#doctor who thals

[doctorwhogirlie]

Doctor Who - Planet of the Daleks

[irregularjohnnywiggins]

In honour of William Russell's passing, here's one of those moments that I constantly come back to, time and again: That time Ian, without explicit words (because in 1963 no explicit words were needed) tells you exactly what he was doing 20 years before the episode's airing, and in so doing becomes one of the first people to actually challenge the Doctor to improve his morals:

[dailyclassicwho]

DOCTOR WHO (1963) — 10.20 "Planet of the Daleks: Part Six"

[master-missysversion]

This little speech....literally stopped me in my tracks.

[fanonical]

my weird want for doctor who is that they return to the thals to find out what was going on with skaro’s other genetic mutants

it’s just striking that the original daleks serial was more about the thals than the daleks, but we’ve never really seen them again, and i know there’s some interesting things that could be mined there

[creativecuquilu]

Nearly forgot about this.

These are the Doctor and Bettan hiding from the Daleks...I love it when the Doctor pins himself against a wall.

[mossyfart]

Folks I fear the dopamine switch my adhd needed to flip to be able to get into classic who has been flipped...

Yapping will ensue...

[junkyardbluebox]

Caption This!

[hansolostrickedoutweedvan]

Doctor Who: The Daleks

Coming hot off the heels of An Unearthly Child comes “The Daleks”, debuting way earlier then originally intended and forever damning Doctor Who to be a scifi adventure over the fun historical edutainment it was conceived as. Having left caveman times, the Doctor, still a horrendous person, decides to take the crew to a far future distant planet blanketed in radiation. Despite knowing it’s full of radiation, they all merrily leave the TARDIS and go around a petrified forest, marveling at metallic lizards and stone flowers, increasing their risks of tumours by 2 percent every second. They see a city, which the Doctor wants to explore, but he’s overruled by Ian and Barbara who point out, quite fairly and patiently, that they’d really like to go home and leave, since, you know, he kidnapped them and all.

So the Doctor fakes a mechanical failure, in order to force them to go to the city to look for replacement mercury. There they discover the Daleks, are imprisoned by them while they rapidly start dying of radiation sickness (WOW!) and Susan comes into contact with the Thals, a race of incredibly beautiful blonde, oiled humanoids who are just so peaceful and perfect. The Daleks want to leave their city, which they’re trapped in by the nature of their biology and machinery, purely so they can exterminate the Thals for being different.

Theres a lot of back and forth, with some fun escape sequences in episode 3, and a dramatic conflict in the final episode, but the serial is let down by episodes 4 and 5 which, outside of a scene of Ian convincing the Thals that pacifism is the choice of the delusional when confronting facism, are largely taken up with a slow, repetitive journey through some caves.

All in all, it’s pretty good, and the Daleks are genuinely threatening, with their eerie monotone, and fully inhuman being. A lot of the lore established here about the Daleks won’t make a lot of sense compared to things we find out later (this serial shows the very small number of Daleks, implied to be the entire population wiped out, with no space travel, time travel, or the ability to travel outside of their statically charged metal floors.) There have been numerous attempts to justify this in extended universe material, with some suggesting these are a population of prototype Daleks created by Davros and abandoned in favour of newer models when they left Skaro, as well as the truly wild claim that they are merely a convergent evolution of Dalek, another instance of the same form emerging- Skaro doesn’t have carcinization, it has Dalekization. That actually sounds like a modern Doctor Who story, thinking of it.

In any case, as the blueprint of the Daleks, virtually every key element is here from the minute go: the design is immediately recognisable as virtually identical to a modern Dalek, the voice, the use of “rels” as a measure of time, the xenophobia and xenocidal tendencies, the (not shown but described) form of the horrible mutant inside the casing. This story is probably one of the most Dalek stories out there, without the grotesquely huge scales of conflict they’d later be associated with, and I think that works very well.

Notable First: The Daleks, the Thals,

Rating: Sylvester McCoy and a half out of David Tennant

[rassilon-imprimatur]

GANATUS: "If only there'd been some other way." 

THE DOCTOR: "There should have been another way."

[doctorwhogirlie]

Doctor Who - Thals

[find-me-in-hell]

the thals outfits are so camp in s1

[dailyclassicwho]

DOCTOR WHO (1963) — 1.10 “The Ordeal”・The Daleks: Part Six

[reachingforthevoid]

Doctor Who: Genesis of the Daleks

I rewatched this serial on 2 March 2023, some 48 years or so after it was first on the BBC. Back in 1979, a shortened version of this story was released on LP record. I’ve no idea how many times I listened to it, but quite a lot of it is burned in my memory.

The opening scene involves soldiers that really look like soldiers fighting in a brutal war. In that, it’s reminiscent of the World War I scenes in The War Games.

We soon learn that the Time Lords have interrupted our heroes’ transmatted return to Nerva Beacon from Earth; they are now on Skaro in a battle zone. It’s all quite different from the planet we’ve been to before. Then again, we’re in Skaro’s distant past... a different past to that we’ve seen before. This isn’t the first time Dalek history’s rewritten as we go. I mentioned in a previous post my surprise at the surprise about the Dalek ability to travel through time… and yet, they were doing that all during the 1960s. Doctor Who was all about reinventions and rejuvenations from very early on. It’s one of the main reasons for its continued success.

Thinly disguised allusions to Nazism have appeared in Doctor Who before. In this serial, the allusion is so thin it might as well not be there. But, there is more to this story than that. Our heroes show genuine bravery, more than in previous stories, and supporting characters on all the different sides are complex. I think this serial is more about the different types of resistance to evil that exists and how imperative it is to resist it. The noblest forms of resistance are not necessarily the most effective, but they need to be tried regardless.

Fun fact: the Thals have clothing in this serial. A lot of clothing, most of it in green. Every other time we’ve met Thals they seem to favour skimpy outfits, and not in green.

[alonyssima]

And then she instead married the other companion and named her son after him

John Alydon Ganatus Chesterton

personally would really enjoy a dr who episode where the whirlwind single-episode romance (a la the girl in the fireplace) is between the companion and a historical figure instead of the doctor. And while the short-lived love story should be beautiful in its own right I think there should also be a moment of realization at the inevitable tragic end where the companion is like oh this is what love is like for you all the time.

[ukiyaseed]

It's been ages since I first saw "The Daleks", but this rewatch reminded me one fact about the Daleks that modern Doctor Who tend to forget. They were once teachers and philosophers before they were consumed by hatred and the desire to exterminate. It's scary how hate changes people.

This made me wish that one of the Doctor's later companions to be a Dalek before their race had a war with the Thals.