Day 37 — February 6th 2021
The Executioners and The Death of Time
The Executioners (The Chase — Episode One)
The Chase feels a bit like the black sheep of 1960s Dalek stories, doesn’t it? The Daleks has the honour of introducing the creatures, The Dalek Invasion of Earth is the long-awaited rematch, and a real epic for the programme, featuring more location work and larger casts than ever, The Daleks’ Master Plan is the awe-inspiring 12-week marathon, Power introduces the Second Doctor Who, and Evil manages to kill the creatures off with some real spectacle.
And then there’s The Chase, which in fairness gets to write out Ian and Barbara and introduce Steven as their replacement, but doesn’t really have a whole lot else going for it. I’ve never bee a huge fan of this story, but I’ve never particularly disliked it either. It’s just sort of there, but watching through this time, I’ve found myself really disappointed by the opening episodes of the story.
It’s my own fault, really. I enjoyed The Dalek Invasion of Earth so much that I was looking forward to seeing the Daleks back again properly, but where that story felt bursting with how much it had to say, this opening episode makes it clear that Terry Nation doesn’t have the story to fill six weeks this time around. We spend ages messing around with the Time Space Visualiser, which is a fun idea and I’m sure I’d enjoy spending some time with, but not when I want to be getting on with some Dalek action. It feels like the whole episode is an exercise in treading water until the cliffhanger, which is itself a poor imitation of the one from World’s End.
I also feel the need to argue that this episode isn’t particularly competent, either. It’s only fair given how much stick I gave The Keys of Marinus a few weeks ago. They can’t fit the TARDIS Console in the studio, so they make do with having Hartnell reach off camera and operate the controls, which is fine in theory… but you can see beyond the TARDIS walls to the back of the studio beyond! That feels clumsy. There’s also a clever idea to have the Daleks go round and round when entering their time machine, which is again a clever enough plan… but you end up with such a long awkward wait for them to get back into position each time, and the shot feels like it goes on for an age.
And then there’s the studio set for the surface of Aridus, which looks to all the world like they’ve thrown some cloths down onto piles of boxes and scattered a bit of sand around. And when we cut to location it’s a nice change and gives some proper scale… but it all looks so dark and contrasts massively with the studio space. Even Vicki’s hairstyle changes between location and studio and back again!
I think we were spoilt by The Dalek Invasion of Earth — and it’s that age old situation where the designers manage so much better when creating something real. The sets for post-invasion London were gorgeous, and I believed in every setting. But the sets here… well, they feel cheaper than we’re used to, and that’s baffling for a Dalek story, which at this stage were still the programme’s real currency.
Ooh, Vicki. There’s a point. She starts this episode complaining about being a spare part and being treated like a kid, but is it just me or is she written as terribly flirty with Ian later on, when they go off exploring together? The pair of them feel like they’re caught in some love affair, and I can’t tell if that’s deliberate or just me reading too much into it!
I know I’m being terribly negative, but I was genuinely excited by the Dalek cliffhanger yesterday, having forgotten all about it, and this episode just feels like a let down. 3/10.
The Death of Time (The Chase — Episode Two)
I think I’ve put my finger on what it is I don’t like about the Daleks in this story — they don’t tally up with the ones we’ve seen before. It’s been nagging me since yesterday, but I’d not been able to see it because I’m looking back with almost 60 years of Dalek continuity clouding my thoughts.
The issue is this; the Daleks in this story are specifically out to ‘get’ Doctor Who and his friends, and are aware that they need to track down and destroy the TARDIS. But the Daleks at this stage don’t really know about Doctor Who or the TARDIS, do they? The ones we encounter in The Daleks are sometime in the far future, and are destroyed in the final episode. And even if one or two escaped, they never saw the TARDIS as it was beyond the range of their sensors. I can’t remember if they discovered our heroes were time travellers, but I don’t think they did.
The ones we meet in The Dalek Invasion of Earth never find anything much out about the TARDIS or it’s crew either. A Dalek certainly may have seen the TARDIS when it emerged from the Thames (although it was fairly well buried by debris from the bridge collapse), but it had no reason to suspect it was anything more than something that existed in London (indeed, they’d probably seen other police boxes, assuming one or two survived to the 22nd century).
It really rankled in The Executioners, when the Daleks first set out on their mission;
Black Dalek: ‘The operation will proceed at once. The movement scanners have located the enemy time machine, TARDIS.’
Daleks: ‘TARDIS! TARDIS! TARDIS! TARDIS! TARDIS!’
That just feels oddly out of place for the Daleks as we’ve encountered them in the series so far. It’s a story written by someone who’s familiar with the series and knows that the two biggest icons are the Daleks and the TARDIS. Someone who knows that Doctor Who has fought and beaten the Daleks twice already. It doesn’t really work within the internal logic of the programme.
The issue continues today, with the Daleks deliberately searching out the ship, and then surrounding it and attempting to destroy it. It should be a really terrifying moment, watching Doctor Who’s greatest enemies attacking his time machine, but I just didn’t believe it for a second. I feel like you need Doctor Who and his friends to defeat the Daleks in a first episode, have the survivors work out that the Police Box is a time machine, and then set out after it.
I’m also not a fan of the ‘comedy’ way in which our heroes try to distract a Dalek towards the end of the episode, either, jumping up and shouting ‘yoo hoo’ at it. Doctor Who even shouts ‘over here, auntie!’. I hate complaining about comedy, because I’m usually someone who loves a spot of humour in Doctor Who, but here it doesn’t work for me at all. It feels too much like it’s undermining the Daleks, and after the previous two stories had done so much to establish them as a credible threat.
3/10.
