August 7, 2024

Death to the Daleks

“There may be a powercut, and the candles burn down low, but something inside of me, says the bad news isn't so.”

Many fans have stories about reading Target books of Doctor Who serials before seeing the serials themselves, and of being disappointed by the scale or production of 1970s television compared to their own limitless imagination, as prompted by Terrance Dicks’ prose. That’s not really my experience, if I’m honest. I did read a lot of Target books as a kid, and there must be a lot of stories where I read the book first. But I remember the first time television Doctor Who was ever disappointing, and it wasn’t a serial of a book I’d read.¹

Regardless, at this point in The Long Way Round it’s still 1988, and I’m ten and I’ll take as much new or old Doctor Who as I can get, and with equal excitement. I am, let’s be honest, much the same now at the age of [[mumbles quietly, you can work it for yourself with a bit of mental arithmetic if you must]]. One story that I know I read before I saw it is Death to the Daleks. I also know I read that book before I saw Day of the Daleks because when I read Death I saw Colin Baker’s Doctor in my mind’s eye as I read it, having no real experience of Jon Pertwee’s at all.

I don’t know when that was, but I do know it was before the Spring of 1988. Because in 1988 my school friend Adam loved Daleks.² He was one of those Doctor Who viewers who liked Daleks more than any other aspect of Doctor Who, and when his birthday came around in the spring, he got Death to the Daleks on VHS; and after a decent interval, I was allowed to watch it too, and I did so knowing this was the telly version of a book I’d read.

The slitscan title sequence, which I know now to be the second Pertwee version, was a shock and then a delight. Because part of me had decided that there was a single, specific version of the Doctor Who opening titles and theme music for each Doctor, and I was baffled and then delighted to discover that I was wrong. Maybe this is why, even all these years later, that version is probably my favourite.

Looked at now, the debut of the “diamond logo” and Bernard Lodge’s silvery opening credits in the final Jon Pertwee run, when they’re associated in most viewers’ minds with Tom Baker’s Doctor is an indication of the 1974 series’ transitional nature. That the format of the Pertwee years, the post monochrome era earthbound “UNIT family” (TM) was nearing its end.

Producer Barry Letts, Script Editor Terrance Dicks and star Pertwee, all of whom had been in those jobs longer than anyone before them, were destined to move on by the end of the production block in which Death to the Daleks was made. It should have been bad news for Doctor Who; the team who had dragged the show from the brink of cancellation to “national institution” status all moving on simultaneously. but in the end the foundations they’d laid were so sound that the series barely missed a step for a decade.

Also, looking back, what we call Seasons 11, 12 and 13 have at least as much in common with each other as the latter two do with 14, or that the first does with 8 or 9, but the change of Doctor at the end of 1974 helps disguise that. You can think of it as the Sarah Jane era, if you like. They all have a couple of UNIT stories, and a sense that, while the TARDIS can go wherever it wants (if not necessarily where the Doctor wants), the corner of the UNIT lab is its home.

This story is Sarah Jane Smith’s first visit to an alien world, although little is made of that in dialogue. Exxilon, whence the TARDIS is dragged en route to a beach holiday, is pretty darn alien. The TARDIS arrives at night in a mixed studio and location world of steaming, ashen sand flats inhabited by hooded, murderous “savages” and haunted by Carey Blyton’s dazzling odd and ferociously under-appreciated score. It’s something genuinely shocking when one of the murderous Exxilons invades the sanctuary of the mysteriously depleted TARDIS and forces Sarah to flee into an inky alien night.

We know that incoming script editor Robert Holmes worked on this story uncredited while trailing Dicks, and it’s hard to not see his influence here, particularly his interest in horror. Because while the first episode follows much of the structure usual to a Terry Nation scripted Part One³ it’s also noticeable how little dialogue there is in it, and how much the episode depends for its success on horror images, on that music, Michael E Briant’s edgy direction and Sladen’s complete refusal to play these scenes in an obvious or stereotypical way.

Separated from the Doctor Sarah eventually finds herself outside a giant polystyrene CSO city so well realised it was convincing in 1988. Hell, it’s convincing in 2024. This Living City is responsible for both the TARDIS’ powerless state and the reversion of its builders and former inhabitants to the Stone Age.

Doctor Who, meanwhile, has met up with some “space marines”. These are not the heavily armed, big-shouldered types suggested by that term to someone who grew up in the era of Aliens and Warhammer 40k. Instead they’re a gaggle of middle class Englishmen called things like “Richard Railton” and “Peter Hamilton”, all of whom sound like photographers personally known to the Royal Family, and a dour Glaswegian called Dan Galloway, who doesn’t. Plus a token woman called Jill Tarrant, who has objectively fabulous hair.

The casual sexism of the time raises its head very firmly above the parapet when we’re told that Jill is “our civilian exographer” rather than a member, like the men, of the Marine Space Corps; later in the story it’s necessary to rescue Galloway and Hamilton because Jill can’t fly the ship. Even that she couldn’t fly the ship alone (i.e it requires more than one person to operate it) would be preferable. It would be better still if they rescued their comrades simply because it’s the right thing to do.

Because, in its own way, Death to the Daleks is rather interested in the question of what’s the right thing to do. When giving an interview about Blake’s 7 in 1979, Nation came out with an anecdote that he intended to characterise the tyrannical Federation of that series, but which also illuminates something about this serial.

“I think it's the Third Crusade. All these guys set off and they were really going to wipe out these ‘heathens’ and they got as far as Venice, I think, and ran out of money, ran out of boats and a million other things. And the Venetians said ‘Okay, fellahs, listen. There's a Christian community over there. You've got the men and the arms. Go and wipe out that town and we'll give you the boats.’ So they wiped out the Christian community so that they could get the boats to wipe out the ‘heathen’ community. It's that kind of deviousness.” ⁴

This is, of course, exactly what Dan Galloway does in Death to the Daleks. He agrees with both a squad of equally-trapped Daleks and the dominant cultural group of Exxilons that he will exterminate a smaller tribe of Exxilons for them. These Exxilons only crime is refusing to worship the Living City as a god. In Galloway’s reckoning, this evil will lead to a greater good. In return for this (let’s call it what it is) genocide, he will be allowed to mine the planet for the minerals the MSC have been sent to acquire; needed by human colonies being devastated by a space plague.

It’s not quite internet favourite The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas - although Nation habitually read short science fiction and may have encountered Ursula K Le Guin’s then very recently published story when writing this one. But both draw on older traditions anyway, most obviously Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and the work of the philosopher William James. Again, Nation doesn’t need to have actually read either to be playing with the same ideas, although it’s needlessly dismissive of him to assume he can’t have.

Doctor Who habitually has little time for utilitarianism, and while this condemnation of it is not a huge part of this serial, really only a single conversation, it fits well inside both this story and the wider programme. Although there is the interesting wrinkle that Galloway’s cold worldview is not necessarily hypocritical.

That his ethics are sincere might seem confirmed when he willingly sacrifices himself to destroy the Daleks. He dies for the greater good of curing the plague, just as he expected others to. But at least he makes his own choice; and what, anyway, was his alternative choice? What logically are the consequences of what he does on Exxilon once he returns home?

Commander Railton has already told us Dan is a glory hunter, and tried to deny him command responsibilities with his dying breath, only for Galloway to prove him right by pretending not to hear him, refusing the final order from his dying commanding officer in order to take power. The rest of the crew don’t know this, but they’re appalled by his deal with the Exxilons. They’re not going help him cover it up. Which means his later suicide bombing ensures he’s remembered as a dead warrior, not tried as a live criminal.

The story also foregrounds Nation’s interest in plague and how modern people respond to having technology stripped away from them, and their subsequent difficulties when having a practical problem to solve. This would form the core of his Survivors, in production at almost exactly the same time as this serial.

But then this a serial very much of its time. It’s easy, but also probably correct, to see the way the City of the Exxilons robs the TARDIS of electricity as influenced by (if not necessarily a comment on) the power cuts that plagued Britain during the 1970-74 Heath government’s conflict with the Miners’ Union.⁵ It’s not like it’s something that anyone in Britain could have avoided noticing, after all.

But it’s also a grander, all-purpose metaphor. The Living City draws power to itself literally and figuratively; it disempowers others to empower itself. It centralises authority and reduces everyone and everything around it to subservience. Like the Daleks. Like Galloway taking control of the human expedition. It’s not exactly subtle, but it’s been little commented on.

This is a good story for the Daleks, their last appearance without Davros until 2005. They’re written as devious, treacherous, little bastards, constantly moving the goalposts during their deals with the humans and the Exxilons and delighting in doing so. They look good too, their never reprised silver and black colour scheme a result of director Briant having worked in junior capacities on stories from their silver and blue heyday.

The ringing, whistling of their new projectile gun sticks (their exterminators having been disabled by the power drain) is an example of a bed of sound effects exemplary even by mid 1970s radiophonic workshop standards. The screaming noise of the Living City’s roots is probably the highlight.

Highlight. Roots. Geddit? Oh, please yourselves.

If we’re looking for flaws, then perhaps Holmes’ inexperience as an editor shows itself at points. There’s no scene where the Daleks recognise the Doctor. They go from being ignorant of his presence to arguing with him in full knowledge of his identity. Although is it a scripting or delivery error that means that the Doctor says “I know the Daleks” twice in successive scenes? Either way, it feels clumsy.

At the end, there’s no good reason at all why the Daleks don’t exterminate the Doctor’s party except for plot convenience, and no one raises the question of what will happen to Bellal and his helpful heretics now the city has been destroyed. No one cares. Because the story is done. But these are the kind of failings common in Doctor Who, and it doesn’t do well to dwell on specific examples of them.

Except, maybe, it’s relevant that the way the serial’s flaws and virtues are indicative of wider Doctor Who points to the most important thing about this story; that essentially all of a particular kind of Doctor Who is here, and it’s the exact kind or Doctor Who that, when Jon Pertwee came into the show, it had been decided it was no longer possible to make.

Yet pretty much everything about Death to the Daleks works. After five years of hard slog from Letts and co to make the inherited Earthbound version of Doctor Who a success, and on the way out the door, they bring back the writer of Doctor Who’s very first alien planet story to show the incoming production team, now successors to them all, the way back to the stars.