Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 176: The Evil of the Daleks, Episode Seven

Dear diary,

I spent a fair bit of time during The Faceless Ones talking about the way Samantha Briggs was being set up as a companion, with a proper back story that served to show off all the aspects of her character – she was plucky, inquisitive, unafraid to dive right in to potential danger (she’d come all the way down from Liverpool, too, you know) and there was a real connection between her and Jamie. She was so very clearly the new companion… right up until the end of the story, at which point she wasn’t.

I’ve then spent plenty of time in this story actively waiting for the chance to show Victoria being signposted as the companion… but she isn’t, until the latter half of today’s episode – six after she was introduced. Victoria has come across as just a bit of a damsel in distress, and although much of the story has revolved around her (or, at least, around Jamie’s attempts to rescue her), she hasn’t really made much of an impact on me. Certainly, I couldn’t tell you very much about her character at all, whereas Sam Briggs was fully rounded by the time she kissed our highlander goodbye.

It’s surprising, then, that her being accepted onto the TARDIS as the new companion carries as much weight as it does. I’d forgotten that her father died during the course of this story, so his sacrifice to save the Doctor came as a pleasant surprise, and it was very movingly done. ‘You’ve just saved my life,’ the Doctor tells him. ‘It’s a good life to save,’ Waterfield replies, before asking the Doctor to look after Victoria for him. Jamie later muses that they can’t just leave Victoria (alone on Skaro, with her father and her best friend dead? I should think not!) and the Doctor confirms that she’s leaving with them. It’s a lovely moment, and oddly emotional, considering my lack of attachment to her up to now.

It’s odd to think that this is it (barring the odd cameo) for the Daleks until quite some way into the Third Doctor's era. They'll be absent from the series for the next five years, and absent from The 50 Year Diary for the next five months, rather fittingly returning for me just around the time of Doctor Who's 50th Anniversary. It was at this point Terry Nation started to really look at selling the Daleks as their own series, and this is probably the more logical placement for Daleks: The Destroyers to sit, but it felt like 'the final end' was a good point to leave the creatures on for now.

I wonder, though, what it would have been like if the Daleks hadn't turned up again to face off against Jon Pertwee? It's definitely true to say that without them, the programme wouldn't have gotten out of the First Season (possibly not even that first 13-episode commission), but by this point in time, it really has picked up it's own following, and losing the Daleks here and now possibly shows that they're not really needed for Doctor Who any more. Imagine a world in which the return of the Daleks, those pepper pot creatures from the 1960s were being revived for the new series as a slightly more obscure monster, in the same way the Macra and the Ice Warriors have been in recent years!

On the whole, I'm sad to say, The Evil of the Daleks hasn't been the barn-storming end to the Fourth Season that I was hoping for. The story's reputation within fandom has always been very high, but it really hasn't delivered for me. Lots of very nice moments, but it's felt like the Daleks leaving the series with more of a whimper than a bang, a real shame. I'm almost tempted to read the Target novel at the end of Series Five (when this serial was repeated on television) to see if I can improve my opinion on it - worth doing?

Aside from that, and The Highlanders, Season Four has been very strong. I've really loved it. I worries so much about these 'middle' seasons of the 1960s, since there was just so much missing, but it wasn't until after I'd finished with today's episode that I realised - we've not had a complete story all season! THat's about to be changed, with the release of The Tenth Planet and The Moonbase with animated episodes, but for me, every single story has been supplemented with the soundtracks. I think it's a testament to the season that it's managed to make such a great impression with so little visual material to go on.

But forget all that! We move onwards, and into Season Five! Not only that, it's my first complete Troughton story, and it's the classic tale I've always considered my favourite Doctor Who story. Little bit excited? You bet I am!

a

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 175: The Evil of the Daleks, Episode Six

Dear diary,

It’s very clear that we’ve got Roy Skelton on Dalek duties in this episode, isn’t it? At times, it sounds like Zippy’s gotten hold of a ring modulator! If anything, it actively helps to story – as if these child-like Daleks weren’t already unnerving enough, they’re speaking in the voice of a beloved children’s character. Fantastic stuff.

That whole opening scene, with the Daleks continuing to play their games with the Doctor, is absolutely brilliant, taking the great ending to the last episode and taking it even further. There’s something very unusual about the way that the Daleks slowly drawl the Doctor’s words back at him (though we get ‘Traaaaiiiiinnnn’ and ‘Dizzzzyyyyy’, I’m a little sorry that they didn’t attempt to copy ‘Roundabout’. I’ll have to make up for it by saying the word in a Dalek voice to myself for the rest of the day. Or to strangers on the street. Why not? Roundaboooouuuttttt…). The scene seems to keep getting creepier and creepier, until it’s drawn to a close when the Daleks ominously state ‘we must go now’. It’s said in a way that wouldn’t be out of place coming from a spooky child in a horror film, and really works.

I was starting to think that’s I’d never have a nice word to say about The Evil of the Daleks, so I’m really leased to find that things are more to my taste now. I was hoping that the shift over to Skaro would be a turning point for the story, and it seems that it has more or less coincided with this, so I’m happy. And it’s the first time that we’ve seen the Doctor travel back to an alien planet we’ve already been to! We’ve seen him return places before (He’d been to Dido in The Rescue, for example), but this is the first time that we’ve seen both of the trips to the planet (Hm? You what? Oh, all right then. Yeah yeah, we visited Kembel on two separate occasions in The Daleks' Master Plan. I'll give you that one, but as that was all part of one big adventure - spread across several different stories! - I'm discounting it. This is the first time we've seen him return to an alien planet in a completely different context.)

Years of being a Doctor Who fan means that I know full well how the sets look for this episode, with the stark black and white angles, and the Dalek Emperor sat in the corner, plugged into the city (the narration on the soundtrack nicely describes it as sitting at the centre of its ‘web’), but I can’t help picturing the stark, metal corridors of the original Dalek story – without the visuals to this episode, my mind has automatically gone back to what I consider to be the ‘default’ design.

There’s something quite brilliant about the Doctor facing up to the Dalek Emperor, who towers over him. He’s cool and confident, musing that he’d always wondered if the pair would ever meet. It put me instantly in mind of a similar scene, in which the Ninth Doctor steps out of the TARDIS and confronts another Dalek Emperor. In another similarity between this and The Parting of the Ways, the Doctor seems to issue spoilers for us, when he tells the Emperor that he’ll have a revolution on his hands pretty soon, once the new ‘humanised’ Daleks start to ask questions.

The main issue I have with all of this - and the reveal that while the Doctor thought he was isolating this ‘Human Factor’, he was actually helping to discover a ‘Dalek Factor’ – is that I’m not sure I care. Much as I love Alpha, Beta, and Omega, I’ve said before that I wasn’t really paying too much attention to the experiments that the Doctor was being forced to do, so it doesn’t feel like some massive shock revelation here. I’m hoping that won’t matter too much as we move into the final episode, which I already know is the much fabled ‘Final End’ of the Daleks (at least during the 1960s).

a

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 174: The Evil of the Daleks, Episode Five

Dear diary,

My favourite Beatles Album (Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band) was released in June 1967, while The Evil of the Daleks was being broadcast (between Episodes Two and Three, to be precise), and watching through the series in order, it's easy to draw some comparisons between the evolution of both the band, and Doctor Who's greatest foes. Although it's not as black and white as I'm about to paint it, I've always thought of the Beatles as being split into their early, very '1960s' stuff, and their later more abstract music.

Similarly, The Daleks have evolved since their earliest days in the series, and I think it's fair to say that they can be divided into the early stuff where they're just 'evil' pepper pots, who come along and invade/kill/shout a lot - essentially, every William Hartnell Dalek story. Or to put it another way, every Dalek story that Terry Nation had a real hand in - and the later Daleks who are more experimental: the two Whittaker stories.

They've not really had a massive presence in this story so far, and I don't think I'd have missed them had they not arrived until this episode in the narrative. Now that the story is shifting its focus back onto them, though, we're given that more abstract kind of Dalek scene that Whittaker is so good at - the episode closes on three Daleks playing a game. It sounds so simple, but it would have been unthinkable for the series to do something like this two years ago. Even the 'comedy' Daleks in The Chase ultimately get restored to shouting 'exterminate!' a lot and chase the Doctor and his companions.

This is the kind of cliffhanger that I've been waiting for from this story - one which takes the Daleks and does something interesting with them. Even when Power of the Daleks was left to show us a group of Daleks amassing an army, they did it on such a scale as to make a real impact. Cliffhangers like the one we had yesterday (two Daleks approach Jamie! Oh no!) just don't pack a punch any more, whereas this kind of thing is fantastic.

I think it's fair to say that the store has a whole has turned around a bit for me today - certainly I've been far more receptive to it. It helps that after several episodes in which we watch people move from 'A' to 'B' to 'C' and back again, things seem to be reaching a kind of point now. The idea of identifying the 'Human Factor' was introduced back in Episode Two, but it feels like so long since then that it had almost become irrelevant in my mind (Of course, it's the whole point of everything that has happened in Episodes Three, Four, and Five, but to my disconnected mind, I couldn't care less).

It might just be because I'm feeling more generous towards the episode, but I've picked up on a lot more sparkling dialogue today than in the rest of the story - it's the first time that I've written quite this many notes for a few days' There's obviously Troughton's speech about being a professor of a wide academy (of which human nature is merely a part), which has seeped into being one of those quotes you often see associated with the Doctor. There's also his discussion about the human emotions and how useful they can be, and his sheer delight when the Daleks push him around the room on a spiny chair. It's another thing I just can't imaging Hartnell's Doctor doing: for all his giggling and light-hearted moments, I can't imagine him being pushed around on a chair by a group of Daleks. Something about that image doesn't seem right in the way that picturing Troughton doing it does.

Perhaps my favourite dialogue from today's episode comes from the Doctor and Jamie's argument. I praised the earlier one they had in which the Doctor tricked Jamie into doing what he needed, but that one was partly play acting, at least on the Doctor's part. Today's argument is real, and you can tell from the way it's played. It's much lower-key than the earlier example, and it feels far more real. In many ways, it's reminiscent of the final scene of The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve, and there's a number of beats in both those arguments that are the same.

I didn't know that the Doctor and Jamie ever had a discussion like this - I always thought they spent all three years together as the absolute best of friends, with never a cross word between them, so it's brilliant to see that there's more to their relationship than all that, and to know that Jamie is capable of being fleshed out in such a way. 'Look, I'm telling you this - we're done, you and me. You're too callous for me,' Jamie tells his friend, and it ties in nicely with my thoughts about the Doctor being seen to manipulate his friend earlier in the story. As always, it's a little thing, but it really works.

I'm hoping that the goodwill I've built up over this episode is a good sign, and with another two to go I may yet figure out why this story is held in such high regard. It's good to know that we're three characters shorter now, as I have to confess I was starting to get a bit lost as to who was who. Now that we've got Daleks acting very differently, and the story seemingly headed somewhere, things are looking up…

a 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 173: The Evil of the Daleks, Episode Four

Dear diary,

How do you type that noise you make when you suck air in through your teeth? I’m genuinely not sure how to type this one today. All I’ve got written in my notes is ‘Jamie fights Kemel for the first five minutes’. After that, there just wasn’t really anything else that I felt compelled to write about. I’m so disappointed – this was supposed to be the great one! The big send off for the Daleks!

I think the thing that annoyed me the most was the cliffhanger. I spent every episode of The Power of the Daleks absolutely singing the praises of the episode endings. Every singe one felt new and fresh, taking the Daleks and making them scary in a way completely unlike anything we’d ever seen from them. Today’s cliffhanger involves Jamie reaching a door, while two Daleks trundle up behind him, guns at the ready.

At the end of Doctor Who’s fourth year, this just doesn’t hold up as a Dalek cliffhanger. We’ve seen them approaching people ready to kill in various forms ever since the fifth episode - and there we only see the plunger and Barbara from the Daleks point-of-view. Take away the thrill of not knowing what this strange thing could be, it’s still framed more interestingly than this one, at least judging from the tele snaps.

I think I was just expecting there to me a bit more to The Evil of the Daleks. Now, I’m not completely in the Dark, I know that at some stage the action will switch to Skaro, and we get a big destruction of the pepperpots, with (so I hear) pretty good integration of model work and studio footage – not that I can actually see it…. I know we’ve got a huge Dalek Emperor on the way, and I can only assume that this is what sets this story on such a high pedestal. It’s just that… I thought from reputation that we’d be getting a brilliant story from start to finish. Ah well, you can’t win them all, I guess.

I’ve always been more intrigued by the proposed notion of a Daleks vs Cybermen story from the 1960s. I know we eventually got one during the Tenth Doctor’s era, but there’s something about the idea of the 1960s versions of these creatures dueling it out that really appeals to me, and I can’t help but feel that I’d be enjoying it more than I currently am this one. I don’t think it’s helping that I know The Tomb of the Cybermen is coming up, and I’ve always thought of it as my favourite Doctor Who story, so this one just feels like a bit of an obstacle in my way!

Hm? Sorry? What do you mean you can feel a tenuous link on the way? I don’t know what you’re talking about.

…Knowing that this story was on the way, with its big old Dalek Emperor, I decided to pick up my (slightly battered) copy of The Dalek Chronicles on my last trip home. It’s a 1994 Doctor Who Magazine special, which reprints all of the Dalek comic strips from TV Century 21, in order from the start. I managed to grab a copy on Ebay years and years ago, but I’ve never actually read it. Always meant to, just don’t think I ever found the time. I’ve been reading it in chunks alongside this story, and I’m somewhat dismayed to find that I’m enjoying it more than The Evil of the Daleks.

I’d imagine that a number of people reading The 50 Year Diary will have at least a vague idea of what these comics are, but for the uninitiated: Tv Century 21 was a comic produced in the 1960s, and for 104 issues they ran a single-page comic titled The Daleks. It told the story of the Dalek’s creation on Skaro – there’s no Davros, but they’re still created by a scientist, and there’s still a great big war – and then follows them as they spread out across the stars. They fight the Mechanoids a bit, too. The final strip in the series ends with the Emperor Dalek declaring that the Daleks will conquer Earth, which leads quite neatly into the second of the Peter Cushing Dalek films, and tellingly, the later strips see the design of the creatures morph to look more like their movie counterparts.

I think it’s probably fair to say that it’s not any great literary feat, and it doesn’t stand up to a great deal of scrutiny, but taken at face value as a weekly adventure strip featuring the Daleks, it’s really rather good. It has the feel of a comic strip from The Eagle (perhaps unsurprisingly, as the first artist on the strip, Richard E Jennings, had contributed to The Eagle for a long time, and Eric Eden who filled in for a few issues in the middle of the run had worked on Dan Dare), full of that wonderful breed of what we tend to call ‘retro futurism’ these days. The design of the Daleks’ city is fantastic, and there’s plenty of little touches to the strip that can’t help to make me smile.

Quite early on in the story, only about five or six issues in, a spacecraft lands on Skaro for the first time, and the Daleks plot to capture it. The thing that I enjoy about it is the way they hide themselves to prepare their attack: the emperor orders the Magnetic Sand to be switched on, and it covers the city in a perfect disguise. It’s the kind of fantastic futuristic thing that you’d expect to find in a children’s ‘space’ comic of the age, as is the invention of things like the ‘Astrodalek’ later on in the story (A Dalek with his eyestalk plugged into the end of an enormous telescope), and the Daleks’ flying Hover Discs, which have become quite iconic withing Doctor Who - there’s even a new Dalek toy set available now that comes with one.

The strip is mostly written by David Whittaker, but it’s far more traditional than some of the things he tries with the Daleks on TV. That doesn’t mean that things are rendered to being dull, though, as it has a kind of simplistic charm to the story. Whittaker even still takes old favourite ideas from Terry Nation and does something new and different with them – there’s a wonderful moment on the planet Alvega with some living plants (haven’t seen any of those in a while!). While it could be reduced to being a rubbish retread of the kind of things we’ve seen in stories from The Keys Of Marinus, to The Chase and The Daleks’ Master Plan, Whittaker depicts the plants as plotting against the Daleks, and there’s a fantastic panel at the end of one strip where the plants have worked their way inside a Dalek’s casing and grown out, bursting out from every seam. It’s a bizarre image, and it looks stunning. Pleasingly, it’s given plenty of room to breathe.

The first three strips, and a few from later in the run (once Ron Turner had taken over art duties for the latter half of the run, a style which, sadly, down’t appeal to me half as much as the earlier one does), have recently been reprinted in the Doctor Who Magazine Dalek spacial, reprinted from the original art which makes them look gorgeous – certainly much better than the versions in my 19-year-old version! Here’s hoping that they’ll see a full reprint in the near future, because the series as a whole is certainly worth a read, if only to see an alternate (and much more 1950s/60s sci fi) version of the Daleks’ early years…

I think I’ll be giving the strip as a whole an 8/10 – wish I could say the same for The Evil of the Daleks!

a 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 172: The Evil of the Daleks, Episode Three

Dear diary,

Oh dear. I think I've taken the same kind of issue with this story that I did back with The Highlanders - I've decided early on that I'm simply not impressed and now that's all my mind can focus on. Things are even worse here, though, because I'm going in with the pre-defined notion of this being a real classic that can do no wrong…

Whereas actually it's just a bit of a plodding bore that can do no… well… anything, really. Seriously, we're almost 75 minutes into The Evil of the Daleks, and very little has happened. The TARDIS is stolen. The Doctor and Jamie are kidnapped and taken back to 1866. Turns out the Daleks are there, and they want the Doctor to perform experiments on his young friend. Oh, and now there's a Turkish man in a fez and a series of elaborate traps for Jamie to get through so that the Doctor can actually undertake these steps.

Really, though? Really? This story was voted top 18 in the last big fandom poll? (I've yet to see how it's faring in our own large-scale poll of Doctor Who episodes, so I don't know if it's retaining its position, or if it's following its previous form and slipping down the table.)

Oh, all right. It's not all bad. Certainly, it's not reached the point where I'm dreading the throughout of having to go on and start looking for an alternative way of finishing the story (Hello, The Highlanders, again). I think the only thing that's keeping me going at this stage is the promise that things are going to get better. I don't often seem to agree with received fan wisdom, but they can't have been this wrong for so long, surely? The Evil of the Daleks is going to become fantastic any minute now, yeah?

There's one or two little pockets of things peppered throughout the story that are keeping my interest up, and today's thing of interest has to be Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines. Again. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know I've praised them to the high heavens plenty over the course of Season Four, but they really are something special, aren't they? Today, we get to watch (hear) them having a blazing row, and it's enough to make the ones the earliest Doctor used to have with Barbara look like a minor play fight.

And then, it's all revealed to be a part of the Doctor's plan - a way of tricking his companion into taking part in the experiment, so that they have a chance further down the line. People often single the Seventh Doctor out as the arch manipulator, but this is a perfect example of it being used much earlier on in the programme's run. I've commented before that this incarnation is very good at dropping the right word or the right action at just the right moment to get the results he wants, but it's never used better than this.

Aside from that scene, which comes fairly late on in the episode, I'm afraid that things just aren't grabbing me. I was going to be rating this one a little lower than I have, but that scene alone is so good that it deserves to bring the score up just a little bit…

a 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 171: The Evil of the Daleks, Episode Two

Dear diary,

I've often thought that if (when) I ever got my hands on a time machine, I'd quite like to visit Victorian England. Couldn't tell you why it's the top of my list, but I've always been fascinated by it. Even at school, the Victorian era was one of my favourites in history lessons. In many ways, I've always thought of Doctor Who being particularly suited to the era, too, and it seems many other's agree with me - several parts of the most recent season have been set there, and it's not been uncommon for the Doctor to visit in the past.

It's odd, then, to think that this episode marks the first time that we've actually seen this era in the series (yes, yes, pedants, the scene on the Marie Celeste during The Chase is technically set in Victorian times, but it was way out at sea, and might as well have been set in any generic past if it wasn't for the joke at the end, so I'm disqualifying it), almost five years in. Oh, and it's done beautifully. It's said a lot, but the BBC design department really do make a stunning job of this period, and this episode is no exception. Maxtible's drawing room has to be the crowning achievement, as it looks simply brilliant, and it's nice to have an episode from the story surviving so that we can really appreciate it.

Speaking of which, it's bloody lovely to see a Dalek again! We've had them in the series quite recently to welcome the new Doctor to the series, and I watched The Destroyers not all that long ago, but thanks to the gaps in the archives (and the lack of production of The Destroyers…) this is the first time I've actually seen a Dalek on screen, moving and everything, since The Daleks' Master Plan, and that feels like a lifetime ago. Technically, it was for the Doctor.

It's nice to see that the Daleks here are the same kind of manipulative ones seen in Power of the Daleks, and the cruel, terrifying version that we had in Master Plan, too. Yesterday's episode ended rather nicely with a Dalek screaming at Kennedy to identify himself (though it wasn't as good a cliffhanger as they had pretty consistently in their last tale), and then the resolution to that ending today? The Dalek exterminates him as soon as we're done with the reprise. Then it disappears, and Waterfield has something of a breakdown as he realises he'll have to dispose of the body. The Daleks really are at their best when their callous, and Whittaker knows exactly how to use them in the right way.

All that said, I'm sorry to say that the story still isn't really capturing me. I've seen this episode before (a long, long, time ago on a bored Sunday-afternoon viewing of the Lost in Time collection), and remembered it being pretty good, but this time around it still feels as if I'm waiting for things to get going. As ever, there's a lot to like, but it just don't seem to be doing very much. Maybe I'm being put off by the fact that people say it's one of the stone-cold 'classics' of Doctor Who, and my expectations are just set a little bit too high?

We do get our first introduction of Victoria in this episode though, as a captive of the Daleks, who seem obsessed with her weight. They're holding her prisoner as leverage with Waterfield, so that he'll help capture the Doctor and force him to conduct some experiments on Jamie. I complained yesterday that the plan to get the Doctor to the antiques shop was a bit round the houses… but now it makes even less sense! Surely it would have been quicker to knock the Doctor and Jamie out at Gatwick, transport them to 1886, tie Jamie up in the lab and force the Doctor to get to work under Dalek guard? Why all the messing about?

Victoria herself comes across as less obviously a companion as Sam Briggs did in the last story (heck, even Mollie seems to be a more likely candidate to step aboard the TARDIS at this point!), but it does have to be said that Debbie Watling does look beautiful in her first scenes. I've not seen much of Victoria's tenure outside of The Tomb of the Cybermen (as Deborah herself says on one of the DVD special features about this era - there's nothing left of there time on the show, really), so I'm hoping she'll blossom once she's out from under the Daleks' watchful eye-stalks.

a 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 170: The Evil of the Daleks, Episode One

Dear diary,

In the early 1990s, The Evil of the Daleks was voted the best Doctor Who story ever by the readers of DWB. It had dropped a little in estimations by the time Doctor Who Magazine ran a similar poll five years later, coming in at number nine in the list, and in the 2009 Mighty 200 poll, it slipped even further, to number 18. Indeed, in Doctor Who Online’s very own 50th Anniversary Poll, it’s currently sitting at number 25! Despite this decline in opinion, it still has to be said that Evil has something of a reputation amongst Doctor Who fans as being pretty darn good.

It's perhaps surprising, then, that this first episode comes across as being just a bit of filler material. The impression I got from the opening to the episode is that the Doctor and Jamie were supposed to see the TARDIS heading off on the back of a truck (at the end of the last episode, the Doctor had already deduced that it had gone, and now they actively see it), and then Bob Hall is planted in one of the hangars to put the pair off the scent. He's then followed, and is knocked unconscious for it - his being followed is clearly not a part of the plan (Kennedy even plans to beat the Doctor and Jamie over the head to make sure that they don't discover anything). It then transpires that the pair were intended to come here, because there's a pack of matches planted to lead them on to the coffee bar. So why knock out Hall? It leads to his fleeing the city, and is surely a waste of a valuable ally?

Once the Doctor and Jamie have made it to the coffee shop (where contemporary music helps to set the scene, though it's a shame to know that the Beatles' Paperback Writer had to be removed from the soundtrack), they're met by Perry. Perry has been sent by Waterfield (who also sent kennedy to plant the matches and, I'm guessing, Hall to start the whole thing rolling) to ask the Doctor to come to the antiques shop at 10pm. Why the overly-complex plan? Surely seeing the TARDIS being carted away - and then being asked by Hall at Gatwick to head to the antiques shop if they want to see the police box again - would be enough to get them there?

The whole thing is an exercise in delaying the pair until the story is ready for them. I don't know if the story was intended to be a six-parter which was then extended out to seven (in the same way as The Mind Robber being given an extra episode late in the day) or if it was just needed to get things set up ready for the main tale, but either way, it's odd.

That's not to say that it's a bad thing, mind. There's plenty to like about this episode, not least the fact that we get to spend some more time in the company of Troughton and Hines again. I'd not realised that such a large part of the story kept them in the 1960s (I'd always assumed that they stumbled into the Victorian era pretty quickly once the story got started), but it's odd just how well they really do fit in here. Whereas in The War Machines, at the end of last season, the sight of William Hartnell climbing out of a cab was unusual, it doesn't feel at all out of place to see (or, at least, hear) Troughton doing so. Considering how much time Ian and Barbara spent wishing the TARDIS would land in the 1960s, it turns up there an awful lot these days (I make it The Massacre of St Bartholemew's Eve, The War Machines, now here, and there's a couple more trips to this period in the next couple of seasons).

Not only that, but the ship keeps returning to the city on the same day! In the fantastic History of the Universe in 100 Objects book from last year, there's a line describing the 20th of July 1966 as being the day that WOTAN launched his War Machines, the Chameleons returned hundreds of missing people to Gatwick airport, and the Daleks were at large in their time-travelling antiques shop. Surely that sentence really sums up just why this era of the show is so fantastic?

Despite all the running around, and knowing vaguely what's going on, which runs the risk of lessening the tension (It's a shame, for example, to know that the Daleks are going to be a part of the story - of course they're in the title - because it takes away some of the tension of Waterfield arguing with his 'unseen masters'), there is enough here to hook me in to the tale. I don't know, for example, what the Daleks need from the man. Or why they've stolen the TARDIS (the Daleks have time travel, so it can't be that… are they just trying to capture the Doctor's attention?), or what the time-travelling antiques shop has to do with anything, and I'm keen to move on and find out, so I guess that's the story doing something right!

But to come in the top 25 Doctor Who stories ever…? I think it's got a way to go, yet…

a