Planet of the Daleks

…And we get this. The Doctor and Jo arrive on the planet Spiridon, where the invisible race of natives have been enslaved by the Daleks, who have hidden a huge army on the planet and seek to find the secret of invisibility. The Doctor and Jo join forces with a Thal expeditionary force to combat the Daleks.

In the 60s, Terry Nation was still a jobbing scriptwriter and had to prove to various production teams that he could be relied on to deliver the goods. Come the 70s, things were different and nowhere is this more obvious than in this phenomenally lazy script. Parts of previous Nation scripts are reused. Spiridon is a watered down version of Kembel, the Spiridonians obviously influenced by the Visians. The Jo/Latep attraction is a weak echo of the Barbara/Alydon attraction. The narrative is a weakly connected assortment of even weaker set pieces. The dialogue and characterisation never rises above the functional and the story could be described as padded if there was anything of substance to pad out.

The production values are competent at best. The squirting fungus pods and eye plants are quite imaginative, but the jungle set is otherwise unexceptional. However, cheap unimaginative design litters the rest of the production. Worst of all are the Daleks themselves, who wobble around continuously (explained, albeit inadequately. in the story) and seem in danger of literally flipping their lids (not explained in the story) The performances from the regulars are reliably good as usual, but only Bernard Horsfall stands out amongst the guest cast. It is a pity that this should appear on David Maloney’s CV, considering his outstanding record as a director in the programme.

I would like to know how contemporary viewers felt about this story. Frontier in Space promised an epic story with the Master joining forces with the Daleks. What we get is this. There is nothing really bad in the story, but there is nothing really good. It's just 150 minutes of- nothing. There are several Doctor Who stories worse than this one, but very few more boring- as far as I am concerned, boring is the worst thing a Doctor Who story can be. I was checking my watch half way through episode 2 and it says a lot when the greatest excitement was when episode 3 was in black and white, an effect that will be lost forever due to the very impressive re-colourisation used for the upcoming DVD. This is, quite simply, one of the most unappealing Doctor Who stories of all time.

NEXT: The Green Death