the time to play tricks on its audience. Aubrey Woods’ Controller, the Daleks’ puppet in charge of earth, is a good example. He starts off playing a very mannered, very theatrical stage villain, and yet at the end it’s his act of heroism in defiance of the Daleks that saves the past, even though it is probably condemning him to death. Of the assassins, an interesting point was that the leader, Anat, well played by Anna Barry, was a woman. A mature, intelligent woman, noticeably smarter than her companions, and every bit as brave. But before we go congratulating the show for this, the simple fact that it sticks out when the show put a woman character in this position shows that it still had quite a long way to go.

You know, it’s often said that the third Doctor is the most ‘Establishment’ of all of the Doctors, the most reactionary and the least anarchic. I’m not saying that I would disagree with that, and yet, that having been said, the third Doctor just really hates these Whitehall types. Maybe it just sticks out more because he has to deal with a lot more of them, being stuck on contemporary Earth. Still, Sir Reginald Sykes is just the latest in a line which included Mr. ‘Double’ Chinn in “The Claws of Axos”. Frankly, the idea of a pompous pig like that ever being a diplomat is a little far-fetched, but hey, I’ve only ever known one career diplomat in my life, and he is a delightful man, so who am I to judge?

Had I not watched the accompanying documentary among the extras on the BBC DVD, I wouldn’t have seen the contrition from the production team over the Doctor’s use of a gun to shoot an Ogron. It is an issue with the story that he does this, and all in all it probably would have been better had he not done so. Yes, it might fit better with Pertwee’s Doctor than it would have ever done with the first or second Doctors, but even so there has to be a set of core values central to any portrayal of the Doctor, or they then become separate characters, and the show becomes meaningless. The Doctor doesn’t like guns. Full stop.

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Final words on “Day of the Daleks”, then. There’s a level of complexity in this that we haven’t seen in season 8, which while it doesn’t hit the heights of season 7, makes this an intensely watchable and enjoyable story.

What Have We Learned?

You can change the Future, but the Future can also change the Past.

36: The Evil of the Daleks

Before Watching

This is one of the most celebrated of all the lost Troughton stories, one of the reasons being that it was the story which saw the final end of the Daleks – well, for five years anyway. What do I expect? Well, part of the trouble is I do remember the synopsis of this one quite well. It dovetails nicely with the Faceless Ones, since the TARDIS was stolen at the end of the last episode. I can remember that it was stolen by a guy who invented a time machine – no honestly – back in Victorian times, and is in league with the Daleks since his daughter, Victoria, has been taken as a hostage to ensure his cooperation. The Doctor ends up going to Skaro, injecting, or infecting Daleks with the Human Factor, and thus starting a civil war, in which the Dalek city, and the Emperor Dalek are destroyed. Obviously made an impression on me when I first read the synopsis. So the real interest for me is in how well it’s done. David Whitaker set a hell of a high standard for a Dalek story with The Power of the Daleks, and so he has a lot to live up to.

After Watching

There’s a remarkable lack of preamble at the start of this story which is really all to the good. We get a very brief recap reminding us that the TARDIS has been stolen from Gatwick, and then our heroes, the dream team of Troughton and Hines are off on its trail.

The plot, even when you boil it down to essentials is rather complex. The Doctor and Jamie trace the TARDIS to one Edward Waterfield, a dealer in Victoriana. The stock in his store seems remarkably new. When Jamie suggests that maybe he has just popped back in time to pick up his stock, he is poo poohed by the Doctor, and yet it turns out to be the correct explanation.

Waterfield, who has been bankrolled by eccentric, and extravagantly bearded industrialist Theodore Maxtible, has invented a method of time travel using static electricity. I didn’t really understand the explanation, but it’s all done with mirrors apparently. The first time that they wired it up and fired it up, flash, bang wallop, and an army of Daleks came out of it. The Daleks immediately took Waterfield’s daughter, Victoria, hostage, as you do, and insisted that Waterfield use his machine to bring them the TARDIS and the Doctor.

Waterfield arranges a meeting with the Doctor and Jamie in 1966, then gases them, and transports them back in time to Maxtible’s mansion. The Daleks then explain that they are sick and tired of losing to the humans on penalties after extra time, and so they want the Doctor to isolate what they call ‘the human factor’ , and inject it into Daleks to give them whatever it is that makes human beings able to defeat them. The Doctor uses Jamie to do this, and creates some very childlike Daleks who become his friends, and learn to question orders.

At this point the Daleks, along with the carpet chewing Maxtible, Victoria, the Turkish Servant Kemel, Waterfield and Jamie all are transported to Skaro, where the Doctor gets to meet the Emperor Dalek. The Doctor informs the Emperor that he has created Daleks who question orders, who will teach other Daleks to question orders, and this way he will eventually be overthrown, to which the Emperor gleefully replies that the real purpose of the experiment was to isolate the Dalek factor, and spread this to humans. It is tested on Maxtible who does indeed become a human Dalek – and the Doctor, who, not being human, doesn’t. He replaces the Dalek factor with his own phials of the human factor and begins converting Daleks. A civil war soon ensues in which Skaro, the Emperor and Maxtible are all seemingly destroyed – although it is hinted at that one Dalek may have survived. Edward Waterfield redeems himself by saving the Doctor’s life at the expense of his own, and thus the Doctor takes Victoria on board the TARDIS as his newest companion.

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Human factor – Dalek factor – Krypton Factor – X – Factor - Max Factor - it all sounds like complete hokum and it is. Yet this story is such an embarrassment of riches that you never stop to think that. It’s one of the great tragedies of the wipings that only one episode of this story actually exists. Episode 2 is not even the best episode of the story, and yet it looks cracking. I could weep when I think that episodes 6 and 7 could have survived instead of some of those that actually made it.

What’s so great about “The Evil of the Daleks”, then?

The use of three settings/time periods. The story starts in the present day (20^th July, 1966 to be precise.)Now, unlike The War Machines, TEOTD isn’t trying to be especially trendy and ‘swinging’ and as a result the scenes with Jamie and the Doctor holding a council of war in a coffee bar look totally authentic, as does Waterfield’s antique shop. We know that Waterfield isn’t what he seems right from the start because he has some rather impressive Victorian sideburns – almost into mutton chop whisker territory.

Then the action switches to Maxtible’s mansion, which is highly impressive with all of its acres of wood paneling, its heavy carpets and high neo-gothic time cabinet. The state of the art Victorian laboratory with all the beautifully shaped test tubes and equipment that Maxtible shows to the Doctor is a joy too.

Finally we get to make our first return trip to Skaro since The Daleks. The Dalek city is different here, or rather, it looks more developed. There’s still the corridors and assymetrical doors, but now long pathways, and the Emperor’s room is very arresting.

The Performances: Marius Goring, as Theodore Maxtible wasn’t the first big name to appear in Doctor Who, but he was certainly a real triumph for the casting director. For one thing he so looks the part. There’s a famous photo of Isambard Kingdom of Brunel, with a cigar in his mouth and a top hat on his head, standing by the chains of the great eastern, and I’m sure that Maxtible has the exact same amount of cigar sticking out of his mouth in exactly the same angle as Brunel’s in a huge number of the telesnaps. For me it’s a well-judged performance in that Maxtible doesn’t appear as mad, or callous and indifferent to the plight of fellow human beings at the start, you come to realize these things. Maxtible’s continued belief that the Daleks will show him the method to turn base metals into gold despite all the overwhelming amount of evidence to the contrary isn’t necessarily unbelievable either, and in fact has echoes of Mavic Chen from The Daleks’ Master Plan. I don’t know so much about the Dalekified Maxtible in the last episode though. You see, it doesn’t really matter how you try to imitate a Dalek – even if you don’t stick your arm out in front of you, you will always sound like a kid in a playground pretending to be a Dalek. So I didn’t find that to be as effective as it might have been.

John Bailey put in a lovely turn as Edward Waterfield. At first the man seems to be just a nasty, cold, two bit villain, but once he gets the Doctor back to Maxtible his human side starts to come through. It’s clever the way that, of the pair, Maxtible is revealed to be the real villain of the piece, while Waterfield, it turns out, is just a misguided scientist/inventor (one of many in classic Doctor Who) who is in an impossible situation, and just trying to do whatever he can to save his daughter. It’s a tribute to John Bailey’s acting skill that his jumping in front of a Dalek gun to save the Doctor was completely believable, and now seemed to be completely in character.

Deborah Watling, as Victoria, featured a surprisingly small amount considering that this was her debut story, so it was difficult to judge what she brought to the table. In fact, for the middle part of the story it’s Jo Rowbottom’s spirited maid, Mollie, who looks the most likely candidate in the next companion stakes.

With all of this also on offer, the fact is that this is the Doctor and Jamie’s story. The Highlander’s faith in the Doctor seems to have been totally destroyed when he overhears the Doctor conspiring with Waterfield and Maxtible to use Jamie for the tests to extract the human factor. Yet by the end , on Skaro, the Doctor asks Jamie to trust him, and he does. It’s a brief yet perfect demonstration of the unshakeable foundations of the relationship between these two characters, and a testament to the chemistry between Patrick Troughton and Fraser Hines that they manage it so economically and so seemingly effortlessly.

Is it without flaws? No, of course not, no story is. There’s Kemel, for one thing. Now, I’m not saying that Sonny Caldinez who played him did a bad job, but I just think he’s a bad character who introduced a worrying note into the story. Kemel is a Turkish Wrestler, who works as a heavy for Maxtible. After a fight with Jamie, Jamie saves his life, and he helps him from then onwards. Here we have the only black character in the story, unable to speak, and being referred to by other characters as possessing the mind of a child, clearly only valued for his physical strength. Now, you may very well say, well come on, you can’t judge something that was made in the mid 60s by the standards we have today. Maybe not, but neither should we sweep it under the carpet. Now, I have seen the whole of Tomb of the Cyberman a couple of years ago, and we have to consider the fact that there is a very similar character, called Toberman – a huge, mute, physically strong man played by a black actor. Is it racist? Yes, I’m afraid that it is, without a corresponding black actor in a far more positive role to offset it. Am I accusing the production team of deliberate racism? Not necessarily, but at the least I think you have to admit that this is lazy stereotyping, and I wish that the team had stopped to think a little about this before going this way with Kemel.

With that admittedly jarring note, then, the story isn’t perfect. But I have to say that for 60s Doctor Who, this is about as good as it gets. The return to Skaro particularly intrigued me. On his previous visit, in The Daleks, the Doctor knew nothing about them at all. Now, on his second visit, he knows more than enough. Indeed, somewhere along the line he has also learned about the Dalek Emperor, for when they meet for the first time the Doctor says that he had wondered whether they would ever meet. A word of praise for the design of the Dalek Emperor. He looks like a Dalek, but he doesn’t. He’s considerably larger than a Dalek, and on top, instead of a single dome, he has a sort of arrangement that puts me in mind of the ice cream head of Mr. Whippy. It has an eye stalk but no gun, and I would guess that it’s immobile since it is connected to external tubes, for whatever reason. I think that this is ultimately clever design work. Nothing is actually said on screen, but this presentation of the Emperor leads you to draw conclusions about the futility of power and control. The Emperor has total control over all the Daleks, and yet when one begins to question his orders, he is totally unable to defend himself, and his power turns out to be all a façade.

All in all, even being mostly recon, The Evil of the Daleks is a tour de force, and I can completely understand why it was chosen, at the end of series 5, to be the first ever Doctor Who summer repeat.

What have we learned?

If you’re thinking about using mirrors and static electricity to build your own time machine, don’t.

The Doctor has learned that the Daleks are led by an Emperor at some time prior to this adventure.

30: The Power of the Daleks

Before Watching

Well, I’ve already mentioned the Daleks on a conveyor belt memory. That kind of dominates all of my thoughts about this story, and I can’t say that I have any great recollections of reading the synopsis years ago. I obviously did, since I read synopses of every Hartnell story and every Troughton story, but it just hasn’t stuck.

I’ll be interested in a couple of things particularly. The way the Doctor’s relationship with Ben and Polly develops is one of them, as is the way that the first Dalek story not to be scripted by Terry Nation works out. OK – The Dalek’s Master Plan did have episodes scripted by Dennis Spooner, but this is the first complete Dalek serial in which Terry Nation didn’t script any of the episodes at all. A quick check in my trusty “Doctor Who : The Television Companion” – David J. Howe and Stephen James Walker, first published in 1998 by BBC Books – reveals that the story was scripted by David Whitaker. Now, with a Terry Nation script you pretty much know what you’re going to get. My impression of David Whitaker’s stuff, though, is that he’s far more difficult to pigeonhole – he wrote both “Edge of Destruction” and “The Crusade”, for example, and it’s difficult to think of two Doctor Who stories by the same writer that are as different as these two.

I think it’s a shame that this is a full recon. It would have been fascinating to actually see Troughton acting for the first time as The Doctor. You can only get so much from voices and photos, at the end of the day.

After Watching

That was a great story by anybody’s definition. Here’s the basic idea: - the newly regenerated Doctor lands the TARDIS on the planet Vulcan. Yeah, it’s a bit of a coincidence that Star Trek would use the same name for a planet at around the same time (I think that Doctor Who came first, just) Having said that, though, it’s no great surprise considering that Vulcan is a Roman God, and all the planets in our own solar system are named after Roman Gods and Goddesses, with the exception of Earth. The human colonists on the planet are expecting a visit from an Examiner from Earth. Who, unbeknownst to most of them, has been murdered, and dumped in one of the planet’s mercury swamps. All this in the first few minutes of the first episode, mind you. The Doctor is mistaken for the Examiner, which handily gives him the run of the colony. He meets the scientist Lesterson. Lesterson has found and retrieved an ancient capsule from the planet’s mercury swamps. When the capsule is opened, they find three deactivated and cobwebbed Daleks. That’s a great cliffhanger on which to end the episode, only slightly spoiled by the fact that you knew the Daleks were coming because of the title of the story.

Lesterson and the other colonists fail to see the deadly danger they are in. Instead, some of them see a great tool to help them in their mining, and some of them see them either as a weapon to use for their rebellion against the colony’s government, or a weapon to suppress rebels. Despite the Doctor’s warnings, Lesterson powers up one of the Daleks, who pretends to be his servant. This enables him to reactivate the other two Daleks, and then to obtain raw materials and power to begin manufacturing more Daleks on the previously mentioned conveyor belt. Once the Daleks are ready they attack the humans, rebels and government forces alike, and only the Doctor can save the day.

This brief synopsis doesn’t really do this story any justice, but then you ought to watch it yourselves to prove or disprove this. Anyone who thinks all Dalek stories are rather simplistic and samey really should. So, what’s so great about Power of the Daleks?

The first ‘difficult’ regeneration

Patrick Troughton acts extremely oddly at times in the first episode especially, speaking of The Doctor in the third person, as if he really isn’t the Doctor himself, ignoring Ben and Polly largely, and playing that flipping recorder. The fact that this is a six parter for once works in the show’s favour as it allows Troughton the time to grow into the part, and start to develop a relationship with his companions by the end of the story. It’s such a shame that this is a recon, which means that apart from a few very brief fragments we don’t get to see Troughton move, and it’s difficult to tell how much screen presence he has. It’s worth noting that some of the little pegs on which he seems to be hanging his portrayal of the Doctor will gradually fade away in time. I’m thinking of his silly hat fetish, for example, and his overuse of that flaming recorder.

The way that the Daleks are used

This is very clever. Every time we have met the Daleks so far they have been two dimensional malevolent killing machines. This story explores what happens to them, what they are like, when you take their guns away from them. There’s a beautiful use of dramatic irony in this story. Lesterson and his fellow colonists don’t really know the Daleks at all. All they have to go on is what the Doctor says, and they ignore that largely. We, the audience, like the Doctor, know exactly what the Daleks are like, and know that it’s not a matter of IF the Daleks go on the rampage, just when. This makes scenes like those where the three Daleks chant ‘we are your ser-vants’ even more effective. The story adds another facet to the Daleks, since we see their cunning, and their ability to manipulate, which is something we’ve only really seen before in the original Dalek story.

The Political Drama

Yes, underpinning the reappearance of the Daleks is a tense political drama. “The Power of the Daleks” is an obvious title for the story, since the Daleks need power to reactivate and then start reproducing themselves. However it is also an ironic one, since much of this story is about the power of the humans, or rather the human desire for power over fellow humans. These colonists are a nasty bunch, the smart ones are amoral, and the decent ones are fools. The leading Dalek at one stage asks Lesterson “Why do humans kill humans?” What a brilliant piece of scripting that is. Think about it. If the Dalek had just said words to the effect of – you are no better than we are – it wouldn’t have had the same effect, yet essentially that is the conclusion that the Dalek is inviting the viewers to draw for themselves. Lovely writing.

It’s telling that the Doctor advises Ben and Polly that they should all leave quickly at the end of the last episode, since rather than thank them for ending the Dalek menace, the surviving colonists are far more likely to present them with a bill for all the damage that was done in destroying them. That’s just the last example of the wonderfully cynical edge this story has, remarkable considering that it was made in the mid 60s.

Very Good Acting

Bernard Archard brings a touch of class to any production, and he would go on to play Marcus Scarman brilliantly in one of my all time top 10 stories, Pyramids of Mars. You just knew that his character Bragen was going to turn out to be a villain. His self-delusion that he can still control the Daleks once their attack has started is played to perfection, and totally convincing. Robert James as the misguided scientist Lesterson has his own descent into madness, and does so very convincingly, and Pamela Ann Davy puts in a good turn as the rebel turncoat Janley, who is gunned won brutally by the Daleks without warning. It’s hard to think of anyone who doesn’t put in a good performance in this story, helped, no doubt, by the excellent script that they were working with.

Is “The Power of the Daleks” perfect? No, not quite. The only obvious deficiency of the script is in the denouement. It’s just not clear how the Doctor has managed to destroy the Daleks. He has installed something onto the power console, and messes about with the switches, but it’s not clear whether his success was by design or accidental. It’s not explained in any great detail exactly how this works – there’s a hint that the Doctor has overloaded them with power, but it’s not clear, and that’s a bit of a shame, especially considering the excellent if somewhat downbeat end to the episode.

It’s interesting, if ultimately rather pointless, to speculate how “The Power of the Daleks” might conceivably have been done as a William Hartnell story. This may be rather controversial, but I reckon that Hartnell could have pulled it off as well. He’d certainly have had some good confrontations with Lesterson and Bragen. But it would have been a different story, and that’s the point. Doctor Who has now embarked upon a different course from what we’ve seen before, and judging by this first story everyone involved embraced the change whole heartedly.

What Have We Learned?

Daleks can convert electric current into static electricity, but need a large amount of it to really get their motors running.

Daleks can reproduce exceptionally quickly given enough power, raw materials and equipment.

Dalek capsules, like their own time machines, are dimensionally transcendental.

The kind of human being who’d willingly live and work on a colony like Vulcan is a very nasty piece of work.

You don’t have to be Terry Nation in order to write a classic Dalek story, in fact the evidence from this story suggests that it is probably helpful not to be.