Day 86 — March 27th 2021
The Evil of the Daleks Episode Seven
The Evil of the Daleks — Episode Seven
In the back of my mind, I’d had The Evil of the Daleks down as being largely dull until you reach Skaro, at which point everything picks up. I’m sad to say that on this occasion, though, I’ve not even found my interest ignited by this final episode, although it’s undeniably one of the most ‘epic’ we’ve had.
I think this is another occasion (and I seem to be saying this more and more during the third and fourth seasons) where things would be so much improved if I could actually see the episode properly. The tele-snaps for this one are full of gorgeous details like a proper close up of a Dalek’s gun firing, which even in tele-snap resolution looks gorgeously HD. I think being able to see the Dalek Civil War would really help to elevate my opinion on this one, and possibly on the story as a whole.
There’s a handful of surviving clips from the big battle sequence, and it has to be said that they are impressive. They even go some way towards disproving my theory from yesterday that the Dalek Emperor might have looked a bit rubbish on screen, because the angles we get to see look pretty impressive after all
Outside of the Dalek action we get some interesting material with Doctor Who thinking about going home;
Doctor Who: ‘Even if I could trust the Daleks, even if they set us free, we still couldn’t go back to Earth. I suppose I might try and take you all to another universe. I might even try and take you to my own planet.’
Victoria: ‘Your own?’
Doctor Who: ‘Yes, yes, I live a long, long way away from Earth...’
It’s especially interesting that we should get this here, in a story which has toyed with the idea of Doctor Who being ‘more than human’, and it’s perhaps telling that this is the first time he’s (openly) thought about going home since he last had a bust up with his solo male companion in an episode that introduces the new girl. It’s almost becoming a theme.
In hindsight, this almost looks like it’s setting up things for the later in the era. This is the final story of Season Four, and the final story of Season Six — and of the Troughton era as a whole — will end up taking us to his home planet. I know that wasn’t all planned out and intentional at the time, but it’s a nice bit of foreshadowing in retrospect.
And yet, as much as I’ve praised this episode above… I’m afraid it’s another 4/10. The Evil of the Daleks has never been a favourite of mine, and I’ve a feeling that I’m at the stage now where I’m too entrenched in that point of view to really see it any other way. I’ll accept that it’s a favourite for many people — and perhaps that’s not entirely down to the reputation it held for so long of being ‘the best ever’. But for me it’s not one that I’ve ever going to be fond of, and that’s a shame given that it’s the end of a season I’ve found particularly strong, and the end of the Daleks for the rest of the black and white era. It’s going to be some time before I see the pepper pots again.
Well, almost…
The Daleks — The Destroyers
The Evil of the Daleks features what Doctor Who calls ‘the end of the Daleks forever — the final end’. And in 1967, it might have really felt like the end. It had been agreed that the Daleks would be finished off in Doctor Who because Terry Nation had bigger plans for his metal monsters.
‘I went to the United States and said I wanted to make a series called The Daleks,’ Nation explained in Starburst Magazine in 1978. The first time I heard about this proposal for a Dalek spin-off series I thought it was just one of those fan rumours. Everyone says that the BBC planned to make a series based on Jago and Litefoot in the 1970s, but I don’t think there’s any paperwork to prove that. The Daleks is a different kettle of fish, though, because not only was it true, but it came really close to happening.
Nation wrote the script for a pilot episode throughout 1966/67, titled The Destroyers, complete with its own snazzy logo. The script focussed on the Space Security Service who’d appeared in Mission to the Unknown and The Daleks’ Master Plan, and resurrected the character of Sara Kingdom.
Things got so advanced that studio space was booked, and draft contracts were drawn up to cover the input of half the budget by the BBC — and it was in this area that things started to fall apart. The whole saga is far too detailed to go into here, but is covered brilliantly in Doctor Who Magazine 406. In short; the Beeb were willing to cover half the costs of a pilot and then renegotiate for a series, while Nation and his team were under the impression that the BBC would happily cover half the budget of every episode.
Ultimately the pilot did ultimately get made… 40 years later on audio by Big Finish. I thought if there’s any time to have a listen to this one, it’s here when the Daleks have been killed off ‘for good’ on TV, and around the time that the series could have become a relality.
I’ve also had a read of Nation’s original script for the episode because I wanted to see how closely it matches up to what we can hear. It’s strange that the two Nation-penned SSS one-off episodes are the ones I’ve been able to listen to ‘new’ versions of, and then compare to the script for authenticity…!
The main thing which stood out to me while listening through was just how old Jean Marsh sounded. It seems a churlish thing to criticise given that this was made in 2010, but it did distract me a fair bit from the narrative. I found myself picturing and older Sara Kingdom, which wouldn’t be a bad thing on its own, but certainly wasn’t the intention!
As for the story itself, it’s full of Nation ‘stuff’. Of course there’s some plant life which is more animal than vegetable. It feels like a really packed narrative, including a Dalek attack on a human base, Sara getting into trouble in the jungle, a pursuit fo the Daleks complete with some near-misses, a sequence of our heroes having to cross a treacherous cavern (another Nation favourite there), and a set up for the rest of the series with the Daleks intending to conquer the Earth.
I assumed that at least some of this stuff had been added to pad out the audio adaptation… but no. It’s all in the original script. And, it has to be said, the adaptation is remarkably faithful to the script, too. Much of the narration comes directly from the (very detailed) material included in the stage directions. Take for example the opening narration, compared to the script extract above;
‘Explorer Base One sits quietly in the night on the surface of the giant meteorite M5. The Home Base of an Earth Exploration Team, it is newly arrived. The construction of its pre-fabricated dome housing all personnel. Only just complete. The dome stands glistening in the centre of a clear section of ground. Lights gleam from its handful of windows. The main entrance stands a few feet off the ground and is approached by a gently sloping ramp.’
The density of the directions in the script is, I think, a sign of just how interested Nation was in the idea of crafting his own series. It’s a real contrast to many of his Doctor Who scripts, and a million miles away from the stories of sparse notes submitted for approval which was often told by Donald Tosh!
One of the things that often gets said about The Destroyers is that it’s fronted by Sara Kingdom, and that’s on the back of how impressed Nation was with Jean Marsh in The Daleks’ Master Plan. I’m not entirely sure either of those things are true, though. Marsh (and therefore Kingdom) does appear in the story, and gets listed as the first ‘human’ character in the cast list, but I’m not convinced that she’s the lead character. Indeed, she seems curiously weak here, letting Jason Corey take charge of the adventure, and generally coming across as a bit feeble. I think it’s probably a sign of how much Dennis Spooner brought to the character before — Sara appears in more of his episodes than Nation’s own. Having always thought of this as ‘the Sara Kingdom spin off’ it fells really off to listen to.
I think what harms the adaptation the most, though, is the pacing. At the end of his script, Nation estimates the entire adventure to last just under 28 minutes. That’s a lot of action to pack into a half-hour episode, but I think that’s just a sign of how fast-paced the series would have been — or at the very least the opening episode. The audio version though, having to use lots of lengthy bits of narration delivered at a slow pace by Marsh, clocks in at a rather more bloated 73 minutes.
While it’s admirable to have mined so much from the script’s lengthy descriptions, I can’t help but think I’d have enjoyed this more if they’d mounted a 30-minute version and used the sparse style of narration we tend to get on the Narrated Soundtracks of the missing episodes instead. Indeed, I’m almost tempted to see if there’s a way of re-editing the story to do just that, but I can’t imagine that the narration accounts for the story more than doubling in length.
Overall… it’s an interesting curio. A fun ‘what if’ to think that the Daleks came so close to having their own series in the 1960s. I’d love to investigate the whole thing properly one day and write about it in depth. And I think the idea has legs. The Daleks comic in TV Century 21 certainly proved that they can sustain their own narrative for a long period, and almost become heroes in their own right.
Big Finish this year are producing Dalek Universe, a series for the Tenth Doctor Who, which seems to follow the same basic outline as this episode did; a series based on the creations of Terry Nation. Those audios have already announced the inclusion of the Daleks, the SSS, Varga Plants, Mechanoids, the Movellans and Davros. I’d love to see The Daleks created as a serial one day, perhaps released as weekly 30-minute installments, and I’m amazed that almost 55 years after this pilot was written we’ve not really seen it attempted yet.
