Tue 19 May, 2009
Well, it took a while, but we finally got around to watching the second Doctor Who serial, The Daleks.
The Amazon link above also has The Edge of Destruction with it, which is the next serial.
The Daleks
It is hard for those of us who are a bit younger, and who grew up with much more action and color, to watch older shows like the original Doctor Who. But I think it’s necessary to get a full understanding of where The Doctor came from.
In this serial, the Daleks are introduced (if you didn’t get that from the title). Unlike the first Doctor Who serial though, I think that William Hartnell started to give The Doctor a personality. He is more condescending to Barbara and Ian in the Daleks. He treats them like they are inconvenient to him, because they are stupid and because they don’t share his curiousity about things.
However, Ian does take charge in this serial. I thought it was kind of wierd as he is telling The Doctor what to do.
The basic plotline is that The Doctor, Susan, Barbara and Ian have landed on a dead planet and discovered a city. The Doctor tricks them into going to the city where they are captured by the Daleks. They then discover that there is another race on the planet, the Thals. The Daleks and the Thals had a war years before and a bomb was exploded to destroy the planet.
The Daleks set a trap for the Thals, who then fight back.
That was a very short synopsis, but I’m sure you would rather watch it than read about it.
Doctor Who and The Daleks
After a few years, the BBC made a TV movie called Doctor Who and The Daleks. This was based directly off of the serial, although with a few differences. First, The Doctor was played by Peter Cushing, and he took a bit more control than in the Serial. Ian was more of a clumsy boyfriend to Barabara. Barabara and Susan are also both granddaughters of The Doctor.
The Doctor is also a human inventor, not an alien.
We watched this as well, and I do have to say, color does not make everything better. Although I like that The Doctor took more control, the whole movie was (I believe) done in bland way. I think it was made to introduce more people to the serial, but the fact that they changed so much doesn’t make sense.
The Daleks in this movie are also taller than what they were in the series. They also are colored. Some are blue, some are red. The biggest problem is that in this movie, they talked so slowly and haltingly, that it was very hard to listen to.
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