OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 006
STORY NUMBER: 002
TRANSMITTED: 28 December 1963
WRITER: Terry Nation
DIRECTOR: Christopher Barry
SCRIPT EDITOR: David Whitaker
PRODUCER: Verity Lambert
FORMAT: DVD - The Beginning Boxset
This is the episode that changed everything.
The Doctor, Ian & Susan find out the truth about the radiation level and the Doctor reveals his sabotage so he can see the city walking out of the control room they encounter machine creatures.... The Daleks! The Daleks temporarily paralyse Ian for trying to escape throwing them into a cell with Barbara.
"Ian, do you think they really are just machines? Do you think there's someone inside them?"
The Daleks are totally different to anything seen before. They're not obviously a man in a suit and for many years people believed they were remote controlled.
Cut to the Daleks Control Room: we get the heartbeat noise which does persist to this day. The Daleks believe the travellers are Thals, but when convinced otherwise tell the Doctor the history of the planet. The Doctor agrees to fetch some drugs that they found at the Tardis and Susan ends up making the journey.
Oh dear, another set of running while being whipped with plants!
This episode is soooo quiet in places, I've got the sound on the TV right up!
This holds the attention right the way through, a cut above the previous four episodes.
As we've already said, this episode was recorded the night that president Kennedy was shot! I had to wait till 1992 to see it all the way through when it was bought for me for Christmas..... and I got two copies,one from my parents and one from my friends. The parents copy went back in exchange for something else, I remember not what!
Sydney Newman, one of the television executives instrumental inn the creation of Doctor Who - see the Origins documentary on Doctor Who - The Beginning DVD Boxset - famously said he wanted no "bug eyed monsters" in his television show. When he saw the Daleks he exploded, but the Producer, Verity Lambert, convinced him that these were different and he allowed himself to be over-ruled. Interviewed on the subject he said he didn't want to do the Daleks and didn't want to do the Forsythe saga which shows how good a television producer he was!
Years later, Newman & Lambert would donate their first names to the fictional parents of the human doctor in Human Nature.
If you are going to have BEMs, against your bosses best judgement, then you need to make them the best BEMs you can if you are going to get away with it.
ReplyDeleteFortunately the Daleks are about as good as you could ever hope for. For me I think their secret is the combination of their wholly non-human appearance with motivations that are human enough that we can understand them by analogy. The Daleks' sense of ideological superiority is something that people can firmly grasp - we know what Daleks want, and why that makes them evil and I think that really helps to make them a great monster.
A cracking episode and what a way to introduce the Daleks, and such a great thing to go with non-humanoid monsters right off the bat.
ReplyDelete