Motorised Dustbins (Doctor Who: The Dalek Invasion of Earth P2: “The Daleks” Review)

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?

DW EP-BY-EP BONUS: Season One (The Story So Far)

Written by Tom

[So we’ve officially finished reviewing Doctor Who Season One in its entirety. Might as well do some overall conclusions and sketch out some final thoughts before we venture onto Doctor Who 2.0 {which, given our analysis of the show so far, should actually be Doctor Who 3.0 at least, but you get my point}.

Part One: But Wait a Minute, Is This Actually Where Season One Ends?

Before we start though, let’s do a little bit of admin that’s going to prove very useful for our analyses of the first few serials of Season Two. Firstly, let’s ask ourselves a question that feels like it should be obvious: do the Doctor Who episodes running from “An Unearthly Child” to “The Reign of Terror” actually constitute Doctor Who Season One?

There are multiple ways of defining what a season of television is. By far the most common definition is that a season of television is a single block of episodes produced under the same banner which all air in sequence one after another, usually on a weekly basis. Each season is then separated from each other by a large period where the show isn’t being broadcast. Ergo, Doctor Who Season One consists of the serials running from “An Unearthly Child” to “The Reign of Terror” because these aired in the same weekly timeslot one-after-another before stopping for a few weeks, this break in the broadcast marking the end of the season and its return marking the beginning of Season Two. Simple.

Classic Doctor Who does challenge this paradigm though. Take, for example, the Tom Baker era of Doctor Who which started airing at the end of one year and finished airing at the start of the next, taking a break in the middle so that people wouldn’t miss a few episodes during Christmas and New Years. No-one’s really going to claim that “The Brain of Morbius” and “The Seeds of Doom” actually constitute Doctor Who Season 14 purely because Christmas forced there to be a small gap between them and the rest of Season 13, surely?

Nothing Can Stop the Daleks (Doctor Who: The Daleks P7: “The Rescue” Review)

Written by Tom

Ian, Barbara and the Thals break into the Dalek’s control room and turn off their electricity generator, thus killing the Daleks forever with there being no way of them ever coming back. (Other things we will also never see again: a Hartnell-era Doctor Who episode called “The Rescue”.)

The storming of the Dalek control room is… alright, I guess. The Daleks shutting the doors on Floor Nine to stop the Thals reaching the control room on Floor Ten is a good moment, making for some cool action beats as people get trapped under the closing doors and all that. It’s bizarre how this never actually gets resolved on-screen though; the Thals and co. merely run off-screen mid-action sequence and the next time we see them, they’re outside the control room. Did the Daleks really close every segment of Floor Nine but never thought to turn the elevator off? If they had stopped the lift, they wouldn’t have had to mess around with the doors.

The rest of the plot is just as perfunctory. It’s convenient how the way out of the cave just happens to be where the Thals and co. are having their breakdown. It’s convenient how the machine that powers the Daleks just so happens to be in the console room next to the big fight. It’s not that these moments don’t work – this type of convenient plotting can be found in literally anything ever written – but after seven episodes dedicated to exploring Skaro as a series of ecosystems, having everyone just bum-rush the main set ten minutes from the end such that everything sorts itself out does come as a bit of a let down.

We Mustn’t Diddle Around Here (Doctor Who: The Daleks P6: “The Ordeal” Review)

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?

Cannot Control! Cannot Control! (Doctor Who: The Daleks P5: “The Expedition” Review)

Written by Tom

Ian pretends to sell a woman into slavery to convince the Thals to be his own personal army. The Thals agree to fight the Daleks and split themselves into two factions: one led by the Doctor who will distract the Daleks at the front of the city, another led by Ian who’ll sneak into the Dalek City through a swamp located at its back. Meanwhile, the Daleks accidentally kill an entire section of their own city using anti-radiation drugs. Figuring that they now need radiation to survive, they make plans to re-nuke the whole planet.

While last week presented itself as a fake final episode, this presents itself as a fake first episode which is comprised almost entirely of set-up for the next few weeks ahead. This results in the second episode of the serial to be primarily dedicated to moving its chess pieces around the board, pushing its three main plot threads down their designated tracks. It even splits it three main plot elements into the separate acts of a traditional three act structure, though admittedly it then goes on do Act One and Act Two simultaneously before moving onto Act Three. While the result sure contains a lot of incident though, it lacks any particular core which feels idiosyncratic to itself. It’s not so much its own episode as a way of getting from one episode to another.

There’s Something Jammed Inside Here (Doctor Who: The Daleks P4: “The Ambush” Review)

Written by Tom

Team TARDIS try to escape the Dalek city but find themselves inconvenienced by an elevator. The Daleks’ plan to kill the Thals in an ambush gets disrupted by Ian. After hanging out with the Thals for a bit and planning to leave Skaro entirely, Team TARDIS are horrified to find that they’ve left the TARDIS fluid link in the Dalek city.

The cliffhangers in this serial have, to be frank, been a bit naff. The Dead Planet‘s cliffhanger is iconic but this is purely because Jacqueline Hill’s acting allows us to ignore the fact that it’s a woman being menaced by a sink plunger (oh the gender politics). Similarly, The Escape‘s cliffhanger has the iconic glimpse of a Dalek mutant, but this is a single image being used to mask the fact that the episode otherwise stops mid-sequence having reached the twenty-five minute mark. Meanwhile, The Survivors‘ cliffhanger fragrantly picks the wrong beat to stop at, menacing us with Susan remembering that she’s still got half the trip to go when the episode should’ve ended with the climatic reveal of the Thals.

The cliffhanger to The Ambush is quite savvy though. The Cavemen Serial before this one was four episodes long and featured Team TARDIS travelling somewhere, getting captured and escaping. So far, the Dalek Serial has lasted four episodes and featured Team TARDIS travelling somewhere, getting captured and escaping. So when they make to leave at the end of the episode, we’re being primed to expect that, based on how the show’s worked so far, this is it and the serial’s done. The reveal that Team TARDIS have lost the fluid link is thus not a random inconvenience designed to pad out the serial for another three episodes (well, not just that) but a challenge to how we thought the series as a whole was going to go. Wait, there’s more of this? But that breaks the rules!

Ooh, It Moves Well Enough (Doctor Who: The Daleks P3: “The Escape” Review)

Written by Tom

Susan meets one of the Thals, a race of bad actors who speak entirely in backstory. He gives her enough pills to stop the rest of Team TARDIS dying. The Daleks invite the Thals to their city under the pretence of sharing resources. Team TARDIS break out of their cell, having hollowed out a Dalek and plonked Ian in the casing.

This is very much an episode which has a bunch of jobs to do and dedicates itself to doing them. Those jobs in order: a) establish the Thals, b) establish the serial’s backstory, and c) move Team TARDIS from the prison to wherever the next episode needs them to be.

The Thals definitely do turn up and there is an attempt to make them into people, what with their minor debates on pacifism and their chemistry-less romances that the script dutifully informs us of. The decision to play the Thal leader as a direct pastiche of William Hartnell’s Doctor is an interesting one, though hard to make coherent at this moment in time. And there is a clever reversal of expectations built into them when the supposed mutants of the radioactive landscape turn out to be an organised society of beautiful blonde people. That said, there is something quite uncomfortable about how much the script is willing to lean into its “You’re good looking, ergo you must be good” subtext that comes with this, particularly when combined with how Aryan the Thal’s haircuts are.

It Destroys All Human Tissues (Doctor Who: The Daleks P2: “The Survivors” Review)

Written by Tom

Team TARDIS are the prisoners of the Daleks, one of two main races on Skaro who’ve recently survived a nuclear apocalypse. Slowly dying on radiation sickness, the Doctor realises that the pills left outside the TARDIS last episode were anti-radiation gloves – I mean drugs. The Daleks let one of them go to the TARDIS to pick up the drugs. Everyone takes it in turns arguing that Susan shouldn’t be the one to go. Susan ends up being the one to go.

There’s all sorts of weird stuff happening around the edges of this episode. Take, for instance, the fact that Dalek’s control room seems to be playing proto-versions of the Doctor Who opening credits on all its monitors. Traditionally, the Doctor has been the show’s main representative of Doctor Who, this bizarre metafiction that threatens to engulf all TV as we know it. Yet in the one scene where the Doctor interacts with the Daleks and is surrounded by the monitors, he’s an exhausted and visibly ill man who’s not even been allowed to wear his full costume. Meanwhile the Daleks, these bulky metal robots who are now one with Doctor Who, are allowed to stand over him, having apparently took his show off from him, leaving him powerless and feeble. The result is that he finally becomes a member of Team TARDIS in this episode, his increasingly near-dead state being what finally unites everyone behind a single cause. The Daleks have finally shunted Doctor Who in something close to its final form.

One Bite and I Taste the Bacon, Another and I Taste the Egg (Doctor Who: The Daleks P1: “The Dead Planet” Review)

Written by Tom

Team TARDIS have landed on an alien planet with stone forests and metal wildlife. While looking around, Susan is touched on the shoulder by something – presumably the same something that later leaves some glass vials by the TARDIS. Spying a nearby city and wanting to explore, the Doctor sabotages the TARDIS, forcing everyone into the city to find a spare part. Getting separated from the rest, Barbara screams in terror as she’s menaced by an evil toilet plunger…

This is an odd episode in that it features an awful lot of setup but never feels like anything’s actually happening in it. This is largely because of how much it’s willing to embrace atmosphere and tone above all else. Having come up with the idea of a dead planet in which everything’s been putrefied, the production team has gone all in on creating a protracted tone of disquieting stillness, focusing on maintaining a slow pace, bleaching out the visuals, and underpinning everything with a series of ambient soundscapes. This isn’t a bad thing though as their work pays off in spades, making its still aesthetic into something genuinely palpable. The move from the white bark of the forest to the flat metal sheets of the city is particularly effective, any sense of naturalness slowly bleeding out the landscape the further into it we get.

In now-standard Doctor Who style, this stillness is used as a backdrop against which to explore the current emotional relationships of Team TARDIS. You can see this prioritisation of their relationships in the way the episode’s structured: while Act One is us investigating a putrefied forest and Act Three is us investigating an alien city, Act Two is everyone hanging around the TARDIS and making bacon and eggs with a food machine. If this episode was meant to be a purely grimdark romp through an alien world, they’d have put the bacon and eggs in Act One as a calm before the storm; instead, it’s the sci-fi family breakfast which gets centralised at the core of the narrative, both defined by and providing definition to the alien world which lies around it.