Review Of All Six Episodes - Some Spoilers
Planet Of The Daleks sees the first DOCTOR WHO script from Terry Nation for eight years . Unfortunately his script gives the impression that it's an over extended episode from his last story The Dalek Masterplan . You can see that both Frontier In Space and Planet Of The Daleks were conceived as tying in with one another similar to this year's season finale The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang and where as that two part finale lacks a narrative cohesion so does Frontier and Planet
This manifests itself in the opening episode . The Doctor lies unconscious in the Tardis and Jo leaves to find help . Didn't the Doctor send a telepathic message to the Time Lords requesting help at the end of the previous episode ? Didn't the humans and Draconians find out it was the Daleks who were behind the raiding parties ? Wouldn't they send a taskforce to find and destroy the Dalek base on Spiridon ? All this is quickly forgotten and the story could have easily have been inserted anywhere in the season with minimal rewriting . It also renders any sort of logic and continuity meaningless when the Doctor finds out that the Thals have found an invisible Dalek since the Doctor - and the audience - are expecting to find Daleks . Likewise the cliffhanger to episode two someone states there's ten thousand Daleks on the planet . Well of course there are . It's where the Daleks are staging an invasion force to take over the galaxy after the war between Earth and Draconia
Another problem with the writing is that Nation seems unaware that cinematic set pieces and ambitious locations have become more and more difficult to realise in DOCTOR WHO . You might get away with a jungle planet in black and white 405 line television in the mid 1960s but not colour 625 PAL television ten years later . David Maloney is considered as being one of the great directors from the classic show but even he can't make the jungles of Spiridon appear convincing in anyway and some scenes are laughable such as the attack by wild animals at the plain of stones in episode four
That said no one really watches a Dalek story due to the plot , they watch mainly down to the fact that the show's most iconic monsters are appearing and despite the very basic plot it's nowhere as bad as some of the Dalek stories from NuWho . Perhaps because it does have such a basic plot ? It's also very grim and pessimistic which is something you rarely see in the 21st Century show and as s twenty five minutes of Saturday night entertainment it did its job away back in 1973
Planet Of The Daleks sees the first DOCTOR WHO script from Terry Nation for eight years . Unfortunately his script gives the impression that it's an over extended episode from his last story The Dalek Masterplan . You can see that both Frontier In Space and Planet Of The Daleks were conceived as tying in with one another similar to this year's season finale The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang and where as that two part finale lacks a narrative cohesion so does Frontier and Planet
This manifests itself in the opening episode . The Doctor lies unconscious in the Tardis and Jo leaves to find help . Didn't the Doctor send a telepathic message to the Time Lords requesting help at the end of the previous episode ? Didn't the humans and Draconians find out it was the Daleks who were behind the raiding parties ? Wouldn't they send a taskforce to find and destroy the Dalek base on Spiridon ? All this is quickly forgotten and the story could have easily have been inserted anywhere in the season with minimal rewriting . It also renders any sort of logic and continuity meaningless when the Doctor finds out that the Thals have found an invisible Dalek since the Doctor - and the audience - are expecting to find Daleks . Likewise the cliffhanger to episode two someone states there's ten thousand Daleks on the planet . Well of course there are . It's where the Daleks are staging an invasion force to take over the galaxy after the war between Earth and Draconia
Another problem with the writing is that Nation seems unaware that cinematic set pieces and ambitious locations have become more and more difficult to realise in DOCTOR WHO . You might get away with a jungle planet in black and white 405 line television in the mid 1960s but not colour 625 PAL television ten years later . David Maloney is considered as being one of the great directors from the classic show but even he can't make the jungles of Spiridon appear convincing in anyway and some scenes are laughable such as the attack by wild animals at the plain of stones in episode four
That said no one really watches a Dalek story due to the plot , they watch mainly down to the fact that the show's most iconic monsters are appearing and despite the very basic plot it's nowhere as bad as some of the Dalek stories from NuWho . Perhaps because it does have such a basic plot ? It's also very grim and pessimistic which is something you rarely see in the 21st Century show and as s twenty five minutes of Saturday night entertainment it did its job away back in 1973