Planet of the Daleks is a serial that looks good.  David Maloney is one of those directors who knows exactly how to shoot the types of sets Doctor Who works with to give a false sense of scale even if it is limited by the studio.  This is also his first serial shot in color and the colors are quite vibrant greens and blues throughout.  The image of pools of molten ice are the perfect kind of dumb contradiction that I love from science fiction like Doctor Who.  Likewise Jon Pertwee commands every scene he’s in, even in a first episode that sidelines the Doctor and puts Jo Grant front and center while writing her as a generic companion (Katy Manning trying her absolute best with the material).  Bernard Horsfall is also here with commanding screen presence.  The Daleks themselves are presented as truly menacing and that’s also great.

The trouble with Planet of the Daleks lies in the script itself.  Terry Nation was given first right of refusal on Dalek serials after Day of the Daleks entered production without his permission, and the story that he came up with is basically the greatest hits of The Daleks, The Dalek Invasion of Earth, The Chase, and the first half of The Daleks’ Master Plan.  Essentially we have a story made entirely of spare parts, The Daleks being the main basis for the story itself.  Now these weren’t bad stories, and in 1973 when there was no home media outside of Doctor Who and the Daleks being rereleased on paperback later that year, viewers likely didn’t notice, but watching it in a marathon in the age of streaming, you can tell how little this serial has to say.

It wants to be anti-war which is good but feels like an afterthought when Nation’s earlier work did it far better.  Not helping matters is a first installment that is the closest direct rewrite of “The Dead Planet” but keeping the lead in that the Doctor and Jo know the Daleks are behind things while the script refuses to acknowledge it.  The second episode then builds to a revelation that there are thousands of Daleks on the planet.  The planet also has other Nation tricks: deadly plague, deadly fungus, invisible creatures, etc.  It’s certainly not a bad serial, but it is a tedious one.