Written by Tom
Ian, Barbara and some Thals walk through a cave. The Daleks give up on their plan to drop an atom bomb and instead decide to bombard the planet with excess radiation from their powerplants, as if there’s any difference between the two from an audience perspective. The Doctor and Susan have a lot of fun vandalising an elevator before getting recaptured by the Daleks.
In 2006, The Daleks got released as part of Doctor Who: The Beginning DVD boxset. A 13 year old Tom bought the boxset and devoured it. His memories of The Daleks are that it started amazingly before devolving into a staggeringly boring slog through a cave.
In 2022, a 28 year old Tom started watching the episodes from The Beginning boxset again, this time not treating them not as three TV serials but as thirteen individual episodes of television which tell three separate-but-linked stories. It struck him that the back end of The Daleks was always going to be where this different approach to watching had its most potential. Does the cave sequence of The Daleks perform better when it’s “The Cave Episode” rather than when it’s half-an-hour of padding positioned two hours into a TV movie, or is the sequence just so dull that sectioning it off to its own episode does nothing but waste an entire episode?
My friends, the cave sequence wastes an entire episode. The big issue is that the sequence just isn’t about anything. Well, maybe that’s unfair. If you squint, it sorta contributes to the show’s themes of teamwork and leadership. Ian, the person who keeps jostling with the Doctor over who gets to be leader, is finally given his own team and has to guide them over a massive chasm in the middle of a cave. Alas his team has one person in it who doesn’t want to be there and, right at the end, Ian screws up, leaving that member dangling from a cliff while he clings on to a rock for dear life. Fair enough – these are good things to face Ian with. But the way they’re played doesn’t work at all. Ian never actually interacts with the Thal who doesn’t want to be in cave, so the issue isn’t that Ian fails at dealing with him but that the rubbish Thal is overly insular and ends up messing everything up. There are perhaps ways of rephrasing this into some form of comment on Ian – maybe he should’ve noticed that the rubbish Thal was worried, or wasn’t approachable enough that the rubbish Thal would talk to him rather than his friend – but this is a stretch. Ultimately, the issue is that the cave scenes never reach a point of aboutness. They are drawn out sequences of mild peril presented purely because what else are you going to fill your adventure serial with?
If these scenes have little to do with the series’ overall themes though, they fit the themes of this specific serial even worse. What does this have to do with nuclear armageddon and the debate between pacifism and war? Nothing. It’s filler. Let’s be honest, given that serial did a fake ending a fortnight ago and a fake beginning last week, The Daleks feels like nothing more than a four episode serial which has had three extra episodes grafted on. Apparently not knowing what else to do for episodes five and six, Terry Nation has reached into his book of adventure serial clichés and gone “A swamp and a cave, will that do?” They will, but barely.
Not helping things is that this is the first episode where Doctor Who‘s usually fantastic set designers finally produce a blunder. While the cave tunnels are pretty decent, the set with the chasm doesn’t work at all. The show wants the chasm to be a wide expanse over an eternal pit which needs a running jump to be cleared. Constrained by the available space in the studio and, to a lesser extent, the show’s 4:3 aspect ratio, the two sides of the set end up getting smushed together and the chasm becomes this tiny gap which looks quite easy to skip over. If they could sell the idea that the chasm is impossibly tall, they might have been able to get away with it. Unfortunately there’s no shots looking down in the chasm so that we get a sense of its scale, mostly because pointing the camera down the chasm would reveal that it’s a TV set that’s been positioned a few feet above ground. These shots are conspicuous by their absence though, leaving you in a “doomed if you do, doomed if you don’t” scenario.
Of course, there might be another issue with the chasm sequence – namely that it requires us to stay excited while we watch every character jump over the chasm, one after another, in real time, for two thirds of an episode. With the best set in the world, that’d be a hard sell. With an imperfect set and the feeling that this isn’t really about anything, the results are the worst scenes of Doctor Who so far.
Everything that isn’t the cave still delights though. The scene where the Doctor and Susan destroy the elevator is wonderful – their glee at blowing up the elevator’s fuse box is a delight, as is story beat where the Doctor boasts about his anarchism just before the Daleks turn up to surround him. Also funny is the Daleks planning to drop an atomic bomb on Skaro only to find out that the bomb needs to be custom ordered and will only be finished 23 days from now. They continue to be bleaky comic and thus incredibly entertaining as villains. And at some point in the past two episodes, Barbara started wearing Thal trousers. Who did she swap her trousers with? The fanfic part of the brain boggles…
So yeah, it’s a bit of a rubbish episode to have at the end of your adventure serial but not joyless. You can’t win them all, and at least next week is our Dalek grand finale…
FNORD 