02.10: Dalek Invasion of Earth

[ray gower]

Synopsis
After eight months blundering around time and the Universe, the Doctor finally manages to return his two less willing passengers to something that looks like London in 1964.

Except things are not quite right. Where are the people? Why has Battersea powerstation lost two chimneys? why is everything so badly decayed?

The answer is that it is 2164 and the Daleks have taken over the world and are even now digging to their final victory deep under the lime of Bedfordshire.
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As a young chap I was deeply impressed by this story, especially by the science lesson about magnetic forcefields after the Doctor and Ian where caught by the Daleks.
I never even gave great thought to the practicality of scooping out the Earth's magnetic core to make way for a star drive either. But hey, this is Sci/Fi.

Watching it again after 40 years the first thought was it is so corny it ought to have Fray Bentos corned beef labels attached. Susan, as usual, is a melodramatic accident waiting to happen, there is the required 1950's wobbly flying saucer, the Robomen are mincing around as if their mobile phones are about to fall off their heads, everybody suffers from the terminal shortsightedness that can only be caused by the need to pretend 10 feet in a studio is actually 400 yards in the real world, just what is a Slither and why would the Daleks want one as a pet?

Which is a pity, because once past the limitations imposed by a non-existent budget and technology it really has a lot going for it.

Even the story of how the Daleks, a race that nominally can't even handle stairs is well considered- Bombarding the Earth with meteors, then deploying a plague to further weaken and break up any coherent resistance by humanity.

There are the characters that they meet, sometimes unpleasant, some honest, but all ordinary people trying to organise a resistance and survive under the Dalek plunger.

And then there is the flight of Barbara and her party of two (plus wheelchair) across a deserted London, avoiding Dalek patrols. Surely one of the most dramatic scenes of any childrens show?

It is not as glossy as the later film, but the story is much stronger and of course the body count is higher!

[Dave]

Originally posted by ray gower
Synopsis
once past the limitations imposed by a non-existent budget and technology it really has a lot going for it.

One thing that modern day viewers forget, and even I do, and I used to watch this every week as a wee lad, is that the number of episodes was never billed, only the episode titles. The overall stories didn't even have titles until later. So, you never knew if the story had ended and the Doctor and companions had finally escaped or would be recaptured. Now that we have magazine and internet spoilers of everything, and downloads of complete series, not to mention DVDs so that you can run and re-run episodes again and again, it is really from another age.

Also, that it was much closer to the second world war and Nazi Germany and the Cuban missile crisis and the Daleks could actually be humanities own fate not just a successful scifi monster.

I haven't seen this in 40 years yet I still remember the images of Daleks in famous London landmarks. That, in it's own, is incredible.