Written by Tom
The Slyther, a giant beanbag which waggles its little arms around a bit, falls off a cliff. (Well, it never did seem to have eyes.) Everyone’s on their way to the mines. The Doctor, Susan and David are heading there through the sewers, taking the occasional break so Susan and David can slap each other with some dead fish. Seeking a break from their trip to the mine, Barbara and her friend stop off at the house of two random women, only to be ratted out to the Daleks and, well, taken to the mine. Meanwhile Ian’s already in the mine, walking around and being generally ineffective before getting himself stuck in a giant rocket that the Daleks are going to use to destroy the Earth’s core.
The overall structure of this serial has been three linked travelogues in which Team TARDIS get separated at the start, go through their own adventures, and reunite at the end. It’s a clean and sensible structure, yes, but not fantastically enacted. The fact that Team TARDIS are going to reunite at the mines at the end is essentially a coincidence, Barbarba and David just so happening to make similar decisions to go to the same mine that Ian just so happens to have been dropped off at. The times at which each character makes their decision to go to the mine have also been spread out across the six episodes, never happening at the same time. As such, at no point does the “everyone gets split up; everyone goes back together” structure feel particularly purposeful – we’re watching three functionally random plotlines over the course of six episodes, all of which happen to end at the same place and the same time.
The weekly structure perhaps doesn’t help this thing. Four weeks in, it’s slightly difficult to remember exactly why Barbara and her friend are going to the mines. (To join the rebels there, I think, these presumably being the people Ian hung out with last episode, though there wasn’t a lot of them and do the rebels really want to be hanging out at the entrance of the main place where the Daleks send their political prisoners?) Elsewhere, other parts of the script seem to have been written under the assumption that we would forget things from last week. When did the Doctor recover from his tiredness in order to join Susan and David on their exhibition, for example? It’s not hard to make the narrative jump required here, but it is a change to the status quo that the script is trying to hide in the week between two episodes.
This does lead to everything feeling slightly underwhelming, something which is a particular issue in an episode that perhaps features one of the show’s most ostentatious premises yet: namely the Daleks plan which is to replace the Earth’s core in order to convert the planet into a spaceship. This premise is at least fun on its own merits, though. Let’s ignore the fact that it’s nonsense – the Daleks have always been treated by the show as absurd creatures and the shot of them explaining their plan, filmed from a low dutch angle for maximum visual impact, is clearly trying to impress us with scale rather than sense. Instead, let’s just enjoy the bigness of the concept, particularly given that this is a BBC show which has traditionally worked on incredibly low stakes. It’s silly but pursued with zeal, and that’s a really likable tone to hit.
The episode also interestingly mirrors the original Dalek serial too. Once again, we have a penultimate episode where the Dalek decide to wreck the planet they’re on with a bomb, thus allowing them to terraform it to their uses, leading to a final episode whose ticking clock is whether Team TARDIS and their new friends can stop the bomb going off. We even have people having to walk through woods and caves in order to get to the final confrontation – the “Daleks Invade Earth” serial really is the story of the original Dalek serial transposed onto Earth.
But this is perhaps where the slightly underwhelming nature of the scripts comes back to the fore. What the hell is this all actually about underneath the surface? We’ve discussed previously how the entire serial works as a “It Could Happen Here” story about the soviet Daleks invading the landmarks of Britain. Has any of this idea been advanced any in the five weeks since we first discussed it though? Not really. It’s spectacle led but the spectacle isn’t really being wedded to much, making for something which is occasionally very visually impressive but ultimately a bit shallow.
Not even having its own Cave Episode can really save it.
FNORD 