'Doctor Who: Death to the Daleks' (1974)


Even after getting rid of one hell of a load of books and DVDs, there are still plenty of both to keep me going up until Christmas at least (the DVDs that is, the books will keep me going well into the New Year). With that in mind, I thought I'd see how many 'Doctor Who' DVDs I can get through before Christmas. You'd think that would be easy but DVDs, in my flat, do have a habit of turning up in piles of books... We'll see how it goes.

First up is 'Death to the Daleks', a story that's a year and a bit older than I am and a story that was picked by my youngest daughter for me to watch last night. I might need to have a quiet word about her choices, 'Death to the Daleks' wasn't all that...

A power failure in the TARDIS throws it off the course , and the Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith end up stranded on the bleak planet of Exxilon. They soon meet members of an Earth expedition in a similar situation. The humans are searching for a rare mineral but first they must find out what is draining their power and avoid what's inside another grounded spaceship – the Doctor's worst enemies, the Daleks.

On the face of it, 'Death to the Daleks' looked like it had everything it needed to work. You've got Jon Pertwee's 'Action Doctor', Sarah Jane switching between needing to be rescued and doing the rescuing, Daleks and shadowy undergound action with aliens and an entire living city. You can't go wrong with that... can you? Well, you shouldn't be able to but somehow, 'Death to the Daleks' really didn't work for me

It just felt like a bit of a mess to be honest. You've got a schism in the indigenous people that you only get part of the story as the largest group of aliens do nothing but grunt. The human expedition know exactly what the Daleks are about yet somehow fail to do anything to guard against the inevitable betrayal. And that's an awful lot of wandering around inside the living city to cover off what is only a small part of the plot. An important part of the plot admittedly but I'd argue that it didn't need that much time spent on it.

And what was going on with the Doctor and Sarah Jane? I know the Doctor can be pretty egotistical, that's kin of the whole point of him, but I've never seen him be so patronising to a travelling companion as he was here. He was lucky that Sarah Jane didn't just wait in the TARDIS and leave him to it. The only group to come out of 'Death to the Daleks' with any credit at all were the Daleks themselves who lets be honest, just had to turn up and be Daleks. Which was just what they did and they did it pretty well.

I'm not sure what happened here but 'Death to the Daleks' started off with a bit of a promise but swiftly became something that I had on in the background while I made sure that my bank account balanced. Which it did, to the penny :o) You can't win em' all I suppose, I'm sure the next one I pick will be a lot better.

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