Episode #10 : The Dalek Invasion of Earth

"One day I shall come back. Yes, I shall come back. Until then, there must be no regrets, no tears, no anxieties. Just go forward in all your beliefs and prove to me that I am not mistaken in mine."

 



Episode 10:    The Dalek Invasion of Earth.
Companions: The 1st Doctor, Susan Foreman, Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright.
Air Date:        Six episodes. 21st November to 26th December 1964.

The TARDIS returns to London; however it's the 22nd century. With bodies in the river, and quiet in the docklands, the city is a very different place. The Daleks have invaded and it's up to the Doctor to thwart them once again.

Here we have the return of the Daleks and this time they have invaded and defeated the Earth. Their plan is to core out the planet, insert an engine of some kind and pilot it about the galaxy. Just where are they doing the nessecary mining for this? Bedfordshire. Since I live on the Bedfordshire border I find this rather amusing.

The story itself isn't a bad one and has enough pacing to keep the viewer interested. Since the characters get split up almost immediately you get a lot of scenes in different places across London, the countryside and at the mine site. All of which prevents the monotony of a lengthy story run.

The Dalek Invasion of Earth also sees the first time that we lose a companion. In this case, Susan. I would love to know the reasoning behind it at the BBC because I can't think of any reason for doing so. Shame too though because Susan is one of the characters I quite like from the early days of the show and now with Doctor Who in its modern incarnation I keep hoping that they will bring her back. She has reappeared once in The Five Doctors, but I would really like to see her make an appearence and perhaps be a companion again for a while.

This story was also turned into a cinematic movie as a sequal to Doctor Who and the Daleks, both films starring Peter Cushing. As with the first film adaptation I think the movie does a much better job of carrying the story than a six part serial manages.

On the DVD release of this story there is a rather cool option to either watch it with the original special effects or with new CGI that replaces the old style Dalek saucers with the design from the current series of the show.