So. Brave new era. New horizons. New beginnings. Same old feckin’ recons… We are entering now a long period of mainly reconstructions – occasionally punctuated with the occasional single episode that still exists. And while I haven’t had too much of an issue with recons thus far that might be to do with the fact they’re usually quickly followed by a fully existing story…
And I have to admit that from the off this suffers from being a recon. Patrick Troughton’s first few scenes as The Doctor are sadly lost to us and the recon really doesn’t do them any sort of justice. He’s obviously unstable but it’s very hard to get a grasp on what he’s actually doing. He may be brilliant. Or he may well be being a tit. Hard to tell.
The plot takes some time to settle in… A capsule has been found, buried for bloody ages (technical term, I forget the actual amount of time). In it are two deactivated Daleks. And then a third, apparently. Once woken up the Daleks are acting as the human colonists' servants and, obviously, The Doctor is really quite suspicious of this. As the story progresses it transpires they’re pretending to do work for the humans but actually building resources to start replicating more Daleks.
The Daleks are more considered and more intelligent than we’ve seen them up until now, not just a bunch of bastards roaming the universe looking for things to kill.
Eventually – and rather predictably – The Daleks get a bit bored serving the humans, start up with all that “Conquer and Destroy” malarkey and all hell breaks loose.
The central plot idea is an interesting one – our first display of Dalek cunning as they try and pretend to be human servants – but the story is let down by its length. After getting used to 4 part Hartnell stories we appear to be starting a regime of 6 parters and this one really does not benefit from the extra two episodes.
It’s possible I missed something – I was busy giggling every time a Dalek discussed “Laying cables” – which they did a lot – but the ending seemed rather rushed. After 5 episodes of buildup, the Daleks go on the attack and the Doctor finds a convenient way to mess around with all the cables they’ve laid. One big bang later and everyone’s a winner. Just seemed very unsatisfying.
Like I say, the central plot idea is a good one and The Doctor does have a cool stovepipe hat to walk around in. But it drags on too long and the ending is just a bit disappointing.
Oh and that bloody recorder is irritating as hell...
6/10
EDIT: I've decided I might have been a touch harsh (This edit is written literally 5 minutes after I hit "submit" on the main entry). There are some nice ideas in this - the Daleks have a few nice lines, including one about humans killing humans. The problem is the nice bits just seem diluted by far too much buggering around. I'm still giving it 6/10 but I suppose I just wanted to clarify that I did spot some good stuff in there, just I felt it was rattling around on its own a little bit too much.