Planet of the Daleks

Be careful how you tell that story. Don't glamorize it. Don't make war sound like an exciting and thrilling game.

Planet of the Daleks is the follow-on to Frontier in Space. It also is the return of Terry Nation after eight years away (The Dalek's Master Plan). I know this story is generally poo-pooed by fans generally as it completely ignores the prior story to which it is supposed to be working in conjunction with. I've also heard that it's been given the nickname of Terry Nation's Greatest Hits so we can expect the Terry Nation trope-meter to be buzzing. As such, expectations for this story are not overly high.

Plot Summary

Picking up from the end of Frontier in Space, Jo helps the Doctor back into the TARDIS where he sends a mental message to the Time Lords just before collapsing. Jo gets him on to a bed to rest and he gives her an audio recording device before he passes into a healing coma. Jo records her observations and the TARDIS lands on the planet Spirodon. The Doctor's temperature drops below freezing and his hearts slow considerably. Jo decides to leave the TARDIS to find help, emerging in a thick jungle.

As Jo walks, both she and the TARDIS are sprayed with the sap of a native flower. Jo continues to walk until she discovers another spacecraft. She enters it to find the pilot dead. However, two of the surviving crew return from a patrol and ask her who she is. She tells them about the Doctor and how she had come looking for help. A third crewman enters talking about a patrol and the leader, Taron, orders Jo to hide in a storage room while the three of them go to help the Doctor.

The three crewmen find the TARDIS covered in fungus. They don protective gear and strip it off, allowing the doors to open. The Doctor had woken earlier but noticed that the emergency oxygen had triggered. Unable to open the doors due to the fungus, the atmosphere of the TARDIS was running out of air and the Doctor was starting to suffocate. Free now, the Doctor notices that his three rescuers are Thals. He identifies himself as the Doctor, the same man from their legends about their great war with the Daleks.

Back on the Thal ship, Jo hides as an invisible creature comes aboard and looks around. It rattles the handle of the closet Jo is hiding in, but doesn't push it when finding the door locked. It departs and Jo relaxes. However, she notices that a fungus has begun growing on her hand. She begins to feel ill and passes out, the fungus growing up her arm.

The Doctor comes with the Thals back to their ship and offers to help them in any way. As they return, they discover another invisible creature, not a native Spirodonian but instead a concealed Dalek. The Dalek is inoperative and the scientist Codal wants to open it but the Doctor warns him that the Dalek's emergency signaling mechanism might still work and that would call in more Daleks. Instead, they make their way back towards the ship, the Thals informing the Doctor that the Daleks are attempting to copy the invisibility techniques of the natives.

Jo comes to on the ship and logs that a fungus is growing on her arm, rendering it numb. She attempts to leave the ship but stumbles, too weak to walk and dropping the recorder. She sees movement and crawls back into the ship where she passes out for a second time, now exposed to the invisible creature.

As they proceed through the jungle, the third Thal, Vaber, becomes increasingly agitated about not fighting the Daleks directly. A patrol of Daleks is spotted and the group tries to go around but they run into a group of Spirodonians. Codal runs into the jungle to draw them off. They catch up to him and knock him out. The other three make their way to the ship just as two Daleks discover it. The Doctor, believing Jo to still be inside, begs them to leave it be. The Daleks stun him and then destroy the ship.

The Daleks take the Doctor back to their base where he discovers Codal, who was captured by the Dalek patrol after being knocked out. The two men work together in their cell, deciding to attack the Daleks when they open the cell door to try and escape.

Jo wakes in a nearby cave, having been pulled out of the ship earlier by a Spirodonian named Wester. He applies a balm that kills the fungus on her arm. He then tells her of the Dalek invasion and the capture of the Doctor and one of Thals by the Daleks.

Taron and Vaber recover some of the explosives from the wrecked ship with Vaber wanting to go in guns blazing to take out the Daleks. Taron overrules him and Vaber nearly shoots him trying to take the explosives. They are distracted by a crashing spacecraft. Investigating, they discover it's a second Thal ship. The commander, a woman named Rebec, informs them that the Thals intercepted a transmission indicating that there are not the dozen Daleks they thought were here but nearly ten thousand. The help the other two Thals out of the wreckage and head towards the Dalek base.

Jo and Wester also head to the Dalek base. She sees cloaked figures entering and Wester explains that those are his people but with cloaks on to protect them from the cold of the base, which is built into an ice volcano. Jo hops inside one of the baskets being carried and sneaks inside the base to look for the Doctor, leaving Wester to watch from outside.

Outside the base, Taron, Rebek and another Thal named Marat decide to sneak into the ice ducts to try and set up interior explosives. Vaber and the remaining Thal, Latep, plant additional explosives on the exterior of the mountain. The three Thals crawl down the passages, aware that from the surges of cold, an eruption of ice is due soon. It soon becomes a race to get into the base before the eruption catches them.

In the cell, the Doctor and Codal perfect a small device that will disable a Dalek up close. When a Dalek comes to take them for interrogation, they jump it and the Doctor plants his device. The Dalek loses control and then shuts down, though it's thrashing destroyed the Doctor device. The Doctor and Codal are spotted in the corridors and the Daleks chase them down, herding them toward the lowest level of the base.

On the lowest level, the Doctor and Codal find Taron and his team in the ducts and help them out. They get them out just before the Daleks can seal off the vents. Their jamming the doors buys them additional time as the ice explosion covers the Dalek patrol pursuing the Doctor and Codal, freezing them for a short time. Additional patrols arrive though and the group is forced to take refuge in a control room. Marat refuses and engages the Daleks in the corridor where he is gunned down by the Daleks. The Daleks also discover a plan on Marat's body of the locations of the explosive plants and move to remove those.

In the base, Jo switches on the communications and overhears how the prisoners have been herded to the lowest levels and how a Dalek patrol is heading out to remove the explosives. With no way to get down to the lower parts of the base, Jo shadows the Dalek patrol going after the explosives back out of the base.

In the control room, the Doctor buys a small amount of time by sealing the doors, though the Daleks begin to cut their way through. The group discovers a shaft channeling warm air out and a heavy duty cooling unit nearby. The Doctor activates the cooling unit and the group ties together several pieces of plastic sheeting under the hot air shaft. As they do so, the Doctor notices through a window that there are thousands of Daleks assembled and waiting. As the Daleks begin to break through the door, the temperature contrast begins to pull on the plastic sheeting and pulls the group of four up the shaft.

Jo follows the Daleks outside the city and to the location of the explosives. The Daleks rig the explosives to detonate early and then leave. Jo deactivates two of them but a small avalanche briefly knocks her out before she can disarm the third one. She comes two, grabs the two she defused and runs off as the remaining explosives explode.

After cutting through the door, the Daleks realize the prisoners have gone up the shaft. They bring in an antigravity plate and send a Dalek up the shaft after them. As the balloon reaches the top, one corner tears and the Doctor is forced to leap off and hold on to a ledge. The other three reach the top and hoist the Doctor up on a rope. They then roll a small boulder in, smashing the Dalek and knocking it back to the bottom of the shaft.

Moving away, the party walks past Jo's hiding spot where she is delighted to find them. As she and the Doctor catch up, Vaber and Latep find them after being forced to scatter to avoid Dalek patrols. Jo informs them of her rescue of some of the explosives and the group decides to head to a plain of stones which trap the heat of the day for the night as the nights on Spirodon are frigid.

Once at the plain, they make camp but Vaber still wants to attack the Daleks directly. They figure that they can use the explosives to destroy the refrigeration unit at the bottom of the shaft and that will cause such massive overheating as to destroy the Daleks. Vaber wants to set off at once but Taron insists on waiting until morning so they can formulate a plan. Vaber attacks him but is restrained by the others. Once the rest fall asleep, he steals the explosives and runs to the shaft to destroy the unit.

In the base, the Daleks plan to release a bacterial agent that will destroy all non-inoculated life on the surface of the planet. They send out the Spirodonian slaves to scour the area and send everyone in for inoculation. One group of Spirodonians discovers Vaber and captures him. Taron and Codal go after him with the Doctor warning to not let the refrigeration unit be destroyed as it would awaken the Dalek army he saw earlier.

Taron and Codal knock out two Spirodonians and disguise themselves in their cloaks. Varon is taken to a Dalek who interrogates him about the others. He offers to lead the Daleks to them but tries to run as soon as he is let go. The Daleks shoot him down. In the confusion, Taron and Codal seize the explosives from another Spirodonian and run back to camp with the Dalek patrol pursuing them.

Back at the camp, Wester arrives and tells Jo about the bacteria to be released. He intends to sneak into the base and try and stop it. The Doctor and Jo promise to assist later. As he leaves, Taron and Codal return, warning of the pursuing patrol. The Doctor sends Latep and Jo to distract the Daleks for a short time before leading them back to the camp. They do so and the Daleks arrives a few minutes later at the plain. The Doctor lures one Dalek to the shore of a small lake where the water is liquid but perpetually around freezing. He and Taron leap from hiding and push the surprised Dalek into the water. The other Thals and Jo do the same with the second Dalek when it arrives and the shock of the cold kills both Daleks. The Doctor then has the Thals pull out the mutants and clear space for Rebec to get inside one of the Dalek casings.

Wester arrives at the base as the Daleks and the Spirodonians are receiving immunity from the bacterial mass. He pretends to have a message for the Dalek commander who is in with the mass. He is ordered to wait until the commander is no longer busy.

At the same time, Rebec enters the base disguised as a Dalek with Taron, Codal and the Doctor disguised as Spirodonians. Latep and Jo have gone on to the vent shafts to enter in that way, with both sides instructed to blow up the tunnels and seal the Daleks in the base. The Doctor's group gets to just outside the storage facility when Wester leaps up and rips open the case with the bacterial mass. The infection flows outward, killing Wester. The two Daleks are safe as they had been immunized earlier but they cannot risk unsealing the door as most of the Daleks had not yet been immunized and opening the door would destroy the army.

The Doctor's group tries to get to the lower level but another Dalek orders them to proceed to another level with the rest of the Spirodonians. However, the Dalek also spots that their feet are visible and sounds the alarm, aware they are not Spirodonians. They throw off their disguises on the Dalek and run away, eventually making their way to the lowest level. They set up a barricade against the Daleks and look to see how they can deal with the Dalek army.

Outside, as Jo and Latep head towards the heat shaft, they see a Dalek spaceship arrive and a Supreme Dalek disembark. The Supreme Dalek unseals the door with the trapped Dalek commander, the infection having gone inert. Displeased with his failure, the Dalek Supreme kills the commander and orders both that the army be revived and that the Doctor be taken alive, having been recognized by the Dalek leadership.

Jo and Latep get to the shaft and begin to rappel down. Jo had remarked earlier that the Thals could steal the Dalek spaceship to return home but Latep tries not the think of that as the idea that this had been a suicide mission gave the Thals focus. They arrive at the bottom level to see a group of Daleks about to punch through the barrier the Doctor's group had erected. Latep hurls his bomb at them and destroys the entire group.

Jo and Latep meet up with the Doctor and the other Thals as the Doctor and Codal are setting up the other bomb in a weak section of the cave wall. They had noticed that the refrigeration unit had been deactivated and that the Daleks were waking up, although they were still highly disoriented. Codal sets the timer as Taron returns, having found a catwalk that would take them back to the surface. The explosives go off, destroying two more Daleks pursuing them.

The cave wall buckles for a moment and then collapses in a wave of supercooled water. The water rushes in to the lower level and covers the reviving Dalek army where it begins to freeze in a solid block of ice. The explosion also creates fissures throughout the base, causing supercooled water to seep into other levels. The Dalek Supreme attempts to contact others but finds he and his escort are all that remains. He orders the evacuation of the base as other levels begin to flood and collapse.

Emerging on the surface, Jo points out the Dalek ship and Codal takes control of it. The Doctor wishes Taron well but implores him to tell the whole story of their adventure so as to not make war so glamorous. Latep asks Jo to return to Skaro with him but Jo kindly declines. The Thals then take off, leaving the Daleks stranded.

The Dalek Supreme spies the Doctor and he and his escort chase them back to the TARDIS. They take off just before the Daleks overtake them. With the Doctor gone, the Dalek Supreme orders they signal for a rescue ship and workers to begin pulling the army out of the ice. On the TARDIS, the Doctor offers to take Jo wherever she would like, but she asks to just head home.

Analysis

I think one's appreciation of this story is going to depend entirely on how they come in to it. If you come in expecting it to be a continuation of the story line from Frontier in Space, you are going to be disappointed and probably frustrated by the whole thing. But if you come into it as just another Terry Nation Dalek story, it's actually not bad. It is impossible to treat the story as a complete standalone as it opens with a wounded Doctor recovering from the Master's attack and Jo and the Doctor's catch-up in Episode Four reference back to the Dalek involvement in stirring up a war between the humans and Draconians. But those are fairly easy to gloss over and don't impact the overall plot in any significant way.

There is one other elephant in the room to address with this story and that is that it's well deserved moniker of Terry Nation's Greatest Hits. Unquestionably, there is almost no salient plot point or element that has not been harvested from another story. The primary story as a whole is a rehash of The Daleks with a heavy dose of Mission to the Unknown thrown in for good measure. There are also a couple of grabs from The Dalek Invasion of Earth thrown in for good measure. However, it is important to remember that this is Terry Nation's first story in almost eight years. The odds that any of the viewing audience would have seen or remembered much of any of these three stories is pretty remote, even with the 1965 movie to reinforce the plot. As such, though we see all the tropes and poo-poo Terry Nation's recycling of plot, the audience would have not noticed this and just seen an action story with Daleks.

What's more, even with the retread of plot elements, the pace of the story is quite different with the more action oriented Third Doctor as opposed to the plotting and cautious First Doctor. You could make an argument that Taron is a morph of the First Doctor and the Thal leader Alydon which puts the Third Doctor into what was the Ian role, although he doesn't need to trick the Thals into fighting. But there is no trickery regarding the fluid link or any other hokeyness to get the plot moving. The Daleks have invaded and are a threat so the Thals and the Doctor take up the role to defeat them, thus borrowing more from Terry Nation's planned series involving the Space Security Service. I could see how the borrowing could get annoying, especially as Nation did it before, but the combination of the tone shift and the long break didn't bother me unless it hit a sour note regarding some other plot point.

One of the things that helps this story immensely is the quality of the acting. Everyone did well, even the famously overacting Prentis Hancock as Vaber did well and it kept me engaged. The Doctor was his usual intellectual and action-oriented self. One of the nice things about dealing with Daleks is that the Third Doctor can't default to his martial arts tricks and actually has to think of a way to defeat the Daleks. If there is a significant flaw to the Third Doctor overall, it is that he sometimes goes a little too James Bond and loses some of the intellectual advantage he has over his enemies. He also has a nice rapport with Jo in this story. There are a few stories where the Doctor is overly dismissive of Jo to the point of rudeness, but here he is much more in the role of a fatherly friend who also trusts her to get things done. At one point he does try to chastise her but is quickly rebuked when he learns that he didn't give her any instructions. He even goes so far as to apologize for this action which is almost unheard of in the interactions between the Doctor and Jo.

Jo herself does pretty well in this story. Long gone are the days of her being the klutzy damsel in distress. Instead, she is as much a person of action as the Doctor. When she infiltrates the Dalek base in Episode Two, you generally expect her to get caught. But instead, she avoids trouble, learns of part of the Dalek plan and manages to salvage a couple of bombs which drive much of the later plot. She stands up the Doctor as well, allowing her two more instances where she works against the Daleks without him supervising her. Given that she actually went the entire story without being caught by the Daleks as well puts her a notch above the Doctor in that score. Of course, Jo also has to turn the head of one of the men and gets another marriage proposal, which does feel a bit clichéd but it at least is not overplayed.

All the Thals were pretty good, although I thought Taron did especially well. He had the air of a reluctant leader yet a man determined to see the job done. I think it would have been very easy to go over-the-top in that role, but there was restraint in the performance and that gave it an extra edge of gravity. When he tells Rebec about how he feels for her, there is a genuine tenderness in his voice and you can feel that the two of them must have had a history of some kind just in the way they interact with each other. It is well done and gives the characters both depth and backstory that doesn't require clunky exposition. It also makes you care about the survival of those characters.

On the weaker end of things you had Latep and Vaber. Neither was bad, but they weren't as strong as the others. Vaber was doing the traditional hothead but to the point of just being stupid. It was overplayed enough that you knew he was going to die and it was only a question of when. Latep on the other hand was just a bit flat and much of that was probably due to lack of screen time. He was broadcasting his feelings for Jo almost from the moment they met so there was at least some believability in his proposition to her. But aside from that, there was almost nothing else in how he acted to draw a person's attention. Not bad, but just kind of there.

The Spirodonians were a bit lame as far as the native collaborators go. Invisibility is a bit of a cheap trick to allow the designers a break so they don't have to create another alien. However, the invisibility should be used for something. Yes we are told that the Daleks are attempting to create invisibility for themselves, but it's never really used. It's more the McGuffin that gets everyone to Spirondon. If there had been a scene or two of a Dalek patrol becoming visible or we saw more use of the invisibility, I could have respected that choice. But as is, it didn't do much for me.

The Daleks themselves were okay but they did veer on to the silly side at times. It took some effort, but two Daleks were shoved into the ice pond by the Doctor and his companions. We also had the obligatory get away by obstructing the eyestalk of a Dalek, complete with it ranting that it's vision is impaired. In many ways, the Daleks aren't shown much as they are a more simple threat that does not need to be developed. They are the bad guys with guns and an army and must be stopped. Any further development is not particularly necessary. It's not bad again, but it is pretty simple.

The direction in this is pretty good. The jungle set is also pretty good and the director does a good job of convincing you that the jungle is real as are the base sets. I think he also did a good job of establishing tension where you might not have otherwise felt it. There are several scenes that could have been overly silly or ineffective but because of how they were shot, they came across as having real drama and I think all credit there should go to the director.

I think one's overall opinion of this story is going to depend on how they go into it. If you're expecting a full follow-on to Frontier in Space, you will be disappointed. Likewise, if you are expecting a deeper story, you will again be disappointed. This story is a basic adventure, much like Terry Nation wrote in the 60's. As far as that adventure goes, it does a decent job, I think. I appreciate good thinking stories or stories with darker edges, but I also don't have a problem with a good run around either.

That being said, it is also not a story that you are going to rush back for a repeat viewing. It entertains you well enough but it's also flash in the pan. It's easily a story that you could have in the background while doing something else. Sometimes you want that and the first time around it is pretty engaging. I'm not going to punish a story for being shallow, especially if is entertaining that first time around as many stories fail even in that regard. But I'm also not going to bestow high praise on it and say that it's a great story. It is serviceable and reasonably entertaining and sometimes that's good enough.

Overall personal score: 3 out of 5