The Doctor: Conquer the Earth, you poor pathetic creature? Don't you realise that to conquer the Earth, you would have to destroy every living thing?
Dalek: We are the masters of Earth. We are the masters of Earth. We are the masters of Earth!
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"World's End", 21 November 1964
"The Daleks", 28 November 1964
"Day of Reckoning", 5 December 1964
"The End of Tomorrow", 12 December 1964
"The Waking Ally", 19 December 1964
"Flashpoint", 26 December 1964
Written by Terry Nation
Directed by Richard Martin
Script editor: David Whitaker
Produced by Verity Lambert
Associate producer: Mervyn Pinfield
William Hartnell as the Doctor
William Russell as Ian Chesterton
Jacqueline Hill as Barbara Wright
Carole Ann Ford as Susan Foreman (last regular appearance)
Ian and Barbara are initially elated when the TARDIS arrives in London, under a bridge on the south bank of the Thames. Susan is so excited that she scales a pile of debris to get a better look at the city. But the debris isn't as stable as it looks, and being disturbed causes a small avalanche. This results in two problems: first, Susan has twisted her ankle badly, and worse, the TARDIS is now blocked behind a large iron spar, far too heavy for the TARDIS team to move on their own.
And the Doctor has noticed something is wrong: London seems deserted. Not just deserted--entirely devoid of life. They can't even hear birdsong. And under the bridge, a large sign is posted: IT IS FORBIDDEN TO DUMP BODIES IN THE RIVER.
Ian and the Doctor head into an abandoned warehouse to see if they can find an acetylene torch to cut the iron spar, while Barbara remains behind to tend to Susan. Inside the warehouse, they find an old desk calendar, printed for the year 2164, and they find a dead human body, hidden in a crate. The dead man is wearing some sort of elaborate, futuristic headgear with a radio built into.
("But Doctor," Ian gasps, "you mean these people have invented some form of--personal communication?")
From a factory window, the Doctor and Ian see a massive flying saucer make its way over London, then set down somewhere in the vicinity of the Chelsea heliport. They decide it's time to leave, and head back to the TARDIS. But Susan and Barbara aren't there anymore.
They've gone because a man arrived, David, who expressed dismay that the two women were out in the open and demanded they come with him. He leads them across the ruins of London in a brilliantly atmospheric film sequence, which I've already lauded in my earlier review of this story.
But meanwhile, back at the TARDIS, the Doctor and Ian find their companions missing, and they've been replaced by four men in the same headgear as the corpse at the warehouse was wearing. And it's more than just a personal radio--the weird metal helmets are also brain control devices, turning the men who wear them into human robots ("Robomen"). The Doctor and Ian make a break for it, attempting to escape from the Robomen, but they're headed off by the creature that's controlling them: a Dalek.
The Earth has been occupied by a Dalek invasion force, and now Ian and the Doctor are Dalek prisoners. A full year after the programme's debut, and in a time when it was exceedingly rare for TV episodes ever to be seen again after their first viewing, this is the first time that Doctor Who has returned a villain, and for a few minutes some hay is made from the novelty of the experience, with Ian being horrified to hear the Daleks' voices again, and the Doctor explaining that, while their previous meeting occurred in the species's twilight days in the far future, the twenty-second century is the Daleks' Golden Age, when they have an interstellar empire.
David has now led Susan and Barbara to their destination: an underground hideout, used as the base for a cell of the human resistance movement against the Dalek occupation. We meet other resistance fighters: Tyler, the morose, fatalistic leader of the cell; Dortmun, the resistance's scientific genius, bound to a wheelchair; and Jenny, the brusque young woman who's in charge of the cell's organisation and administration.
The Doctor and Ian are imprisoned aboard the Dalek saucer that they saw landing from the warehouse window. There, they're told the history of the Dalek invasion by their cellmate, at the same time as Barbara and Susan learn it from the resistance members: first, about ten years ago, came a wave of asteroid impacts, followed by a horrible plague. These two combined to wipe out much of the Earth's population, particularly in Asia, Africa and South America. The few communities that remained were too small and isolated to resist the Daleks when they arrived. The Daleks enforce their rule by enslaving the Robomen, who only last for a limited time before the Daleks' mental control drives them insane and they kill themselves.
Tyler's resistance cell mounts an attack on the Dalek saucer, using a new hand grenade that Dortmun promises will penetrate the Daleks' casing, made of an extraterrestrial named dalekenium. But Dortmun is wrong; the bomb has no effect, and the resistance cell is mostly wiped out. Before that happens, though, they manage to get aboard the saucer and free a number of the prisoners held there, including the Doctor. As soon as the attack is repulsed, the saucer takes off. Ian is still aboard, but he's not a prisoner--he's hidden, Star Wars-style, in a secret compartment under the deck, with a fellow escaped prisoner, Larry.
After the failure of the attack, our heroes have been sorted into three groups, in which they'll remain for the duration of the story. There's Ian and Larry aboard the saucer. There's Barbara, Jenny and Dortmun, who have remained at the resistance headquarters and decide, when they hear of the attack's failure, to attempt to travel to another resistance rendezvous point in the North. And there's Susan and the Doctor, reunited when the Doctor was rescued from the saucer, who are accompanied by David and Tyler, the resistance fighters. Holed up in a makeshift hiding place, they listen to the sounds of the Daleks exterminating what resistance remains in the streets of London.
From David and Susan, the Doctor learns that the Daleks have turned the whole of Bedfordshire into a gigantic mining area, and he surmises that this facility must be the focus of their activities on Earth. He therefore decides that the four of them will strike out toward Bedford to investigate it. He can also see that some sort of connection is forming between Susan and David. The Doctor himself takes a liking to David when the young man, rather than attempting to take charge of the group, instead defers to the Doctor as the "senior member of the party".
Barbara, Jenny and Dortmun make their way across London, avoiding Dalek patrols. It's to this sequence that the famous images of the Daleks trundling across Westminster Bridge and standing guard in Trafalgar Square belong. When the three of them stop to rest and resupply at the Civic Transport Museum, Dortmun gives his life to save the two women. He rolls to a stop in front of a pair of Daleks and clambers awkwardly up out of his wheelchair, so that he can die on his feet.
With the distraction Dortmun has provided, Barbara and Jenny take a lorry from the Transport Museum's collection and are able to escape the Daleks into the countryside. They stop for the night, seeking shelter with a pair of haggard women in a creepy country cottage near the Bedfordshire mine. But the women turn out to be informants for the Daleks, enjoying their freedom in exchange for turning in runaways from the mining camp. Soon a Dalek arrives and arrests Barbara and Jenny, and they find themselves pressed into the mine's slave labour force.
The saucer carrying Ian and Larry also heads to the mine. Ian and Larry sneak off, and are saved from being captured by the camp foreman, who takes them with him to a meeting with a black marketeer who sneaks into the camp periodically to sell the foreman food for the workers. The black marketeer is a cynical, calculating individual (his line, "You're not one of these 'brotherhood of man' types, are you?" with his lip curled in disgust at Ian, takes on a whole knew meaning once one is familiar with Brotherhood of Man), but he nevertheless agrees to take Ian out of the camp and back to London.
Before he can do so, though, he's eaten by the Slither, a hissing, shambling monster that roams the camp at night, a pet of the Black Dalek, the camp commandant (and apparently the senior Dalek of the occupation force). To escape the Slither, Ian and Larry head into the mine's tunnels, where they're confronted by a Roboman, whom Larry recognises as his brother, Phil. When his attempts to make Phil remember who he is fail, he strangles him, and the two of them die together, with Phil shooting Larry.
Barbara and Jenny have gained access to the Daleks' control room by claiming to have knowledge of an imminent revolt. There, they learn the purpose of the mine: the Daleks are drilling to the centre of the Earth. They then plan to drop a bomb into the Earth's magnetic core, hollowing it out so that they can replace it with a propulsion device.
Now the Daleks are ready to drop their bomb down the completed mineshaft and detonate it. They start the countdown and depart, leaving Barbara and Jenny to die in the blast. Unbeknownst to them, however, Ian has come upon the bomb shaft in the mine tunnels, and he's blocked it. The bomb will still go off, but it will do so up here at the mine, having no effect on the Earth's core.
Barbara and Jenny are rescued by the Doctor, Susan, David and Tyler, who have arrived at the mine and mounted an assault. In the Dalek control room, Barbara identifies the microphone from which the Daleks give the Robomen their orders, and she and the Doctor give them one final command: "Turn on the Daleks. Destroy them. This order cannot be countermanded."
The Robomen and the people of Earth turn on the Daleks, and the occupation ends. (Presumably, all the Robomen still suffer horrible deaths of painful, insanity-driven suicide.) The Doctor leads the people at the camp to safety--apparently, a bomb that's big enough to hollow out the Earth's magnetic core can be safely evaded by moving a few hundred yards away to a cliff.
Everyone heads back to London, where the TARDIS is soon unearthed, and the team prepare to make their goodbyes. Susan's shoe has completely worn through at the sole, and despite her protestations that she has dozens of other pairs in the TARDIS, the Doctor insists on taking it into the TARDIS to mend it.
When Barbara and Ian have also entered the TARDIS, David approaches Susan before she can join them. He asks her to stay and marry him, offering her that which she herself admits she's never known: one place, one time. She's reduced to tears. She admits she loves him, but refuses to stay--her grandfather needs her.
Just then, the TARDIS door slams shut, locking her out. Inside, the Doctor has been listening to all of it, and he has realised that she will never leave him of her own volition. So, seeing what's best for her, he has humanely chosen to maroon her on a planet desolated by war, without even an entire pair of shoes on her feet, and announces over the TARDIS's public address tannoy how much he loves her and admires the woman she's become, and promises one day to return.
(Seriously, it's a really moving scene, as we see the Doctor what's undoubtedly his hardest good bye, emotionally, in the programme's history; the impact on the Doctor of a companion's departure gets dwelt upon more here than it will for anyone else up until the death of Adric in 1982. But when you really break it down like this into describing what actually happens, there are ... implications.)
The TARDIS dematerialises, and Susan and David walk away, hand in hand. Susan leaves behind her TARDIS key, its chain draped across the rubble where the blue box stood.
What Lisa thought: She cried. Susan's good bye scene made her cry. She tried to brush this off by claiming she was crying because it wasn't Barbara who was leaving.
I'm on record that I think this is the First Doctor's best story, and one of the three best Dalek stories the programme has ever managed. Both those mentions sum up the ways that I think the story beautifully captures the atmosphere of a Britain under authoritarian alien occupation.
The next story is "The Rescue".
I
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