Day of the Daleks DVD NTSC Region 1 DVD PAL Region 2 VHS Video NTSC A NTSC B NTSC PAL

(Doctor Who Story No. 60, starring Jon Pertwee) written by Louis Marks produced by Barry Letts directed by Paul Bernard music by Dudley Simpson 4 episodes @ 25 minutes each Story: Sir Reginald Styles, a key politician involved in tense international negotiations, is attacked in his home at night, but the attacker suddenly vanishes "like a ghost." U.N.I.T. is called in to investigate, discovering a small portable time machine, an unconscious guerrilla soldier, and a futuristic ray gun, while the Doctor and Jo decide to spend a night in Sir Reginald's "haunted" house searching for more clues. But also monitoring events closely are unknown forces from the 22nd century, a time when Daleks have conquered and subjugated the Earth. Can the Doctor unravel this complicated temporal conundrum, before they all loop around again to their own doom?

DVD features (on 2 discs no less) include:

• Original 1972 edit (4 episodes, mono)
  • Audio commentary (stereo) by producer Barry Letts, script editor Terrance Dicks, vision mixer Mike Catherwood, and
    actors Jim Winston (Shura), and Anna Barry (Anat).
  • Pop-up Production Note Subtitles
• "Blasting the Past" making-of featurette (30 min.) adding actors Katy Manning (Jo Grant), Ricky Newby (Dalek Operator), and
  monster maker John Friedlander.
• "The Unit Family - Part Two" featurette, including Nicholas Courtney (The Brigadier), John Levene (Sgt. Benton),
  Richard Franklin (Capt. Mike Yates), Fernanda Marlowe (Corporal Bell), and Derek Ware (recurring stuntman).
• "Now and Then" location featurette
• featurette on multi-camera studio vision mixing
• featurette on the contradictions in the chronology of the settings of UNIT stories.

• Special Edition 2011 edit (4 episodes, mono)
  • Making of the Special Edition featurette with producer Steve Broster, Dalek voice Nicholas Briggs, audio engineer Mark Ayres,
    cameraman John Kelly, Dalek builder Toby Chamberlain, Kevan Looseley (UNIT Soldier), and Nick Nicholson (Ogron).
  • The Cheating Memory featurette with Steve Broster

• Photo Gallery
• Primary school first prize Dalek footage
• Blue Peter presenter Peter Purves remembers his experiences on Doctor Who

Jon Pertwee has every right to regard the Daleks as being the most boring Doctor Who villains. Although I tend to disagree with him in general, his own era boasts four of the most uninspiring Dalek productions of all time.

"Day of the Daleks" however is a bit of an exception. It has by far the most intriguing plot of any Pertwee Dalek story, and is largely a success because of it. The producers actually grafted the Daleks onto its good script at the last minute, which was a logical move on their part that should have worked. As far as the 1972 version is concerned though, the Daleks themselves turned out to be the weakest part of the production, both poorly directed and poorly voiced.

All that may be changing though, thanks to a new 2011 version. Will it be able to turn the tables on the production, and breathe new life into what was essentially a fascinating story? There is much that it would need to try and tackle....

Daleks in Production

Both the action sequences and the Daleks suffer the most. Many scenes are just not blocked out well enough to believably hide the protagonists from searching Ogrons, be it in the corridors or on the grassy knoll. There are too few close ups of Boaz during his final heroics, and what we do get isn't linked well into the long shots, leaving the audience confused when they should be emotionally engaged.

Once again, the leading Dalek gets the frailest sounding "Granny" voice and too much unnatural pausing between syllables. Now that the Daleks' TV adventures are in colour, the old full screen negative effect for their weapons' blast is really outdated. Far from making any improvements, we get it in slow motion with hammy acting from the victims, making it absurdly silly.

Topping it all off is the ridiculous handling of the Dalek numbers. The BBC only has three Daleks at this point, and one has been painted gold to represent the leader. That leaves only two blue Daleks to represent the hordes. Cutting away from the tunnel and back as the same two blue Daleks emerge over and over again with different arrangements of Ogron support is predictable, yet still effective. It's in fact the only effective part of the Dalek Horde sequence. Paul Bernard gives the game away time and again afterwards by always grouping the three Daleks together and showing lots of empty space around them in the long shots. Where are all those other blue Daleks that aren't supposed to be so close to the one and only Gold Dalek? We need to cut in shots of blue Daleks all over the place one after the other to maintain the effect. Important: Do not put the gold Dalek in every shot, or the game is up once more! And the high long shot needs to be an inlay composite showing something like ten blue Daleks, but only one gold, to be of any use at all. Can't do an inlay composite due to time and money? Fine, then just don't do the long shot at all. It isn't worth having if it's going to destroy the illusion of lots of Daleks.

Dudley Simpson's music is not great this time around, not composed well enough to elicit much emotion from the audience, and not performed on a great choice of instruments either, electronic or otherwise. But at least it is somewhat thematic and therefore, somewhat memorable.

Story Threads

Episode two has a questionable act from the perspective of the Doctor's character. He escapes from the house, captured ray gun in hand, and rounds the corner to find two Ogrons out for a leisurely stroll. It's his first encounter with the creatures in the entire story, he still hasn't really found out who's who from the rebels yet, and thanks to Paul Bernard's direction, the Ogrons appear quite pleasant and non-threatening. The good Doctor then raises the ray gun and disintegrates one of them in cold blood. Nice first contact policy, Doc! If ever the Valeyard wanted good evidence to convict the Doctor of meddling and interference, this incident would make a most damning case! Keeping the Ogrons stupid and useless, the other Ogron fails to react to the fact that his comrade is no more, and would happily continue walking to the same fate like a lemming if the Brigadier hadn't shown up and beaten the Doctor to the draw.

"Day of the Daleks" gets good and interesting by episode three. The old prisoner dynamic pops up, but is kept to the barest of minimums, only used as a vehicle for exposition of a few important human characters of the era. That single scene in the Doctor's cell holds a lot of excellent dramatic meat, and completes the range for many of the characters. The Doctor redeems himself from his ray gun fiasco by taking on the Controller head on in philosophy, and getting his position absolutely right on.

Time Paradox

I will give the temporal paradox here the same nod of approval that I give to the eighth Star Trek feature film "First Contact", which is that the events we see are all technically okay, while the characters are allowed to have incorrect theories about what is going on. In fact, "Day of the Daleks" holds up a bit better, because there really is no Commander Data babbling away the wrong idea to the audience unobstructed. Here it is interesting to note that the Doctor appears to have embraced what he learned in "Inferno" (story no. 54), that an infinity of parallel timelines exists, allowing free will, and to use his own words, "the pattern can be changed". (In my own words, it is important to say "the pattern can be chosen" instead, as none of the various timeline options actually change.) Anyway, gone is the old conviction of not being able to affect outcomes that plagued the Doctor in the Hartnell era, in stories like "The Aztecs" (story no. 6) and "The Massacre" (story no. 22), and the Doctor is definitely a more enjoyable and heroic character here as a result.

An added bonus here is that the metaphysical aspects of people creating their own reality is made very tangible as well. Violence begets violence, and as the rebels try to use it to gain their own ends, so they discover that it is precisely what dooms them to a violent fate. Beautiful touch.

"Day of the Daleks" ends on a powerful note of choice, in the present day, making a firm stand for proactive peace instead of reactive violence. (Something it might not have done so well if the story had ended on the other half of the time loop in the Doctor's lab.) All the more power to it. Most thankfully, it does not attempt to show any magical change sweeping across the future as happens in so many Star Trek fantasies. The "Brannon Braga Disney-Wand" has no jurisdiction here. We don't have to pretend that the timelines all rotate around whatever a few time travellers may do, we can perceive those travellers simply navigating their own tiny routes around and through the timelines instead. The pro-peace timeline shown at the end does not wipe out the one of world war and Dalek invasion, but is allowed to co-exist with it. The Doctor and friends simply choose their way into it, as naturally and believably as you please.

Finding the Chosen Future...

And so, this latest society of Anat and Monia's 22nd century Earth has a new Controller, and a new Gold Dalek is likely to arrive from Skaro at his earliest convenience, but that's about it for now. For although the Doctor and all his friends in the 20th century have chosen their way onto a new time-line, it co-exists with the old one, and Anat and Monia are still on that old one. They would need a "sliding" machine or an "Inferno"-style accident with a time machine to get onto the time-line that results from the Doctor and friends choosing a different version of their history. Anat and Monia still have choices they can make to free their world, but their choices are in their present, not their past. Had they time traveled with the Doctor, made their choices, and time traveled forward again, they might have been able to arrive in the world they struggled to achieve, however their old world would still be occupied, and they would merely have abandoned it, and become considered lost or disintegrated. And the Daleks might still invade the new world they arrive on, bombarding the planet with meteors if the humans are too united to decimate themselves, as happened in the 2164 timeline that William Hartnell's Doctor visited, or the 2150 timeline that Peter Cushing's Doctor visited. Anyway you slice it, a better key to getting rid of 22nd century Daleks is to use the Earth's magnetic core against them, as Sir Ian Chesterton of Coal Hill can attest to. ;-)

Fiction Mirroring Fact???

Some reports indicate that it could have led to an attempt at something that mirrors the plot of "Day of the Daleks", and thus might be an interesting read for Doctor Who fans. While we will present a good chunk more detail in our article on The Philadelphia Experiment, the basics are that an early version of stealth technology involving electromagnetism was being tested on the USS Eldridge during World War II to hopefully make it invisible to radar and/or the naked eye, and it was discovered that these powerful magnetic fields could actually punch holes in space/time. However, they found out the hard way that much more research into the human mind and its electromagnetic properties was needed before people could safely exist in or pass through these fields. As the story goes, the Philadelphia research eventually combined with mind amplification research until a way was discovered to create a vortex connecting two points in space time and send people back and forth.

There is a fairly long document created by Valdamar Valerian multiplying itself over the internet in whole and in part, which gives a lot of insight into this subject. It was reportedly "constructed from over 9 hours of video interviews, personal interviews and individual commentary". I had intended to quote several passages here, but I discovered in my research quite by accident that I actually had in my possession the 2-hour video interview from which the earliest parts of Valerian's document were made. So why not depart from the rest of the internet and quote the actual source instead? The video has no proper title known to me; it looks like a homemade camcorder video from 1989 would, with 3 interviewees in a living room answering questions from about 5 or 6 audience members. Here are some excerpts from my own more detailed transcription:

Atrocious stuff, this assassination bit, but the irony that made me laugh was the difficulty that the perpetrators had to understand what it was all about - that they could not sit back in their time-travel control room, send others through time to do their dirty work, and watch some magic wand of time swoop by and erase their arch-enemies from existance. They might have been able to keep the far end of their time-tunnel-vortex locked onto their assassin no matter which time-line he chose himself into, but when they bring him back to their end, it is still back into the same time-line as before, one with a living breathing future leader of a new One-world government.

For more on this subject, and links to some of the existing copies of Valerian's document, see our article on "The Philadelphia Experiment".

Final word: "Day of the Daleks" had poor Daleks and uninspired directing (which the 2011 special edition may somewhat fix and overcome), but is thankfully based on a gripping and worthwhile time-paradox story. This one deserves to be revisited and celebrated.

DVD NTSC Region 1 for the North American market: in the U.S. in Canada	DVD PAL Region 2 for the U.K.	VHS Video NTSC A in the U.S. NTSC B in the U.S. NTSC in Canada PAL for the U.K.

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