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| The Daleks, Masters of Earth! |
6 episodes: Worlds' End, The Daleks, Day of Reckoning, The End of Tomorrow, The Waking Ally, Flashpoint. Approx. 149 minutes. Written by: Terry Nation. Directed by: Richard Martin. Produced by: Verity Lambert.
THE PLOT
The TARDIS materializes in London - but the Doctor quickly realizes that they have not come to Ian and Barbara's time. The city is eerily quiet, with few signs of life and a strange sign near the River Thames warning against dumping bodies in the water.
The year is around 2164, and the Earth has been invaded by the Daleks! The Doctor and Ian are captured and taken to a Dalek saucer, while Barbara and Susan fall in with a local resistance group. Dortmun (Alan Judd), a wheelchair-bound scientist, hopes to defeat the Daleks using a bomb he has created that he believes will pierce the strong Dalek casing. The group decides to test the bomb in an attack on the Dalek saucer. Despite freeing the Doctor, Dortmun's device proves useless and only a handful of resistance members make it out alive - and they are scattered.
The Doctor, Susan, and young resistance fighter David Campbell (Peter Fraser) decide to head to mines the Daleks have started in Bedfordshire, something the Doctor is certain is significant. Barbara and the pessimistic Jenny (Ann Davies) reunite with Dortmun, and decide to head to that same mine. Meanwhile Ian, who escaped his cell in the attack but could not get off the Dalek saucer, finds himself at the mining site - where he learns that the Daleks are mining for the magnetic core of the Earth itself!
CHARACTERS
The Doctor: "I never take life - Only when my own is immediately threatened!" One of the joys of revisiting the early stories is watching the selfish Doctor of the very first serials transform gradually into the same hero we recognize in the modern series. This is a strong piece for the Doctor, who takes the lead in defeating the Daleks (something that wasn't true in the original Dalek serial). Hartnell is terrific throughout, particularly in the scenes involving Susan. Seeing Susan's blossoming attraction to David Campbell, the Doctor sets aside his stubbornness and instead asks for the young man's suggestions as to what to do next, earning grateful smiles from his granddaughter. After Susan declares that she loves David, the Doctor makes a decision whose difficulty you can see etched in his wrinkled face. His closing monologue is one of the series' genuinely iconic moments, irreproachable in both its scripting and Hartnell's performance.
Barbara: After the failed assault on the Dalek saucer, Barbara quickly agrees to go to a museum at the heart of London where Dortmun believes others might gather. When Jenny points out that this will hurt their chances of making it out of the city, Barbara replies that the wheelchair-bound scientist would have no chance without their help - revealing not only Barbara's selflessness, but her sensitivity. If she were to simply offer Dortmun her aid, the man's pride might make him refuse; but by making him believe he is helping them, she is able to get him to in reality accept help. Barbara remains constantly alert for potential advantages, quickly identifying the device the Daleks use to control the Robomen and hatching an on-the-spot plan to try to make use of it.
Ian: Paired with the Doctor for the first two episodes, then is split off on his own, investigating the mines from the site even as the others work their way toward him. He has the least interesting slice of the story, having to pretend to be wary of a genuinely pathetic-looking man in a monster suit for the Episode Four cliffhanger. Still, William Russell manages to hold the screen even when tasked with carrying the weakest of the three main threads.
Susan: Her departure story gives her more to do than usual, and Carole Ann Ford does well with the additional material. Still, while this is the second above-average treatment of the character in a row, I don't find myself the slightest bit sorry to see her go. There was always potential in Susan, but the sad fact is that it was rarely tapped. She was usually called upon to either do something stupid or be put into peril to create a story crisis for the others. It's good that the character got to leave with more dignity than she was allowed for much of her actual run - But the honest truth is that Susan was never a favorite of mine, and I much prefer her immediate successor.
Daleks: The Daleks were tremendously popular in their first appearance, their first story sending Doctor Who's ratings from average fare to ratings juggernaut. Bringing them back was a no-brainer, complicated by only one thing: That they were completely wiped out as a species at the end of their debut. No problem for a time-travel show - When Ian brings up their extinction, the Doctor simply tells him (and us) that this is a much earlier point in the Daleks' timeline. The Daleks were already identified with Fascism, and Terry Nation's script makes good use of this by evoking World War II imagery at every possible turn, from the very French Resistance-like human rebels to the forced labor camp of the mines.
STORY VS. SET PIECES
The Dalek Invasion of Earth was the first story to bring back a previous villain, and it remade the Daleks from a weak and dying race trapped in a decaying city into a military force capable of conquering (and exterminating) entire planets. It was also the first companion departure, with the exemplary handling of Carole Ann Ford's departure setting the precedent for the many cast turnovers to follow.
The actual story, however, is quite thin and rather silly. The Daleks have invaded the Earth and enslaved the human race - Ultimately, we discover, in order to extract the Earth's magnetic core and then... throw that core away (presumably into a convenient black hole) and replace it with an engine so they can drive the planet around like a fancy new car. We don't even hear about this granting some tactical advantage; turning the Earth into a Dalek spaceship would appear to be an end in itself.
One imagines Ming the Merciless grinning his approval from some distant dimension... Before turning back to torturing some minions, of course.
What makes this serial work - and it does work - is how good many of the individual set pieces are. There are several wonderful moments and images that still work quite well today: The Dalek rising out of the Thames at the end of Episode One; Daleks gliding around a deserted, devastated London; slave laborers, disheveled and without hope, marching into a mine to be worked until they are useless and then discarded. Black and white is a tremendous asset here, making the proceedings feel a little grittier than if had been in color.
THE COLLABORATORS
One of my favorite moments is one that's largely irrelevant to the overall story. Barbara and Jenny are making their way to the mines when they stop at a shack that's home to two all-but-starving seamstresses (Jean Conroy, Meriel Hobson). The women have been allowed to stay because they are of more use to the Daleks making clothes for the refugees than they would be in the mines. They quickly turn Barbara and Jenny in, in exchange for a little food. The younger woman is rapturous at seeing their bounty, but the older one seems regretful, assuaging her conscience by telling herself that Barbara and Jenny would have been captured anyway.
Plot-wise, this is an aside, a bit of filler to pad out the story. It would make as much sense to have the Daleks capture Barbara and Jenny in London and just transport them to the mine. But it adds to the atmosphere, emphasizing the overall hopelessness and putting a face on human cowardice even as the rest of the serial shows bravery and resistance. In a later story, the women would probably have been brought back to either redeem themselves or be punished (probably both) - but I'm happy that it's just an aside, a convincingly-portrayed slice of life in a particularly bleak world.
PUSHING THE LIMITATIONS
This was the most technically ambitious serial of the first two seasons... Which means that the budget limitations are more visible than usual. Bits of set wobble, with the ramp to the Dalek saucer a particular offender. The actors have to pretend not to see items or people that should be clearly visible, be it the prominent poster warning against dumping bodies in the Thames (finally "noticed" several minutes after the regulars have each managed to look right at it), or the planting of a bomb just a few feet from where the Doctor, Susan, and David are having a conversation. Then there's the bit in Episode Six, in which actresses Jacqueline Hill and Ann Davies struggle gamely to hold their "magnetic restraints" in place, each shake of either actress's hand betraying that they're just holding bits of plastic against their necks.
Director Richard Martin's work for the series was often characterized by pushing the technical limitations. While some bits of staging fall flat, other visual moments work surprisingly well. In Episode Two, David fills Barbara and Susan in on the backstory of the Dalek invasion. As he talks, the episode cuts to a flashback of Robomen and Daleks escorting prisoners to their saucer. Then another person takes up the narration, and we come out of the flashback to find that someone else is filling in the Doctor and Ian on the same backstory - Thus making the visual not just a flashback, but a bridge between one scene and another.
A couple episodes later, as the Daleks exchange exposition, their exchange is lent a sense of menace by being shown threw a slightly skewed camera angle. Finally, we see through a Dalek eyestalk as it approaches the Doctor, preparing to exterminate him. None of this is very complex, even by 1960's standards - but it's just that bit more cinematic than the series' norm at this point in its run, and helps to make this serial feel like the "event story" that it is.
OVERALL
There is no questioning how important a story The Dalek Invasion of Earth is to the series. While the overall story may be thin and a bit silly, it is played very straight by the actors and script. This helps to sell the tension of the situation, while the quality of many of the individual moments within these six episodes makes it easy enough to overlook the weaknesses in the overall narrative.
I'd emphasize that this is not a story to watch in a single viewing. Viewed one to two episodes at a time, it is enjoyable and fairly suspenseful - Any more than that, and it starts to have a numbing effect. As a story, I don't think it's as quite good as the original Dalek serial. Still, by making the Daleks into a formidable opponent, it did well by the series' most iconic villains; and by handling the departure of Susan with intelligence and dignity it prepared the way for the many later cast changes.
The result is a serial well worth watching an episode at a time, to enjoy the many bits that work - And, more critically in the long run, this story is a genuinely indispensable piece of Doctor Who history.
Overall Rating: 8/10.
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