Death To The Daleks: Ranking - 181

  Death To The Daleks

(Season 11, Dr 3 with Sarah-Jane, 23/2/1974-16/3/1974, producer: Barry Letts, script editor: Terrance Dicks, writer: Terry Nation, director: Michael E Briant)

Rank: 181

In an emoji: 🔌⌁

'Wait, don't touch it!!!...Yes, it's the floor tiles of doom. Surrounded by the curtains of chaos, the rug of Rassilon and the gargantuan sofa of reasonable comfort. I knew we shouldn't have gone shopping at the Exxilon branch of Ikea'.  

Now, this is an oddball: a Dalek story that’s actually kind of sweet. No, don’t worry, it’s not that the most vicious and destructive force in the universe have gone soft and turned to picking flowers or helping little old Lakyertan ladies across the street or anything, but you do feel – well – kind of sorry for them. They’re not the big bad army who are out to annihilate, conquer and destroy but a tiny bunch of chemists who are out to protect themselves from a space plague when they end up on a planet that’s taken away their special powers and turned them useless. They just can’t get their revolving heads round the fact their weapons are useless at all. A lot of fans laugh at how they pitch and roll on the rough terrain that makes up a good 50% of this story, but for once you’re supposed to: this is a species out of their depth and a long way from home, still trying to conquer by their usual rules on a world that won’t let them. And there’s no sight in Dr Who more pitiable than a useless Dalek, as shown later in, well, ‘Dalek’. Had the doctor never met them or known what they were capable of they’re portrayed as the sort of race in trouble he’d be helping out. Admittedly you shouldn’t feel too sorry for them as they were planning to hoard the cure and then change all the other planets in the solar system over the odds for it, but by their malicious standards that’s almost…human of them (this is the CDC of Daleks – the Centre for Dalek Cures perhaps?) Across the rest of this story they’re a race that have clearly had their heydays behind them, routinely outwitted by all and sundry even before the Tardis arrives and the victims more than the protagonists. Well that’s life in the universe, writer Terry Nation seems to be saying: one day you’re the ones setting things alight (as happens in ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’) and the next people are setting alight to you (as the native ninja ewok-like Exxilons do on this planet). 

 Usually it’s a slam dunk that Terry Nation is writing about Nazis when the Daleks roll in but, maybe because the Daleks were actually a fairly late addition to a story that was originally more about humans, I think Terry is chucking a few different ideas into the mix here. One is that he’s writing about ‘us’, the bountiful British empire that everyone used to own a bit of everything and dole it out to neighbours in return for their obedience that now had its wings clipped thanks to crippling inflation, endless strikes and power cuts. These were so persistent across 1973-74 that a lot of fans on first viewing – shock horror – didn’t even get to see Dr Who and had great gaps in their knowledge of the Doctor’s adventures in this era right up to the video age (when a shockingly pricey copy of ‘Death To The Daleks’ trundled into shops as early as eighth despite not being an obvious choice by any means). The blackouts must have reminded Terry of his childhood days sitting in a WW2 bunker in the dark making up stories for company and waiting for the all-clear – the starting point for his early Dalek stories. It’s a bit lost on viewers today this story (which is why it makes for a doubly strange one to release so soon) but the people watching at home on first transmission would have nodded with recognition when the Tardis ends up crashing through something draining its power and the Doctor curses, before having to light a simple halogen lamp to see in the dark (just like the ones that were selling like zonkburgers for real in this era). The human explorers – who are all clearly British – also seem to be grounded from their quests into the unknown by this power fade. It’s all so very Dr Who: we get the sort of magical technological city of our dreams, as seen every other week on Star Trek, but it’s one that happens to be in the dark because the power’s not on. There were fears that Britain was becoming, if not exactly a third world country, then maybe a second if we couldn’t even power our homes and our businesses and the whole country seemed to be at a standstill and made sitting ducks. It’s only a small hop away, in people’s fears of the time, to the sort of barbarism seen in this story - hooded savages with spears outside the windows running around in the dark and a technological marvel so complex that you need to jump through multiple different ‘tests’ to get the power back on at all (today we would consider this an ‘escape room’, full of tests you have to pass to survive – they even do Dr Who ones now, yay!; when I first saw this story in the 1980s it reminded me of ‘The Crystal Maze’ with challenges in every room). Talk about the ordinary hitting up against the extraordinary: only Dr Who would make a story about a power cut! 

Then again Exxilon is a city that isn’t just a static one in the dark but a sentient one just waiting for someone to press all the right buttons and turn it on again. Terry’s good at cities and like the Dalek one on Skaro this one works because it’s so obviously made with the local population in mind, not the humanoids who visit. Of all the alien cities seen in Dr Who this is one of the most mystical and alluring, full of not just technological but mystical powers that even the Doctor doesn’t quite understand. By the end it’s treated as if it’s a living entity, to the extent that the creatures that come out to keep the aliens (including the Doctor and Sarah away) are compared to antibodies fighting off an infection. It’s a fascinating idea, the idea of a place that knows it’s alive and will kill any occupants who don’t treat it properly (this is also the era of books like ‘Gaia’ that painted the Earth as a sentient being that was always trying to balance itself from whatever humans could throw at it. The city is certainly smarter than any of the astronaut humans or Daleks and even the Doctor is pushed to understand it’s great powers. Is Exxilon Paris, a mystical city overthrown by war and this is a story about the Nazi/Dalek invasion? Galloway, for instance, is your typical Nazi collaborator, out to save his own skin while everyone walking around this city talks about how beautiful it is without being able to understand how anyone could actually live there everyday (much how Brits think about our biggest rival’s capital city. Mind you most French people I know think that and more about London). I wonder, too, if the Daleks are Napoleon this week, not Hitler as normal (after Who’s near miss of having a young Bonaparte make a cameo in ‘The Reign Of Terror’ despite almost certainly being nowhere near the events depicted on screen): the ‘other’ great dictator of recent centuries who made empires fall at his feet and who was out for power rather than fighting through prejudice, only the drive and ambition that made him conquer countries with relative ease was also his downfall because he never knew when to stop. At the end of the Napoleonic wars old Boney made it to his goal of Ancient Egypt, the civilisation that fascinated him and which he’d always dreamed of seeing, with even more dreams that he was the rightful heir to the Pharaohs and would rule over not the present but the past too. Note that the city is referred to by the Doctor as ‘one of the 900 wonders of the universe’ (we never see the other 899 and even this one’s destroyed by story’s end) – the pyramids are, of course, the only wonder of the ancient world still standing. Like Egypt, though, Exxillon isn’t obviously amazing until you get up close and see how it’s made – they’re both the sort of places where superstitions, sacrifices and basic struggles for survival live hand in hand with impossible advancements and knowledge that gleam from every wall (not least because in this city the walls really do glow! Which doesn’t quite work on screen the way it’s filmed but is still a great idea). Napoleon’s actually a lot more interested in history and careful than most archaeologists, making sure that all the battles don’t take place round anything precious. However, something odd seems to happen once he reaches the famous city – he can’t ‘unlock’ the puzzles of the ancient world as easily as he thought he could, some mystical unseen force (probably just bad luck and some wrong decisions, but that’s less poetical than an Egyptian curse as everyone thought at the time) seems to rob him of his powers so that he ends up defeated, his empire the size of Europe squandered until he cuts a lonely figure in exile on an island with a rock limpet, as per the Turner painting (’Exxilon’ sounds awfully like ‘exile’). In ‘Death To the Daleks’ Exxilon is Egypt, the exile is on the outskirts of the planet and the rock limpet are the Exxilons, a species made out of rock. 

 They’re a great alien race. Usually Terry Nation’s characters are all harsh, up to and often including the Doctor (who is a bit of a grump this story it has to be said) but the other main character we meet is Bellal, whose tiny sweet and cute and who would surely come in the top three of ‘Dr Who characters who most need a hug’. Arnold Yarrow is, at the time of writing, the oldest living actor to have ever been in a Dr Who story (he turned 103 in April 2023) and he gives what’s on paper a pretty thankless role a rare cuteness rare for 1970s Who and a humanity that shines past the layers of make-up rock-like. Yarrow heard that the designers modelled the species on bush babies, with the same big eyes constantly widened in surprise, and spent some time in his local zoo studying them, copying their gestures, their sudden moves and instinct for predators and general air of nervousness (though in Nation’s original draft they’re more akin to bats). They feel as if they’re a part of this planet’s eco-structure as much as any plant life on this planet and it’s a clever move to have them made out of rock; a lesser writer/designer/script editor team would have made a rock creature the ‘salt of the earth’ unstoppable unmovable type, but the Exxilons are as edgy, twitchy and emotional as any species we see. And even though we only get to meet one who talks it feels as if we’ve met a whole race. John Friedlander’s masks are excellent and, like the city, the glowing florescent lighting strips designed to make the locals ‘glow’ too (technical term: ‘axial projection’) is a clever inventive idea that doesn’t quite work in practice (the costumes were dotted with the hi-vis stripes on jackets and bicycles, made to glow by equipping each camera with a torch to shine in the right places – which worked great in rehearsals against straight crisp sits but fared less well on screen when the suits were crumpled and bunched). The camouflage on the suits was so good that on one day of shooting a frantic production team couldn’t find two of the extras in Exxillon suits who had fallen asleep against the rocks for hours (and yes, this does sound like an apocryphal story to me too, but it’s cute and the costumes really are good). Though Sarah Jane, still the new Who girl at this stage, is around too she gets separated from the Doctor early on which means that effectively Bellal is the Doctor’s companion for this story and, while the many hours in the make-up chair made keeping him on full-time unfeasible, he really does feel like the companion who got away. Just think what a boon he would have been to other stories: the Doctor explaining to a stony-faced Brigadier that Bellal is better at passing his test-tubes than any human, Bellal being licked by Aggedor while in Peladon, the sad goodbye to the third Doctor after being run over by the Whomobile on route to Metebelis 3, the fourth Doctor’s confusion as to why he has a talking rock as a companion, the re-match with The Daleks where Bellal ‘accidentally’ fuses the wires that create the Daleks together using his special powers, Bellal sticking up that Harry isn’t an imbecile but a really nice man whose just a little bit out of his depth and didn’t mean to put his foot in a mutated clam honest, so kindly stop shouting Doctor, perhaps even a tearful reminder of the ‘floor tiles of doom’ when playing hopscotch with The Master in ‘The Five Doctors’. Honestly, there’s no story having a sweet calming presence like his wouldn’t have improved and he’s easily the best thing about ‘Death To The Daleks’. Yarrow was actually more famous as a writer at the time of making this story and ended up script editor on Eastenders a decade later – though sadly he wasn’t around for Dr Who crossover ‘Dimensions In Time’, which might have been fun with three-dimensional Exxilons running around all over the place! 

They’re the two great parts to this story – Exxilon (named for the ‘elixir’ cure for the plague that everyone seems to forget about past episode one) an the Exxilons. Otherwise sadly this is as close to a Dr Who by numbers story as you can get: it’s filmed in a quarry, features a barbaric culture who are strangely civilised individually but worship scifi things as religious icons instead of the scientific principles they’re based on and concerns the mining of a mineral that can wipe out plague (put me down for some parrinium to see what it does for covid; it’s no dafter than any of Trump’s remedies). Along the way Sarah Jane nearly becomes a human sacrifice, Jon Pertwee gets some awkward fight scenes despite visibly wincing from a bad back even when standing still and the human astronauts we meet are as uninteresting and wet behind the ears as all groups of astronauts in Who seem to be. It’s hard to feel much for anyone in this story besides Bellal and the put-upon Daleks weirdly and despite the rather good set of ideas it’s all very un-dramatic, never making the most of any of them. We’ve said it a few times in this series but Terry nation scripts tend to reflect his script editor’s more than it does himself – his drafts all tended to be so short and so basic that the colour all came from the characterisation added in the re-drafts. In theory ‘Death To The Daleks’ should be one of the best because it actually has two of them: that’s Terrance Dicks’ name on the credits but he’s already handed in his notice for the end of the year so he’s being shadowed by his good friend Robert Holmes, all ready to take over officially the following season. Three of Who’s best writers involved in this script, who make up the top three of prolific writers of the entire 20th century run of Who should know what they’re doing. But everyone’s bored. Terry’s resentful of the fact that he’s back in rainy England writing stories for a children’s show for a living again after his failed attempt to crack America – he’s already got his sights on his next project ‘The Survivors’ (which started in 1975) and which starts off much like this first episode: a bunch of straggler survivors trying to live out in a nature that’s trying to kill them in the ruins of civilisation after being badly hit by a space plague (and, seriously, what a bad choice of programmes to start re-watching across 2019 that was! The parallels with covid were scary). In many ways this is his template Dr Who script he can bang off in his sleep: we’re down to the last four Dalek survivors versus the last three humans who are still fighting each other on an alien world, where they’re struggling over resources (the perranium works just like the taranium core from ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’), the glories of the universe and civilisation reduced to a basic struggle for the right to live There’s even a character called ‘Tarrant’, his favourite space-age go-to name just like Blake’s 7. Only here she’s a girl. 

 Terrance is already busy with the series that was at one time mooted as Dr Who’s replacement, the serious space drama ‘Moonbase 3’ (which is kind of like watching a space programme in real time, just as simultaneously fascinating and boring in equal measure). His writing style is kind of like Terry Nation cubed too: he’s more at home with action and adventure and derring do than character, which is why the three Pertwee stories don’t have the most memorable parts in them (though ‘Day Of The Daleks’ has a few). And Holmes? Well on the plus side he loves crafting character but on the downside he hates the Daleks with a passion and thinks Nations’ scripts are stupid. The first thing he did was change the story title from the rather basic ‘The Exxilons’ to the lurid ‘Death To The Daleks’ because he didn’t like them one bit (although he seems to have changed his mind with the follow-up ‘Genesis Of The Daleks’, a story which he had far more input in). The second thing he does is name the plague cure ‘parranium’, perhaps because he also considers The Daleks a pain in the backside (though technically it’s a mis-spelling of the bit just up from there in the human body. If this was any other script editor I’d declare it a coincidence but as early as ‘The Krotons’ Holmes has been inserting jokes about chemicals that if used for real actually make stink bombs; it’s entirely in keeping with his cheeky brand of humour). Legend has it that when nations’ final scripts came in and were still under-running by several pages compared to usual, with a tight deadline looming, Terrance had timed his holiday to perfection, leaving Bob a note that told him where the office aspirins were because he’s need them to work on that lot! 

That sense of malaise seems to have spread over into the cast too. By chance a tape of one of the studio recording sessions for ‘Death To The Daleks’ survives – it’s the only the second earliest story where it does – and it’s a distressing experience. Pertwee is clearly not himself: he’s ill tempered with everyone around him and every false start for technicians. He, too, hated the Daleks (because he had no human expressions to interact with), all his friends had either left the series or were leaving, he’s still mourning the tragic loss of Roger Delgado a few months before, he’s split off from his only real friend in the series Elisabeth Sladen for the bulk of the story, he hated director Michael E Briant’s way of working (rehearsing then recording each scene out of order, rather than treating it as a fully rehearsed play filmed in as few takes as possible), he’s just spent another week in a rainy quarry, his back (an old pre-Who injury) is killing him, the scripts give him nothing much to do but great big long lines to learn of exposition and he clearly wants to go home. There are tales told by practically every guest cast who ever worked on a 3rd Doctor story about what a wonderful jokey time everyone had, what a wonderfully warm host Pertwee was and how everyone was eager to rush back and do another one. Not here: everyone is glum. Michael Wisher is still the best of all the Dalek voices and in his last story before taking the Davros role he’s chilling, but given that his pals Roy Skelton and Peter Halliday were both busy he’s left to do all the Dalek voices himself so they sound only monotone and repetitive this story, even by Dalek standards. Only Arnold is acting his socks off and trying to make things interesting. Even the model makers aren’t up to their usual high standards in this era: far from being ‘one of the 700 wonders of the universe’ this city is a bit of polystyrene with a torch inside it. Even Ormskirk has more going for it than that. Location-wise this is yet another quarry in an era when, even by Dr Who standards, there seem to be a lot of them (well, actually technically it’s a sand pit, at Gallows Hill, Dorset, but it’s near enough the same – the business was so pleased to be linked to Dr Who that at first they waived their fee, then donated it to their local boy scouts group). And if the people making this series don’t care about this story then why should we? 

 Well, I’ll tell you why; the ideas. There’s so much promise in this story and so many other places they could have taken it to. The Daleks as victims? Fabulous, that’s a whole angle we’ve never had before and the resolution of the first episode cliffhanger when they first realise their powers won’t work is an absolute cracker (even though this story’s overshadowed by the problems with timing that meant part of episode four had to be moved into episode three so it ends rather awkwardly with one of the silliest cliffhangers in Who history as the Doctor stops Bellal from…walking across a floor. Admittedly it’s an electrocuted floor but we don’t find out till next week!) The idea of a living breathing city that can think for itself is brilliant, especially when the Doctor learns it started evicting the inhabitants for not being good enough to live in it, the ultimate in town planning gone mad (much, much more of this in ‘Paradise Towers’). Having the biggest obstacle in the story be the city’s actual roots, coming up out of the ground ready to kill you, is a superb idea they really should have made more of and leads to a couple of really strong action sequences. It’s cerebral too though: this idea of a city that can think for itself raises so many implications: should you value it’s needs as if it was another actual being? Is it right that the Doctor should try and commit genocide (citicide?) because it tries to kill him and his friends? Should the Doctor now help the Daleks, who technically haven’t done him any harm, over the city which is trying to kill him? Both after all are only working out of survival instinct. Even the idea of tests, something that’s been done before but not for a while and not in the colour era, could have made for some thrilling moments rather than being the sort of games on the Crystal maze you spend screaming at the television going ‘but it’s obvious, even I could do it better!’ I mean, an electrocuted floor and a snake-root-robot are not the horrors from which nightmares are made, more a sort of physical crossword puzzle. (alas Sarah doesn’t get to hang upside down creating rocks in Exxillon alphabet and the Doctor doesn’t get to answer questions from Davros’ Mumsy). After all, what tests do you set for a species to be worthy enough to play with your controls? Had Nation been the sort of writer who kept re-drafting his stories over and over, had this been a period when he had script editors in synch with him, had Sarah been given a proper sub-plot instead of just blundering into trouble every few scenes, had this been a story made at the beginning of the 3rd Doctor’s era rather than the end when morale was higher, this story could have soared. Instead, like the Daleks themselves, it’s all faintly pitiable and feels like a show that’s seen better days. 

 At least one person’s going the extra mile this week and making things memorable and that’s composer Carey Blyton (nephew of children’s writer Enid, but is more alien proggy than sweetly Noddy) who produces a score for an alien planet that really does sound...alien. Usually a synth expert, the director asked him to use only natural instruments, as if to fit the theme of the electricity being turned off and having to go back to basics. It’s not the sort of thing I’d want to hear every week mind, but it’s certainly more daring than Murray Gold’s scores tend to be, quoting everything from Stockhausen to ‘Three Blind Mice’, mostly played through the same ring modulator used to make the Dalek’s voices harsh and alien and so sounding like nothing less than a Skaro version of ‘Peter and The Wolf’ (the score was by Carey Blyton,– Carey even went the extra mile by having the Exxilons chant in sort-of Latin (the rough English translation of which is ‘Arise Shuba, why do you sleep? Arise and do not abandon us. Why do you turn away and forget our troubles?’ A lot of fans find it too bonkers all round but in a story that plays things so safe in other areas it’s one of the things that stands out most. Plus I rather like the idea that there’s a secret Dalek woodwind section that invented the theme that plays during a lot of their scenes. 

 This is, though, more the sort of story non-fans laugh at and fans get defensive, a cheap looking story set in a quarry where not much happens very sadly with the sort of ‘Doctor Who’ acting that suggests nobody in the cast quite believes any of this is real. It’s all the bits of television that Dr Who struggles most with in one handy place to scoff at. Most fans tend to put this story a lot further down their lists than I do. Nevertheless there are enough moments in this story I love to rank it at least in the middle, great bits you wouldn’t get in any other series. After all, what other show would take the acknowledged monotoned baddies and then write a moralistic intellectual piece about how they cope on a planet when their guns don’t work and their firepower is taken away? Which other story would give the Daleks the detail of a range of model Tardises to practice their firepower on? Or end a story by giving a computer a nervous breakdown, back in the days when computers were colossal perfectly run pieces of engineering rather than the home PCs that do this to themselves all the time anyway? Or give such attention to detail that the Exxilons are totally believable as a species that live in the dark, both literally and metaphorically, giving them a bewildered big-eyed expression throughout that’s just so unlike any other scifi species I any show I can think of (though Dr Who’s own Sensorites from a decade earlier share a few similarities). Or throw in a swamp monster that’s truly creepy and looks an eyeball on a stalk (or half a Kroton crossed with a vacuum cleaner if you’d rather). Or give us those eerie opening scenes of The Tardis, our home away from home, stranded in the dark with the lights out as if they’ve just suffered a blackout like the rest of the country. Yes ‘Death To The Daleks’ is silly in all the wrong ways I admit, Dr Who at its worst in the way it’s shown on screen and if not quite the death of the series then at least a sign that everyone needs a rest and a good holiday. However the serious issues at the heart of this story, the imagination and inventiveness, is Dr Who at least somewhere approaching its best. All it needs to get there full time is a regeneration of some sort and as it happens one is just around the corner… 

 POSITIVES + As much as everyone mocks the third Ikea-style cliffhanger, the first one is up there with the very best: the Daleks have turned up, they’re chanting ‘exterminate’ and shooting at the Doctor and stranded Humans, there’s no cover and nowhere to hide, there’s no possible way they can escape...and only then, the following week, do we get the natty bit of storytelling that the Dalek’s weapons don’t work on this planet (which comes as a shock to everyone, not least the Doctor – how useful that this is the one time The Daleks don’t try to engage him in a long speech before trying to mow him down). It’s the ultimate ‘how will they get out of that?’ solution that reveals something we didn’t know that propels the plot forward, the way all great cliffhangers should. Terry really was great at plotting, for all his much discussed faults as a writer. 

 NEGATIVES - …Such as character. In Nation’s stories the companions are pawns to move around and get captured and not much more and that shows here more than usual. Sarah Jane was, in her first two stories, an independent journalist with a life parallel to the Doctors who coped with being thrown into dangerous situations based on her wits, bravery and intelligence that made her someone to admire, but with enough emotions that she normally blubbed in terror as soon as she was safe that made her feel relatable too. Here, following a couple of bits of sarcasm early on, she just blubs. Which is not much of a surprise perhaps given that she’s nearly sacrificed by Exxilons and exterminated by Daleks (a busy day even for her) but is a surprise given that in her two previous stories she’d first been shot at by a similar combination of civilised Sontaron warriors and primitive middle-aged Humans from the Middle Ages and second nearly been eaten by a giant dinosaur and convinced she had been sent into space as part of a colony of the last Humans and barely blinked at either. It’s frustrating to see her revert temporarily back into the stereotypical Who girl role after two strong stories where she even stands up to the Doctor, something unseen since the days of Ian and Barbara (while very few Who companions are ever as wet as reputation suggests: Susan, Polly and Mel are the only ones who came close to being wet blankets and they all had their share of brave moments). It’s a problem that hangs around for the next few stories too (when Holmes takes over from Dicks?) and it’s not until the Doctor turns into Tom Baker that Sarah Jane goes back to being the companion everyone remembers. 

BEST QUOTE: Bellal: ‘Exxilon had grown old before life had even begun on other planets. Our ancestors solved the mysteries of science, they built a craft that travelled through space. They were the supreme beings of the universe’ 

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘The Exxilons’ (2015) is a Big Finish sequel that features the 4th Doctor, Leela and K9 and is a self-confessed bit of indulgence from company boss and Dalek voice Nicholas Briggs, who often cites ‘Death To the Daleks’ as his favourite story. It’s certainly an atmospheric enough audio adventure although the substitution of the Daleks with new race The Locoyuns (a sort of tech-savvy Thals) never quite works and the overall flavour of savagery versus civilisation feels more like ‘Face Of Evil’ than ‘Death To the Daleks’. Nice to hear more of the Exxilons though! 

 ‘The Dalek Protocol’ (2018) continues the story and is much more like the original source material, with Earth on a trading mission to collect more parranium and the Daleks again getting involved. Unfortunately, much like the story, the ingredients are every bit as good but somehow never quite gel in what’s one of the more boring Big Finish stories out there, a lot of people you don’t get to know very well talking at each other rather than actually doing anything.

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