Sometimes a Facebook comment can make your day. I had someone tell me that they started reading my blog posts for two reasons. One was Daleks. The other is that they are the grandchild of Clarence L. Goodwin, who endowed the chair to which I was appointed in 2010! I responded with delight at the idea that Goodwin established a chair which supports my research and leads to me writing things that his grandchild now reads and finds interesting.
This episode picks up where the last one left off as a cliffhanger, in which the Doctor was injured and collapsed. He is now in a coma, with ice forming on him, and so once the TARDIS has landed, Jo Grant goes out looking for help.
Futuristic technology as depicted in the past often looks dated when watched decades later. In this episode, there is an automatic oxygen supply in the TARDIS – which turns out to be a box with three cylinders in it.
When the Doctor recovers and ventures out, he encounters some people who seem familiar to him. Eventually he realizes that they are Thals, and so he tells them that he is the Doctor and that he visited Skaro generations earlier with Ian, Barbara, and Susan.
The Daleks are on that planet, trying to discover the secret to invisibility which the natives have developed. A massive army of Daleks is there, ready to set forth once they have achieved what they came to. The Thals are determined to stop them.
The Daleks are depicted as utilizing biological warfare.
The episode explores serious subjects related to morality and leadership. Courage, the Doctor says, isn’t not being frightened: it is being frightened and doing what you have to anyway. Command is said to be the perview of humans rather than machines – although the comparison is an awkward one since neither the Doctor nor the Thals are “humans” and the Daleks are cyborgs. The Doctor quips at one point, “You know, for a man who abhors violence, I must say I took great satisfaction in doing that.”
In the end, the place where the Dalek army is in a state of suspended animation, a sort of cold storage, is flooded with freezing liquid. The supreme Dalek shouts that the Daleks have merely been delayed and not defeated – “the Daleks are never defeated!” And so the allegedly supreme beings in the universe (in their own eyes), rather than being the objects of blind faith, offer it vainly themselves.
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