The Amaryll Challenge

This strip opens with the Dalek’s many failed attempts to create a working spacecraft.  Eventually the 13th version is successful and the Daleks are free to conquer space.  The familiar Dalek saucers head towards their nearest planet, Alevga, where their sensors suggest, there is not intelligent life.  On landing, however, the Daleks discover that the plant life is sentient and aggressive to intruders.  And so ensues the Daleks’ first invasion of a planet.  With the plants seeding the Daleks and their saucers(with fairly horrific consequences), the Daleks decide to retreat leaving a small taskforce behind to attack the controlling root at the heart of the planet.  As it is, most of these Daleks are destroyed and the last survivor exterminates the central root causing the entire planet to explode!  The Emperor Dalek vows to destroy any planet they cannot conquer – a new Dalek creed.

This is a far more straightforwardly dramatic story than Duel of the Daleks.  Surprisingly, it is also relatively tragic (in the dramatic sense of the word) in that the Daleks are technically defeated by the native life forms, who are also wiped out when the planet explodes.  The story even starts by detailing the Daleks’ various failures at inventing a working spacecraft.  Initially it seems an odd thing to do for the ‘leads’ of your comic strip, to show their failures, but in retrospect it makes sense.  It highlights how driven the Daleks are to reach their ultimate aims – the conquest of the universe.  They are willing to sacrifice themselves and entire races to achieve this.  It’s actually quite chilling.

Also quite chilling is the best frame of artwork so far in any of these strips.  It depicts a Dalek that has been consumed by plant life.  Flowers and tendrils wrap around and through the Dalek casing, bursting from its gun and grills.  It’s beautifully drawn.

What I felt was lacking from this story, though, were the defined characters of Duel of the Daleks.  Even the Emperor in this strip merely spouts a few lines of dialogue.  The Dalek taskforce sent to the centre of the planet are characterless.  Even the remaining survivor isn’t given the character afforded to Zeg in the last story.  It’s a shame because it take something away from the story.  Bizarrely, for Daleks, I was able to invest in the characters in Duel but here they are just a bunch of metal aliens who may as well be robots.  There is very little scheming.  When the going gets tough, the tough bugger off and blow the planet up.

Overall, though, it’s a good story which is certainly better than Power Play.  The next instalment, The Penta Ray Factor, however, looks like it may be returning to (if we consider the Daleks to be our protagonists) human ‘antagonists’ (ala Power Play).  It will be interesting to see if the story becomes as generic as Power Play did or whether it manages to continue the strong run of stories started with Duel of the Daleks.