TARDIS Log: The Daleks

Where and When:

Our first alien planet - Skaro. 

Even Ian and Barbara know that they are no longer on Earth after coming across the Magnedon - a creature the size of a Labrador dog, but with a shell comprising of metal plates and resembling a crocodilian. 

The TARDIS has landed in the middle of a forest, and when the Doctor and his companions emerge they are initially surrounded by a mist, which quickly clears. The trees and plants are unfamiliar, and it is Ian who spots that, despite a breeze, the branches do not stir. It transpires that they have been petrified - and the Doctor thinks not by heat. The soil is ashen.

Susan finds a brittle tulip-like flower, which has retained some colour. She wants to keep a specimen, but Barbara's discovery of the Magnedon causes Ian to crush it in his haste to come to her aid.

The creature is quite dead, however. The Doctor suspects that it had an inner magnetic field and may have used this to draw its prey towards it, if they were also metallic.

Beyond the forest lies a desolate plain, on which sits a large city composed of futuristic buildings.

And beyond that is a mountain.

This city is home to the Daleks - once humanoid but now mutated into small brain-like creatures with vestigial limbs. They inhabit metal casings, created as protective shells which enable them to move around. They can only do so on metal flooring - drawing power through this via static electricity.

They do not inhabit the surface buildings, confining themselves to subterranean levels.

It will be revealed that Skaro was the scene of a devastating nuclear war, involving neutron bombs. The atmosphere is heavily irradiated.

There is another race on Skaro - the Thals. Whilst the Daleks interfered with the evolutionary process by taking to their protective shells, the radiation has allowed the mutation of the Thals to come full circle, and they are now humanoid again - tall, blond and physically perfect. They have developed a drug to counter the radiation.

The war was fought between Thal and Dal - the original name of the Daleks, who were philosophers and teachers.

The Thals were a warrior people, but now live a simple agrarian lifestyle on a plateau many miles from the Dalek city.

They rely on a great rainfall for their crops, and this has failed. (When this disaster befell them is unclear, as the dialogue is contradictory).

They have embarked on an arduous trek under their leader Temmosus to seek help from their old enemies - even though they don't actually know if any have survived. (It is only through Susan that they learn that they have. Despite their life far from here, they must have known about the city and where it was to be located, so may have mounted the odd exploratory expedition to this region).

We only see adult Thals, but dialogue states that there are children present.

The Thals possess history records, which tell of the planet as well as its people. They know that Skaro is the seventh planet of its solar system.

Behind the mountain lies a great lake, which is home to a variety of mutated animals. One looks like an octopus whilst another generates a whirlpool effect before ensnaring its prey.

Surrounding the lake is more forest - though this doesn't appear to have been petrified (shielded by the mountain perhaps).

One of the creatures which inhabits this region resembles a giant caterpillar.

A cave system runs through the mountain from the lake, and the Daleks have used the tunnels to pipe water into the city to generate hydro-electric power.

The Doctor takes some soil samples and tells the Thals that it is not as barren as he first thought, and that life might return within a few generations.

The dating for this story is impossible when you consider only the seven broadcast episodes on their own. 

We can only attempt to work out when The Daleks might be set by looking at the evidence of later Dalek stories.

12 months from now, we'll learn that they are a space-going race by 2164. They are more advanced than the city-bound ones we see here - though they are still reliant on power being beamed to a collection dish on the back of their casings.

The Doctor states in The Dalek Invasion of Earth that these events on Skaro took place in the far distant future - suggesting that they will degenerate and retreat into their old city. This doesn't really fit with the Thal history or what we see here, however.

Everything seems to point to this being the early emergence of the Daleks following the war, encountering the Thals for the first time since that catastrophe.

The big problem is the fact that the Daleks appear to be killed off at the end of the story.

There are two ways around this.

The first is that there is at least one other Dalek colony elsewhere on the planet.

The second - made possible by The Power of the Daleks - is that they have simply been rendered dormant without power. The Daleks in the capsule found on the planet Vulcan are said to have been buried in a mercury swamp for several hundred years - and yet are resurrected when fed power.

For them to be invading Earth in the mid 22nd Century, and if it's the same Daleks, then this story is most likely set in Earth's past, perhaps the 18th or 19th Century.

The TARDIS:

The journey from prehistoric Earth to Skaro lasts only moments. The Doctor asks Susan to check the radiation meter, which is a fixture on the console. It shows normal but, seconds after everyone goes off to freshen up, it climbs quickly into the danger zone. A light flashes, but there is no audible alarm.

The travellers spend the night in the TARDIS before going off to explore the city in the morning - yet no-one spots this flashing light. They even stand around the console when the Doctor operates it, during his act of sabotage - but no-one notices anything.

The alarm must have switched itself off. If so, coupled with the delay in indicating danger, this suggests that the meter is faulty.

Unfortunately, the Doctor broke his handheld meter when he was abducted by Kal in the last story.

Ian suspects that the Doctor doesn't know how to pilot the TARDIS. When asked directly, he claims that if the correct data is known at the start of a journey then the course can be set - but they took off too quickly from the last location to gather this information.

Susan states further that there is a meter fixed to a big bank of computers which can guide the TARDIS, but only if that data is fed in - suggesting some form of 'auto-pilot' function, and the Doctor doesn't have to be at the controls the whole time.

But then she says that the Doctor's inability to navigate the ship is simply down to him being "forgetful".

The Doctor will later think that he might be able to work out their position from the Thal history records, which include a map of local space.

There is an area at the rear of the console room, partitioned off from the rest of the room, which contains a table and chair at which Susan sits to sketch the flower she had found. We see a double inner door leading off this area.

It is in this area that we find the Food Machine.

It is a tall box-like affair with a sloping control panel with buttons and lights at chest level.

The foodstuff requested is created by inputting a code, using clock-like dials, operated as you would the combination lock of a safe. The Doctor gets these codes from a notebook. You then press a central button, lights flash and it emits a noise to let you know when your item is ready. He explains that flavours are made up of component parts, likening it to composing colours from a combination of other ones.

Ian and Barbara select bacon and eggs, and a small item resembling a white Mars Bar - other chocolate bars are available - emerges on a little tray from a slot on the front of the machine, just beneath the control panel.

With one bite you taste the bacon, and another the eggs. Ian jokes his bacon is a little salty, and the Doctor counters that it shouldn't be as it is English.

Presumably he acquired the taste during his five months in London.

The Doctor is determined to explore the city, but Ian and Barbara refuse to let him do this - even alone, as only he knows how to operate the TARDIS (so they assume that Susan can't on her own).

When Susan agrees with the teachers that they leave the planet, the Doctor sabotages the ship.

He ducks down behind the console whilst the others are distracted looking up at the scanner and tampers with a component inside its base.

The power builds up as normal, but the ship fails to dematerialise. 

Susan suggests checking the Fault Locator. This is built into the wall behind a glass frontage, and has a small rectangular viewing port at eye level.

When Susan looks through this we see a device resembling a seismograph, with a rolling strip of paper and a number of inked needles.

From this she identifies the problem as component K7 - which the Doctor knows, without looking it up, to be the fluid link (because he just tampered with it).

This small object comprises four circular discs with a metal rod running through the centre.

It should be filled with mercury, but one end of the rod has come loose and the mercury has run out. 

The Doctor reveals that he doesn't have a supply of this substance on board. This particular fault has never happened before - or so he claims. He will later confirm that there is no mercury on board, having searched through all his spares. Nor does he carry any other fluid links, as the one taken by the Daleks has to be retrieved from the city.

Prisoners in the Dalek city, someone has to return to the TARDIS to fetch the anti-radiation drugs left by the Thal Alydon. Only Susan is fit enough to do this but Ian insists on going, using her key. She explains that the lock has a defence mechanism. Inside are a number of barrels, 21 of them. If the key isn't inserted properly, the entire lock melts.

Ian can't simply keep trying. (Now that he is travelling with people other than just his granddaughter, and they may be with him for some time, the Doctor obviously replaces this set-up at the first opportunity).

The Doctor later uses Susan's key to sabotage the Dalek surveillance system, stating that he can make her a new one easily enough.

(Whilst he can make another key, he can't make a new fluid link it seems. This might be because he lacks the tools or materials, or maybe it's the skill - another possible pointer to the TARDIS not being of his own invention).

The TARDIS has some medical supplies, such as a remedy for headaches, but the Doctor states that there is nothing which might counter radiation sickness. They would need to travel to another planet and hope that a cure might be available there.

The Doctor takes some soil samples away with him, whilst Barbara gains a roll of Thal cloth and Susan one of their cloaks, of the style worn by their females.

The story ends with the Doctor at the console, with the TARDIS power levels building steadily after it has dematerialised from Skaro. The lights suddenly flare, and the room is plunged into darkness as everyone is thrown to the floor.

A word about the console: it has six control panels, but you can't operate it from any one of these on its own. You have to move around the console to operate it effectively, which suggests that it wasn't designed for a single pilot. This does not mean that it requires a crew of six, however - you wouldn't need someone just to operate a single panel - but it may have required at least one other person (a pilot and a navigator or co-pilot perhaps?).

Behind The Scenes:

It was originally intended that Ridley Scott - yes, that one - would design this story. However, when it became known he could only do the pre-filming at Ealing but be unavailable for the studio recordings, Verity Lambert asked that another designer be used for the sake of consistency.

This was Raymond P Cusick. In the end, the sixth episode would be designed by Jeremy Davies.

As the series progresses, designers will pick and choose which parts of the TARDIS set they will use depending on the needs of the director, and what is in the script.

A considerable part of the opening episode takes place inside the TARDIS, so the full size console room set is employed, including the partitioned off area which is to the right of the Fault Locator wall. This is where the food machine prop is also to be found.

The hexagonal floor plate which surrounded the console in the last story is no longer present.

The scene bridging the second and third episodes sees Susan return to the ship to collect the Thal drugs. Here we only see the console and a couple of walls, one of which contains the main doors. Beyond these is part of the forest set.

(It will become a convention of the series that the TARDIS doors will be to the left of the screen, but in the early days it can be seen to the rear of the console or, very occasionally, screen right).

The drugs are resting on a chair with a tasselled covering, just inside the doors. 

At the end of the story we see a shot of the console room from a high vantage point, and it can be seen that only one corner of the set has been used, along with the console itself. The scanner now appears to be positioned above the main doors, judging by where the Doctor and Ian are looking. The console is much closer to the doors.

If you look closely, you can actually see the rear of one of these walls at the back of the Dalek control room set.

A simple lighting effect was used to simulate an explosion, and the overhead lights were then dimmed.