Doctor Who: Planet Of The Daleks (1973)

Dalek War

After the overblown Frontier In Space, I had high hopes for Planet Of The Daleks, written as it was by their creator (no... not Davros!), Terry Nation.

However, sadly, it's more of the same. At six episodes (140 minutes), there simply isn't enough plot to fill out the allocated time and we're once again subjected to a surfeit of padding.

Guided by remote control from the Time Lords, the TARDIS materialises on the jungle planet of Spiridon where the daleks have their massive invasion force hidden.

The Doctor needs time to recover from his wounds and Jo heads out to try and find help, discovering that Spiridon is a deathworld of hostile flora and fauna.

A fascinating concept that is way too ambitious for the BBC budget to realise fully in a variety of unconvincing studio sets.

Jo meets up with a party of Thals (the humanoid inhabitants of the dalek homeworld, Skaro), who she sends to aid The Doctor. Jo, however, has fallen foul of a fungal infection from a plant and is saved by one of the planet's invisible humanoid inhabitants, Wester the Spiridon (Roy Skelton).

A major fault I have with this story is another personal bugbear of mine: the treatment of the power of invisibility in TV science-fiction.

Not only are we subjected to the usual hokem of badly green-screened objects floating in mid-air, but the whole concept of a humanoid race evolving a natural invisibility ability clearly hasn't been thought through.

The planet suffers such extremes of temperature - a key element in the plot - that the natives have to wrap themselves up in huge, ludicrous, purple furs to stay warm, suggesting that they are totally naked underneath... yet, wouldn't they have evolved some natural protection to the cold of their planet over the millennia it must have taken to evolve the power of invisibility... thus negating the need to wear furs?

But if that stretches credibility, you have to look at the handling of the daleks in this story. Not only have they sent an expeditionary force to the planet to study the Spiridon's natural invisibility to try and replicate it, but they have also stored an army of 10,000 daleks in deep freeze under one of the planet's ice volcanoes.

I really think someone needs to check the daleks' "master race" credentials - because how dumb do you have to be to build a storehouse for your space-travelling army on a planet which is so obviously dangerous to you (daleks are susceptible to cold)? Surely they could have stored this army anywhere within their empire and just taken the invisibility technology - once perfected - to it? They didn't need to be right there... under the unstable ice volcano!

Yet, that's not the only disappointment in Nation's portrayal of his creations. These daleks are clumsy, ineffective, unobservant (watch when Jo first emerges from concealment in the dalek base, there is a dalek looking right at her and yet it doesn't react) and generally a shadow of their former glory (look how adept a killing machine a single dalek is in Dalek, then compare it with this Keystone Kops iteration of the would be rulers of the galaxy).

One saving grace though is the arrival of the gorgeous black and gold Supreme Dalek, a member of the Supreme Council, who has one of the finest dalek colour schemes. But it's too little too late.

The Doctor and Thals take forever to formulate a plan, to defeat the daleks, and put it into operation, mainly because they are running hither and thither, wrestling with fur-wearing Spiridons, avoiding dalek patrols, and getting trapped in tunnels and corridors (for instance, the escape by jerry-rigged hot air balloon - although a fine educational lesson for any youngsters watching - is tiresome and prolonged).

Jo manages to squeeze in a random romantic sub-plot with one of the Thals. Given that, in the next story (The Green Death) she meets the man she ends up marrying, you kind of get the impression that this was a companion desperately looking for love!

For me, the tenth anniversary season Doctor Who encapsulates my disgruntlement with Jon Pertwee's era as The Doctor (not with the excellent Mr Pertwee himself per se); too often the ideas behind the stories are too ambitious to present on screen in a believable fashion and the stories just don't know when to quit.

If Planet Of The Daleks and Frontier In Space had both been cut back to respectable four-episode lengths, perhaps a whole new story could have been squeezed into Season 10.