Doctor Who has long been my favorite show, and after a long time of not really watching it very actively, lately I’ve been deliberately working at rewatching all the available episodes of the classic series, and writing up my thoughts on each adventure. But there are a lot of episodes! So it’s taking a while. For extra fun I’m mostly watching them completely out of order.
Death to the Daleks
Starring Jon Pertwee Baker as the Third Doctor
Companions: Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith
Written by Terry Nation. Directed by Michael Briant. Produced by Barry Letts. Script edited by Terrance Dicks.
Format: 4 episodes, each about 25 minutes long
Originally Aired: February – March 1974 (Episodes 11 – 14 of Season 11)
Nicholas Briggs, one of the chief creative forces behind Big Finish, and also the go-to guy for voicing the Daleks in the revised Doctor Who (as well as many other creatures) one named Death to the Daleks as the greatest ever Doctor Who story. However, he also explained that his pick for the best ever story changes regularly, that for many this would be considered one of the worst Doctor Who stories, and that his reasons for choosing it at all were very personal. Now that I’ve rewatched it, I would say it’s a far cry from being Doctor Who‘s greatest story (it’s not even the greatest story from that season) but I don’t know if I’d call it one of the worst ever either. I’ve certainly encountered weaker efforts in my rewatching journey.
Spoilers Ahead!
Death to the Daleks has, at its heart, a truly awesome story idea. Indeed, it’s one of the greatest story ideas that I have ever seen on this show–the idea of the Doctor having to face off with a living, sentient city that is in no mood to show hospitality to trespassers. I just can’t express how interesting that sounds to me–it’s a concept worthy of the grand sort of science-fantasy storytelling that Doctor Who is really built for.
So much potential! And thus so much disappointment when so little is done with it.
Not that there’s nothing done with it of course. I really like the big metallic tentacle like things that show up in caves to zap away anyone that is getting too close. I especially like it when it dishes out the pain to the Daleks, creatures that in generally I find kind of annoying. One of my very favourite scenes is when the metal tentacle comes out of the water, kills a hapless Exxilon, and then obliterates a Dalek by zapping it off a ledge into the murky water below.
But instead of focusing in on the city, the first half of the story spends its time on the conflict between the savage Exxilons and the human explorers, neither of whom are particularly interesting. These Exxilons are basically a generic primitive society, without anything unique going on. They spend most of their time hiding under blankets, which I can only guess was a cost-saving measure? It’s too bad because once we finally see the Exxilons, they look pretty good, at least as far as Doctor Who 70s aliens are concerned.
And the humans characters are equally bland. Obviously, there’s supposed to be this whole thing with Dan Galloway and his disregard of the well-being of anyone outside of his mission priorities, but this idea never actually goes anywhere.
It doesn’t affect the plot, aside for the quickly forgotten moment of disregarding his commander’s order that he not be left in charge. Duncan Lamont does his best to give the character personality, but the results are limited when there’s so little to work with in the first place.
And the rest of the human guest cast is even less interesting. John Abineri, usually a reliable presence in these sorts of things, gets killed off too abruptly to have any impact on the story, and the actors playing Peter Hamilton and Jill Tarrant never do anything to make their characters more than functional story props.
By far the best of the guest characters is Bellal, the Doctor’s Exxilon ally.
As the story continues, the focus shifts to the two of them making their way into the city. This got me hopeful for where things were going, but unfortunately, rather than showing us a gripping battle for their lives against a powerful intelligence, the journey into the city turns out to be a series of rudimentary intelligence tests that the Doctor manages quite easily. There are some good moments here and there (my favorite was when Bellal suddenly tries to kill the Doctor, the city having affected his mind), but for the most part it doesn’t feel genuinely perilous, and so there is little tension.
It all builds to the disappointing conclusion of the Doctor winning by poking around some controls. The “human antibodies” that the city creates as its last defence are not very threatening, and so in spite of the promise that the city would do anything to defend itself, it winds up destroyed without a whole lot of effort. All-in-all an enemy that feels like it should have been nigh-invincible, at least without the benefit of a battle fleet or something, goes down pretty easily.
Speaking of powerful forces that go down like total punks, we should probably talk about the Daleks a bit. The serial, after all, is named after them (which of course drastically undercuts the first cliffhanger where the Daleks are “shockingly revealed” as the occupants of the spaceship that lands). The script makes mention of how the Daleks are a galactic powerhouse, but you wouldn’t know it from anything they actually do in this story. Indeed, the story is aptly named because the main thing they do here is get killed. The city’s tentacles kill them, the city’s human antibodies kill them (possibly), the Exxilons themselves kill them, Dan Galloway kills any of them that are left over at the end of the story with a bomb, and one of them even kills itself.
As all this is going on the Daleks sound incredibly fearful and insecure, constantly announcing their imminent doom in panicky screeches, building up to one of the show’s all-time greatest lines of dialogue ever: just before one of the Daleks kills itself, it shrieks, “Human female has escaped. I have failed! Female prisoner has escaped! I have failed! I have failed! Self destruct! I have failed! Destruct! I have failed! Destruct! Failed! Failed! Failed! I, I, I, I, I.” Now that’s poetry.
Now I frequently don’t like the Daleks very much so I don’t mind them looking like idiots, but I don’t think it helps the story at all. One imagines it might have actually worked better if it had left the Daleks out of it all together and just concentrated on developing the city itself as a threat.
Of course, even at its worst Death to the Daleks has still got both Jon Pertwee and Elisabeth Sladen driving things forward. I wouldn’t say the serial highlights either of them at their best, but they never fail to be reliable and watchable. The serial overall is far from a high point of the era, but it still manages a few points of interest that I enjoyed watching.
Other Thoughts:
• The incidental music in this serial is by Carey Blyton, and, according to the credits, performed the London Saxophone Quartet. I am not a fan. It’s incredibly repetitive and often feels at odd with the mood of whatever is going on.
• When the Daleks are fitting in their projectile weapons (temporary replacements for their regular energy weapons), they hilariously test them out on a little model police box.
Fan theory: the Dalek weapons are powered by hate, so they need something to help trigger that hate when they are testing these devices.
• The Doctor references Hamlet with “A hit! Yes, a palpable hit!” when the Exxilon tentacle zaps a Dalek in a cave.
• When the Exxilon city is being destroyed at the end, it seems to be letting out little semi-mechanical “death screams,” which is kind of horrifying. If this thing really is a living being, more or less, the Doctor seems pretty flippant about it, leaving the story with a just a jokey comment about how there are now only 699 wonders in the universe left.
• Amongst the guest cast of this story is John Abineri, who appeared three other times in Doctor Who: Fury from the Deep, The Ambassadors of Death and The Power of Kroll. Two of those stories (Ambassadors and Kroll) I have just rewatched recently. With this one, I’m now complete on my Doctor Who John Abineri rewatch. Abineri was also Herne the Hunter in Robin of Sherwood, and it was in this capacity that I once met him at a convention.
• This was the last story to feature Murphy Grumbar (who’s also known as Peter Murphy and whose name was misspelt in the credits of this story as Murphy Grunbar) as a Dalek operator. He playing Daleks back since the first Dalek serial in 1963. He hadn’t been involved in every Dalek story since then, but he had in most of them.
• Arnold Yarrow, who played Bellal, was the 8th Doctor Who actor to live to be 100 hears old. He died at age 104 (in 2024) and is currently the longest-lived person to ever be involved in Doctor Who.
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