When I think of 1970s British SF TV (Doctor Who, Blake’s 7, spacey Tomorrow People) this is exactly the kind of production I picture: clearly inspired by Star Trek, but made on videotape rather than film, with lots of greyish spacecraft interiors interspersed with occasional film sequences and aliens declaiming grandiloquently at each other. The Pertwee years didn’t have much quite like Revenge of the Cybermen, partly as a result of the Earthbound format and partly because the space stories were often Bob Baker and Dave Martin weirdness. But I think the Tom Baker years are going to look and feel increasingly like this.

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The nub of the episode, and the entire serial, comes down to the question of whether the Doctor has the right to wipe out the Daleks in their infancy. ‘You can’t change history! Not one line,’ he once said. Later, he modified that to the more ambiguous ‘I dare not change the course of history.’ He’s still struggling with that ambiguity, the idea that ‘some things could be better with the Daleks’, that ‘we’re all too small to realise [history’s] final pattern.’ On top of this, there’s a moral concern that by committing genocide the Doctor not only changes his own history, but his very nature – ‘I become like them. I’d be no better than the Daleks.’

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The centrepiece of the episode, and the story, is the Doctor’s one-to-one with Davros, in which the Doctor compares the Daleks to a deadly virus inimical to all life, and Davros shows his true colours by ranting about the absolute power the Daleks will grant him. The analogy makes is clear that Davros’s only interest is power for its own sake, not with any purpose of doing good. He’d see all life but the Daleks wiped out. This would, clearly, have the side effect of creating peace, but only because there would be no-one left to disagree. It’s echoed in the later scene when Davros talks sneeringly of “democracy” as the ‘creed of cowards’ and states ‘Achievement comes through absolute power, and power through strength.’

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Viewed as a sci-fi historical, the Time Ring fulfils the same function as the inaccessible TARDIS in those early Hartnell adventures: the Doctor and friends have to go back into the Kaled bunker, whether they like it or not. After all, this is the one time when the Doctor could legitimately walk away, claiming that he took on Time and Time won. Instead, he’s plunged back into the nightmare of Dalek history, forced to relive every encounter so that Davros, turning the tables on the Doctor, can change the future.

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There hasn’t been a serial that unfolds with such grim inevitability since The Massacre. Even though the Kaled Council listens politely (more politely, to be sure, than the usual reception the Doctor gets when he claims to be a time-travelling alien from the future) to the Doctor’s Cassandra-like warnings, they refuse to take the definitive actions required to stop the Daleks, and so seal their own fate. They fatally underestimate Davros’s commitment to their cause – as was made clear in the previous episode, he has long ago abandoned hope for his former people. He now commits the ultimate betrayal, colluding in the genocide of the Kaleds so that the Daleks can emerge triumphant.

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I enjoy Genesis of the Daleks most when I think of it as a twist on the John Lucarotti historical, except rather than being trapped in unremittingly brutal and horrible events in Earth’s history, the Doctor and friends are trapped in Doctor Who’s own past. The Thals and Kaleds might as well be Protestants and Catholics; Davros could be Tlotoxl to Ronson’s Autloc, and there’s even a cave of 500 eyes (all belonging to one of Davros’s previous experiments). Uniquely for a non-historical, the audience already broadly know this is going to end in tragedy (I guess there’s a question mark over whether the Doctor will wipe the Daleks from history, but it never seems a very likely outcome), so, apart from the obvious excitement of seeing how the show’s biggest stars came to be, the real interest is in how the Doctor will escape.

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There’s a world of difference between David Maloney’s last Doctor Who story and this. Planet of the Daleks, while pretty stylish, was very much an homage to the classic 1960s Dalek space epics. This, though a much greater piece, feels like the ugly underbelly to every previous Dalek serial, reverting them to their earliest iteration of desperate survivors rather than galactic conquerors. This curiously links the Kaleds to the human survivalists on the Ark, or the beaten-down GalSec colonists (the next stories will also feature the last refugees of war or planetary devastation, skulking about the galaxy).

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Matthew Sweet pointed out that Robot is as near as the show ever got to a TV Comic strip. Similarly, The Sontaran Experiment comes close to being a World Distributors annual story: a slight, and slightly off-beam take on the show, where the Doctor says things like ‘You unspeakable abomination!’ and Harry threatens to ‘knock his bally head off!’ There are a lot of exclamation marks in the script: ‘Worm!’; ‘Murdering swine!’; ‘Come to your death!’. After last episode’s set-up it turns out there isn’t actually much of a story, just Field Major Styre refusing to hand in his homework to the Marshal because he’s too busy torturing the human ants.

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This one feels like a late 1970 British horror movie (I’m thinking something like Killer’s Moon), with a tiny cast lost in vast, remote countryside, and with zero budget. The eerie emptiness of Dartmoor works in its favour, although it’s a shame this isn’t on film as there are a couple of moments when director Rodney Bennett focuses on little details, like water dripping down the rocks, that emphasise the loneliness of the location in the same way Lawrence Gordon Clark often did in his filmed M.R. James adaptations. Nevertheless, I think the sweeping shots of the moors and vast skies are the most interesting thing about this, particularly as it makes an interesting contrast with the previous studio-bound episodes.

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The final episode switches, for a chunk of its length, into a base under siege, with the Doctor and Sarah Jane defending the last humans against the Wirrn swarm. It’s practically the first opportunity we’ve had to see the two of them together. The partnership works well, with slightly less of the sarcasm Sarah demonstrates towards the third Doctor, and not much of Pertwee’s charm. Instead, the Doctor winds Sarah up to rile her into completing her mission, laughs at her indignation, and then half-reassures her they’re safe (although he seems a bit less confident on that point than I suspect Pertwee would have played it).

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