Day of the Daleks
A high ranking diplomat attempting to broker peace in the face of a new world war is attacked in his home by a man who vanishes into thin air. The Doctor and Jo investigate and encounter soldiers from the future who have come back in time on an assassination mission which they believe will change the future. And in that future, Earth is dominated by the Daleks. After a series of wars the planet was left defenceless and wide open to invasion, and all remanining humans were sent to work for the Daleks under the watchful eye of turncoat humans and fierce Ogrons. The Doctor realizes that the freedom fighters who are attempting to unseat the Daleks have created a temporal paradox and actually started the chain of events that will lead to their own subjugation - a chain that must be broken to free Earth from the Daleks once more.
I don't always like stories like this, but only because they never end properly. By definition a temporal paradox does not end but keeps playing through time like a loop, and if that loop is broken there would be no trace of it at all in the end. That said, if we remove the reason for going back in time in the first place, then no-one should actually go back in time, and the whole chain of events should never happen. I saw this happen once on an episode of Star Trek : Voyager and was pleased that they of all production teams got it right. Here, though, we get a resolution (and a pretty limp ending too) and in future there will be reference made to it where no-one should actually remember anything.
The other interesting point in this whole "alternate" timeline take is the time it takes place in; UNIT stories are all pretty much accepted as taking place in the year they were broadcast (in this case 1972), aside from a few references that leave people wondering if maybe UNIT was in the 80's as a vision of the future. Either way, the Dalek-occupied Earth in this story is set 200 years in the future, so call it 2172. The original Dalek invasion of Earth from the Hartnell era was set in or around 2164, and came about under completely different circumstances. None of this is mentioned in the script of course but I just thought it would be fun to point out.
I don't know why the Daleks were used for this. Terry Nation had taken away the Dalek rights following The Evil of the Daleks and came crawling back to the BBC when his dreams of franchises in the United States never materialized, so someone must have decided it would be a good time to use them now that they had been missing for 4 years. I have this feeling the script was actually written for a completely different alien menace and adjusted to fit the Daleks. The thing is, they don't actually do much. It's painfully obvious that there are only three of them being used for filming - two grey and one gold "chief" Dalek and for the most part they sit in their control room and bully the waxy-faced humans who are serving them. In episode 4 they finally go on the offensive, but by then it's too late to impress, and they're just plain boring. Their voices are not the best either; two completely new performers provided the voices this time around, but they're not very good.
As season premieres go, this was pretty weak. Thankfully the rest of the season ahead is going to be good, and the next few appearances of the Daleks (there will be a Dalek story each season for the next 4 years) are going to be better than this. I'd like the Restoration Team to get on this one please, only to get it on DVD so I can retire the old laserdisc I watched this on (there were only 2 Doctor Who adventures put on laserdisc in the 90's, the other being The Five Doctors from 1983).
Next, the Doctor goes back into space at last, while Earth is put in peril again in his absence...
NEXT EPISODES : THE CURSE OF PELADON / THE FACE OF THE ENEMY
I don't always like stories like this, but only because they never end properly. By definition a temporal paradox does not end but keeps playing through time like a loop, and if that loop is broken there would be no trace of it at all in the end. That said, if we remove the reason for going back in time in the first place, then no-one should actually go back in time, and the whole chain of events should never happen. I saw this happen once on an episode of Star Trek : Voyager and was pleased that they of all production teams got it right. Here, though, we get a resolution (and a pretty limp ending too) and in future there will be reference made to it where no-one should actually remember anything.
The other interesting point in this whole "alternate" timeline take is the time it takes place in; UNIT stories are all pretty much accepted as taking place in the year they were broadcast (in this case 1972), aside from a few references that leave people wondering if maybe UNIT was in the 80's as a vision of the future. Either way, the Dalek-occupied Earth in this story is set 200 years in the future, so call it 2172. The original Dalek invasion of Earth from the Hartnell era was set in or around 2164, and came about under completely different circumstances. None of this is mentioned in the script of course but I just thought it would be fun to point out.
I don't know why the Daleks were used for this. Terry Nation had taken away the Dalek rights following The Evil of the Daleks and came crawling back to the BBC when his dreams of franchises in the United States never materialized, so someone must have decided it would be a good time to use them now that they had been missing for 4 years. I have this feeling the script was actually written for a completely different alien menace and adjusted to fit the Daleks. The thing is, they don't actually do much. It's painfully obvious that there are only three of them being used for filming - two grey and one gold "chief" Dalek and for the most part they sit in their control room and bully the waxy-faced humans who are serving them. In episode 4 they finally go on the offensive, but by then it's too late to impress, and they're just plain boring. Their voices are not the best either; two completely new performers provided the voices this time around, but they're not very good.
As season premieres go, this was pretty weak. Thankfully the rest of the season ahead is going to be good, and the next few appearances of the Daleks (there will be a Dalek story each season for the next 4 years) are going to be better than this. I'd like the Restoration Team to get on this one please, only to get it on DVD so I can retire the old laserdisc I watched this on (there were only 2 Doctor Who adventures put on laserdisc in the 90's, the other being The Five Doctors from 1983).
Next, the Doctor goes back into space at last, while Earth is put in peril again in his absence...
NEXT EPISODES : THE CURSE OF PELADON / THE FACE OF THE ENEMY
Labels: Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart, Daleks, Jo Grant, The 3rd Doctor, UNIT
posted by Sean Hoover @ 2:55 PM
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