It starts with a manny running around a location until he gets shot by an arrow fired by an unseen assailant - a classic Terry Nation opening, somewhat reminiscent of The Android Invasion, or a smaller-scale version of the first scene massacre in Genesis of the Daleks. I expect he would probably have done something similar in Planet of the Daleks as well if only he hadn't had to recap the ending to Frontier in Space.
The Doctor and Sarah are in the TARDIS when the lights go out. The Doctor turns on "the emergency units" so that we can still see what's going on, but they soon turn off too. The TARDIS materialises in a rocky location, but inside it is dark and quiet. Sarah turns a torch on, but it soon goes dark as well. The Doctor eventually lights an "oil lamp" which stays on, prompting Sarah to say a line that you probably couldn't get away with these days:
"Hurray for old-fashioned oil."
There isn't enough power to open the TARDIS door, so the Doctor has to open it with his own paws using a "crank handle."
Outside they find a scary rock that makes Sarah scream. the Doctor thinks it is "some sort of lifeform that has become petrified," which is another classic Terry Nation concept, reminiscent of when the Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Susan explored Skaro's petrified jungle. The one thing you can always rely on with El Tel is that he will never come up with a new idea when reusing an old one will do.
The Doctor and Sarah lay out the mystery at the heart of this story:
Doctor: "Some power emanating from this planet has stopped the TARDIS's energy banks. Now logically that power can hardly be of geological origin."Sarah: "You mean somebody or something has caused it?"
Sarah goes back into the TARDIS to get more appropriately dressed for this planet's climate (perhaps a really long scarf?) or, as the Doctor puts it:
"Oh for heaven's sake girl, go and put something warm on."
As soon as Sarah and the Doctor are separated, two mysterious figures in big cloaks start to follow the Doctor. I'm glad I didn't try to count the number of Terry Nation clichés to be found in this story, I would already have run out of cat numbers. When he stoops to look at something on the ground, the mystery mannys run in and knock out the Doctor.
When Sarah leaves the TARDIS and starts looking for the Doctor, she is also followed by a cloaked figure. She finds the Doctor's oil lamp, and it has blood on it. Oh noes! These scenes are terrific at establishing atmosphere, helped out by the incidental music.
Sarah runs back to the TARDIS, but the cloaked manny is there already because the door is still open. Seeing two cloaked mannys outside, Sarah cranks the door closed. The one inside the TARDIS goes all POV monster on her and makes her scream, but then she beats it up with the crank handle. Opening the door once again, Sarah runs away.
Sarah wanders around trying to avoid more cloaked figures in a scene that goes on for a little bit too long, until she accidentally finds the pulsating, glowing white City of the Exxilons.
When the Doctor wakes up, he quickly escapes from his captors by using some Venusian Oojah on them. He also spends rather a long time wandering about on his own (no cat ever claimed that ensuring that the Daleks turn up just in time for the first cliffhanger was easy) before he meets a manny that attacks him. A second manny stops the fight and says sorry to the Doctor. These are Galloway and Captain Railton, the latter played by John "moral duty" Abineri. They take the Doctor back to their base where he meets the rest of their mannys, including Jill Tarrant.
Tarrant! Good old Terry Nation, as dependable as whatever it is that makes clocks go. The only surprise is that none of them is called Dortmun.
They think Sarah will be safe from the cloaked alien Exxilons "just so long as she didn't go near that forbidden city of theirs." Uh-oh! In a textbook case of dramatic irony, we know that is exactly where Sarah is.
"They treat it as a sort of shrine. If you're caught near it, it's certain death."
Even as they speak it fades to show Sarah looking at the city (with vaguely churchy incidental music to emphasise the point about it being a scared sacred place), until an alien runs up and captures her.
Back at the spaceship, the mannys give the Doctor more exposition, this time about why they are on this planet:
"Well, the outer worlds are being ravaged by a disease. The colonists are dying in their thousands. Another ten million men, women and children will die unless we help them, and help them quickly. Every hour we're stuck here on this planet, the death toll's mounting."
They are here for a rare mineral that will cure this disease. Sadly it is not Taranium, it is called "Parrinium." Another spaceship is coming in to land, so the mannys all rush to see if it is friendly.
A group of the aliens have Sarah prisoner. They do some vaguely religious-sounding chanting while one of them commands
"Prepare her for sacrifice!"
It feels as though Sarah has found herself in a tonally totally different story to the one the Doctor is in - more folk horror than space adventure; more The Dæmons than The Daleks.
The spaceship, a flying saucer, lands and it is only then that one of the mannys says
"That doesn't look like an Earth ship, sir."
They're not the most observant of mannys, are they? But he's right, because when the door opens out come... Daleks!
This dramatic revelation is completely undermined by the ludicrous, comical incidental music that, for some reason, accompanies the Daleks exiting their ship. This despite the first thing the Daleks say being the threatening and scary line:
"THE EARTH CREATURES ARE TO BE EXTERMINATED. FIRE AT MY COMMAND. TOTAL EXTERMINATION. FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!"
The Daleks fire their weapons for a few seconds, long enough for us to get a reaction shot of the Doctor and Tarrant being scared (but, crucially, not being exterminated) before the end credits start. This could almost be a subversion of a typical end of part one Dalek cliffhanger, since the question viewers are left asking is not 'What will happen next?' or even 'How will the Doctor escape from this one?' but rather 'What in space just happened?'
* Is that really the title? It looks wrong somehow, surely it should be Something of the Daleks? Power, Evil, Day, Planet, Genesis, Destiny, Resurrection, Revelation and Remembrance all fit that pattern - is this really the odd one out? Ah well, never mind, I'll get the thumbs to fix it in the edit, mew.
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