Although the first story in Doctor Who was decent, it didn't attract much viewer interest. This was partially because it debuted the day after John F. Kennedy's assassination, and was therefore overshadowed by world news. But it was also because audiences hadn't had the opportunity to really see much sci-fi in the show.
This all changed with the introduction of the Daleks. Although the original creators wanted to avoid stereotypical "bug-eyed aliens" and robots, the Daleks were introduced as early villains while the show tried to gain its footing. Although executives feared it would doom the show, it had the opposite effect, creating "Dalekmania" and bringing a new level of interest to the series.
Ironically, the Daleks may well be the only reason Doctor Who was able to last long enough to find its groove. The second serial, "The Daleks," introduced the iconic villains over seven episodes, titled: "The Dead Planet," "The Survivors," The Escape," "The Ambush," "The Expedition," "The Ordeal," and "The Rescue." These episodes aired from December 21, 1963, through February 4, 1964.
"The Daleks" Plot
The second serial picks up right where "The Firemaker" left off, with the Doctor and the other time travelers escaping the cavemen and traveling to a new planet. Susan checks the radiation detector, which reads as normal, but it quickly increases as soon as she walks away.
It's the humans' first trip away from Earth, and while the Doctor is fascinated, Ian and Barbara just want to go back home. They explore the petrified jungle for a little while, eventually finding a highly advanced, yet desolate, city. Everyone talks the Doctor into waiting to explore until the morning, and they head back to the TARDIS.
However, Susan stopped to pick a flower, which separated her from the others. Something touches her shoulder, terrifying her, but nobody else believes that anything could live there. While on board the TARDIS, there is a knocking sound at the door, seemingly proving that there is life on the planet. This makes the others desperate to leave, but the Doctor says the TARDIS can't take off without them filling the fluid link with mercury.
The inability to leave prompts them to go back outside. There's now a box of glass vials outside the door, which they put inside the TARDIS before making their way to the city. The group splits up to look for mercury, and Barbara ends up lost in a building full of corridors and doors. Ian realizes that she's missing, and the camera cuts to a creature approaching Barbara as she screams.
As the rest of the group goes looking for Barbara, they learn that the planet is dangerously irradiated, which has begun giving them symptoms of radiation sickness. This prompts the Doctor to admit that nothing was actually wrong with the TARDIS, saying they should go back and leave. But Ian won't go until they find Barbara.
As they exit the room to look for her, they run into the Daleks. Ian tries to escape, but they paralyze his legs and bring all three to the containment cell where Barbara was taken. The Daleks speak with the Doctor privately, believing he is one of the other species living on the planet: the Thals.
The Daleks believe that the Thals have found a way to be immune to the radiation, a skill they desperately want. Currently, they are trapped underground because of the pollution on the surface. They make a deal with the time travelers, agreeing to let one of them go back to the TARDIS to get the glass vials, which they believe are medicine for the radiation. The others will be kept as collateral.
While Ian insists that he should be the one to go, the TARDIS has too many safeguards. Susan plans to go with him, but when his legs don't heal in time, she is sent out on her own. When she gets to the TARDIS, she meets a member of the Thals named Alydon, who wants to make sure she knows how to use the medicine. She tells him about the Daleks, and he gives her a second set of medicine, warning her to keep it hidden so they can treat themselves.
Although the Daleks do find the extra medicine, they allow her to keep it in the hopes that she can forge an alliance between them and the Thals. Susan writes a letter to start the negotiations but then realizes that the Daleks have been spying on them. They stage a fight between Ian and the Doctor to break the cameras and give them the opportunity to plan their escape.
They successfully theorize that the Daleks must be connected to metal at all times, so when a Dalek comes to check on them, they cover its eye stalk with mud and push it onto a jacket, immediately deactivating it. After removing the being that was inside the metal shell, Ian climbs inside and they leave the cell.
Ian impersonates the Dalek, claiming that he is taking the others for questioning. This works long enough for them to get to a lift, but then the other Daleks find out and set off an alarm. Ian gets stuck inside the Dalek shell, urging the others to leave without him, but he does manage to escape before the Daleks blow it up.
The group manages to escape, but it's at precisely the same time that the Thals come to get food from the Daleks. Alydon is worried that the Daleks might be tricking them, but the leader of the Thals urges him to approach the Daleks with open friendship. Susan and Barbara want to warn them about the Daleks' planned ambush, but the Doctor wants to leave. They compromise by having Ian warn the Thals while the others get back to the TARDIS.
Ian's warning comes too late, and the leader of the Thals is killed by the Daleks. However, the others get away, where they strategize with the time travelers. The Thals can't understand the Daleks' behavior, and the group is horrified by how pacifistic the Thals have become. The Doctor insists that they leave the Thals to their fate, and the others reluctantly agree.
However, the Doctor's lie comes back to hurt them again, because Ian lost the fluid link during the escape. They realize they'll have to go back to the city to find it, which prompts them to push the Thals to fight. Ian tries provoking them, first by threatening to give the Daleks all of the Thals' historical records, and then by threatening to use Dyoni, a Thal woman, as a bartering chip. Alydon punches Ian, proving that they are still capable of fighting.
Meanwhile, the Daleks are having some trouble with the radiation sickness medicine. They had begun distributing it, but those who were given the first doses started to lose their minds and die. Theorizing that it's because the Daleks are now dependent on radiation to survive, they consider setting off another neutron bomb.
They test their radiation theory on the surviving treated Daleks, who quickly begin improving. With that evidence, they decide it's time to irradiate the outside environment so the Daleks can thrive outside their city.
While the Daleks plan the genocide of the Thal people, they are having a moral crisis in the aftermath of Alydon's physical violence. Eventually, Alydon decides that they have to help Ian and the others because they will surely die if they go alone. The group splits up, with half distracting the Daleks while the other half tries to infiltrate the city by passing through a lake full of mutated creatures.
Barbara, Ian, and half of the Thals find a set of pipes, which seem to suggest that the water from the lake goes directly to the city. However, one of the Thals is killed by a lake mutant and another dies while trying to cross a gap in the system of caves beyond the lake.
Meanwhile, the Doctor and Susan work with the other Thals to distract the Daleks. They block the Daleks' surveillance system and manage to short-circuit much of the Daleks' power, but Susan and the Doctor are captured. There, they learn about the Daleks' plan to "exterminate" the Thals by sending radiation into the atmosphere.
In order to keep them from destroying the planet and its people, the Doctor offers the TARDIS to the Daleks, explaining that he will be happy to help them make their own so they can go anywhere they want. In response, they say that they will take the TARDIS after he and everybody else die.
Finally, Ian's team makes it through the caves into the city. This sends the Daleks into a panic, and they start the countdown for the radiation. But the others are too much for them, throwing rocks and manhandling their bodies. The group manages to fully knock out the power, which makes the Daleks start dying. They beg for help "or it will be the end of the Daleks," but the Thals and time travelers leave them to die. (As we all know, it's far from the last time the Daleks will appear on Doctor Who)
After defeating the Daleks, it's time for the time travelers to go back home. The Thals ask the Doctor to stay and help them, but he refuses. He says that he never gives advice but might come back in a few centuries to check up on them. One of the Thals, Ganatus, has had a flirtation with Barbara for most of the serial, and he wants her to stay. She kisses him but goes back into the TARDIS, still intent on returning home.
As they begin to fly away, the TARDIS shudders, knocking them all to the ground and setting up the next episode.
Overall Review
Despite being such an important episode for the overall lore of Doctor Who, "The Daleks" is not a great story. There are entire episodes that can be (and were) explained in just one or two sentences, suggesting that it was stretched out far longer than it needed to be. More than that, the characters had weak motivations, getting into trouble for silly reasons rather than ones that fit the plot or characters.
Ian calls himself "a very unwilling adventurer," and he's the most active member of their party. That's never a good sign, but helps to illustrate where the episode failed. Susan's first encounter with the Thals comes because she's obsessed with picking a flower, and while the Doctor's determination to get his way is a worthwhile reason to stay once, it gets boring seeing the lack of a fluid link stop them from leaving twice.
More than that, the characters failed to develop much in this story. Ian sees himself as the brave hero, but despite that not working out well on numerous occasions, he continues to try it as often as possible. The Doctor was largely irrelevant to the story after he forced them to go to the city, first knocked out by the radiation poisoning and then simply off-screen most of the time.
Susan is by far the worst in this episode, as her character tended to swing between being mildly flirtatious toward Alydon and crying. When she had to go to the TARDIS alone, she literally sobbed the whole way there. When Ian got trapped in the Dalek shell, she flew into hysterics. While she made a few clever moves when with the whole group, Susan was mostly just there to heighten the melodrama.
This is particularly frustrating because it feels disingenuous for her character. She's from the same place as the Doctor, with incredible intelligence, but she is the last choice to go to the TARDIS, despite being the least impacted by the radiation and the most knowledgeable about the TARDIS (other than the Doctor). Later, she seems to trust Alydon exclusively because he is handsome. It may have been another time, but it's hard to connect with a character who is such a bad stereotype.
Surprisingly, Barbara is given the most character development, although even that isn't much. She goes with Ian to the swamp, and he says that he wouldn't have been able to stop her from coming if he tried. It's a bit of a surprising comment, given that she wasn't particularly brave in "The Unearthly Child," but it's proven true. She is stubborn, a trait which presents itself clearly when she repeatedly commits to helping the Thals and stopping the Daleks.
It's frustrating enough that the main characters have so little useful development, but the plot overall feels weak, particularly when trying to set up stakes. The Daleks decide to kill them multiple times, but they never actually try to, even when the Doctor and Susan are actively working against them. They are capable of paralyzing people, if they didn't want to kill them, but instead put their captives in wall cuffs. Finally, they decide to start the radiation process, but it needs to slowly count down from 100 before actually doing anything.
Perhaps I need to just accept the story as it is, rather than as I'd like it to be, but the serial just isn't very well structured. There are far too many scenes that feel like filler, and neither the main characters nor the villains act on the capabilities or motivations that were set up in previous episodes. I wouldn't recommend "The Daleks" as an enjoyable story unless someone was specifically interested in the history of Doctor Who.
Commentary in the context of modern Doctor Who
While I was admittedly very harsh on this serial from an outside perspective, it would be hard to deny how significant it is for the world of Doctor Who. The Daleks are some of the series' most iconic villains, and plenty of fans will enjoy seeing where they came from.
To start with, let's talk about Skaro. According to "The Daleks," there was a war between the Dals and the Thals, which ended when a neutron bomb was set off. This killed off most of the population, with those who survived suffering from mutations. The Dals, originally teachers and philosophers, hid underground in metal shells, turning into the infamous Daleks. The Thals, originally a warrior tribe, continued living on the surface, farming, and approaching life with pacifism.
What they were like before the war is a bit complex. Ian makes a few comments about humanity, and the lack of confusion from the Thals seems to imply that both groups were originally human. Based on records that the Doctor finds, the Thals mutated in such a full circle that they look the same as they did before the war, which adds more evidence to the theory that Skaro was originally populated by humans.
One thing that is a bit troublesome with that idea is that the Thals are presented as pretty much Hitler's perfect Aryan ideal. They are incredibly homogenous in appearance, which is either a sign that the show's creators were racist and stuck to what they found as the most attractive version of humanity or that, in-world, all non-white people were wiped out. Either way, it's a bit disturbing seeing futuristic humans as universally blonde or hate robots.
Turning back to the Daleks, the time travelers learned that they use static electricity as a power source, which requires them to always be touching metal. This is obviously something that is changed in future versions, as modern Doctor Who shows them on all kinds of surfaces, as well as flying. However, their general appearance is pretty much identical to what fans know today, and their penchant for extermination is present from the very beginning.
Audiences also get a bit more information about the TARDIS. For one thing, it has a machine that creates small bars that imitate the flavor of any food a person could think of. This explains how the travelers stay fed on the ship, and provides an interesting sci-fi idea of how food will be consumed in the future. Sadly, this is not around anymore by the time the show was revived in 2005.
Another major difference in TARDIS lore is how it is opened. Modern fans know that there is a TARDIS key, but it seems to be as simple as taking the key from a companion to get into the ship. Not so in the beginning. According to Susan, there are actually 21 different keyholes to choose from, and choosing the wrong one results in the entire lock melting and trapping everyone outside. That's definitely more secure than the modern version, although one has to wonder how the machines even still exist since there's no real way to undo the fail-safe.
Finally, there was a comment made about war that I felt was worth mentioning from a character's perspective. The time travelers try to make the Thals go to war against the Daleks, to which Alydon responds by saying, "This was once a great world, full of ideas and art and invention. In one day it was destroyed. And you will never find one good reason why we should ever begin destroying everything again."
That is such a brilliant line, and it lines up perfectly with how the Doctor sees war in the modern era. His speech in "The Zygon Inversion" is an extended version of this concept. But when the Thals say it, they're mocked. All of the time travelers see it as proof that they're cowardly or weak. It's wild to think about how much the Doctor changed to come around to this idea, as well as how different the writers' perspectives were.
Overall Rating: 6.5/10. This is worth watching for die-hard Doctor Who fans, but there are better episodes if you want to enjoy a conflict between the Daleks and the Doctor. The story is full of fluff and plot conveniences, which makes it hard to commit to the 3.5 hours it takes to watch it.