An Hour of Who a Day: 07/04/14

July 4: Death to the Daleks Parts Three & Four

Thank goodness for Arnold Yarrow. His performance as Bellal the friendly Exxilon is easily the best thing about this story, as he approaches everything with a child-like sense of wonder that Yarrow makes impressively physical, with small gestures and head movements.

Sadly, the rest of the episode (while still more entertaining than the previous two) isn't quite up to snuff. There's a strange moment where the Doctor cheers on a City probe attacking a Dalek, which he then follows up with a lame joke to Sarah about it. ("The root won. Dalek, nil.") And, as we saw in Frontier in Space, wires show up so much more easily on film than on video, so what should have been an impressive shot of a City probe rising out of the water to attack the Exxilons and Daleks working nearby is marred by the all-too-obvious wires holding it up. And there's also the matter of the Exxilon who apparently burns to death while standing in a lake.

It's also worth mentioning Terry Nation's curious decision to add some von Danikenism to the story, by having the Exxilons previously visiting Earth and showing the Incans how to build things. The really odd thing about this, beyond the fact that The Dæmons had already mined this topic pretty well, is how little it connects to anything else in the story. It's mentioned as proof that the Exxilons were traveling the galaxy a long time ago, and of course ancient humans needed alien help to build things, and that's it. The Doctor doesn't, for instance, use the similarities of the carvings here and in Peru to help deduce how to get through a door or anything like that. It's just brought up and then abandoned.

In contrast, the stuff with the logic puzzles in the City isn't bad, and the presence of the Daleks advancing behind the Doctor and Bellal helps add to the sense of tension. Still, it does lead to possibly the worst cliffhanger ever, as the Doctor suddenly stops Bellal from treading on a bit of red-and-white tiling. This is apparently because part three underran fairly significantly and they had to make an artificial cliffhanger (the original one was allegedly the shot of the Daleks appearing as the Doctor works out how to get inside the City). Nevertheless, it's still an incredibly weak ending.

Part four is the best of the bunch, because here things are happening at a suitably exciting clip. The Doctor and Bellal's journey gives us some nice effects and a bit of psychological tension (the part where Bellal is going to shoot the Doctor), while there's a nice bit of fun with Sarah and Jill creating decoy bags of parrinium for the Daleks to load up before escaping -- although this leads to the bizarre moment where the overseer Dalek, having discovered that Jill has escaped, cries "Human female has escaped. I have failed! Female prisoner has escaped! I have failed! I have failed! Self destruct! I have failed! Destruct!" etc.⁸¹, rather than just going after her to get her back and/or exterminate her.

Once the Doctor and Bellal reach the heart of the City, though, it's just a matter of the Doctor performing some technical jiggery-pokery to kill off the City -- and having Hamilton and Galloway plant a bomb on the pillar supporting the beacon and then blowing it up doesn't help the City out much either, one suspects. Then it's back out of the City to watch it destroy itself and for the Daleks to depart, after informing our heroes that they're the ones who caused the plague on the outer worlds in the first place and they're going to do the same thing to Exxilon. But before they can, Galloway blows them up with a bomb he hid on board.

In some respects, this story is the opposite of the last one. There, a strong script was thwarted by fairly pedestrian direction and lackluster model work. Here, we have some interesting directorial choices (the Dalek point-of-view shots are a good example) and a reasonable amount of care being put into the costumes and sets, but it's all at the mercy of a script that frequently feels more like it's going through the motions rather than trying to do something different or interesting -- to the point where even the title (allegedly chosen by Robert Holmes, who hated the Daleks) can't hide its contempt. It also doesn't help how visibly bored Pertwee is by all this. Despite the best efforts of Michael Briant and his team, Death to the Daleks ultimately feels very uninvolving.

⁸¹ The Matt Smith story Asylum of the Daleks mentions that part of the Dalek asylum contains Daleks that survived encounters with the Doctor, and Exxilon is name-checked during this sequence. Based on the on-screen evidence here, this Dalek is the most likely candidate to have survived to be taken to the asylum. Ponder that for a moment.