the good old days

The Daleks was the second Doctor Who serial and the one that cemented the show as a cultural phenomenon in Britain.  It introduced the Doctor’s longest running and most persistent enemies, the half alive, half robotic conical metal monsters, the daleks.  Although they eventually rose to become the most sinister race in all of creation, the daleks started out small.  In their debut, the daleks were relatively few in number, not that imposing physically, and confined to their ancient city on their home planet Skaro, which they share with the Thals.  Three times during the story, the dalek machines were proven to be extremely vulnerable to electrical interruptions.  And in many ways, I think this original conception of the daleks was among the most effective of their portrayals.

Since the topic of this review is the daleks, I think I should share my general opinions of them as Doctor Who’s arch-nemesis race.  In general, I like the daleks.  I have pewter dalek salt and pepper shakers for special occasions; cleanser and I had daleks in formalware on our wedding cake.  As villains, they are sinister, effective, and unique.  However, there is a lot of variation in the quality of the stories in which they appear, and the most recent dalek stories have been uniformly bad.

I don’t like the daleks in the new series.  It seems the produces aren’t satisfied with using the daleks as daleks.  They instead have to have flying daleks who can stop bullets like characters from The Matrix, dalek cults, different varieties of dalek-human hybrids, an insane dalek prophet, and vast dalek armadas which threaten the whole of the universe but can be conveniently annihilated by pressing the right button. Of course, there were good and bad dalek episodes in the classic series.  In The Dalek Invasion of Earth, Ian manages to foil the daleks’ plan to blow up the Earth’s core and fly the whole planet back to Skaro with some lumber he finds lying around.  The role of the home planet Skaro was also a major point of inconsistency.  In Planet of the Daleks, the titular villains have assembled on the planet Spiridon an invasion force one hundred thousand strong to take over the galaxy, yet there are still Thals on Skaro with sufficient infrastructure of their own to send a commando force to disrupt the daleks’ plans.  On the other hand, Day of the Daleks has an excellent and well-thought-out time travel plot, and Death to the Daleks is my all-time favorite Doctor Who story (although more for the city of the Exxilons than the daleks themselves).  And who can forget the special weapons dalek in Remembrance of the Daleks.

In their first appearance (which properly should be titled “The Mutants”), the daleks inhabit a ancient city, vastly too large for them, on an otherwise desolate planet.  After an adventure on prehistoric Earth, the Doctor, his granddaughter Susan, and the school teachers Ian and Barbara land unexpectedly in the dead jungles near the city.   The Doctor connives to force the group to explore the dalek city, where they are eventually captured by the inhabitants.  During their captivity, the heroes learn some of Skaro’s history.  Much of the world was decimated by a brief nuclear war between two intelligent races, the warrior Thals, and the Dals.  The Dals mutated into hideous monstrosities and retreated into armored metal shells.  These silvery hulks were necessary to keep the mutants alive, but they drove them mad with anger and claustrophobia.  The once-humane Dals became the daleks, devoid of any emotions save rage and the atavistic desire to preserve their race’s supremacy.

Eventually, the time travellers escape and come into contact with the remaining Thals, who have travelled to the region because of a crop failure in their own surviving enclave.  The Thals have forsworn battle, and they are easily gulled by the daleks into a trap, where many of them, including their leader, murdered.  The surviving Thals escape, but hidebound by their pacifism, are unwilling to retaliate in any way.  Meanwhile, the daleks, having discovered that radiation is harmful to the Thals but necessary for their own mutant metabolism, plan to explode another nuclear weapon, to gain them final mastery over their world.

Ian eventually convinces the Thals to accompany him on an infiltration mission.  They will sneak into the city through the swamp, mountains, and caves that protect its water supply.  The terrain is rather scary and alien, probably looking better in black and white than it would have in color.  Meanwhile, the Doctor and Susan take out the city’s defensive sensors, before being recaptured.  The story ends with a desperate melee between the Gallifreyans, humans, and Thals on one side and the dalek leaders on the other to control the core of the city.  Thanks largely to luck, the control panel for the entire metropolis is smashed, the daleks lose power, and the countdown for the neutron bomb is stopped.  The travellers can leave in peace, confident that they have destroyed the last debased, corrupted residues of the once-noble Dal people.  (Obviously things turn out differently, but no real explanation is every given for how the daleks avoid the rather certain doom that this story originally meted out to them.)

This story is really excellent, better than I remembered.  The design of the sets and props was excellent.  Obviously, the most important props were the daleks themselves.  They were very unconventional robot monsters in their day, yet at the same time also much more reasonable-looking than humanoid androids.  The distinctive dalek voices and their Hitlerian vocabulary are really a crucial part of their villainous effictiveness.  The huge, empty city, with its pale walls, low arched doorways, and many elevators was alien and subtly frightening.  The jungles and swamps outside were a bit less impressive, but they worked well enough, and the set designers did an excellent job of concealing the small size of the stages on which they were shooting.  And the caves looked more real (thanks to not having a perfectly flat floor) than most that appear on television shows.

The special effects were modest but generally well handled.  The daleks’ disabling weapons caused the scene to shift into negative, which makes for a disturbing effect.  (It’s even creepier in later stories, when it’s in color.)  The split screen shots worked well, especially the ones used to represent elevators.  There were a few missteps, like using an obvious closeup of an ordinary caterpillar to represent a supposedly terrifying swamp monster, but they were limited in number.  They didn’t really affect my enjoyment of the story, which I will definitely watch again when my kids are a few years older.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 28th, 2008 at 8:00 am and is filed under Classic Nerd Television, Doctor Who. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.