Doctor Who:
Day of the Daleks
By Louis Marks
“You're trapped in a
temporal paradox! Styles didn't cause that explosion and start the wars. You
did it yourselves.”
Sir Reginald Styles is
under a lot of stress lately. He is
organizing the World Peace Conference and if he should fail war will break
worldwide. To make matters worse he is
being haunted by assassins who want to kill him. Styles tell UNIT, who is in charge of security
for the peace talks, that it was just ghosts or a nightmare that he had. The Doctor doesn’t believe him and The
Brigadier orders Styles out of his house. The Doctor and Jo decide to spend the
night at Styles house with the UNIT troops around for protection as Sgt Benton
and Mike Yates around to help them if needed.
While eating a lot of
cheese and drinking quite a bit of Styles wine The Doctor finally gets a chance
to meet the assassins. It appears that
they are from the future and want to kill Styles to prevent the future they
come from. A future that has an Earth
controlled by The Doctors most deadly enemies The Daleks. The Daleks have invaded Earth again and will
stop at nothing to keep control of it and it’s up to The Doctor to prevent that
from happening.
Day of the Daleks is a
pretty good Dalek story and probably the best Dalek story from the Jon Pertwee
era. Plus it happens to be a favorite of
mine also as I have always liked the dynamics of it. You have The Doctor traveling in time without
the aid of the TARDIS. He used the crude
device the rebels used to travel into the future and the past and it was a
pretty cool idea to get around the TARDIS not working for him.
This story is also pretty
interesting as it deals with time paradoxes.
The Doctor figures out that the rebels are responsible for their
future. It was their actions that
allowed The Daleks to swoop in and invade Earth. Can you imagine that trying to stop
everything you hate and realizing that you are the cause for all of it. This is a pretty cool plot point in Day of
the Daleks that makes the conclusion that more exciting as The Doctor goes back
and then rewrites history to save Earth from the Daleks.
There are two versions of
Day of the Daleks. There is the original version with the 1972 effects and
horrible sounding Daleks and the new 2011 one that has modern effects and Nick
Briggs sounding Daleks. The special
edition is pretty cool and the new effects are really a great improvement. Plus they added more Daleks to the attack on
Styles house to make it more threatening and more believable than the two
Daleks they used in 1972. I loved how
when someone gets hit by the disintegrator gun the person blows up instead of
disappearing. But the one thing the
special edition didn’t do is make the Ogrons smarter at all as they still
lumbered around stupidly as the Dalek slaves they are.
Day of the Daleks is a
pretty good story with lots of fun things going on in it. For example the way
the Controller tries to manipulate Jo that they are the good guys and well
Daleks on the warpath in a really good action sequence against UNIT. Plus it
also heralds the return of the Daleks after a long time away from the
show. Day of the Daleks is a good start
to season 9 which is a season that is kind of mixed with stories of quality and
luckily this story is pretty good one.
Day of the Daleks is one of my favorite Daleks stories and one of my
favorite Jon Pertwee stories also.
Grade A
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