We discover that their weapons don’t work here, which is a fascinating premise. To be fair, Death to the Daleks does have one interesting hook to the monsters. It’s all decidedly pulpy material, but there’s nothing wrong with that. The image of a once advanced and enlightened culture regressing to a primal state is quite compelling. That said, ten million deaths seems a relatively meagre number for a plague that’s supposedly ravaging the cosmos. The suggestion that the universe is slowly dying is a powerful piece of background information that informs the drama. The idea of a society that built a self-aware city that then drove its inhabitants out is a fascinating one. Like a lot of Terry Nation’s stories for the show, the basic ideas are compelling. In fact, if you remove the Daleks, the story works a bit more fluidly. They are easily the serial’s most extraneous element. There’s really no need for the Daleks to be in this story. Nation even holds back their reveal until the cliffhanger of the first episode, which is itself a favoured Terry Nation gimmick. The Daleks just happen to be the most high-profile of Nation’s favourite tropes and ideas included here, so they get title billing. Did we need an extended sequel to Curse of Peladon, for example?Īnd did we really need another throwback Terry Nation Dalek story, only a year after the last throwback Terry Nation Dalek story? However, some of these decisions to return to familiar concepts feel a little superfluous. Similarly, Planet of the Spiders closes out the recurring New Age Buddhist iconography that the Barry Letts has been injecting into the show. story, with betrayal and disillusionment closing that narrative strand. For example, Invasion of the Dinosaurs feels like the last true U.N.I.T. I’ve remarked a bit that Pertwee’s final year feels a little like a victory lap, a clear attempt to revisit familiar, sometimes to provide a sense of closer. – the Daleks have an understandable reaction to appearing in another Terry Nation script To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the longest-running science-fiction show in the world, I’ll be taking weekly looks at some of my own personal favourite stories and arcs, from the old and new series, with a view to encapsulating the sublime, the clever and the fiendishly odd of the BBC’s Doctor Who.ĭeath to the Daleks originally aired in 1974.
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