User Reviews

Watching this with modern eyes, I cannot help but wonder what made these creatures so iconic that even today they remain one of the most regular aliens that the Doctor comes face to face with. In the first adventure, they are defeated and in the next one they suffer the same. In my opinion, it is because of their use time and again we are still watching these adventures today in 2023. I even remember hiding behind the sofa when I heard them speak as they terrified me. I also had a Darlek suit which I tried to scare my siblings. Note I wrote "tried". On the whole, I think that the Daleks owe their place in our minds due to terrifying and exciting the minds of many young children.

The Dead Planet (1963) is part one of seven of The Daleks, a story that first introduces us to one of the most iconic monster/villains ever, and definitely the most iconic in the UK. The story starts in a jungle, made of very fragile and brittle stone, a dead planet, hence the title, and there is a city in the distance a little east to where the TARDIS parked. This city is a Dalek city. The Doctor (or Dr/ Dr. Who, as seen in the credits) and their companions don't particularly see the point/don't want to go/see this city, so wthey walk back to the TARDIS, but on the way, Susan gets touched on the shoulder by something. At the TARDIS, the Doctor trys to dematerialise the TARDIS but fails because the fluid link doesn't have enough mercury. Because of this, they go to the city to find some more. When they're there they have a look around for it. Barbara gets lost and the others try to find her but, she suddenly encounters a Dalek, roll credits. I think this part (The Dead Planet) is very good at setting the scene, not making it seem to coincidental which I think alot of new who storys suffers from a little bit but it wasn't boring, somthing I'd thought it would be. 9/10.

Suggestive Spoilers to all seven episodes

Arriving on a jungle planet at the end of the previous episode the occupants of the Tardis trek through the jungle only to find a metallic city . Deciding to explore the city the group split up but find the city isn't deserted and is inhabited by a strange race of mutants called the Daleks who are encased in a travel machine . Being held prisoner by the Daleks the occupants of the Tardis find their problems are only beginning as they suffer from the early effects of radiation sickness

You;ve probably heard every story behind the making of this episode , of Sydney Newman the creator of the show insisting DOCTOR WHO was an educational family show and under no circumstances wanting any bug eyed monsters on the show , of Terry Nation accepting the writing gig because a job with Tony Hancock falling through , of a young production designer at the BBC called Ridley Scott being replaced at the last minute by Raymond Cusick but has anyone mentioned how good this story actually is ? I'll just mention it in passing . This story is very good indeed

The idea behind the genesis of DOCTOR WHO was to have a historical story followed by a science fiction story followed by a historical story followed by a science fiction followed by ... this formula worked relatively well and the production team stuck by this formula for three solid years but if you examine the audience figures you'll notice that it was normally the sci-fi stories that had an impact on the general public and by early in the Troughton era the show had taken on the ethos of QUATERMASS rather than how the show started out . Somewhat cynically too you're left thinking that by the late 1960s writers were somewhat jealous of the success of Terry Nation and wanted their own monster creations to be just as successful . Even in Nuwho we get this attitude where the likes of the Slitheen and the Ood hint at a Christmas cash in , but only the Cybermen first seen in the mid 1960s come close at capturing the success of the Daleks and even then were nowhere the merchandising success of the Daleks

All that was in the future but even so The Dead Planet is a story that is very special indeed . For a cheap BBC serial it has the ambition of a science fiction GONE WITH THE WIND epic which despite slightly failing on the grounds of spectacle does remain great drama . You might laugh at the sequence where Carol Ann Ford runs the spot getting slapped by plastic plants held by technicians just out of shot giving the impression shes running through a capacious and massive jungle but the emotional impact of the drama is more important than the realisation of how it comes . Indeed the entire beauty of this story is the understated nature of the drama that never fails to convince . We understand the unsaid sadness of Barbara as she says goodbye to the Thal at the end knowing she will never see him again , of the fear of Susan as she exits the Tardis at the cliffhanger of episode two and of the sceptisim of Ian as the Doctor tells him he needs mercury for the fluid link that can only be found in the city . You might notice a polystyrene rock break off in Ian's hand but the conviction Russell gives in this scene doesn't make his plight any less frightening

But it's the Daleks who are the real stars of the story , a story that cemented DOCTOR WHO in to legendary British popular culture and it's not difficult to see why . There is an imagination given to the Daleks that has rarely been matched before or since in any medium . They're obviously not men dressed up but since they're smaller than a man there couldn't be operated by a man inside them , or are they ? Add to this the strange electronic drone they speak in and the image is burned in to a childs mind for an entire lifetime . Interesting to note that the Daleks themselves are not really portrayed as the space Nazis//religious fundamentalists they later became but are simply to survive as a dominant species against the Thals and by irradiating the planet means extinction of the Thal race well that's Darwin at its most amoral

This is the story that made the Great British public sit up and take notice that a new kind of television had arrived . While a couple of episodes of the previous story got just over 6 million viewers The Dead Planet saw this the audience almost double which was almost down to the iconic monsters featured . Even today DOCTOR WHO is often thought of as " The show with the Daleks " and the Daleks are as much of the show as the title character even though they have never featured as often as the public perceive them has had and the series would probably have only lasted one series without the Daleks . On top of that their debut story is intelligent , dramatic and convincing despite the fantasy scenario and while fans of Nuwho might find the story rather padded and slow it deserves nothing less than 10/10

The TARDIS has brought the travellers to the planet Skaro where they meet two indigenous races - the Daleks, malicious mutant creatures encased in armoured travel machines, and the Thals, beautiful humanoids with pacifist principles. They convince the Thals of the need to fight for their own survival.

Joining forces with them and braving Skaro's many dangers, they launch a two-pronged attack on the Dalek city. The Daleks are all killed when, during the course of the fighting, their power supply is cut off.

Review of seven parts -

Man, I absolutely adore this episode to the death! This is probably the best Dalek story ever, I just love the voice of the Daleks and even when Ian is inside a dalek, man.

I love the soundtrack and the background ambient noise, great character development, hyper realistic acting, quite solid, well-paced, just a great manage to pull off the early stories with a low budget, they just have a lot of thought and effort put into them and it feels hyper-realistic, perhaps it proves that money doesn't make a show good.

10/10

Right after returning from 100,000 BC in the previous serial, the Doctor and his three companions, land on a strange jungle planet named Skaro, which they have to venture into on account of the TARDIS needing more mercury, and meet the two races that inhabit it, the murderous radiated metallic encased Daleks and the pacifistic Aryan-like Thals. This is it, the serial that introduces what would soon become one of the most beloved villains of the show, the Daleks (whom first appear in episode 6) and while they'd have subtle differences in subsequent arks, this first appearance still makes for a very compelling and enjoyable watch indeed. This whole arc would provide the basis of a Peter Cushing movie in 1965, Dr. Who and the Daleks, a film that took certain drastic liberties and departures from the main series.

My Grade: A+

(Note: A review of all seven episodes of the serial.)

Imagine the following: It's the winter months of early 1964. You're a kid coming in as the night falls after an afternoon out playing. You settle in front of the TV at teatime, and the episode of a new science fiction series comes on. You watch for 23 minutes or so, as a group of travelers meets a strange alien race living inside machines, and at the end, you want to know what happens next. By all accounts, such a scenario occurred all over the UK when the Daleks made their first appearance in Doctor Who, thus securing the show's future and creating the template for decades of stories that followed.

If An Unearthly Child was all about setting up the TARDIS and the lead characters, then The Daleks (or The Dead Planet if you prefer) sets up everything the show will be. There are the Daleks (the archetypal Doctor Who monster), a strange alien world in the form of Skaro with its petrified forest before we ever get to the Dalek city where most of the tale takes place, a set of imprisonments and escapes, and moments of philosophical debate (however dubious they might be). Plus a bit of action here and there as well as those all-important cliffhanger endings as well, which were there in the opening serial but are all the more important here. It's all there and, more so than anywhere else, it's here that what we would today recognize as Doctor Who truly began.

However, being the early days of the show, things aren't entirely what they will be later. The Daleks aren't their all-powerful conquering selves just yet, trapped as they are inside the walls of their city running on static electricity. Nor do they cry out "Exterminate!" at the drop of a hat (though they use the word a few times throughout the story). Additionally, and like with the previous story, the Doctor isn't quite the figure we'll come to know just yet either since he willfully manipulates those around him via the business with the fluid link to get into the city, somewhere only he wants to go, and, as a result, lands everyone into trouble. The show is getting there, though, and the origins of what will one day be the hallmarks of the series are all there in these seven episodes.

Even more remarkable is how much of that is by accident rather than design. The atmospheric direction of both Christopher Barry and Richard Martin giving the early episodes of the story inside the Dalek city a genuine sense of menace, to name an example which helps establish the trope of the TARDIS crew arriving in an odd place. Take the Daleks themselves, a genuine combination of Terry Nation's scripts, Raymond Cusick's design work, those operating them unseen, and the voice artistry of Peter Hawkins all coming together just right to give them the right impact. It's incredible to think how much of that came down to chance.

The funny thing is, of course, that this story wasn't meant to have been broadcast here at all. This second outing was intended to have been The Masters of Luxor, a six-part serial scripted by An Unearthly Child writer Anthony Coburn. Like Nation's script, it involved a seemingly deserted city set on a deserted world, seemingly robotic creatures, a reluctant ally based outside the city, and the TARDIS not quite working the way it was meant to be. Superfically, at least, they're quite similar tales. Diving into Masters further, both in the form of its Titan scriptbook and the 2012 Big Finish version, it's clear they couldn't be more different tales as Coburn's script is more talkative, more philosophical. It's what he did with An Unearthly Child in a more overtly genre context and, if it hadn't been for producer Verity Lambert and script editor David Whitaker being unhappy with those scripts as they stood, it could have defined what the series would have become.

Instead, both as a story and as a creation, The Daleks defined Doctor Who. Coburn's scripts for both An Unearthly Child and The Masters of Luxor represented, oddly enough for a just born show, the past: the series as it had been initially conceived in meetings inside BBC Television Center. Nation's Dalek story was its future: action/adventure narratives in a science fiction context. Thus, I submit, Doctor Who was truly born in those winter months of 1963-64.

Fifty-five years on, we can remain grateful for the fact.

The first "Doctor Who" serial "An Unearthly Child" involved the Doctor travelling back in time to the Earth's remote past; in the second, "The Daleks", he travels through space to land on an alien planet. Although a few later serials were to involve time travel, space travel was over the years to prove the more popular of the two themes. This story also introduces the Doctor's greatest enemies, the Daleks, beings who have become instantly recognisable to many people who have never seen a single episode of the programme.

The plot of "The Daleks" owes a lot to earlier sci-fi such as the "Flash Gordon" serials and the "Dan Dare" comics. Following a malfunction of the TARDIS, the Doctor and his companions find themselves on an alien world which turns out to be Skaro, the home planet of the Daleks. The planet is actually home to two races, the aggressive, warlike Daleks and the more peaceful humanoid Thals. (The Thals have much in common with the Eloi in H.G Wells's novel "The Time Machine" and in the film made of it in 1960). We learn that the Thals have not always been so peaceful; at some time in the past a nuclear war fought between them and the Daleks led to the devastation of the planet, which remains heavily contaminated by radiation. (The fear of nuclear war was one of the great nightmares of the sixties; this serial was first shown in 1963/64, only a year or so after the Cuban Missile Crisis). The Thals are able to survive the fallout through the use of anti- radiation drugs, but the Daleks are forced to remain within their city. Because of their previous experiences the Thals have adopted a philosophy of pacifism and refuse to fight back even when threatened by the Daleks, until the Doctor's companion Ian is able to convince them of the soundness of the Just War doctrine. Further elucidation of the plot will probably be unnecessary; anyone familiar with the conventions of "Doctor Who" will realise that it revolves around how the Doctor and his party assist the Thals to frustrate the evil schemes of the Daleks.

This story also served as the basis for "Dr. Who and the Daleks", the first of two Doctor Who films starring Peter Cushing. Although this may sound like heresy to those Who purists who regard the Cushing films as "non-canonical", I actually preferred the film to the television version. There are two main reasons for this. The first is that the film was considerably shorter than the overlong television serial, which used seven episodes to tell a story that could easily have been dealt with in four or five. The opening few episodes are tense and exciting enough, but the tension dissipates in the later instalments, especially during those interminable scenes set in the caves under the Dalek city. (Was Terry Nation, I wonder, an enthusiastic speleologist who wanted to share his enthusiasm with his viewers?) The final battle, by contrast, is over too quickly and is badly staged.

My second main reason for preferring the film version was that I much preferred Cushing's interpretation of the Doctor to that of William Hartnell. Although I started my above synopsis by referring to "the Doctor and his companions", it might have been more appropriate had I worded it "two brave young London teachers, Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright, land on the planet Skaro, accompanied by Susan Foreman, one of their pupils, and her grandfather, a testy, bad-tempered elderly eccentric who claims to be from an alien planet and who can frequently be cowardly, callous and selfish to the point of putting his companions' lives at risk". Although the Doctor is the title character of the programme, at this stage the real heroes were Ian and Barbara. (Doubtless much to the surprise of children watching the show who would not have been used to seeing their teachers cast in such a role).

In the film, by contrast, Cushing's character may be an eccentric, but he is also kindly and more sympathetic. By the time the film came out, the TV producers also seem to have realised that the original characterisation of the Doctor was a mistake as Hartnell's character was very much softened before the end of his tenure. In the film, moreover, there is no mention of Doctor Who being an alien; he is assumed to be a human scientist. Barbara and Ian are not teachers; Barbara is also the Doctor's granddaughter (and therefore either Susan's older sister or her cousin) and Ian her boyfriend.

The Daleks, of course, are the most important element in this serial. With their ruthlessness and contempt for those races they regard as their inferiors, Nation seems to have based them on the Nazis, and they quickly became the most iconic of all the Doctor's enemies. By the time I went to primary school, a few years after this serial was broadcast, children all over the country were marching round their playgrounds chanting "Exterminate! Exterminate!" So important were they to the series that Nation was obliged to ignore two plot elements from this serial. We learn here that the Daleks are so mutated that they cannot survive without radiation; no mention is made of this in later serials. And this story actually ends with the entire Dalek race being wiped out; a way obviously had to be found to resurrect them. Despite its weaknesses, "The Daleks" must rate as one of the most important serials in the whole history of "Doctor Who".