N.B. there might (or might not) be spoilers in this article!
At times Planet of the Daleks feels like a lacklustre cover version: most of the original notes are there but somehow the magic isn’t.
A creepy jungle, Thals helping the Doctor’s companion to recover from illness, invisible aliens, a two-pronged attack on a Dalek city, even a Thal falling for Jo – these all serve to remind you of classic First Doctor tales such as The Daleks and The Daleks’ Master Plan. And it’s not necessarily a bad thing that this story retreads the tropes of those earlier Dalek stories – this was an anniversary season after all – but after a trademark moody first episode from Terry Nation it’s not quite the epic conclusion to Frontier in Space you’d hoped for.
“Daleks here?”
Jo Grant, Planet of the Daleks: Episode Two
It’s probably why, with one minor exception, I remembered absolutely nothing about Planet of the Daleks, making it the blankest of blank spots in my Doctor Who memory for quite some time. (The exception? The Doctor’s apparent surprise at seeing the Daleks on Spirodon even though that’s who he’s been chasing. Even Jo seems puzzled by the Daleks’ presence!)
Indeed it takes until Episode Four for the Doctor and Jo to re-unite and for the Doctor to explain how this all links to Frontier in Space. Either it’s a backup plan or it was the plan all along to invade, but plot-wise that’s about it for linking the two stories (the Master having conveniently disappeared when the going got tough). It could be argued that the Doctor’s anti-war caution in the final episode at least ties them together thematically, but perhaps more obviously so than The Daleks’ Master Plan (which also had two main writers), as a twelve-parter, this is very much your classic game-of-two-halves.
“Somewhere on this planet there are ten thousand Daleks!”
Rebec, Planet of the Daleks: Episode Two
In a way Planet of the Daleks might have been better if this had been the Daleks’ return instead of their being grafted onto Day as the Daleks. Turning up at the end of Frontier in Space after six years’ absence would’ve been a huge surprise and might have mitigated some of Planet‘s failings.
Finally, despite his coming across as the most rounded of the Thal characters here, it would be remiss of me to ignore Taron’s outrageous guilt-trip claim that it would be Rebec’s fault if they failed in their mission. It’s not quite the whole women-shouldn’t-be-on-the-battlefield-distracting-men-folk argument (clearly Taron and Rebec are an item back on Skaro) – but still, what a sh*t!
That aside, the planet itself is very green, which leads us nicely on to …
"Where did the Master go? I really wanted him to show up in the second half of the story."
"This story should have been called Army of the Daleks (not Planet of the Daleks) because the Daleks are getting ready for war on Spirodon, not Skaro – their home planet."
Son of UT Rating: 8/10
