Death to the Daleks Part One

The one where the TARDIS loses all its power...

There's quite a brief but brutal opening, in which a running man is shot in the belly by an arrow and tumbles into a lake to his death. It rather spoils the mysterious build-up that writer Terry Nation crafts throughout the rest of the episode, and I think it would have been much better to open with the second scene, with the Doctor spinning his parasol and crooning Oh I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside. And from there, an inexorable descent into fear...

I have such nostalgic feelings about Death to the Daleks. It was one of the handful of stories I had in omnibus form on VHS in the 1980s, and I absolutely adored this story, perhaps more so than other tapes I had, like The Robots of Death and The Time Warrior. I mean, it had Daleks in it, and I was only 11 years old, so that kind of swung it for me! But I must try and put my warm thoughts aside to review the story episodically, critically, to see whether I still feel the same way.

And I do. I so do! This first episode is crafted by a genius of the medium. Nation probably just rattled this off in double-quick time, but as well as being something of a hack, Nation was also damned good at what he did, so when he did what he did, it was almost always brilliant. He didn't deviate from what he knew well, and what he did well, and for that reason, a Terry Nation script feels both cosy and rewarding. But Death to the Daleks episode 1 is something else again, because it's also bloody scary!

The opening scene is inside the TARDIS, which we haven't seen since, well... the last Dalek story. Things are all very light and jolly as Sarah mills about getting together her sunglasses and water wings ("You can't sink on Florana," the Doctor tells her. "I can sink anywhere!" she replies), but then there's one of those ominous the-story-is-about-to-kick-in flashing lights on the console, a flash and a bang and some falling-over acting as the ship is tossed this way and that. And then the TARDIS begins to lose power, the lights dim, the console goes dead, and everything suddenly becomes quite unsettling. The TARDIS is usually a reassuringly safe place, so to see it incapacitated like this is disturbing. Director Michael E Briant and lighting designer Derek Slee (who also lit Planet of the Daleks so well) turn the TARDIS into a spooky, shadowy cave, while Dick Mills' sound design just piles on the atmosphere, thanks to the eerie moaning of the ship, like a whale in labour. And then it goes deathly quiet ("Not a click nor a tick"), and the Doctor and Sarah's voices echo in the dead space.

The Doctor uses a crank handle to open the powerless TARDIS door, and as it slowly edges ajar, wisps of fog creep their way into the ship, like ghostly fingers. Briant is really excelling himself so far. Outside, Slee's lighting continues to impress, along with Mills' otherworldly sound design, suggesting some form of life on this planet, in the distance.

But there's some life much closer, hiding in plain sight. The Exxilons, with their sandy, rough-hewn cowls, blend in perfectly with the strangely humanoid rock formations on this deserted desert world, and every now and again, what you thought was a rock will move to silently follow our heroes. All of this is a beautiful symbiotic achievement by the production team, combining the talents of Briant, Mills and Slee with production designer Colin Green and costume designer L. Rowland Warne to make a truly alien and unsettling environment.

Sarah's cold in her awful bikini combo, so returns to the TARDIS to cover up. "You won't go away, will you?" she asks the Doctor, who promptly wanders off the moment she's gone back inside. This really unsettled me as an 11-year-old, the fact the Doctor - who you trust - could just ignore you and leave you alone, even when he said he wouldn't. Obviously the draw to explore is too great for him to wait.

Of everything that happens in this story, it is Sarah's time spent alone in and around the TARDIS which spooked me most when I was a kid, and even now, more than three decades later, I still find it frightening.

Although the mixing and matching of location and studio scenes doesn't work very well, it's all so well lit and graded that it doesn't matter. It's before the dawn on Exxilon, and the creatures are at large, following Sarah as she searches for the Doctor. When she finds his bloodied oil lamp, she knows something's wrong, and runs back to the TARDIS, and safety.

But it's not safe, not any more. The haven of the TARDIS's inner sanctum has been invaded. Because lurking in the shadows of the console room, among the lilos and the sun hats, is an Exxilon, which has found its way inside while she was away (that'll teach her to close the TARDIS door behind her). The audience knows the creature's in there with her, so when Sarah starts cranking the door closed, thinking she'll be safe, it's nail-biting for us to watch! And then the Exxilon lurches for Sarah (we see from its point of view, a classic horror movie tool used famously years later by John Carpenter in Halloween), and she starts bashing it into submission with the crank handle. There's then a nerve-shredding bit where Sarah has to crank the door back open to escape, but in true horror movie style, the Exxilon's hand starts to creep toward her foot. Luckily, she manages to finish the Exxilon off with the crank handle before scarpering into the foggy night.

It's a slasher flick on an alien planet.

The Exxilons are like the Sand People in Star Wars (but three years before them!), blending in with their surroundings like chameleons, and watching their prey from clifftops. Some people despise Carey Blyton's score for this story (performed by the London Saxophone Orchestra, no less), but the use of the cabasa and washboard as the Exxilons' theme is terribly evocative for me (notably reused by Dudley Simpson as the mummies' theme in Pyramids of Mars). The Exxilons really give me the willies when they run toward camera from a distance, an unstoppable rage of rags emerging from the gloom. It's reminiscent of how Lawrence Gordon Clark directed the approaching Ager's ghost in 1972's Ghost Story for Christmas, A Warning to the Curious.

Sarah discovers a huge, brilliant white city (beautifully designed), lit intermittently by a pulsing light beacon on top, and Blyton's regal score for the city is gorgeous too. The walls of the city glow when Sarah touches them (including some hieroglyphs which appear to spell the name "DAVE"!), but it's not long until she's captured by a lurking Exxilon and taken to their caves to be sacrificed. The Exxilon faces (masks designed by John Friedlander) are really gruesome too, like cadaverous zombies with huge, staring eyes. These Nosferatu monks are seriously scary monsters for younger viewers, and Blyton's chanting score is magnificent. It's all so Hammer horror! When the high priest intones: "Prepare her for sacrifice", and the Exxilons all start chanting "ooo-aaah! ooo-aaah!" like crazed beasts, that's when I'm convinced this is one of the scariest episodes of Doctor Who ever.

Meanwhile, the Doctor meets up with some cut-out-and-keep Terry Nation space explorers from the bizarrely named Marine Space Corps (what's marine about them?), who are on Exxilon to mine for the mineral parrinium (which I initially misheard as perineum!). Parrinium is as rare as hen's teeth on Earth, but common on Exxilon, and they need it to treat millions of Earth colonists before they die from an aggressive disease which has already wiped out thousands on the outer worlds. The MSC crew is made up of mortally wounded Commander Stewart, his deputy Captain Railton, Lieutenants Hamilton and Galloway, and civilian geologist Jill Tarrant, not forgetting the surname-less Jack, who we saw killed in the opening scene. It's good to have a Tarrant in the story, a name which Terry Nation seemed to particularly covet, as he used it over and again in his work (Blake's 7's Del and Dev, and the 1977 Dalek Annual's Cal).

Suddenly, what the MSC think is their relief ship comes into land, but I could tell straight away that it wasn't the ship they were hoping for because it looks like a saucepan. Saucepan spaceships are Dalek ships, as seen previously in Planet of the Daleks. The ramp lowers, and the silvery Daleks glide out, which is no big surprise as we've known the Daleks are going to turn up from the moment we saw the story's title! The Daleks open fire on our heroes, and I really wish Briant had cut away from the clearly ineffective Dalek gunsticks much quicker, because it's obvious there's no deadly laser beam coming out. It spoils what would otherwise be a quite good cliffhanger.

As you might have guessed, I adore Death to the Daleks part 1. It's scary, eerie, spooky and atmospheric, and boasts some of the finest design and lighting expertise of the 1970s. And I love Carey Blyton's score too, although I suspect there's a certain phrase which will begin to grate on me as the story wears on (it usually accompanies the Daleks, heard for the first time at the end of part 1).

First broadcast: February 23rd, 1974

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: The scene where Sarah is trapped inside the TARDIS with an Exxilon is nerve-shredding.
The Bad: The cutting between location and studio is a little jarring.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★★★★★★

"Now listen to me" tally: 32
Neck-rub tally: 15

NEXT TIME: Part Two...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Part Two; Part Three; Part Four

Find out birth/death dates, career information, and facts and trivia about this story's cast and crew at the Doctor Who Cast & Crew site: http://doctorwhocastandcrew.blogspot.com/2014/06/death-to-daleks.html

Death to the Daleks is available on BBC DVD. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Death-Daleks-DVD/dp/B007EAFV58/