Doctor Who: "The Romans"

Vicki: Has the Doctor told you where we're going next?
Barbara: Oh, no. He never does that.
Vicki: You mean it's a surprise?
Ian: Yes. To everyone.

Nero attempts to woo Barbara

"The Slave Traders", 16 January 1965
"All Roads Lead to Rome", 23 January 1965
"Conspiracy", 30 January 1965
"Inferno", 6 February 1965

Written by Dennis Spooner
Directed by Christopher Barry
Produced by Verity Lambert
Associate producer: Mervyn Pinfield

William Hartnell as the Doctor
William Russell as Ian Chesterton
Jacqueline Hill as Barbara Wright
Maureen O'Brien as Vicki

I'll be honest. For a long time, I didn't really get the Ian and Barbara fans. They were perfectly adequate companions, but I didn't get why they generated such intense adulation in the little corner of Who fandom they can call their own. (To be fair, Ian-Barbara fandom is pretty shipping-centred, and I don't get shipping in general.)

But after seeing "The Romans" for the first time, I got it. The banter between Ian and Barbara in episodes one and four absolutely sings, and it does so because of the chemistry between Jacqueline Hill and William Russell. We're talking Josiah-and-Abigail-Bartlet levels of chemistry, here.

The TARDIS crew are having something rare: a holiday. For the past several weeks, they've been staying at a Roman villa. The owner is away, so finding the villa deserted, the team decided to stay awhile.

Ian and Barbara are loving the idleness, but the Doctor is chafing to go off and have an adventure--and so too is Vicki, who after all has only just joined the crew. The Doctor manufactures a spat with Ian and Barbara so that he can declare, in a huff, that he and Vicki are going to visit Rome. They'll be back in a few days, and Ian and Barbara are not invited.

As the Doctor and Vicki are walking along the road in the twilight,* they come upon the dead body of an old man. He's been murdered, but it wasn't robbery--he's been left holding his lyre, a very valuable musical instrument. The Doctor picks the lyre up and examines it; as he's looking at it, a centurion arrives. Seeing him with the lyre, the centurion assumes the Doctor is the famous musician Maximus Pettulian, who's known to be travelling on foot to Rome to play for the Emperor Nero.

The centurion claims to have arrived to escort Maximus Petullian along the dangerous roads, but the Doctor realises something else is going on: whoever murdered the real Maximus Petullian was hired by the centurion, who has only come out here on the roads to check for himself that the murder was carried out. The Doctor decides to masquerade as the musician (much to Vicki's consternation), and accepts the centurion's company on the way to Rome.

Meanwhile back at the villa, Ian and Barbara are contentedly lazing after enjoying a fine meal. (Barbara has taught herself Roman cooking during their stay; the menu of a Roman aristocratic supper is described in detail during an Educational Moment.) But in the nearby village, a pair of slave traders are passing through. They're leading prisoners from Gaul, who will be sold at auction in Rome. But the traders are dissatisfied with the quality of their merchandise; they won't fetch a good price. Hearing that the villa is currently occupied by four undefended strangers--two of whom are women and one of whom is an old man--they decide to see if they can't kidnap the TARDIS team in order to enrich their stock.

They break into the villa and attack Ian and Barbara. The two schoolteachers fight back. Barbara lifts a pot high in the air to smash over the head of one of their attackers--but the slave trader ducks out of the way, and Barbara brings the pot smashing down on the back of Ian's head instead. Ian's knocked unconscious, and Barbara is quickly captured. They're taken back to the slave traders' camp, where Ian is sold almost immediately, to a galley captain who needs oarsmen straight away. Barbara is shackled with the rest of the prisoners, to be auctioned off in Rome.

The Doctor, Vicki and the centurion stop at an inn for the night, where the centurion meets up with the assassin he hired to to kill Maximus Petullian. The assassin is an illiterate mute (so if he's captured, he can't give up the identity of his employer) and is understandably confused to learn that Maximus Petullian is still alive. He sneaks into the Doctor's room and attacks him, and we're treated to the sight of the aged Hartnell Doctor having a fistfight with a vicious Roman ruffian, until Vicki comes in and pushes the assassin out the window.

Barbara is taken to Rome, where she's auctioned off before a raucous crowd. She's bought by Tavius, who brings the auction to a surprised halt by raising the bid from two thousand sesterces to ten thousand sesterces. Tavius turns out to be the majordomo for the Imperial household, and he puts Barbara to work as the new chambermaid for the Emperor Nero's wife, Poppaea.

The Doctor and Vicki have also arrived at the palace, where they meet Nero. Nero demands that the Doctor immediately perform on the lyre, but the Doctor worms his way out of it by asking that Nero play instead. (Nero, as the Doctor well knows, fancied himself the greatest stage performer of his day, and expected his subjects to treat him as such.)

Ian, meanwhile, has been shackled to an oar aboard a galley, but during a storm the ship wrecks. He washes up on the beach with Delos, a fellow slave whom he'd befriended aboard the galley. Ian and Delos head to Rome to look for Barbara, but they're recaptured by the original slave traders, who decide to train them as gladiators to be killed by lions in the arena.

After his audience with Vicki and the Doctor, Nero proceeds to his wife's bedchamber, where he discovers Barbara. Instantly he's besotted with her.

From this point, part three descends into intentional farce. Barbara flees as Nero chases her around the palace. His continued attention to her provokes Poppaea's jealousy. Several times hay gets made from having Barbara and either the Doctor or Vicki narrowly miss each other, such as when Nero is chasing Barbara round Poppaea's bedroom and the Doctor knocks on the door. Nero appears in the doorway and bellows at the Doctor to leave; after Nero slams the door in his face, the Doctor is turning to leave when Poppaea arrives. The Doctor informs her that Nero has another woman in the room with him, so Poppaea bursts in and finds Nero on the bed, holding Barbara to him. Even the death by poisoning of Nero's valet is played for laughs.

The Doctor eventually falls from favour when, at a banquet in his honour, he cannot get out of performing with his lyre. He pulls an Emperor's New Clothes, telling the audience that his new composition is an exceptionally fine melody that can only be heard by a sufficiently cultured ear. He then mimes plucking at the chords of his lyre; his listeners hear only silence, but none of them are willing to admit that they can't hear his music. Nero gets jealous at the adulation receives and resolves to kill the Doctor. He'll invite him to play before a packed crowd at the arena--but as he plays, the Emperor will have the lions released to devour him.

Before he does that, though, Nero decides to take Barbara out on a date--and when you're a Roman Emperor, a date involves taking a lady to a slave barracks to watch a private gladiator duel. Of course, the gladiators who are chosen to duel are Delos and Ian. It's a fight to the death; whoever wins must kill his opponent, then will be set free. Delos wins, but instead of killing Ian, he launches himself at Nero. Nero escapes the assassination attempt, and Ian and Delos escape out into the streets.

Back at the palace, the Doctor and Vicki are exploring when they come across Nero's office, and on his desk they find his extensive plans for completely rebuilding Rome--plans that Nero hasn't been able to put into effect because the Senate won't vote him the money. The Emperor, just returned from the gladiators' palace, comes upon them. The Doctor accidentally sets fire to Nero's plans, and Nero becomes furious--until the burning plans give him an idea. He will set fire to the city of Rome itself, burning the city down so that he can build his new one in its place. He leaves Vicki and the Doctor, hurrying off to put his new brainstorm into motion.

Nero has some street thugs rounded up and brought to him, so that he can instruct them to set fire to the city. Ian manages to sneak into the palace with the thugs, and then he sneaks off and finds Barbara. The two of them escape, heading back toward the villa and the TARDIS. The Doctor and Vicki, too, have now snuck away from the palace, heading for home. They watch the Great Fire of Rome lighting up the sky from a hilltop overlooking the city.

Ian and Barbara arrive back at the villa first, and we get another great scene between the two of them (though Ian chasing Barbara round as she shrieks with mock fear would probably qualify as sexual assault nowadays). By the time the Doctor and Vicki arrive, the two schoolteachers have fallen asleep on a pair of couches. The Doctor chastises them for idling around the villa for the past few days. Ian and Barbara attempt to explain about their own adventures, but the Doctor won't let them get a word in edgeways. The four of them depart for the TARDIS and a new adventure.

What Lisa thought

The main impression the story made on Lisa was how it paired off the regular characters. Ian and Barbara got some of their best scenes together, and the pairing of the Doctor and Vicki let us know for certain that Vicki--as Lisa puts it--really is going to be Susan by another name. She's still not warming towards Barbara, but she concedes that she's enjoying that she and Ian are becoming more playful in their scenes together.

The next story is "The Web Planet".

I

*I find it irrationally annoying that for the sake of plot, we're not supposed to point out how unrealistic it is that they would start the day-long walk to Rome at sunset.

Doctor Who: "The Rescue"

Why, this is the planet Dido. I've been here before. I know them very well. They're very friendly people.--The Doctor

Koquillion menaces Vicki

"The Powerful Enemy", 2 January 1965
"Desperate Measures", 9 January 1965

Written by David Whitaker
Directed by Christopher Barry
Script editor: Dennis Spooner
Produced by Verity Lambert
Associate producer: Mervyn Pinfield

William Hartnell as the Doctor
William Russell as Ian Chesterton
Jacqueline Hill as Barbara Wright
Maureen O'Brien as Vicki (first appearance)

Doctor Who is currently midway through its thirty-second season. One of the things that's always been true over the forty-eight years it's taken to accumulate those thirty-two seasons is that the programme has shown a capacity endlessly to reinvent itself, to grow and change and sometimes even regress, so that there's really no such thing as a "typical" episode of Doctor Who--no single episode that would represent the entire half-century of the programme's run. That's both a necessary prerequisite and a necessary consequence of lasting for fifty years, in which regard, I suppose, it's a bit of a timey-wimey quality.

Thirteen months into the programme's run, we now get to its very first period of change. We get the first cast change, with the Doctor's departing granddaughter, Susan, being replaced by a pseudo-granddaughter, space orphan Vicki. In so doing, the programme establishes a baseline characterisation for the Doctor's primary companion: an adolescent girl--in fact, a schoolgirl, if she comes from a society where that's the appropriate situation for an adolescent; and often, one who's been robbed of her parents, and so needs the Doctor to serve as a paternal stand-in. These are traits that will generally hold true until the end of the 1960s.

We also see the first changes in Doctor Who's creative authorities. Script editor David Whitaker leaves, replaced by Dennis Spooner; in so doing, he begins the tradition of a departing script editor writing the first script of his successor's tenure. And Mervyn Pinfield is about to leave, too, after the story that follows this one, leaving Verity Lambert the programme's sole producer. Lambert--who, when Sydney Newman put her in charge of his new children's science fiction programme, became not only the BBC's first female producer, but also its youngest producer--had now proved herself capable of running the programme on her own.

We start off aboard a crashed spaceship, its wreckage strewn across a valley nestled amongst craggy mountains. Two survivors are living aboard the ship: the aforementioned teenager Vicki, and Bennett, a middle-aged man who's confined to the bed in his cabin by a leg injury.

Vicki gets excited because the ship's radar has detected another spaceship, landed somewhere up in the mountains. The rescue ship must have arrived early. But Bennett scoffs at this; the rescue ship must have landed early. But Bennett scoffs at this: the radar didn't detect the spaceship landing, only after it had landed, and besides, the rescue ship should still be days away. He has Vicki radio the rescue ship to confirm, and she's stunned when they confirm that they are, indeed, still three days from reaching them. Bennett also gives Vicki a dark warning to "watch out for Koquillion."

What the radar has picked up is, in fact, the TARDIS, which has materialised in a dark cavern up one of the mountains. The Doctor has nodded off and actually managed to sleep through the materialisation. Ian and Barbara wake him, and he prepares to lead them outside. "Susan," he says, "open the doors," before he realises Susan isn't there anymore. Once outside in the cavern, he encourages Ian and Barbara to go off and explore, then declares, "And I think I'm going to have a nap!" and disappears back inside the TARDIS.

Ian and Barbara are bemused at this behaviour, but they reason the Doctor must be somewhat depressed by Susan's departure. They make their way out of the cavern and find themselves at the top of a sheer cliff face looking down into the valley, where they can see the crashed spaceship.

Before they can start looking for a way down, they're confronted by Koquillion, a native of the planet. He's a fearsome looking humanoid, with a mane of threatening spikes, a pair of curved tusks that look like giant mandibles, and long claws for hands. His words are friendly, but his manner is threatening. When the humans reveal that there's a third member of their party back at their spaceship, he sends Ian into the cavern to fetch him, leaving Koquillion alone with Barbara, who's clearly uneasy.

No sooner has Ian gone than Koquillion pushes Barbara over the edge of the cliff, then uses a bulky sonic device he's carrying (it looks like a large adjustable wrench, to be honest) to seal the Doctor and Ian inside the cavern with a rockfall.

The Doctor emerges from the TARDIS when he hears the rocks; he and Ian search fruitlessly for an exit. The Doctor has realised from a rock sample that they're on the planet Dido, which he has visited before. From Ian's description he recognises Koquillion as a member of the native species, but he's surprised at such aggressive behaviour; he remembers the Dido people, whose population is only about a hundred, as profoundly peace-loving.

Barbara has survived her fall without any real injury; Vicki finds her at the base of the cliff and brings her back to the spaceship, then hides her when Koquillion comes visiting. The fearsome alien makes some threatening remarks about how Vicki should remember that she owes him her life, then decides to visit Bennett, locking himself in the older man's cabin.

Once he's out of the way, Vicki returns to Barbara and explains how the situation came about. She was a passenger on the ship, headed to a colony world, but it crashed on Dido. The people of the planet invited the ship's crew and passengers to a feast, but Vicki couldn't go as she had a fever. During the feast, a tremendous explosion wiped out everyone from the ship--the humans, including Vicki's father, had been lured to their deaths by the natives. Bennett, badly wounded, was the only survivor, and he crawled back to the ship. Now he and Vicki are in the power of Koquillion, who claims to be protecting them from the other natives; they haven't told Koquillion about the approaching rescue ship.

Once Koquillion leaves Bennett's cabin and departs the ship, Vicki takes Barbara to Bennett. He's stunned to learn of another human being alive. Barbara suggests that together, the three of them can overpower Koquillion, but while Vicki is receptive to the plan, Bennett angrily declares it too risky and refuses to countenance it.

Vicki and Barbara return to the spaceship's main cabin, leaving Bennett to rest. There, they're elated when Ian and the Doctor arrive. The two men, having failed to find a way past the rockfall, moved deeper into the caves and found another exit from the tunnels. After hearing Vicki's story, the Doctor determines he wants to meet Bennett, but he wants to meet him alone. He makes his way to Bennett's cabin and knocks on the door, but Bennett's voice responds, "No, you can't come in!" This doesn't deter the Doctor, who breaks the door down.

Inside, he finds the cabin empty. Bennett's voice came from a tape recorder. The Doctor also discovers a hidden trapdoor in the floor, allowing Bennett to lock his cabin door and then leave the spaceship unnoticed.

Back in the main cabin, Ian and Barbara are explaining to Vicki that they're not just space travellers; they're time travellers. "What year was it when you left Earth?"

"Why, 2493, of course," Vicki responds, then boggles when Barbara tells her that she and Ian left Earth in 1963. "But ... that means you're about five hundred and fifty years old!" she exclaims.

Ian doubles over with laughter at this while Barbara tries not to feel offended; it's a truly charming moment, probably one of my favourites in all of Doctor Who (amidst an otherwise unremarkable story), because it's so genuine.

(William Russell has a real talent as an actor, I'm discovering in this rewatch, for having his character laugh at things a real person would laugh at, and do it in such a way that I honestly wonder if it's Ian who's laughing, or Russell.)

The Doctor, meanwhile, has gone through the trapdoor, and found himself in the Great Hall of the Dido natives, where he waits. Eventually, Koquillion arrives, as the Doctor knew he would. The Doctor has figured out what's going on: he recognised Ian's description of a Dido native, but he realised that when Ian described Koquillion's appearance, he was describing clothing, not physical form. Koquillion is simply wearing the ceremonial robes of the Dido people.

So Koquillion removes his mask, revealing that he is, of course, Bennett. Bennett explains to the Doctor what really happened: he murdered a man aboard the spaceship and was arrested for it. So when the ship crashed and the Dido people invited the crew to a feast, it was Bennett who set the explosion with supplies from the ship's armory, killing both the humans and the entire (tiny) population of Dido.

(Bennett says it was "easy" to set the explosion, though he doesn't give us any hint as to why it was so easy for a man under guard for murder to gain such complete access to the ship's armory.)

Vicki did not know of Bennett's crime or arrest, so after the explosion, Bennett dressed up as Koquillion to convince her of the foulness of the planet's native population; once the rescue ship arrived, she would confirm his story, and he'd be a free man.

Bennet and the Doctor grapple hand to hand, with Bennett winning the upper hand. But just as he's about to strike the killing blow, two men emerge from a hidden recess in the great hall. These are the real natives of the planet Dido--possibly the last two natives, survivors of the explosion. Bennett, terrified, runs from them, but he falls over a cliff and plunges to his death in the caverns.

Vicki, then, is left with nobody to care for her, so of course the Doctor, Ian and Barbara invite her aboard the TARDIS. As it dematerialises, we cut back to the spaceship, where the rescue ship is radioing that they're about to land, but they receive no response. The two Dido natives enter the cabin and, not wanting any contact with the species that has just wiped out their entire population, smash the radio to pieces.

What Lisa thought

"I thought it was pretty good. It was a good introduction to Vicki." A pause. "I think I like the four parters best."

All of which I'm inclined to say is just about right. "The Rescue" is clearly just there to introduce us to New SusanVicki. It's a cute enough little story--there's no world-shattering stakes in play, and it gets a nice little twist at the end. There's also a few good light moments, like the scene where Vicki calculates Barbara's age, or the scene where Barbara shoots a fearsome beast dead as it creeps up on Vicki, only to learn that it was in fact Vicki's pet, a sand crawler she'd named Sandy. She'd been training it to come to her for food. Vicki retains an endearing, slightly petulant resentment at Barbara for this throughout the story.

So it makes a nice break, but Doctor Who's at its best--as it turns out Lisa agrees with me--with the ninety minute stories.

The next story is "The Romans".

I

Doctor Who: "The Daleks"

Oh, there's a reason. Or "explanation" might be better. It's stupid and ridiculous, but it's the only one that fits. A dislike for the unlike. They're afraid of you because you're different from them, and whatever you do, it doesn't matter.--Ian Chesterton

"The Dead Planet" directed by Christopher Barry, 21 December 1963
"The Survivors" directed by Christopher Barry, 28 December 1963
"The Escape" directed by Richard Martin, 4 January 1964
"The Ambush" directed by Christopher Barry, 11 January 1964
"The Expedition" directed by Christopher Barry, 18 January 1964
"The Ordeal" directed by Richard Martin, 25 January 1964
"The Rescue" directed by Richard Martin, 1 February 1964

Viewers get their first look at the Daleks

Written by Terry Nation
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

The TARDIS has landed in a petrified forest. Everything--trees, shrubs, even blossoming flowers--has been suddenly turned to a powdery stone that crumbles at a gentle touch. Something happened here that destroyed all life in the blink of an eye. Barbara and Ian nevertheless hold out hope that they're somewhere on Earth, until Barbara discovers the carcass of a wild animal whose skin is actually made of metal--clearly, no such animal could exist on Earth. (The Doctor theorises that the animal was held together by an internal magnetic field, and that it might have actually been able to draw its prey toward it through magnetism. I think that's pretty cool.)

Beyond the lifeless forest is a lifeless, abandoned city. We can tell it's the product of an advanced civilisation because every building looks like the Stratosphere in Las Vegas. The Doctor wants to explore the city, but Ian and Barbara object; they want to get back to the TARDIS so the Doctor can try to return them to Earth. Plus, it's getting spooky. Susan is convinced a stranger came up and tapped her on the back in the forest, though she ran away screaming rather than turn and see them. No one believes her until they're all back at the TARDIS and hear some activity going on outside. They don't see whoever's there, but when they head back outside, they find that someone has left them a case of glass vials containing clear liquid--several doses of some sort of drug.

Ian, Barbara and Susan are now all desperate to leave, so the Doctor agrees. When he starts the TARDIS going, however, the engine starts, and then grinds to a halt. A component called the fluid link has lost its fluid and needs to be refilled. But the fluid it needs is mercury, and the Doctor doesn't have any mercury. There's nothing for it but to head over to the city. (It's pretty obvious even at this point that the Doctor has deliberately sabotaged the TARDIS so that he can explore the city.)

There's a vignette inside the TARDIS at this point, where Susan and the Doctor introduce Ian and Barbara to the TARDIS's food machine. You input what you want, and the machine gives you a biscuit that, when you eat it, tastes just like what you ordered. It's one of those twentieth-century sci fi cliches that ignores that texture and consistency are key to taste.

In their explorations of the silent city, they come across a lab filled with scientific apparatus. The lab contains a Geiger counter, which is indicating that the radiation level is fatally high. The Doctor theorises that the whole area must have been subjected to a neutron bomb--destroying all life instantly, but leaving the city's physical infrastructure intact. At any rate, it doesn't really matter right now; the important thing is to get back to the TARDIS as quickly as possible. It's now that the Doctor tells Ian that he made up the deficiency in the fluid link, and the TARDIS will actually function perfectly fine.

During their explorations, the Doctor, Ian and Susan have become separated from Barbara, and the Doctor has another of those "morally ambiguous" moments here (a term we use when wishing to obscure that the early Hartnell Doctor is actually immoral), being perfectly willing to leave the two schoolteachers behind in the city while he and Susan head back to the TARDIS and leave the dead planet. But Ian grabs the fluid link off him, forcing him to stay and search for Barbara.

Not that it matters, as the city's inhabitants now make their appearance, emerging from the tunnels deep underground where they live--the Daleks, dome-shaped mechanical creatures that glide about along the floor, peering at things with their long, disquieting cyclopean eyestalk. Their first reveal, screencapped above, is really well done, starting with a tight shot on the Doctor, Ian and Susan as we see them jump with fright and horror, then pulling rapidly out to show the forest of Daleks they suddenly find themselves amongst.

The Daleks imprison the Doctor, Susan, Ian and Barbara and keep them in a cell in their underground tunnels. It's here that I feel really glad I'm doing this rewatch, seeing the programme in order from the beginning. Because that way, I can appreciate that the Daleks aren't the monster of the week--because Doctor Who has never before had a monster of the week. The TARDIS crew--including the Doctor--don't simply take the Daleks in their stride; they're all terrified of what might happen. That terror increases when Barbara realises that they might not be robots as they appear; perhaps there is some alien creature inside them.

We learn a little about the history of this planet, Skaro, when the Daleks bring the Doctor to their control room to interrogate him. The Daleks are the survivors of the "Neutronic War", which they fought against a race called the Thals. After the war, the Daleks withdrew into the tunnels beneath their city, and also withdrew into their domed travel machines, while the Thals disappeared to somewhere else on the planet and haven't been seen since. Fallout from the neutron bombs that ended the war have caused the Daleks (and presumably the Thals) to mutate significantly, into the present small creatures that live inside the Dalek shells. The Doctor realises it must have been Thals who spooked Susan and left behind the vials of clear liquid in the petrified forest--and that the clear liquid must have been anti-radiation drugs.

Meanwhile, radiation sickness is taking a serious toll on the TARDIS crew. The Doctor and Barbara in particular are soon hard hit. They manage to persuade the Daleks to allow Susan to leave, returning to the TARDIS so she can retrieve the Thals' anti-radiation drugs. What they don't know is that the Daleks have no intention of actually allowing them to take the drugs; when Susan returns, they will confiscate the drugs from her so that they can perform research on them.

Susan has a harrowing run back through the forest, and when she gets back to the TARDIS, she's confronted by a Thal. But he's not a hideous mutant--at least, not by human standards. The descendants of the Thal survivors of the Neutronic War are physically perfect human beings, tall, strapping, fond of not wearing all that much clothing.

(When Susan enters the TARDIS, the viewer can see the dead forest through the TARDIS doors, an effect the show would only attempt to achieve once or twice more over the entire run of the classic programme. Oddly, though, when the view comes from inside the TARDIS, even the outside of the TARDIS doors are covered in roundels, rather than looking like the doors of a police call box.)

The Thal, Alydon, tells Susan that after the war, his people retired to a distant plateau, where they have transformed themselves from a warrior race to a society of pacifist farmers. But now the rains have failed, and after being subjected to a long drought, the Thals have migrated back to the vicinity of the Dalek city. They're hoping to make contact with the Daleks and establish a lasting peace with them.

Alydon realises that the Daleks might mean to confiscate the drugs Susan is carrying, so he gives her a second supply. When she returns to the Dalek city, she's allowed to keep the second set and uses it to treat the TARDIS crew, who are all soon feeling much better. Susan tells the Daleks of the Thals' hopes for peace, and they dictate to her a message for the Thals, offering them an exchange--the Daleks will provide the Thals with synthetic food from their labs, if the Thals will work to bring the soils around the Dalek city back to life. But it's a trap; when the Thals arrive to collect the Dalek food, the Daleks intend to the final remainder of the whole Thal race.

Meanwhile, the prisoners from the TARDIS have realised the Daleks are monitoring their conversation by means of closed-circuit cameras on the walls. There's an unintentionally hilarious moment when the prisoners concoct an elaborate sham, in which Ian and the Doctor get in an argument that leads to Susan physically attacking Ian, in an attempt to make it look as if the cameras got accidentally destroyed in the struggle. The camera then cuts to a pair of Daleks, watching the whole thing from their control room.

"Do you think the destruction of the camera was an accident?" one of them asks.

"No," the other replies.

Shortly after this, the TARDIS team mount an escape from Dalek captivity. They've realised that the Daleks draw their power from static electricity in the city's metal floors--this is why they can't leave the city, to pursue the Thals into the forest. They're able to cut power to one of their captors by dragging him onto a large cloak (given to Susan by Alydon to keep her warm), thus separating him from the floor.

(They first capture the Dalek by smearing mud over its eyepiece, blinding it. The Dalek repeatedly screams, "Keep away from me!" rather than, "My vision is impaired!")

Ian and the Doctor remove the mutant creature from within the Dalek--their reactions make it clear that the thing looks hideous, through all we see is a single grasping claw--and Ian climbs inside, masquerading as a Dalek who's taking the Doctor, Barbara and Susan for questioning.

The other Daleks see through the subterfuge, but the four of them are nevertheless able to make their escape to the top of one of the city's tall spires. At one point, Ian has to be left behind while the rest of the team head upwards in an elevator, because he can't get himself free from the Dalek shell he's been pilot; Susan and Barbara alternate hysterical fits at the prospect of leaving him behind.

He's able to get free, though, and joins the others at the top of the tower, from where they're able to make their way down to ground level and escape into the forest. But from the top of the spire, they spot the Thals arriving for the massacre the Daleks have planned. While the others head back to the TARDIS, Ian stays behind, trying to contact the Thals and warn them. His warning comes too late to save Temmosus, the Thal leader, but it does allow the rest of the Thals to escape.

Once the Thals and the TARDIS crew have gathered together back in the woods, Ian and Barbara expect the Thals to mount an attack on the Daleks, since their people face extinction if they can't get access to Daleks' synthetic food. But Alydon, who has succeeded Temmosus as leader of the Thals, declines. The Neutronic War has turned the Thals into an utterly pacifist people, unwilling to bring another Armageddon upon their planet. If the Daleks will not make peace with them, then the Thals will simply return to their plateau and wait to die.

The Doctor is utterly uninterested in what's to become of the Thals; now that the four of them have escaped, he wants only to depart in the TARDIS. But that plan gets disrupted when Ian realises that the Daleks still have the fluid link, taken from him when they were first imprisoned. Without it, the TARDIS cannot leave Skaro.

There's no way the main characters can take on the Daleks unless the Thals will fight alongside them. A debate follows amongst the TARDIS crew over the morality of persuading the Thals to join their cause--and inevitably persuading some of them to die--just to get back a small piece of electronic equipment. Barbara and the Doctor are all for it, because not doing so would mean spending the rest of their lives on Skaro; Ian and Susan insist that, regardless of the consequences, enlisting the Thals would be wrong.

It's a fascinating moment, and one where we can't help but be aware that we're not looking at "the Doctor and his companion(s)", as we will be once Susan, Ian and Barbara have all left the programme. Instead what we're looking at is an ensemble cast. The Doctor isn't presented as the most experienced, most natural leader of the group; his opinion carries no more weight than anyone else's.

At last Ian agrees to the idea of enlisting Thal aid, but only if the Thals will agree of their own accord to attack the Daleks. He goes back to the Thals to put the TARDIS crew's case before them, but just as before, his call to action falls on deaf ears. So Ian decides to put the Thals' insistence that they would rather die than fight to the test. He takes hold of Dyoni, the daughter of the dead Temmosus and betrothed to the new leader Alydon, and declares that he will offer her to the Daleks in trade for the fluid link. As he's leading her out of the Thal camp, though, Alydon comes after him and punches him across the face, knocking him to the ground.

"So there is something you'll fight for," Ian points out.

Back at the city, the Daleks have been experiment with the Thals' anti-radiation drugs by giving them to some of their own number. The Daleks who have taken the drugs soon start dying, and the Dalek command come to a realisation--the Dalek race have mutated in such a way that they now need the radiation to survive. They begin considering ways to preserve Skaro's irradiated state, and soon decide to detonate another neutron bomb. This would, of course, have the effect of destroying the Thals, but Daleks aren't really the sort who'd be concerned about that.

Meanwhile, Ian's demonstration has persuaded Alydon to face the Daleks, and through a stirring speech he's able to convince the rest of the Thals to follow him. They realise, though, that to attack the Dalek city from the front would be pointless; it's too well defended. To the rear, though, the city is nestled against an imposing mountain range, and the mountains are themselves guarded by a swamp full of fearsome, mutated predators that have already claimed the lives of a Thal scouting party sent to investigate. The Thals realise that the mountains are their best shot at entering the Dalek city--the Daleks will have left that approach unguarded, as they will have assumed that the dangers of the swamp will be enough to keep any attacker from approaching from that direction.

An expedition enters the swamp, led jointly by Ian and a Thal named Ganatus, who spends most of his time flirting with Barbara. The monsters who inhabit the swamp are really well done, I think--much of black and white Who seems to have more convincing special effects than the first decade of colour Who that followed. On the far side of the swamp, the expedition discovers pipes from the Dalek city, drawing water. The pipes are cut through the mountains, and Ian and Ganatus realise that they can reach the Dalek city by following the pipes through the caves, rather than having to scale the mountains.

The Thals who have remained back in the petrified forest have the task of trying to knock out the Daleks' radio surveillance tower before the expedition arrive from the mountains. Alydon, the Doctor and Susan sneak into the city, but as they reach the tower's controls, they're ambushed by Daleks. Alydon escapes, but the Doctor and Susan are captured.

During the passage through the caves, Ganatus's brother dies when he falls down a chasm. He sacrifices himself, cutting his safety rope so that he doesn't drag Ian down the chasm with him when he falls. The remainder of the expedition reach the Dalek city and start sneaking their way to the Dalek control room, but what they don't know is that they're racing against time: the Daleks have started the countdown for the detonation of another neutron bomb.

A battle ensues between the Thals, the TARDIS crew and the Daleks in the control room. The Thals manage to smash the Daleks' power centre. This stops the bomb countdown, and also cuts the static electricity to the metal floor, through which the Daleks power their travel machines. The machines all power down, and the mutants inside them die--five hundred years after the Neutronic War, the Thals have finally achieved the extinction of the Dalek race.

It's a lovely touch that they're not happy at this; instead, the Thals are wistful that they weren't able to find a solution other than fighting. But with the death of the Daleks, the Thals now have access to the Dalek methods of synthesising food, and their survival is assured.

What Lisa thought: She definitely felt more engaged with the narrative than she had with "An Unearthly Child". Lisa is no fan of the Daleks, but she liked them here--she liked them because they weren't The Daleks, the greatest menace to all life in the universe; they were simply a new menace the TARDIS team were facing. Though she did laugh at the idea of the Dalek raise facing extinction at the story's end.

The next story is "The Edge of Destruction".

Doctor Who Rewatch Index

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