344 Planet of the Daleks Episode One

EPISODE: Planet of the Daleks: Episode One
OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 344
STORY NUMBER: 068
TRANSMITTED: Saturday 07 April 1973
WRITER: Terry Nation
DIRECTOR: David Maloney
SCRIPT EDITOR: Terrance Dicks
PRODUCER: Barry Letts
RATINGS: 11 million viewers
FORMAT: DVD: Doctor Who - Dalek War: Frontier in Space & Planet of the Daleks
EPISODE FORMAT: 625 video

"Shortly after entering the Tardis, the Doctor fell into a deep coma. His respiration was very shallow and his skin icy to the touch. I could find no trace of pulse or heartbeat, and his breathing apparently ceased. But I've seen the Doctor in this condition once before and he recovered after a sudden rise in temperature. The Tardis seems to have landed. I suppose the Time Lords are working it by remote control again. I've no idea what the Doctor said to them in his message, or where we are. I just hope that they've brought us somewhere where I can find some help for the Doctor!"

Jo lies the Doctor down on a bed as he falls into a deep coma leaving him ice cold. She records her thoughts on the Tardis log. The Tardis lands in deep jungle and she goes to find help. Something unseen stalks her through the jungle. While exploring a local plant spits some liquid onto her hand which stings. The Doctor wakes to find the Tardis oxygen supply being depleted. Jo finds a crashed spaceship with a body in a spacesuit. She is in turn found by Taron & Vaber two blonde haired men who think Earth is a name from their legends. They tell her that she was lucky that "they" didn't find her before a third man Codal arrives reporting a patrol is nearby. She directs them to where the Doctor is and they leave, but she remains in the ship. She hears heavy breathing as objects start moving seemingly by themselves. The Doctor is still trying to repair the Tardis oxygen supply but is failing and then finds he cannot open the door. The men chip a mould away from the Tardis doors allowing them to be opened and the Doctor rescued. His rescuers tell him they are from Skaro and the Doctor recognises them as Thals. He tells them he was there during the Dalek war. Vaber doubts his story but Taron recalls his presence from their legends. Taron finds the Doctor has been infected by the fungus and treats it. They tell him he is on Spiridons, home of the invisible Spiridons. They are there on a secret mission, but Vaber is despairing of their chances of success having lost 4 of their 7 man party. Jo has collapsed in the spaceship overwhelmed by the fungus. The Thals hear something approaching, which they think has been overwhelmed by lightwave sickness. Using a liquid paint spray they reveal their previously invisible foe: A Dalek !

And off we go again. Just in case you've missed the last week's episode, and haven't read the title on the credits or the Radio Times, both the Doctor & the Thals keep quiet as to who they're fighting till the end of the episode when the Dalek is dramatically revealed using spray paint. But hey, it's Dalek story and tradition states that your Dalek has to be obscured till the end of the first episode. Returning writer Terry Nation, who hasn't contributed since Dalek Masterplan, and director, David Maloney, absent since the War Games at the end of the Troughton era, know what's expected of them and deliver.

Nation in particular tucks into his back catalogue with glee giving us Thals (The Daleks), a jungle that sees "more animal than plant" (Kembel in The Dalek Masterplan, Mechanus in the final few episodes of The Chase and The Keys of Marinus Part 3: The Screaming Jungle), ruins (Screaming Jungle again) and invisible monsters (The Visiains in Dalek Masterplan 5 & 6). Yet there's odd signs here our Tel is starting to look towards the future: There's the guns, connected to the belt of the spacesuits by a power flex (it's little details like this that people have claimed Nation was prone to include at the expense of things like dialogue): hardly unlike the guns on the Liberator in Blake's 7 at all...

We've got a Thal called Taron which isn't a million miles from Tarrant, a name that will be familiar to anyone who's seen any post Planet Terry Nation stories, and I don't mean just Doctor Who either! Bernard Horsfall plays Taron. He's previously been Gulliver in The Mind Robber and a Time Lord in The War Games. He'll return as Chancellor Goth in The Deadly Assassin. All four of his appearances are directed by David Maloney, who didn't use him on The Krotons, Planet of Evil or Talons of Weng Chiang. Before Doctor Who he'd been in Out of This World, playing Dr. Arthur Bailey in Divided We Fall, and featured in the third season of it's successor Out of the Unknown, playing John Stewart in 1+1=1.5. Sadly both episodes are missing. Unseen until recently is his Doomwatch appearance in Sex and Violence, which was unbroadcast! It's available to watch on The Doomwatch DVD. He's in the George Lazenby James Bond film On Her Majesty's Secret Service as Campbell. In later years he has appeared in Agatha Christie's Poirot as Harrington Pace in The Mystery of Hunter's Lodge.

Prentis Hancock, as Vaber, we've previously seen in Spearhead from Space as a reporter. He'll be back in Planet of Evil as Salamar and The Ribos Operation as Shrieve Captain. He's most famous for playing Paul Morrow in Space 1999. He was also in Survivors as McIntosh in A Little Learning and plays Arnold Meyer in Chocky's Children & Chocky's Challenge, both written by later Doctor Who script editor Anthony Read He achieves a rare double by appearing in The Professionals as the Army Major in Lawson's Last Stand in 1982 and then 17 years later in CI5: The New Professionals a Carl Dietrich in Souvenir. You can hear him interviewed in Toby Hadoke's Who's Round #129.

Tim Preece is Codal, and although I didn't think I knew him from anything else IMDB shows a bit part CV a mile long including at least three things I've definitely seen and a stack of Doctors & Vicars! I've just spotted him in the second series of A Very Peculiar Practice, which you can see on DVD.

The Doctor's meeting with the Thals makes reference to his encounter with them in the original Dalek story:

VABER: What are you staring at?
DOCTOR: Oh, I'm sorry, it's just, just that I thought I knew you.
VABER: That's not likely.
DOCTOR: Where are you from?
TARON: A planet, many systems from here.
DOCTOR: Skaro! Yes, of course, you're Thals!
TARON: How did you know that?
DOCTOR: Because I've been to Skaro, that's why.
TARON: When?
DOCTOR: Oh, many years ago. During the Dalek war.
VABER: Dalek war?
DOCTOR: Yes.
VABER: That's impossible. That was generations ago. You couldn't have been there.
DOCTOR: Well, I can assure you that I was.
TARON: How?
DOCTOR: By travelling through the barriers of time. If you must know, I was with the Thal group when they broke into the Dalek city.
TARON: In our legend, there is a being, a figure from another planet who came to Skaro when the Thals were in their greatest peril, in something called a Tardis. He had three companions with him.
DOCTOR: Yes. Barbara, Ian and Susan.
VABER: And their leader was called?
DOCTOR: The Doctor.
TARON: Are you trying to tell us that you are the Doctor?
DOCTOR: That's right.

As I said during Frontier in Space episode 5, both stories use a prior visit by The Doctor as a key point in gaining trust. Here we have the advantage of having seen the prior visit!

Lots of the Thal gear is recycled: the suits are the Spacesuits the Astronauts wear in Ambassadors OF DEATH while the helmet, seen on what I assume is the body of their commander, is another reuse for Beaus helmet. You do wonder why the Thals would keep the body of one of their crewmates in it's seat in the ship, especially as they still seem to be using it. I know the wobble of the ship set is designed to make it look like the ship's sitting unstably but all it makes me think of is a very holiday caravan. Actually the body in the spacesuit reminds me of a scene in the Space 1999 episode Another Time, Another Place (by future Doctor Who writer Johcnny Byrne) where John Koenig & Alan Carter find their own corpses in spacesuits aboard a crashed Eagle.

The body in the spacesuit is played by Alan Casley who'd been in The Quatermass Experiment episode State of Emergency as a member of the Abbey Crowd.

The spacesuit isn't the only thing reused from Ambassadors of Death: panels by the door and by the dead Thal spaceman's head were reused from space capsule built for that story.

There's loads of things in this episode just make me giggle: the bed unit in the Tardis is so obviously 70s MFI! And the Tardis Log is recognisably a cassette case!

We are now forced to consider why the Tardis' Oxygen supply runs out, an old fashioned device to force the crew out of the Tardis similar to the fluid links failing or running out of Mercury.

From a plot point of view it's not necessary: Jo will leave the Tardis looking for help and the Doctor, when he recovers, will go to look for Jo. It just adds a little peril for the Doctor. I can conceive that the Tardis takes on fresh air when it lands and this mechanism gets blocked by the fungus spraying plants. But the Tardis is a huge ship that voyages through space & time, surely it should have a huge onboard air supply? So why do we run out of air so quickly?

Fortunately the show's immediate and recent past provide us with not one but two convenient explanations: First the Doctor could have damaged the Tardis' life support systems while attempting to repair it while it was immobilised by the Time Lords and has only just found out now the air intake has been blocked.

A more likely explanation however is that the Master has deliberately sabotaged his old friend's ship. He had it in his possession for most of Frontier in Space and it wouldn't be out of character for the Master to leave a little trap behind as a parting gift for his friend.