Written by Tom
The Doctor and Ian are kidnapped by the Daleks and put in a cell with an intelligence puzzle in it. The Doctor beats the intelligence puzzle easily and thus becomes the Daleks’ next candidate for conversion into a CyberRoboman. Meanwhile, the English Resistance has come up with a new anti-Dalek grenade that they use to storm the Dalek’s ship.
It is endlessly amusing to me that the big set piece of the episode – the thing which is unique to it instead of leading to/from the episodes next to it – is a logic puzzle about refracting light through glass. After successfully reintroducing the Daleks through the second most iconic shot of Doctor Who‘s first year, the script uses them to deliver a half-formed science lecture on refraction, because it’s GCSE science that we’re interested in here and not the apparent end of the world via alien invasion.
Indeed, the Daleks are odd creatures here. Apparently they build their prisons as escape rooms in order to find the cleverest humans. Why? So they can figure out the best candidates for… being turned into mindless android servants. It’s a baroque audition process to say the least, and are we sure that intelligence is the metric they want here?
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FNORD 