Yup, I lied about Seeds of Death being next, mostly because I'm still not done with it. So here goes with a Tom Baker classic, a story that generally makes the top 5 list.
The plot in a nutshell: The Doctor is tasked by the Time Lords to interfere in the Daleks' creation. No, really. The same people who killed his second incarnation and exiled him for three years for interfering now want him to interfere. Whatever, roll with it, the Doctor ends up in something that looks an awful lot like a BBC Quarry undergoing something that looks an awful lot like World War Two, except everyone is evil. You have the Nazi Kaleds in their dome versus the Nazi Thals in theirs, and the barbaric Mutos who live out in the wastelands and hate everyone. Into this mix comes Stephen Hawking, I mean Davros, who has created a Mark Three Travel Machine to house the Kaleds' mutated forms. Because evolution works that way. The Doctor realizes that the M3TM looks an awful lot like a Dalek... which also happens to be an anagram of "Kaled."
Meanwhile, Sarah gets captured by the Thals, who, really, are no better than the Kaleds. This is an awesome reversal of the normal standard, where one group of people are the designated good guys who will help the Doctor defeat the bad guys. Here that group is the Mutos, who seem generally unpleasant until about the halfway point.
Doctor Strangelove, I mean Davros, is a magnificent bastard who nukes his own city when the Kaled leaders try to stop him. Then he exterminates a bunch of scientists who disagree with him, only to be exterminated at the end by his own creations. The Doctor accomplishes zilch beyond trapping the Daleks inside their bunker (like it'll take them more than a day, tops, to get out), and goes swanning off, mumbling something about how the Daleks might ultimately be a force for good.
Elsewhere in this blog, you've already heard the critique for the prosecution, that the Doctor's a flip-flopping bleeding-heart who can't do what is necessary for the good of the Universe. And now, the critique for the defense:
That Dalek hatchery blows up, and yet the Daleks still come back in four more classic Who serials. So even if the Doctor had demonstrated resolve and blown it up the first time, he still wouldn't have eliminated the Dalek threat.
All right, here's a different sort of prosecution: given that this is the last good Dalek serial for more than a decade, the Daleks should have been exterminated here.
Defense: never going to happen. Even with Bob "Death to the Daleks" Holmes as script editor, the monsters were too popular to kill off. Besides, you're using hindsight to attack a serial for the faults of later serials.
The Doctor drops those wires the first time because he honestly believes that a negotiated solution is viable. Fine. That works; he really doesn't want to be the one who kills a bunch of Daleks. This is perfectly in keeping with his character. We could have done without the proselytizing, but now we're just being picky.
Speaking of being picky, what about that land-mine scene in the first episode. Pointless filler or comedy gold?
Prosecution: we already know this is a violent world, what with the slo-mo squad death at the very start of the episode. Then they found a body and got shelled. We get it already. The land-mine scene has no tension and is really just there to take up space.
Defense: One, Tom Baker's deadpan delivery of "Harry, I'm standing on a landmine" is pure comedy gold. Yes, it lacks tension, and yes, it is filler, but it's still a damn sight better than what we normally expect from Terry Nation (see half of Planet of the Daleks).
Bottom line: 9/10. Bravo to Peter Miles for sneaking his Iron Cross on the set (most of the time) to really drive the Nazi imagery home. Bravo to Michael Wisher for making Davros such a legendary villain. Bravo to David Maloney for actually turning the lights down in some scenes, for the slo-mo violence at the beginning and the freeze-frame cliffhanger when Sarah falls off the rocket gantry (the resolution, not so much). It's a great story with a couple of flaws that keep it off my Top Five list, but it is a great story nonetheless.
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