Day Three — January 3rd 2021
The Dead Planet and The Survivors
The Dead Planet (The Daleks — Episode One)
There’s a bit of a debate about what these early serials are called. The debate sort of goes on for all of the Hartnell stories which have individual episode titles rather than one over-arching name, but it’s these first three serials which seem to be the most hotly debated.
Most people call the first story An Unearthly Child, but there’s arguments to be made for 100,000BC and The Tribe of Gum. Let’s be honest, neither of them are as catchy. The story after this one is almost universally called The Edge of Destruction, but some people prefer Inside the Spaceship. And then there’s this story. Most people — including the BBC themselves, on the likes of VHS and DVD — go with simply The Daleks.
It makes sense, given that this story is the debut of Doctor Who’s most famous adversaries, and likely the reason that the series survived beyond the 1960s. In 2021 the only hold-outs to calling this story The Daleks seem to be Doctor Who Magazine, who insist on calling it The Mutants (aka The Daleks). They also favour alternate titles for the other two stories from this initial batch of three, but this is the only one they ever acknowledge an ‘aka’ for. It makes you wonder when the time comes to call a spade a spade.
Or, at least, to call it a Dalek.
And then there’s me, who generally insists on calling this story The Dead Planet when I’m talking about it with friends (which, it has to be said, doesn’t happen an awful lot). I really like the title The Dead Planet, and although it’s perhaps not as fitting-a title as The Daleks — or even The Mutants (aka The Daleks) — it’s the one that feels the most magical to me.
I have bowed to general opinion when writing the title of the entry, though. As much as I’d like to use my title, I’ll accept that it’s not the actual title of the serial.
Anyway, enough being contrary about the titles and time to be contrary about missing episodes, because if I could have any single missing episode back, it’d be the original version of this one. Everyone bangs on about the fact that the very first episode of the series was recorded, then remounted a few weeks later. But it’s often forgotten that the same thing happened with this episode. We’ve a handful of pictures which come from the original version of the episode, but the actual thing itself is long-since lost.
The original version was deemed a technical failure, with talkback from the gallery burned into several parts of the recording, and the decision was taken that it wasn’t fit for broadcast. Anyone familiar with 1960s Doctor Who can imagine just how bad it must have been for that to be the case!
Quite apart from having an alternate version of the episode to compare with this one, complete with different model effects for the Dalek city, it would be interesting to listen in on the noise from the gallery and get a sense of just what it was like in studio in November 1963.
One last thing to be pedantic about today — everyone says that the first monster in Doctor Who is the Daleks, but they’re not are they? The first monster encountered by Doctor Who and his friends is the metal creature in the petrified forest here! It doesn’t matter that the creature is dead, it’s played as a frightful encounter for Barbara, and they muse on how monstrous the thing is!
Rewrite the history books! Justice for the Magnedon!
This episode is brilliant. All four regulars on sparkling form, a beautiful sense of mystery, and one of the best cliffhangers, in retrospect, that the series ever delivered. 9/10.
The Survivors (The Daleks — Episode Two)
The greatest evidence that the production team on Doctor Who didn’t realise how important — or iconic — the Daleks would become to the series, or British culture as a whole, isn’t (spoilers!) that they’re killed off at the end of the serial, it’s that Doctor Who first encounters them by simply walking through a door and just finding them there.
Ooh, but they’re good, aren’t they? It might just be nearly 60 years of history that lends the Daleks in this serial an air of being something special, but everything just works right from the off. The design, the voice, the little flashing lights on the top of the head… even the sucker arm seems to work in context.
Every now and then, I find myself thinking about Ray Cusick’s other designs for the creatures, and I wonder if they’d have worked as well as the one we ended up with. I don’t reckon they would, although they’re quite nice in their own way. The first looks a bit TV Comic and Trod-dy, while the second looks like something Doctor Who itself would do later in the 1960s to try and recapture the appeal of the Daleks themselves. Come to think of it, it’s remarkable that they didn’t do something with these designs at the time.
My absolute favourite thing in this episode is something that happens, I reckon, by mistake. When Susan reaches the TARDIS to collect the Anti-Radiation Gloves, er, Drugs, she opens the doors to make her way back to the Dalek city. Outside the doors to the set we can see the Petrified Forest, and it looks beautiful. One of my favourite things about the 1960s TARDIS set is that we get to see outside the doors like this.
Only on this occasion there’s a storm raging over the forest. lightning cracks, and as it does so all the roundels on that one wall of the TARDIS are illuminated by the lightning! It’s gorgeous, and I only wish all the roundels in the ship were lit up the same. I say I reckon it was a mistake because I think it probably was — the intention is to see the lightning in the forest outside the ship, it just happens that the roundels being the material they are don’t black the light out. But god, if it was a mistake then it has to be one of the best Doctor Who ever had.
I think there was talk of having the TARDIS Control Room do similar when the show returned in 2005 — to have windows in the roof which would show you the outside, or at the very least to alter the lighting through the fabric parts of the ‘dome’ to give a suggestion of what lay beyond, but it never came to happen. It would probably be impractical to do as an ongoing thing every episode, but a boy can dream!
As for the episode itself, there’s lots to enjoy but despite the arrival of the Daleks it’s just not as good as the first part. I’m going with a 7/10.
