"The Dead Planet"

The TARDIS arrives in a petrified forest, everything appears to be dead, and the TARDIS crew are unaware of the dangerous radiation levels. This is some impressive set design considering their budget, forests and jungles will repeatedly be a strength of Doctor Who set designers. I like Ian and Barbara’s conversation about being unsure about things, and afraid because they don’t know if the Doctor will be able to get them back home, just a nice character moment. Ian’s observation that the Doctor has a knack for getting himself into trouble makes perfect sense, both in hindsight and for a viewer at the time. Susan finds a flower, tries to show Ian, but he hears Barbara call and immediately runs to her aid, crushing Susan’s flower. If we needed any early indication that Ian and Barbara like each other, there it is, the way he’d immediately drop whatever to come to her aid. I like that they don’t make it so overt though, it’s done with some degree of subtlety. The metal creature they found is pretty cool, though it’s not worth Barbara screaming over. The Doctor being so inquisitive in this episode is really cool, it’s the first we really see of the Doctor’s scientifically focused mind. He just wants to explore and study everything, which is a very Doctor-like character trait.

The Doctor wants to go down to the city they find in the distance, but it’s getting dark so Ian insists that they all go back to the TARDIS. We get to see the TARDIS food machine, which is fun, and I really like the way the Doctor mainly introduces it as a way to distract Ian from all his questions. It’s a shame we don’t really get to see the food machine much beyond this story and The Edge of Destruction. On the way back to the TARDIS, Susan was convinced she heard a sound and a hand touched her, and they hear a tapping from outside the ship, confirming that Susan in fact hadn’t imagined it. The Doctor again wants to go out and explore, the rest just want to leave, so he gets the TARDIS started, but takes out the fluid link so it won’t take off. He says it needs more mercury and they must go down to the city to see if they have any. Early One was such a troublemaker and was so stubborn, always trying to get his way in some manner. So they go to the city, finding a metal box outside the TARDIS containing a few glass vials. Susan puts them into the TARDIS and they continue on. I wonder if those glass vials will be important later. They get down to the city and they split up, Barbara gets trapped in there, and gets backed against a wall while we see from the perspective of something that looks like it’s carrying a plunger. Of course we all know that’s a Dalek, but that is one hell of a good cliffhanger, complete with Jacqueline Hill’s blood-curdling scream. That will get people to tune in next week, easily one of the best Doctor Who cliffhangers of all time. This episode is a pretty good start to this story.

"The Survivors"

The rest of the crew look around while they wait for Barbara. The Doctor quickly realizes that this city must be home to some very intelligent race, based on the technology and the architecture. He is right of course, but it’s fascinating to see the Doctor before he really knows just how bad the Daleks are, and there are a few parts of this story where he oddly praises them, which is just odd when we know what we know now. They find a Geiger counter, and the Doctor figures out that the planet must be dead because of nuclear fallout and radiation, and it also explains why they’re starting to feel unwell. Maybe they should have properly checked the radiation meter before they left the TARDIS, it was even blinking. Now that they know their situation, the Doctor realizes he made a mistake with the fluid link and that they need to get out of there before they all die. He confesses to the deception he did earlier, says they need to go, but Ian takes the fluid link from him saying that he won’t give it back until they’ve found Barbara. I like how Ian is not afraid to stand up to the Doctor, not afraid to call him out on his BS, and this scene is no exception. We’ll see time and time again how Ian clearly influenced the Doctor to become the character we know now.

The three of them are rounded up by more Daleks. Ian tries to run and is paralyzed, and they are captured and reunited with Barbara. It’s very interesting to see the Daleks first go for the incapacitation rather than outright killing Ian. Part of that is that the Daleks aren’t fully developed yet, but I guess with hindsight of what we know of the Daleks, and the context of the episode, they want information on the Thals, and Ian can’t potentially give them that unless he’s alive. These original Daleks look really good, and I like that the Dalek design really hasn’t changed that much over the years, Cusick’s iconic design needs no change. Also, Peter Hawkins on the voice, they really sound scary and intimidating when he does it. All of our TARDIS crew is starting to suffer the effects of the radiation, and the Daleks start with the Doctor for interrogation. They think he’s a Thal, but find it odd that he’s suffering from the radiation, as they know the Thals can live on the surface, they want to know if the Thals have an anti-radiation drug that is keeping them alive. The Doctor of course doesn’t know what they’re talking about, the Daleks don’t know what he’s talking about when he mentions the TARDIS and such, but they come to the realization that the box left outside the TARDIS must have contained anti-radiation drugs. Seeing these two age old enemies not know a thing about one another is fascinating, a feeling that is unsurprisingly not captured again when the Daleks get their records of him wiped in Asylum of the Daleks. The plan is to send someone back into the forest to get the drugs, and bring them into the Dalek city. Susan is in the best shape from the radiation so she ends up sent. Some really funny small set pretend running later, and Susan gets to the TARDIS the episode ending with her, drugs in hand, ready to return. Another good episode, mainly for the proper introduction of the Daleks. What we lost in the atmosphere of the mysterious forest and city, we gained in the Daleks being great right from the start. The episode still moved along at a decent pace too.

"The Escape"

Susan exits the TARDIS and immediately meets the Thal Alydon. She explains the situation, and he says not to trust the Daleks, giving her an extra set of the drugs to hide, one to give to the Daleks, one for them all to use themselves. I will point out, this is a lot of standing there chatting, when Susan’s instructions were to go and come straight back. Susan and Alydon are puzzled, because the Daleks called the Thals mutations, but they look completely normal. Makes you wonder what may be underneath their metal casings. He guides her back to the Dalek city so she can save her friends. The Daleks, upon Susan’s return, realize she must have made contact with the Thals and they believe that maybe she could bring the Thals to them. This is why they allow Susan to keep the second set of the drugs to save themselves, unbeknownst to our four main characters. Susan infodumps about the Thals, how they’re starving because of the lack of rain, and need to make a deal with the Daleks for food, which of course the Daleks are listening in on. I really like how the Daleks are kind of lurking in their base, listening to all this intel, and plotting a plan. The Daleks to me are always way more interesting and intimidating when they’re scheming and being clever, rather than just going around shooting everyone.

The Dalek collects Susan and gives the other prisoners more food and water, it says it needs her to help the Thals. We see the Thals discussing their situation, whether or not they should trust the Daleks. There’s a lot of casual 60s sexism in this scene where they basically don’t want to listen to the women’s opinions, and saying the drugs would have been safer had Alydon not given them to a girl, an observation Dyoni, a woman, made. Not such a, in Susan’s words, perfect people are they? The Daleks have Susan write a letter to the Thals inviting them to the city for food and supplies. I enjoy the comically large way she wrote “Susan” at the bottom of the page, so the audience could see it, and the Daleks not understanding what a name is is pretty funny. The Daleks say they will deliver the message. How? They established earlier that they can’t leave the city. Did they somehow get two Daleks to use their plungers to fold it into a paper airplane to throw from the city? Wad it up and shoot it out of a cannon? The Doctor and Ian stage an argument that turns into a bigger struggle, which they use as an opportunity to destroy the camera in their cell, stop the Daleks watching and listening in. I like the way they didn’t flat out tell us what was happening, aside from an, “all set, Doctor?” from Ian. They just showed it happen and let the audience easily figure it out without a whole “here’s the plan” bit.

Then they all work together to try and figure out a plan to escape, figuring out how the Daleks are powered. I like how all four of them had something to contribute, and it really felt like they were starting to work together as a team. Actually, we do figure out how the Daleks delivered the message, they just left it on the ground just outside the city, presumably hoping the Thals would just happen to find it. That’s a little silly, even if it worked. The Dalek returns with more food, and leaves. They realize they need a way to distract the Dalek, then grab it and put it on the coat Alydon gave Susan to insulate it from the static electricity in the floor that powers it. We’ll ignore that static electricity, by definition doesn’t flow like a circuit to power things. Barbara makes mud with the water the Daleks give them and dirt from Susan’s shoes. That is a lot of water compared to the dirt, which she just throws in the bowl, no way it makes the thick and putty-like mud that she ends up with. Anyway, they jam the door with a bit of the camera, mud the Dalek’s eye, hold the gun away, and drag it onto the coat. The Dalek is disabled and the plan worked. They open the Dalek up, and take the creature inside out. But they had to make sure the women didn’t see the horrible creature inside, it’s not for their eyes of course. Sixties sexism at play again. Ian gets into the Dalek casing and they do the old prisoner-in-escort trick as the episode ends. Another solid episode this one, good Dalek scheming, good TARDIS team planning.

"The Ambush"

Ian figures out how to operate the Dalek on his own, and they do some pretend prisoner stuff, including a wink from Susan in her ruse. Maybe a little on the nose. On the eye? Anyway, they get into a lift, the Doctor fixes the door shut, but Ian is now trapped in the Dalek casing. I like the shots of the lift going up and down. I bet it’s just a cardboard tube with holes for the “floors” on the end of the camera with a cylinder moving towards or away, simple, but I think gets the job done very effectively. That and some clever uses of split screen effects to show things moving in the shaft on set. We have the Daleks trying to cut the door down, a race between them that our heroes win. They get to the top, and throw a big styrofoam rock onto the lift to stop the Daleks. From above they get a nice view of the city and the nearby forest, and the Thals making their way to the city. That shot of the four of them with their muffled banging on the window trying to get the Thals to hear them will never not be funny. Alydon and Temmosus, the Thal leader, are talking, Alydon is suspicious of the Daleks, Temmosus believes that if he’s unarmed and talks to the Daleks peacefully, he’ll be fine. He says something about how fear leads to hatred and war, so clearly Yoda ripped off The Daleks in The Phantom Menace.

The Doctor wants to get everyone back to the ship and get the hell out of here, but Ian stays behind to try and warn the Thals. He wouldn’t feel right just letting them be ambushed. It’s kind of weirdly done, the way Ian stands around while Temmosus makes his plea for peace and cooperation, and waits until just before Temmosus is exterminated to actually do his warning. But, we get our first proper Dalek extermination here, and I really think the making the screen negative in lieu of any actual beam effects is another creative but inexpensive solution to get the effect across. Ian apologizes to Alydon for being late, which is amusing since he was there for a good half a minute before the Daleks fired, and he gets Alydon and the surviving Thals back to the camp and the TARDIS. They get back, they have a bit of a discussion about fighting the Daleks vs. fleeing, but that’s done in more detail in the next episode. I like the bits where the Doctor is talking to Dyoni (hey, someone’s listening to her now) about the history of Skaro. It’s good world building and done in a way that fuels the Doctor’s inquisitive nature. Skaro is the 12th planet in its system. The Thals used to be the warriors on this planet, fighting against the Dals, until there was a neutronic bomb which devastated the planet. There were mutations over the many centuries, which came full circle and made the Thals look the way they do, but for the Dals, they ended up the horrible mutations that we found inside the casing, they became the Daleks. A planet scarred by war called Skaro? That’s Terry Nation planetary naming at its finest. Now, of course we all know what happens to that origin story 11 years later in the show, but it’s still interesting stuff to learn. The Doctor and the others decide they should probably leave, not get further involved, but Ian realizes the Daleks took the fluid link when they searched him, and they can’t leave without recovering it. This episode goes by pretty quickly, there’s a lot of action in it, the first four episodes of this serial are very solid, it’s unfortunate that the final three episodes don’t do the first ones justice.

"The Expedition"

The Daleks have duplicated the Thal anti-radiation drug, and are now testing it on themselves. Meanwhile they’re just watching on their range scopes to see that the TARDIS team and the Thals have made contact and decide that it’s logical they will team up to attack them. Hard cut to Alydon saying he and the rest of the Thals won’t fight. The contrast there is a bit unintentionally funny. Ian tells Barbara that they won’t fight, and honestly he doesn’t feel it’s right to ask them to put their lives on the line for them. Barbara says that they’d be stuck here forever if they don’t have their help, and knows it’s only a matter of time until the Daleks figure out how to leave the city and kill them all. What I like about their debate is that they are both right in their own ways, which I think makes it a pretty well written part of the episode. The Doctor apologizes for his trick with the fluid link getting them in this mess, well, as much as this Doctor apologizes for anything, and we get the first Doctor gets Ian’s name wrong gag, which is funny every time, one of my favorite recurring jokes in Doctor Who. Susan and the Doctor are both on Barbara’s side, they need the Thals to help them, there’s no other option. Ian agrees, but says he will only convince them if they themselves want to, not just risking their lives for them.

The next bit, where Ian asks what if he took their history records to make a trade, or even one of their women, while admittedly a little bit based in 60s attitudes, I think is still a good scene in this episode. The Daleks have always been an allegory to fascism and Nazis, and this scene is basically asking, what will it take for you to stop accepting, ignoring, or appeasing fascism until you finally decide to stand up and do something to fight against it. Fighting against fascism is generally a good idea, and I think that’s a good message to put in the story. The Daleks meanwhile, have realized that the drug was toxic to them, and that they actually need radiation to survive, that’s how they’ve evolved after the neutronic war. So their new plan is now to detonate another bomb, kill what’s left of the Thals, and irradiate the planet some more. Alydon has decided that he will help the Doctor and co. and gets volunteers to join them, giving a good rousing speech in the process. “There is no indignity in being afraid to die. But there is a terrible shame in being afraid to live.” is a pretty good line contained within. They split into two groups, one, the big one with Ian, Barbara, Ganatus and others, will go through the swamps to get to the Dalek city from the mountains, and the other with the Doctor, Susan, and Alydon will go by the front door so to speak as a distraction. Some will stay by the camp and use mirrors to reflect light to blind the Daleks’ range scopes, so they can’t see them coming. The rest of the episode is basically just they sleep for the night by the lake, which is comedically a puddle in the studio, a Thal gets pulled into a whirlpool, where the episode ends. About the first half of this episode is interesting, the question on whether or not to fight, that thematic material, but then it gets very slow after they start out on the titular expedition. It feels like the story has lost a good bit of momentum. Momentum that isn’t really recovered in the next episode either.

"The Ordeal"

Welcome to the cave episode. It’s exactly what it sounds like. Ian’s group makes it to a cave, and they spend the episode getting through it. Ganatus falls, but is recovered. They jump over a gap, everyone except Antodus makes it across, and the episode ends with him dangling, threatening to pull Ian in. There isn’t much to say about that part of the episode, it’s pretty bog standard. It’s dark, kind of hard to tell exactly what the layout of this cave is supposed to be. Ganatus seems to have taken a liking to Barbara, she was his first concern when he fell, since she was on the other end of the rope, and they talk a bit in this episode and a bit in the previous, but they don’t really explore this all that much. Antodus is shown to be a coward, wanting to turn back the whole time, so of course we knew something bad would happen to him eventually. Additionally, the Doctor’s group makes it to the Dalek city, and the Doctor wants to try and short out their static electricity system, and hopefully some of their other systems as well. What I find funny about it is the panel has things far too small for the Dalek plungers to operate. Sure, we’ve seen other attachments, like the tool they used to cut the door in the third part, and maybe that could come into play here, but it still struck me as amusing thinking of a Dalek trying to use this panel with a plunger. I do like the Doctor standing there, bragging about his genius of doing the simple task of creating a short-circuit, when the Daleks show up (they could track them by their vibrations this whole time) and take him and Susan captive. Hey pride, meet fall. A very uneventful episode this one, we’ll see how it ends in the final part.

"The Rescue"

Not to be confused with the season 2 serial by the same name, we start with them trying to pull Antodus up, when he decides he won’t risk pulling anyone down with him. Antodus cuts the rope and lets himself fall to his death. I hope it was far enough to be instant for his sake. I guess he did something selfless and non-cowardly in the end, and Ian learned a valuable lesson of not using himself as the anchor to tie the rope around. They are about ready to turn back, declaring this plan a lost cause when they see a light, which leads to some kind of stock image machine room, they’ve made it to the Dalek city. The Doctor has a good moment here where we first learn just how truly evil the Daleks are. He condemns their plan of senseless killing, they want to spread the radiation so that none but the Daleks will be able to live on Skaro. This is the first we really see that they see themselves as the superior beings and will destroy anything that isn’t a Dalek too. The Doctor tries to bargain with the Daleks with his knowledge and the means by which he arrived on this planet. Many people have speculated that this kind of thing is what told the Daleks there was life beyond Skaro, leading them to seek it out to destroy it. The Doctor may have created his own biggest enemy by his involvement here. Now, of course, that is contradicted, as many things are, by later Doctor Who, but that’s just inevitable in a franchise that’s gone on this long.

The Thals, Ian, and Barbara enter the city as the Daleks begin their countdown for the bomb. There’s a fight, some Thals die, the Daleks lose their power, they stop the detonation and recover the fluid link. It’s actually a fairly simple conclusion to the problem, at least the pace moves better in this episode. They start to make their goodbyes. I think it’s a little odd that the Doctor basically tells them to ignore all the Dalek technology unless they want to end up like them, I’m sure there are plenty of good ways the Thals could adapt the technology, just be careful not to let the Daleks activate again. I do like his one piece of advice though, “always search for truth. My truth is in the stars, and yours is here.” We do get our first classic instance of the Doctor fixing a problem and then going on his way before he’d have to help them rebuild their society, which is always funny, and has never led to further issues. They say their farewells, Ganatus gives Barbara a kiss and says he’ll never forget her, and the TARDIS departs. As the TARDIS is in flight, there’s a sound, everything goes dark, and they all fall on the floor. Overall, I think this story is a pretty good introduction of the Daleks, and clearly it was successful as the show is still around today, Dalekmania being a huge boost to its popularity. I think it could have been condensed into a more concise 6 parter, but certainly cutting it down as much as The Daleks in Colour did is excessive. The Daleks felt threatening, there were other characters to like such as Alydon or Ganatus, the set design and effects were impressive for the budget. I’d say it’s a bit unfairly criticized for being boring and slow, I think it moves along just fine outside of the 5th and 6th parts. 3.5/5 Stars from me.