In keeping with the new style that producer Philip Hinchcliffe seems to be adopting, this is a brutal story. It looks dirty and dangerous, and there's not a friendly face to be found in the entire first episode (Time Lord messenger excepted). The decision to primarily use realistic projectile guns and recognizable weapons (such as landmines) also adds to this bleak atmosphere. (Although you do get the chance to finally see the Drahvins' guns in color, a mere ten years after Galaxy 4.) And the landmine sequence may be pure padding, but at least it's well-played, tense padding. The rest of the episode serves as a series of captures, escapes, and recaptures, but it's done well enough that you don't really mind.
But what's really happening here is that Terry Nation has decided to go back to the beginning and tell the story of how the Daleks came to be. What's perhaps most surprising is how closely this sticks to the history described in The Daleks -- the biggest change is that the name of the Dalek progenitors is now Kaled instead of Dal. Everything else serves as expanding that story. But the biggest introduction is the crippled scientist Davros, creator of the Daleks (sorry, Yarvelling). Time has robbed us a bit of the impact of seeing him for the first time, his lower half encased in a Dalek-looking base. And the cliffhanger gives us our first look at a Dalek -- a time-honored tradition on Doctor Who, but one that actually makes sense in this context.
There is no recap of any kind in part two (which you could tell if you were watching the omnibus edition, as I first did, because the end of the title music suddenly intruded) because they've got to get right to it. While there's some more stuff with the Dalek and introducing it to the Kaled scientists (which leads to some of them becoming concerned with the direction of the Dalek project and thus deciding to help the Doctor and Harry), the primary point of part two is to show the Thal side of things. What's most striking here is that we see the Thals are just as brutal and amoral as the Kaleds, taking prisoners and forcing them to do dangerous work at gunpoint. So Sarah and her fellow prisoners are forced to load toxic distronic explosives (which the story treats as a form of radiation) into a rocket designed to completely wipe out the Kaleds. Both sides are apparently willing to do whatever it takes to end this thousand-year war. As Sarah doesn't want to die from distronic toxaemia, however, she leads an escape attempt to climb the scaffolding next to the rocket and climb out the top of the dome. Things don't go well, though, and the cliffhanger to part two shows Sarah losing her grip and falling from the scaffolding, ending with a freeze-frame. How is she going to get out of this one?
85 As we'll see next story, the Doctor never does return to Nerva to tell them that the transmat is working again. So what does Vira think when neither he nor his friends ever return? Do the surviving Galsec people transmat up at some point?
86 There aren't a lot of fluffs from Tom Baker (there are some bad ad libs, but that's not the same thing), so this line is probably the closest we get, and even then it takes a minute for the problem to sink in.