Written by Terry Nation | Directed by Richard Martin | Produced by Verity Lambert | Original air date 12/05/64
I will never tire of humans tipping over Daleks like cows. It never gets old!
I'm really enjoying this serial so far. Terry Nation does an admirable job of setting up how dire Earth's situation is on a minuscule budget. The location filming helps - it's kind of crazy, seeing a Dalek patrol the streets near Westminster. Those scenes are a bit excessive, but I suppose the tradition is set here for Doctor Who doing gratuitous shots of the city they're filming in. City of Death does this too, that serial being set in Paris. The music is a little more interesting, there - here in Dalek Invasion of Earth, we get a pretty repetitive drumbeat over almost two minutes of footage of Barbara pushing a man in a wheelchair around the city, running from the Daleks. Still, I enjoyed it - and at least here, there's a little more urgency as to why we're seeing what we are - in City of Death, it's just the Doctor and Romana crossing the street a lot.
I'm sad Craddock got robotized and eventually electrocuted. I liked the poor bugger, dumb as he was. Rewatching this, I note with interest the hints being dropped throughout the serial that something is going on with Susan. The Doctor asks her if she's disrespecting his authority at one point, then when David returns from scouting, he asks for the Doctor's advice, all nice and politely. The Doctor, charmed, suggests Susan's idea, which Susan appreciates. There's also a scene where Susan and David linger a bit, faces an inch apart - it's fleeting, but knowing like I do that Susan eventually marries this dude, I almost expected them to kiss*.
Sadly for Susan, she gets a meta line: "I've never really had any identity," she tells David. True, you haven't, besides screaming a lot and hiding your face when trouble comes your way. It's a shame for Carole Ann Ford, because I think she's a good actress - but Susan is not a good character. Actually, there's another meta line in this episode - when Barbara tells Jenny that the Doctor can't possibly be dead, she replies, "He doesn't wear some sort of invisible shield, does he?" Yes, he does, Jenny, it's called a plot shield. The Doctor surely can't die in his own television show! ...said Doctor Who fans, prior to October 29th, 1966.
"Doctor Who" puns so far: 2 | Tomorrow: "The End of Tomorrow"
*In several Big Finish audios, the Eighth Doctor goes back and visits his granddaughter (and at one point, she and her son Alex visit the TARDIS for Christmas). These are very strange audios, as McGann, while happy to see her, doesn't play his Doctor as that bothered that he's regenerated seven times since he last saw her (well, okay, he saw her on Gallifrey in the Five Doctors, but that's even weirder, because half the Doctor's incarnations barely acknowledge Susan, and even the Fifth Doctor basically says "sup" to her before pissing off to save the day. But that's another post). Alex, meanwhile, is an unfortunate character. He's underwritten in the few audios he's in, and he quickly becomes a heroic sacrifice, and it's hard for there to be any gravity to it since he's not a character we're all familiar with very much. It'd be nice to see a Susan episode written well someday. Fingers crossed for the Christmas 2017 special...
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