My latest pick-up from the library was a twofer: "The Daleks" and "The Edge of Destruction." The former introduces the one foe every televised Doctor has face: the Daleks.

If you're like me, you'll be a little disspointed in the Daleks in their first appearance. I'm not a present-day snob, but I've grown too attached to the Daleks as batshit insane. The warped vocalizations are there, but the berserk tones only come out occasionally, like when the Doctor and his crew (schoolteachers Ian and Barbara, and granddaughter Susan) manage to subdue one, and when the Daleks begin to die from antiradiation medicine.

The plot has the gang land in the petrified forests of Skaro, running into the Daleks as well as the Thal, a race that has reverted to peace. Even at seven episodes, I don't think the arc is padded. Even with the revelations of the Daleks in ensuing decades, I feel it holds up well. The biggest downside? This Doctor is a bit of a prick. "I want to explore the city, but the others won't let me...so I'll just make up a story about how a part is broken and we have to find mercury." After it turns out the Doctor had lied, followed by Ian losing the part to the Daleks, I'm surprised Ian didn't lay out the Doctor with one blow. Worse, Ian ends up trying to get the Thal to man up and go to the city (via irradiated swamps and treacherous caves) in order to take back the planet...all for a missing piece of the TARDIS.

Since there aren't many DW DVDs to be had from the library, I have to ask...how much of this story is in continuity? I don't just mean with Susan being the Doctor's granddaughter, which is headache enough. Have future stories retconned "The Daleks" away, or does it still hold up?

I've been enjoying the early episodes as I've been watching them but I've got to say the one really bad part of that one had to be Ian climbing into a Dalek shell like he's hiding in a big trash can and then the others helping steer him around, lol.

The Doctor's personality is quite different in the early episodes. He's disinterested in humans, and in helping anyone. It's been argued that the combination of travelling with Ian and Barbara (who insisted that he care), and his continual meetings with the Daleks shaped him into the hero he became.

Genesis of the Daleks retcons a lot of stuff away. Even Dalek Invasion of Earth messes with things a bit.

I think Planet of the Daleks references this story a bit - it's the first time the Doctor meets up with the Thals again, so we find out that their exciting trip into the Dalek City has become a Thal myth, but all that stuff about the origins of the Thal/Dalek war is overwritten by Genesis of the Daleks.

This was a pretty good story, even if it did go on for too long (I thought). I find it intersting how Barbara, who is obviously not meant to sex symbol as so many later companions would, manages to attract men with such ease. She totally had that Thal guy hooked.

I just got this one from Netflix, only the third original series story I've seen. One interesting bit is Susan saying the TARDIS lock has 21 holes, and if you put the key in the wrong one it will melt. Seems by the new series the Doctor has removed that detail given how he gives a key to Rose with no warning.

Babs was obviously giving off a vibe that we in the more blatent 21st century aren't picking up on, because pretty much anywhere she went, she had men interested. In fact, if there was a prize given out for Single Most Lusted After Companion Within The Narrative Of The Show, it would probably be a straight fight beween Barbara and Peri. And Peri only got that much interest because she was bouncing around in bikini's and skin tight leotards. Barbara wore some of the most sensible cardigans known to man and yet still managed to pull.

I like the Daleks in the 1960's, I find them as effective as the Daleks we currently now see.

It's interesting how both Old and New Who didn't open their series with them but waited.

Well, the old Who people had no idea at all they'd explode into such an icon.

I've seen a little further now, and there's another big discrepancy with the Daleks only being able to move on metal, while Doomsday shows a lot of them in the outdoors. Though I guess you can fanwank that they're hovering slightly.

Yes, but within the old series their methods of locomotion changed. In the Dalek Invasion of Earth (which is the second Dalek story), we get the creepy image of a Dalek emerging from water and Daleks rolling all over a conquered London. I think we're just supposed to believe that they developed new methods or that the Daleks in that first story actually degenerated (since this is supposed to be the end of the Daleks rather than the beginning of an iconic villain).

'The Daleks' Daleks don't have the vertical slats in the middle - which store power - that they subsequently acquire when they go outside the metal city.

...and of course it wasn't until Sly's (7) Doctor (and the advent of better BBC effects!) that the Daleks learned to fly (well, levitate) which they now do all the time and prevented the "run up the stairs" defence (Tom Baker - 4 - even snarks at a Dalek that they can't follow him up a rope, as any 10 year old could have and did tell him).

How they managed for six doctors to not fly is amazing when you think about it.

They used to fly on anti-gravity disks in the DWM comic strip and another magazine which I have forgotten the name of. I also think they were supposed to fly during the Chase when they were fighting the mechanoids, at least according to the novelisation.

There's the bit on the sailing ship in The Chase where it is very strongly implied that it's the only way they could have got up to the higher deck.

Darkestboy, I thought that there was a Dalek that levitated in Revelation of the Daleks before exterminating the graverobbers. Davros was also levitating in the same episode when he was confronting Orcini.

darkestboy...thinking about it, we didn't see a Dalek in full until the second episode of the arc, which was the sixth overall. In the new edition, "Dalek" was the sixth episode to air. That couldn't have been coincedential.

There's a bit of retconning, in that Genesis of the Daleks shows the original nuclear war itself and it's different to what's described here. But, then again, it's probably just that the Thal's oral history got it wrong. The chief difference is that the Dals are actually called Kaleds in the later stories and that the Daleks were deliberately created by the Kaleds rather than being Dals accidentally irradiated in the war (there's no reason the Thals would have known that, anyway).

Thinking back on this, I wonder what the lesson was supposed to be? In An Unearthly Child it seemed to be making fire (great lesson for kids there!) but this? The best I can figure is it's about the dangers of radiation, though that's forgotten about by episode four. Seems the show was already well on its way to leaving its educational roots.

Well, since this was 63 and WWII would have been one of the major experiences of the adults' lives that their children didn't know directly, there's an element of "Very Special Episode: National Socialism" about it. The era it was made in is probably a big part of the reason some of the essential Dalek ideas, like rounding up the racially inferior for orderly extermination, are treated a bit more seriously than in the 70s and 80s.

Thinking about it, I guess the three main lessons are:

(i) If an egomaniacal genocidal maniac offers you a peace of paper offering to be your bestest buddy ever, don't be a Neville Chamberlin about it.

(ii) The French/Thals are a bunch of lightweight surrender monkeys who really need a good stiff lipped Englishman to sock them on the jaw and wake em up to themselves.

(iii) Concentration Camps are Bad, m'kay?



It's also a bit of a HG Wells primer, since it rips him off so much ("Ha ha! If I put the disembodied, tentacled brains encased in war machines on the future world where humanity has split between the beautiful, passive dumb folk on the surface and the horrible superintelligent mutants in an underground city then nobody will ever suspect!")

Nuallain: Good points about the fascist/WWIII angles to the story. There was always something intriguing/disturbing to me as well about how the Thals became mutations that evloved full-circle: to everyone of them being blonde-haired, blue-eyed.

I agree Barbara would at least make the top 3 of companions who were courted, hit on, romanced, wooed, and manhandled (Keys of Marinus, that one was an attempted rape if I remember right!).

I forgot, we'r enot supposed to link to full episodes.

It's on Veoh.