The Doctor is able to use the sonic screwdriver to tell which parts of the floor are safe and which are dangerous. It's as easy as pi!
Once he and Bellal are past it, the Daleks soon arrive at the floor trap and the first Dalek rolls straight into it. It gets electriced, but still manages to cross to the far side. The second Dalek shoots the floor a bit before crossing safely. This scene helps reestablish the Daleks as a credible threat, since they are able to withstand a trap that would have killed our heroes.
The Doctor and Bellal are being watched on TV by a mysterious figure. Either this is a metatextual reference to the viewers watching at home, or else it is an alien at the "heart" of the city.
In a seemingly empty room, Bellal gets hypno-eyesed into trying to shoot the Doctor with the Dalek gun. Dalek guns are so dangerous they can threaten the Doctor when the Daleks aren't even there! The Doctor again uses the sonic screwdriver to make a noise (one of the more reasonable uses it gets put to, it is a sonic screwdriver after all) that causes Bellal to hesitate long enough for the Doctor to dispaw him of the gun. Then Bellal is freed from the hypno-eyes, and they are both permitted to pass into the next room.
The Doctor has a theory about the city's purpose in doing all these tests to allow them inside:
"By passing these tests we've proved that we have an intelligence level that could be useful. We might have some knowledge or science that they could add to their databanks."
He adds to this
"Well, if I'm right, the ultimate test will be an assault on our sanity, so be ready for it."
The next room has flashing lights and distorting SFX in it. The Doctor shouts out
"Fight it! It's an illusion. It's an illusion! You have no substance. No truth! You do not exist. You do not exist!"
When it passes, the Doctor looks very tired and ready for some sleeps. He probably had enough of this sort of thing back in The Mind of Evil. The Doctor and Bellal go into the next room and see the alien watching the TV, but the TV is blank and the alien slowly collapses and disappears.
The real brain of the city is not an alien, but a small plastic box that looks like a prototype version of Orac. The Doctor tries to break it, but the city fights back by starting to manifest two mannys. The Doctor says this means
"The city is creating antibodies. They're trying to neutralise us."
It's a race against time to see who can break who first.
Outside the city, the Daleks have given the mannys Galloway and Hamilton two bombs with which to blow up the beacon on the top of the city. This is an odd subplot in that, if it succeeds, it will render everything that the Doctor and Bellal have been doing in this episode redundant. They climb to the top where Galloway decides they only need one bomb for this, and can keep the other for later.
Sarah helps Tarrant escape, which leads the Dalek who was guarding her to overact itself to death:
"HUMAN FEMALE HAS ESCAPED. I HAVE FAILED. FEMALE PRISONER HAS ESCAPED. I HAVE FAILED! I HAVE FAILED! SELF-DESTRUCT! I HAVE FAILED! DESTRUCT! I HAVE FAILED! DESTRUCT! FAILED! FAILED! FAILED!"
The antibody creatures attack the Doctor and Bellal. The Daleks arrive (sadly we did not get to see how they got past the last two tests) and the creatures attack them instead, allowing the Doctor and Bellal to run away - the Doctor's sabotage allowing them to run all the way back out of the city. The Daleks also want to run away, and start shouting
"EVACUATE! EVACUATE! EVACUATE! RETIRE TO CITY ENTRANCE. FASTER! FASTER!"
The Daleks make Galloway and Hamilton load sacks of Parrinium onto their spaceship. The Doctor and Bellal meet up with Sarah and Tarrant, but they are all captured by the Daleks just after the bomb goes off and destroys the city's beacon. Instead of killing them, the Dalek acts like a classic James Bond baddy by both telling the Doctor their plan:
"WE HAVE ALL THE PARRINIUM WE NEED. WITH IT, WE CAN FORCE THE SPACE POWERS TO ACCEDE TO OUR DEMANDS. IF THEY DO NOT, MILLIONS OF PEOPLE ON THE OUTER PLANETS WILL PERISH."
and then leaving them to die in a slower but more diabolical way than just shooting them would be:
"WHEN OUR SHIP IS IN SPACE, WE WILL FIRE A PLAGUE MISSILE ONTO THE SURFACE OF THIS PLANET. THE PLAGUE WILL DESTROY ALL LIFE AND MAKE FURTHER LANDINGS HERE IMPOSSIBLE."
But the Daleks haven't noticed that Galloway isn't among their prisoners any more - who would have though that their racist 'all mannys look the same (except for the Doctor, who almost always looks different)' attitude would come back to nom them?
The Daleks' spaceship takes off, leaving our heroes behind. Sarah reveals that she and Tarrant switched the Parrinium for "bags of sand" and the real Parrinium is on the mannys' spaceship.
The Daleks are getting ready to fire their "plague missile" from their computer with Chock-a-block buttons when Galloway blows them all up with the bomb - a classic self-sacrifice from El Tel as a climax for the story.
The Doctor and Sarah see the city melting, as though it were made of polystyrene and had had polystyrene cement poured all over it by a clumsy SFX manny. The Doctor says
"It's rather a pity in a way; now the universe is down to 699 wonders."
What's so good about Death to the Daleks?
Death to the Daleks* carries on from the previous year's Planet of the Daleks in being full of Terry Nation goodness: a mysterious planet and city to explore (with parallels to the Dalek's own city on Skaro from their very first story), a Tarrant, a plague, a rare chemical with MacGuffin properties, mannys (and aliens) being used as slave labour, a threatening figure who turns out to be an ally, a once-advanced civilisation now fallen to barbarism, puzzles used as an intelligence test, a race against time, and all ending with a self-sacrifice. It really feels like El Tel went out of his way to fill his scripts with all the things we love about his stories.
It is also notable for being the last Dalek story of the original series not to feature Davros, and as such it is the last time the Daleks get to be "brilliant technicians" and scientists in their own right, on top of being murderous pepperpots who like shouting "EXTERMINATE!"
That said, the Daleks are possibly at their least threatening ever in this story. It's not their lack of "projected energy weapons" that's the cause of this, but rather the distinctly unthreatening incidental music sting that accompanies and undermines them wherever they go.
So sadly I must conclude Death to the Daleks is not all good mews - as well as the usual trouble with pacing in part one to ensure the cliffhanger comes in the right place, there are other signs of difficulties with the scripting or the production process. Most obviously there is the subplot with the bomb - necessary for the story's conclusion, yes, but invalidating much of the Doctor's own adventures in the process. Said adventures in the Exxilon city are also oddly paced, and while the cliffhanger ending to part three is brilliant, it has the feeling of being unintentional or unplanned as a point upon which to end an episode.
While Bellal is a great character and worthy one-off Companion for the Doctor, his accompanying of the Doctor to the city means Sarah has to be left behind in the less interesting (but functional) subplot involving the spacemannys and their need for Parrinium. This may mean Sarah has been sidelined in her third story, but it allows us to switch between the two plotlines and so pad out the runtime. That this should be required in only a four-part story is not a good sign, and may indicate that Terry Nation - perhaps uniquely of all Doctor Who writers - was more suited to writing longer stories than short ones.
* Oh, apparently it is called that, mew. Just when you think El Tel is at his most predictable, he pulls a complete subversion of a standard story naming convention out of his writer's hat of tricks. Good old Terry Nation!
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