As a countdown to the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who I and my wife will be watching an episode a day until we are caught up to whatever the Beeb has planned. This is a record of my initial reaction to each day's episode published with minimal editing and crappy synopsis.
"But they said you were.... but they called you... but you're not, you're perfect."
The set of the serial is that 500 years before the TARDIS arrived there was a Neutron War that killed almost everything. The agressive Thals started the whole thing and the scientist/teacher Daleks survived by going underground and building mobile life support units to house their rapidly mutating forms.
The Daleks believed that the Thals had mutated horribly. Susan expected to see something out of Franz Kafka's worst nightmares when she ran through the petrified forest to get back to the Ship. Instead she finds herself practically prostrate at the feet of a blonde haired Adonis.
All of the Thals (at least the half a dozen or so that we see) are blonde and unblemished. I bet that there were a lot of very disappointed British kids back in the winter of 1964. Instead of a clash of the mutants between the Daleks and the menagerie that kids of the time must have imagined the Thals to be like, they find out that the Daleks' enemies are, in the words of my wife, "blonde guys in half their pants."
I realize that they were trying to go for a twist. I'm all for good plot twists, they liven up the story. This one leaves me shaking my head a little though. Terry Nation has set the Daleks up as evil. They lie, manipulate, have weapons built into their life support systems and want to eliminate the Thals simply for not being Daleks.
Nation has set up the Thals to be wise, idealistic, pacifistic and hard working. A force for good to match the evil of the Daleks. He also made them physically perfect (his words not mine.)
This comes across as equating beauty with moral superiority and the ugly as evil.
The series would come back to this idea in a later Hartnell serial which had evil blondes and a good hearted "monster." It's good to see that they didn't let this stand for long.
Now I'll step off my soapbox and return to my regular ramblings.
Despite the unfortunate implications mentioned above, this is still an excellent episode.
The Thals are presented as having some range of personality and there is an attempt to give some backstory to the notable Thals. There's even a bit of bawdiness that's fairly rare for this era of Who. A Thal woman is jealous of Alydon's contact with Susan and storms off in a huff. Alydon starts griping something about the fact that "we're all working towards the same end." One of Alydon's friends calls him on the double entendre.
It's also refreshing to see the villains of the piece written intelligently.
At one point, after Susan has returned, the time travelers figure out that the Daleks are monitoring their activities in their cell. They decide to stage a fight and "accidentally" knock the camera from the wall. The camera comes down. Cut to the Daleks who know full well that the fight was rigged and that the camera was too well secured to be casually knocked off. When the Dalek guard comes to give them food he's not fooled by the two men trying to hide on either side of the door.
The Doctor eventually figures out that the Daleks are powered by static electricity. They pull power up from the metal floors that they glide over.
They use an insulated Thal cloak to cut a Dalek guard off from his power source, pry open the lid and pull out something. Whatever it is is small and ugly. We aren't given a full view. Ian and the Doctor's look like they're this close to loosing their lunches. They bundle the lump into the cloak and leave it to die in the cell. The only part of it the viewer is allowed to see is one clawed glistening hand reaching out from under the cloak before dying.
Ian gets into the Dalek casing. He doesn't know how to operate the controls so they decide to push him. Somebody wonders if that won't look suspicious. The Doctor, probably still suffering some of the after effects of radiation sickness, says that it won't be.
Next up: The Ambush
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