Wandering the Wastes a Little Too Long

I won’t deny, this was a hard watch. I like Doctor WhoThe longest running sci-fi franchise (at least in terms of sheer seasons), Doctor Who has seen cancelations, relaunches, and reboots, but the core of the series remains the same: a madman in a box traveling through time and space., but we’re two stories into the original run of episodes for the classic series and, man, this series is slow. We have to give the series some grace as it was still figuring itself out. It wasn’t just treading new ground on its own terms, but it was doing so for the whole genre. There weren’t many sci-fi shows like Doctor Who at the time it arrived, with the closest comparison I could even think of, Star Trek (aka The Original Series), not coming onto the scene for another three years (in 1966). So the creators for Doctor Who had to figure out what they were doing as they went along.

And they also really didn’t know the characters, storytelling style, or anything else for the series. Not yet anyway. The general rule for a show, especially one from before the age of streaming, was that the first six episodes were really part of the “pilot” run for the series. These first six episodes would repeat the same basic beats each time, letting audiences know the kind of series they were showing up for and what to expect. Shows really only started to break formula and explore themselves past their first six episodes. In the case of Doctor Who, we really need to extend that to the first six multi-part stories since these six would be iterating on the same ideas, over and over, until the series found its footing.

All of that is to say that despite this second story being foundational in many ways, especially because it establishes Doctor Who’s greatest villain, the Daleks, the story itself is actually kind of terrible. This is a very rough, very long, and at times quite tedious story made for a show that hadn’t yet figured out its pacing, or how to tell its deep and interesting stories on a shoe string budget. All of that would come with time, but it does this second official story for the whole franchise absolutely no favors.

As we saw at the end of the last story, “An Unearthly Child”, the Doctor and his crew landed on another planet, but this time they had no clue where or when they were. Since they hadn’t gathered samples from their previous stop, they had no bearings to know where they were for this stop. So they have to go out and explore, and what they find is a desolate, dead planet that seemingly went through some kind of cataclysm before the TARDIS’s arrival. Unfortunately for the Doctor, Susan, Barbara, and Ian, they missed the radiation dial on the ship suddenly spiking, meaning they didn’t know the kind of danger they were walking into.

As they explore the crew find a distant city. The Doctor wants to explore it, but Ian refuses, stating they should just take the ship and travel again. The Doctor then lies and says he needs to go to the city to fix a broken fluid regulator for the ship, and to fix it he has to get mercury. Grudgingly the rest of the crew follows, but as they explore around and get lost in the city they begin to succumb to the radiation sickness. Worse, they also encounter the Daleks, a race of robotic drones who capture the crew. The Daleks don’t trust the TARDIS crew, especially because they had just gone to war with their own humanoid citizens, the Thals, before the TARDIS arrived. All of these complications are going to pit the TARDIS crew against the Daleks in all out war before the adventure is over.

“The Daleks” is a weirdly long story. Functionally it has a pretty basic story, with the Daleks wanting to rid the world of the Thals while the Thals, a peaceful, farming community, simply want to be left alone so they can survive. Our crew gets introduced, then gets captured by the Daleks, escapes, then joins with the Thals before convincing them to fight and take on the Daleks for control of the planet. It’s a back and forth narrative that could easily be told in three or four short episodes, but instead this serial pads it out to seven episodes and you quickly feel every minute of it.

The early going isn’t bad, with the introduction of the world, the radiation, and the Daleks all moving along at a breezy enough pace. It’s once the crew escapes that the pace really slows down. The Thals simply aren’t interesting as characters, a group of humans all wearing the same costumes, none of whom want to fight and all of whom simply want to be left alone. It’s not that they’re wrong to want that, but when you have a race of evil pepper pots willing to nuke the whole world to get rid of you, you’d expect the Thals to be a little more motivated.

The back half of the story really suffers the most from how unengaging the Thals are. The story then mires us in a long run of episodes of everyone slowly going back to the city to invade and fight off the Daleks, which takes way too long to perform considering we were able to get to the city in the first episode in a matter of seconds. Watching the crew slowly work their way across the couple of sets of landscape over and over before then walking through the same few halls of a cavern system, all for them to finally get back to the same couple of halls of city set dressing… well, it gets very boring and very repetitive.

I get it, Doctor Who had almost no budget for these early episodes so they had to make do as they could. When a set was built they needed to use it as much as they could before tearing it down, so instead of building a planet for one or two episodes, they used it for seven. From a budgetary standpoint that makes perfect sense. But when you go and watch the episodes in a run you can’t help but notice all the seams, and feel all the budget constraints, as the show tries to tell an interesting story.

And the story is interesting at its core. The Daleks are iconic looking, and they’re very alien. Seeing them come on screen is a shock, especially the first time you’re ever exposed to them. And then hearing them talk about dropping nukes and irradiating the world certainly underlines their true, unrestrained evil. That would have gone double-so back in the 1960s when nuclear fear was still a very real thing. This is a solid parable about violence, warmongering, and the dangers of nuclear weapons, all wrapped up in a sci-fi setting, making for an effective monster story. It just struggles to remain engaging so many years later.

This is the danger with going back to an old work long after the era it was made in. I don’t know if this story could possibly have aged well, no matter its length, but certainly the seven episode run doesn’t help it at all. If it were two to three episodes shorter I think “The Daleks” would be a far more effective story. Certainly we’d be able to get to the meat of the tale quicker, and there would be faster action and less talking. But Doctor Who could do that back then… or simply didn’t know how at the time, so we get this longer, slower adventure that doesn’t quite hit the mark.

There’s no denying that “The Daleks” is a big creative swing for the series, and the creatures themselves left such an indelible mark on Doctor Who that they’ve been brought back again, and again, and again over the many years the series has continued. But as a piece of media you can go back and enjoy on its own, “The Daleks” has aged maybe a little too much. I’m glad I watched it, for historical purposes, but I don’t know that I’d be able to sit through it again.