The Chase Daleks Invasion Earth 2150 AD Venusian Lullaby |
BBC The Dalek Invasion of Earth |
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| Episodes | 6 |  |
| Story No# | 10 | |
| Production Code | K | |
| Season | 2 | |
| Dates | Nov. 21, 1964 - Dec. 26, 1964 |
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With William Hartnell, William Russell,
Jacqueline Hill, Carole Ann Ford. Written by Terry Nation. Script-edited by David Whitaker. Directed by Richard Martin. Associate Producer: Mervyn Pinfield. Produced by Verity Lambert. |
| Synopsis: The Daleks return as masters of Earth in the 22nd century, crushing a small band of resistance fighters and capturing the Doctor. |
A Review by Paul Williams 2/3/19
The second story featuring the Daleks is much stronger the first, inspired by the second world war rather than the threat of nuclear conflict. The Bedfordshire camp and the treatment of the humans resembles Auschwitz, and, as the Daleks talk of the final solution, you are encouraged to make the Nazi comparison. Pitted against them is the spirit of the blitz epitomised in Dortmund. This time Terry Nation excels in characterisation, bringing the rebels to life as individuals and giving the regulars plenty of action. Susan's romance with David is nicely plotted, and the Doctor's farewell speech is magnificent.
The problem is the Daleks themselves. Visually, they look more sophisticated and impress when patrolling through occupied London. Such scenes make a mockery of the Doctor's claim that their demise on Skaro is millions of years in the future, until you realise how stupid they are. One rises from the Thames where it had no reason to be. Then they leave a convoluted intelligent test in the saucer cell, to identify the Doctor as someone suitable for robotization and almost immediately proceed to robotize the less intelligent Craddock. They spend ages making a big hole in the earth for an explosive to release the molten core, then fail to protect both the device and the base before being easily defeated. Barbara and Jenny demonstrated how easy it was to control the Robomen, so the Daleks, instead of exterminating them, leave them imprisoned and unsupervised in the same room.
Nation attempts to keep the Daleks in the background, but the Slyther and alligator, whilst adding to the sense of danger, are, like the Robomen, ineffective substitutes. The Daleks missed their opportunity to dominate.
A Dalek Britain by Matthew Kresal 22/12/20
In my review of The Reign of Terror, I noted how Classic Doctor Who rarely engaged in the big end of seasons tales that Modern Who does. If you want proof of that, look no further than the second story of its second season. The Dalek Invasion of Earth is a story that has all the hallmarks not only of those modern finales but of the best tales of the Hartnell era.
That's something down mainly to the sheer scope of the piece. For perhaps the first time in the show's run, there's a genuine sense of an epic feel to proceedings. The Doctor and companions take viewers on a journey across a Dalek-occupied Britain of the 22nd century (even if it looks suspiciously like the 1960s at times). We get to learn of the Dalek onslaught via not only dialogue but get to see it first hand in a series of extensive film sequences shot on location. The best of these are in episodes three and four, with Barbara, along with members of the resistance, trying to escape London as Daleks patrol around various landmarks. Those sequences, and the first-episode cliffhanger, have become iconic and deservedly so in the eyes of this 21st-century viewer.
While the series had pushed to do big scale stories before (particularly with the likes of Marco Polo or The Keys of Marinus), this is the one where it feels like they finally figured out how to do it right. There's the aforementioned location filming, but also how director Richard Martin and designer Spencer Chapman push and often strive against the limits of the multi-camera studio. Even the use of stock footage in places serves the story well when it shifts to the Bedfordshire mine. True, those effect sequences of the Dalek saucer aren't up to much, so much so that it's all too easy to understand why the DVD release has the option to look at some nicely done replacement shots, but that's a small flaw in an otherwise well-made serial.
That it works as well as it does is how grounded it is. Yes, this is a science fiction story with Daleks, Robomen and a weird alien known as a Slyther roaming around as a kind of guard dog. For all of that, the trappings and tropes at play owe less to 1950s sci-fi than to the Second World War. For make no mistake, this is Terry Nation channeling those fears from 25 years before of a Nazi invasion of Britain.
And it's not even done subtley. The way the Daleks insist "WE ARE THE MASTERS OF EARTH", their propaganda broadcasts, the slave labor at the mines, to the use of "the final solution" to describe their ultimate objective in the concluding installment all bear this out. Elsewhere, there are plenty more tropes of Second World War fiction on display, from the resistance members the TARDIS crew encounter, their leader Dortmun's Churchillian speeches, to the black-marketeer Ashton. Even the women in the woods who betray Barbara and Jenny to the Daleks for better treatment, justifying their actions by telling themselves they would have been caught anyway, echoes stories from across Nazi-occupied Europe during the war.
Terry Nation wasn't the first writer to explore the idea of Hitler's Britain, of course. Noel Coward's Peace in Our Time was among the earliest works, written and performed in the immediate aftermath of the war. Also being made around the same time was the pioneering independent film It Happened Here, which likewise features sequences of young men in Nazi uniforms marching around many of the same landmarks we see in episode three. Other works would follow, among the most notable being Len Deighton's thriller SS-GB but The Dalek Invasion of Earth is notable not only for being among the earliest works but also for how it put a particular genre based spin on events.
Lastly, there's a significant first here, one that brings us back around to Modern Who: a companion exit. The last ten minutes or so of the final episode deal with Susan's departure, the Doctor leaving her behind to help rebuild this post-invasion world. It's a beautifully handled sequence, well played by both Hartnell and Carole Ann Ford, the grandfather saying goodbye to his granddaughter. Its effectiveness is helped by the way that the relationship between Susan and a young man named David Campbell is built into the story throughout, setting the stage wonderfully for what would follow. There would be companion exits throughout Classic Who but rarely handled as well as this one was, as evidenced by the likes of Dodo's exit in The War Machines and Leela's departure after The Invasion of Time. Indeed, this sequence would set the stage for the departures we've seen throughout Modern Who from Rose in Doomsday to the many (and finally overwrought) departures of Clara in the Moffat era. All of them, the best and the worst across nearly sixty years, have their basis in what viewers first saw on Boxing Day 1964.
If you only ever watch one Hartnell story, you could do a lot worse than watch The Dalek Invasion of Earth. It is, hands down, one of the best stories of this era. It's also a notable gamechanger for the series, bringing back a monster for the first time, telling its first alien invasion story, and featuring the first companion exit. It deserves it's status based on any one of those reasons but, to the credit of all involved, it's also a cracking story to boot.
And that makes it a rare beast, indeed.