Doctor Who: "The Chase"

Am exterminated! Am exterminated!--A Dalek, upon losing a fight with a Mechanoid

The Doctor and his evil double duel with their wood. Let the slashfic commence!

"The Executioners", 22 May 1965
"The Death of Time", 29 May 1965
"Flight Through Eternity", 5 June 1965
"Journey into Terror", 12 June 1965
"The Death of Doctor Who", 19 June 1965
"The Planet of Decision", 26 June 1965

Written by Terry Nation
Directed by Richard Martin
Script editor: Dennis Spooner
Produced by Verity Lambert

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

The Doctor has been tinkering with a time-space visualiser, which he took from the space museum, and he's got it working again. With it, the TARDIS team can watch any instant in all of space and time. They watch Lincoln give the Gettysburg Address, an audience between Shakespeare and Elizabeth I, and a performance of "Ticket to Ride" by the Beatles on an episode of Top of the Pops. Vicki has heard of the Beatles, has even visited their museum in Liverpool, but "didn't know they play classical music", a description that disgusts Barbara.

The Beatles sequence isn't on the North American DVD of "The Chase" (though it was on the earlier North American VHS release), and, while I understand the rights issues involves, I think that's a shame. That performance of "Ticket to Ride" actually gets used in Beatles documentaries, and it only exists because of its appearance in Doctor Who--the rest of that episode of Top of the Pops has been wiped.

(The story goes that originally, the Beatles themselves were actually scheduled to appear in the programme--made up to appear in their seventies, they'd be picked up by the time-space visualiser while attending their fiftieth anniversary. But Brian Epstein put the kibosh on them appearing in a cheap kids' science fiction show.)

That bit of fluff concluded, the TARDIS materialises on a hot desert planet, boiling beneath the heat of two suns. Ian and Vicki dash off over a dune to go exploring, while the Doctor and Barbara hang back to sunbathe. At this point I kind of wondered in the Doctor would attire himself for sunbathing by pulling swimming trunks on over his frock coats and check trousers, a la Batman and the Joker having their surfing competition, but no, he just remains fully clothed while he lays out.

Ian and Vicki discover a metal hatch in the sand. They pull it open and descend into the crumbling tunnels of an abandoned subterranean city. But soon they're attacked by a large, tentacled creature--it looks a bit like a squid, but moving about on dry land. And it's between them and the hatch, so they have no option but to retreat deeper into the tunnels.

Back on the surface, the Doctor and Barbara are prevented from looking for their friends by a sandstorm, which not only changes the entire landscape but also buries the TARDIS. And it reveals a new threat: a squad of Daleks, hunting the TARDIS team (whom they now describe as "our greatest enemies").

They flee and take refuge with the planet's native humanoid inhabitants, the Aridians, who look like anthropoid silver fish. (I don't mean they look like anthropoid silverfish, but that they wear lycra jumpsuits and swimcaps spray-painted silver, with fins glued on to look like fish.) They explain that this planet, Aridius, was once an aquatic paradise, but that the water burnt away as the planet was drawn closer to the twin suns.

(Which opens the question as to how it came to be named "Aridius". Was it named by the Ironic Planetary Naming Authority, or by the Bad Luck Planetary Naming Authority)?

The Aridians tell the Doctor and Barbara that when the planet dried out, the mire-beasts invaded the Aridians' underground cities. The mire-beasts--one of which is obviously the creature that has cornered Vicki and Ian--cannot be defeated, and so the only solution for the Aridians is to wall off those sections of their tunnels that become infested.

The Aridians take Barbara and the Doctor to their city, but soon enough the city is contacted by the Daleks, who demand that the Aridians hand over the TARDIS team or face extermination. Not wishing to put their hosts in a bad situation, the Doctor declares that he and Barbara will leave, but the Aridians refuse to allow him to do so--the Daleks have specifically told them that if the team escape, they will destroy their city.

Meanwhile, Vicki and Ian have fought off the mire-beast, but in the process Ian took a blow to the head and got knocked unconscious. Vicki runs off in fright, and in her mad dash through the tunnels, she somehow finds a way through into the very chamber where the Aridians are holding Barbara and the Doctor. They make to arrest her, too, but before they can, a mire-beast bursts in, having followed her through the tunnels.

In the confusion, the Doctor, Barbara and Vicki make their escape, and Vicki leads the group back to Ian. He's awake--his wound looks worse than it is. (And it really does look bad--there's a lot of blood flowing from that temple for 1965 television.) While awake, he's found an exit from the tunnels--and it leads right to the TARDIS.

The TARDIS, buried in the sandstorm, was discovered by the Daleks, who captured a pair of Aridians and used them as slave labour to excavate it, then killed them when they were finished. Ian and the Doctor are able to distract the Daleks, and the team escape and dematerialise.

A few minutes after they're in flight, though, the Doctor learns some shocking news from the TARDIS's sensors: the Daleks are pursuing them. They've built their own time machine and are hunting the team through space and time.

Cut to the Dalek time machine's control room. One Dalek gives a report calculating how big a lead the TARDIS has on them, and after he gives this report, the Dalek commander demands he convert the amount into Earth measure. The original Dalek actually stutters as he does the arithmetic. ("Um ... er ... ah ... twelve ... Earth minutes.") This is one of those moments in fandom that's cited as a reason why "The Chase" isn't a very good story--the ridiculousness of a stammering Dalek. But what I'd like to point out is how unreasonable the Dalek commander's demand is in the first place--why on Earth would he need the time units converted to Earth measure? If you're, say, the pilot of an RAF bomber, and your tail gunner reports, "We've got German fighters closing in behind us, skipper! About five hundred yards!", you don't very well respond, "Sorry, Bill! Since our enemies are German, I can't act on that information until you translate 'five hundred yards' into German for me!"

Anyway. We now go into a series of set pieces, where the TARDIS materialises, the crew briefly interact with their surroundings, and then depart; then the Daleks arrive, ascertain that the TARDIS has already left, and pursue it. This includes extensive shots of the time vortex, with a cardboard cutout of the TARDIS chased erratically across the screen by a cardboard cutout of the Dalek time machine, while some very jazzy incidental music played. You kind of wonder if the BBC hired the Dave Brubeck Quartet to do the music for this serial. (In fairness, the cardboard cutouts do get larger as they cross the screen, which does an excellent job of creating the illusion that they're moving three-dimensionally rather than two-.)

The first stop on the chase is atop the Empire State Building, where the team meet Morton Dill (played by Peter Purves), a tourist from Alabama who's just gosh-darned amazed at everything he sees in the big city. When the TARDIS dematerialises a few moments later, he concludes he must have stumbled across the production of a movie, something he thinks gets confirmed when the Daleks show up a few minutes later. He examines the Dalek he meets by walking in a full circle around it, and the Dalek's eyestalk follows him, tracking 360 degrees to keep up with him--it's a really cute moment. (Morton Dill survives the encounter--the Daleks murder no one on their visit to the Empire State Building. Well, not on this visit.)

Next, the TARDIS arrives at and quickly departs from the Mary Celeste. The Daleks also arrive and depart, but not until their appearance has so frightened everyone aboard that they've jumped ship into the Atlantic Ocean, leaving the Mary Celeste deserted, with its famous half-drunk cups of coffee and breakfasts in the middle of being eaten. A Dalek falls overboard, too, and actually screams in terror as he falls.

The TARDIS's next destination is the front hallway of a spooky, dark, deserted mansion, which the Doctor identifies from its architecture as Central European. The Doctor and Ian head upstairs to explore the house, while Barbara and Vicki wait by the TARDIS.

While, they're waiting, a figure in a dark cloak approaches them, introduces himself as Count Dracula, and then departs. The Doctor and Ian discover a laboratory with a shrouded body lying on a slab; they pull back the shroud to reveal Frankenstein's monster, and quickly flee the lab.

The Doctor theorises that somehow, the TARDIS has transported them into the recesses of the human mind, a dream world. This excites Ian, because surely the Daleks can't possibly follow them into the human subconscious. But he's wrong, because soon enough, the pepperpots do indeed arrive.

A battle ensues between the Daleks, Dracula and Frankenstein, with the Daleks' guns having no effect on the monsters. In the commotion, the Doctor, Ian and Barbara pile into TARDIS and dematerialise, and not until it's already too late do they realise that they've left Vicki behind. The Doctor insists there's no way to go back and get her; he simply doesn't have sufficiently fine control of the TARDIS.

Vicki, though, manages to dart inside the Daleks' time machine and hides there; the Daleks withdraw from their battle and take off in pursuit of the TARDIS. After the spooky house has once again fallen quiet, a camera shot shows us its front entrance, where a large sign identifies it as a carnival fright house, part of the "Festival of Ghana, 1996; admission $10" (yes, dollars). But a sticker placed over the sign tells us that the festival has been "cancelled by order of Peking".

While hiding aboard the Dalek time machine, Vicki is able to watch the Daleks hatch their next stratagem: they construct a robot duplicate of the Doctor, identical to the original in every way save for the fact that he's played by an actor who doesn't really resemble William Hartnell at all, and programme to "Infiltrate and kill!" the TARDIS crew. (That phrase is repeated a good eight or ten times during episodes four and five.)

I can't really think of a better way they could have done the duplicate-Doctor, given the constraints under which they were operating, but I've got to say, it's pretty unsuccessful. The production team make a valiant attempt to have William Hartnell play the duplicate whenever possible, but most of the time, they have to use the unconvincing double. And I don't just mean that happens the Doctor and the robot have to appear in the same scene; I mean it happens whenever they appear in consecutive scenes (which happens for most of the robot's time in the programme).

1960s Doctor Who was shot "as-live", meaning that as near as possible, a thirty-minute episode was recorded during a thirty-minute block of time at the studio. So when the camera cuts from a scene between Ian and the Doctor in one location, to a scene between Barbara and the robot in another location, there simply isn't time for William Hartnell to run across to the other side of the studio to play both scenes.

In the robot's first appearance, at the cliffhanger for episode four, the double is used for a long shot, surrounded by Daleks; we then cut to Hartnell for a closeup, still stood on the TARDIS set from the previous scene, with a Dalek eyestalk extending into frame to make us think we're still aboard the Dalek time machine. But that really doesn't work: neither Hartnell's posture nor the background match the double's.

Still, two things do work. First, William Hartnell dubs all the robot's lines as the double mimics them; sure, there lip syncing's slightly off, but that's forgivable given that, once again, this was being done live. And second is the scene where the Doctor and the robot finally meet. Hartnell will speak a line playing one character (of course, by that point, we don't know if he's the Doctor or the robot) facing off to camera left; we then cut to a shot of Ian or Barbara or Vicki, during which, Hartnell turns around; we then cut back to Hartnell, now facing off to camera right, and Hartnell delivers a line as the other character.

So. The TARDIS now arrives on the planet Mechanus, a jungle planet. (No doubt it was named Mechanus by the same Ironic Yet Creepily Predictive Planetary Naming Authority that named Aridius.) But it's a jungle of large, extremely aggressive fungi that are more than happy to eat whatever human-sized creatures come near them. The TARDIS team are trepidatious about walking off into the jungle, but then suddenly, a path lights up along the ground. They follow it, and it leads them to a cave where they take refuge.

Meanwhile, the Daleks have landed and sent their robot off to find the team. Vicki waits till all the Daleks have left, then heads off into the jungle to try to rejoin her friends. From their cave, the others hear her calling for them, and Ian and the Doctor head into the jungle to find her.

While they're gone, the robot arrives at the cave and rather callously tells Barbara that Ian is dead, killed by the fungi. She doesn't believe him and insists they go look for him, so the robot accompanies her into the jungle. As soon as they're isolated, the robot attempts to kill her, but he's stopped when Ian comes upon them--Vicki has by now told him and the Doctor about the robot.

The robot Doctor runs off into the jungle, and the team split up to find him. Of course, the endgame for this is that Ian, Barbara and Vicki are all gathered in a clearing, and the two Hartnells enter from opposite sides at the same time, so that neither we nor the team know which is the real Doctor.

One of the Hartnells orders Ian to get out of the way so he can thrash his double with his cane. Ian says, "And if I don't?" to which the Hartnell responds, "Then I'll give you the same treatment!" and takes a swipe at him. Ian and this Hartnell, supposedly the robot, grapple, while Vicki, Susan and the "Doctor" watch on. Ian throws the robot to the ground and picks up a large rock, preparing to brain him.

The "Doctor" with Vicki and Susan then forcibly turns Vicki away, saying, "Susan, I don't want you to see this." This lets Vicki and Barbara know that this "Doctor" is actually the robot. Ian is stopped from braining the real Doctor by Barbara's scream. The robot runs off, and the Doctor follows him. The two of them then duel with their wooden canes, and while they're locked together, the Doctor is able to pull the robot's wiring from its chest, destroying it.

Yes, that means that the real Doctor, while aware that his fellows didn't know whether or not he was a robot sent to assassinate them, attempted to beat Ian with his cane purely for not getting out of his way fast enough. The sad part is that I can't actually say, "This is a horribly contrived, out-of-character action for the Hartnell Doctor to perform," so much as I can say, "This actually isn't all that big a stretch, character-wise, for the Hartnell Doctor."

So with that all taken care of, our heroes retreat back to their cave. But they're soon found by Daleks, who surround the cave and prepare to exterminate the team. The Doctor attempts to impersonate the robot, exiting the cave and telling the Daleks that they've all already been killed, but the Daleks see through the ruse easily. The Doctor narrowly escapes extermination.

(It's actually Ian who suggests he try it. Barbara objects immediately, and while Ian, Barbara and Vicki argue about it, the Doctor slips out at the back of the frame. They're all just agreeing it's an unworkable plan when they hear the Doctor's voice speaking to the Daleks, telling them the mission has been completed. The Daleks respond with a gunshot, and the Doctor darts back into frame, looking rather frazzled. It's a cute little scene.)

Before the Daleks can storm the cave, however, a door opens at its rear and a robot emerges. It's a giant metal sphere with bits and bobs attached, and it speaks with a droning intonation not unlike the Daleks' voices. It ushers them into the door from which it has just emerged, with turns out to lead to a lift.

They ascend in the lift. The Doctor attempts to make conversation with the robot, but it ignores him. The lift takes them to a magnificent city of what spires, built on a platform high above the fungal jungle. (Man. "Fungal jungle". I'm calling that one. You want it, you pay a royalty.)

They're ushered through the city's corridors--populated only by more of the spherical robots--to a sleeping chamber, where they meet another human being. This is Steven Taylor, who's played by Peter Purves, the same actor who played Morton Dill back atop the Empire State Building. He was a space pilot in Earth's interplanetary wars, but his ship crashed. For two years, he's had no one to talk to but his cuddly toy panda.

Steven explains that the robots are Mechanoids. Earth had intended to colonise Mechanus and sent the Mechanoids as an advance party, to build the city. But when the wars came, Mechanus got forgot about. Now the robots will only think that arriving humans are the colonists if they know the Mechanoids' code; since neither Steven nor the TARDIS party know the code, they're trapped here as the Mechanoids' prisoners.

Their cell contains access to the roof, where Steven goes to exercise. On the roof is an extensive length of electrical cable; now that there are five people here, instead of just one, they can use the cable to lower each other the fifteen hundred feet down to the ground. Vicki, terribly acrophobic, has to be forcibly held down while the others tie the end of the cable around her, then holds her eyes shut in terror as they lower her to the ground.

Meanwhile, the Daleks have ascended the lift chute and demand the Mechanoids hand over the TARDIS team. When the Mechanoids refuse, a battle ensues, and soon the whole city is ablaze. The battle is actually very well done, a montage of model shots and shots of the two different robot forces rolling around and firing (the Mechanoids are equipped with flamethrowers), framed by flames licking at the edge of the screen.

When smoke starts billowing onto the city's roof, Steven, panicked, dashes back inside, to rescue his cuddly panda. When he doesn't re-emerge, the TARDIS team assume he's been killed. They themselves finish climbing down to the ground, and they make their way through to the jungle to the Daleks' time machine. They discover it's been abandoned--all the Daleks, like the Mechanoids, have been wiped out in the battle.

Now Barbara realises that, with the intact guidance mechanism on the Dalek time machine, she and Ian can use it to travel back to 1963 Earth, if only the Doctor will show them how to use it. He angrily refuses, calling them both utter idiots, but really, of course, he just doesn't want them to leave him. It's really a terribly sweet moment, such a very true portrayal, especially for someone of Hartnell's age and generation, conditioned not to show soft emotions.

But thanks to Ian and Barbara's entreaties, he agrees, and next thing we know, the two schoolteachers have landed in London. It's 1965 instead of 1963, but as Ian says, "What's two years between friends?" There's then a lovely montage of Ian and Barbara frolicking through London; playing with the pigeons in Trafalgar Square; Ian expressing mock horror upon discovering a police box on the Thames Embankment.

At the end of the day, they climb aboard a bus, speculating about whether they'll be able to get their old jobs back. The conductor comes along to sell them their tickets, and Ian reaches into his pocket, asking for two threepennies.

"Two threes?" the conductor exclaims. "Where you been, the Moon?"

"No," says Ian, "but you're close!"

Vicki and the Doctor watch the whole thing through the time-space visualiser. Vicki is overjoyed to see them so happy, but the Doctor is still grumpy. As he shuffles off, he murmurs the truth: "I shall miss them. Yes, I shall miss them."

What Lisa thought

"Well," she gruffly conceded, "maybe I'm sort of sorry they're gone. But only because I don't get to complain about Barbara anymore!"

All gruff on the exterior to hide how much she cares on the inside. Sort of like William Hartnell, is my wife.

I, on the other hand, am pretty happy. With "The Web Planet", "The Space Museum" and "The Chase", we've now finished a run of sixteen episodes that I think are pretty dire, broken only by the first episode of "The Space Museum". And next up is one of my favourite Hartnells, "The Time Meddler".

I

Doctor Who: "The Dalek Invasion of Earth"

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!

A Dalek patrols occupied London

"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

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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