'Doctor Who: Planet of the Daleks' (1973)



If you can remember all the way back to last week (I can but only because I scrolled down the blog until I found what I needed...), you'll remember that I was going on about the 'Dalek Omnibus' book that I had, as a child, and how I had this urge to go and watch the TV serials that the novelisations were based upon. Well, I'm going for it! Last week was all about 'Day of the Daleks' and now, thanks to eBay, today is going to be all about 'Planet of the Daleks'. You might have to wait a little while until 'The Dalek Invasion of Earth' though, lets see how the post holds up under what's going on out there...
It also gives me a little chance to get to see more of Jon Pertwee's Third Doctor. I've been watching 'Doctor Who' for almost as long as I've been alive but there is still so much that I haven't seen. I'm not too bad as far as anything from the last couple of fourth Doctor stories onwards, anything before that though... I may have read the book but it's very likely that I've never seen it on the TV. I like what I've seen of Jon Pertwee's Doctor, so far, so lets crack on and see how he does here, shall we...?

Following the events of 'Frontier in Space' (which again, I've never seen but you do get the last few minutes of that in the first episode of 'Planet of the Daleks' so it all ties together nicely) the Doctor is barely able to send a telepathic message to the Time Lords before he falls into a coma, leaving Jo at the mercy of wherever the Time Lords are sending the Tardis to. That turns out to be the planet Spirodon, where both the flora and the fauna are so ravenous that the Spirodon people have developed the ability to become invisible. Is that the only reason why a team of Dalek scientists have come to Spirodon though? Together with a team of Thal soldiers, the Doctor and Jo will find out that there is a lot more to Spirodon than there looks. You see, somewhere on the planet are ten thousand Daleks...

Invisible Daleks? How cool would that be? Well, maybe it will be cool one day but today is not that day... You only get to 'see' the one invisible Dalek here and it's malfunctioning because Daleks and invisibility don't get on all that well, or 'at all' really. Maybe another time.
Luckily for us then, 'Planet of the Daleks' is a surprisingly tense affair. I say 'surprisingly' as in the seventies, people were really up against it in terms of building sets that would help the viewers suspend disbelief and get into what they were watching. 'Planet of the Daleks' is no exception... If there's any chance of a Dalek's head wobbling while it talks then it will and that's only the tip of the iceberg as far different camera shots of the same bit of jungle and it being horribly obvious that the Dalek army are all toys go... But despite all that though, it works. I'll admit to having my eye open for the latest coronavirus update but that to one side, I was really invested in what happened here. Despite the wobbly set, I never felt that the stakes were anything less than really high, so what happened?

For me, it was the actors and how seriously they played it. When you've got someone really playing up how serious things are then it's easy to jump on board with that and be taken away into the story. Jon Pertwee's quiet and unflappable authority and Katy Manning really throwing her character behind what the Thal's are trying to achieve, that's what did it for me here. It wasn't just them though as the dynamic of the Thal team really threw up some interesting sub-plots to get behind with the loneliness of command (especially when you were never really trained for it) taking centre stage. There's so much here to get your teeth into, and that's before you start trying to deal with the hellish trek through a landscape that just wants to eat you.

So 'Planet of the Daleks' turned out to have a lot more to it than it looked like, to start off with, and ended up being quite the compelling story. Better than the book though? I don't know, my copy of 'The Dalek Omnibus' is long gone now so I guess I'll never know for sure. I had fun watching it so I'm happy and that's all that counts at the end of the day :o)

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