The Dalek Invasion of Earth: episode six – Flashpoint (26 December 1964)

SPOILER ALERT: We'll be discussing some of the Doctor Who adventures broadcast over the last 50 years. In this blog, we're looking at episode six of The Dalek Invasion of Earth. It contains spoilers both about the specific episode and the story as a whole.

As the Daleks' terrible plans to turn the Earth into a warship lie in ruins at the end of their epic second story, the Doctor has a terrible decision of his own to make about his granddaughter. In the course of this adventure on 22nd-century Earth, Susan has fallen in love with a young Scottish freedom fighter named David. What with the threat of apocalypse always looming, their courtship has been necessarily fast, including a rather bizarre episode where they slap a dead fish in each other's faces. But while Susan now has a chance to put down the roots she's always craved – "rebuilding a planet from the very beginning, that's a wonderful idea" – she cannot bring herself to leave her grandfather.

So the Doctor takes the decision out of her hands: locking the doors and leaving her to an exciting new future of domestic bliss, town-planning and fish-slapping. He does something cruel out of kindness, breaking his own heart – and I'm not sure the show has another departure quite so beautifully done until Rose. For the series, this was the beginning of its accidental future-proofing, establishing a format of a revolving cast that would keep it durable for 50 years.

The Daleks' ruse, having invaded the planet, was to enact a drilling operation in Bedfordshire – of all places – enslaving an army of human Droogs as "Robomen" to help them install an engine at the Earth's core and pilot the planet around space. Our Tardis team, having none of this, band together with a group of freedom fighters to foil the dastardly plot. In the end, wonderfully, all it takes is the Doctor and Barbara putting on silly Dalek voices over the intercom, fooling the Robomen into mounting an insurgency against the Daleks, and a fantastic final showdown. Yes, in the cold light of 2013, this showdown is effectively a Benny Hill-style run around a quarry, with some stock footage of explosions. But it is still fantastic.

Life aboard the Tardis

In the time since our last blog, Ian and Barbara have gone from grumpy kidnappees to fast allies, and the Tardis team is a proper power unit. It's all about Jacqueline Hill as Barbara for me, all crisp vowels, pluck and immovable hair, even when driving a truck through a murderous Dalek onslaught. She looks positively gleeful as she uses her history teacher skills to fool the Daleks into believing the rebellion is global; the Native Americans running parallel with the Boston Tea Party, General Lee and the Fifth Cavalry and Hannibal's forces from the Southern Alps. Buttoned-up Barbara has developed a sense of mischief. There is a little something of River about her.

Behind-the-sofa moments

Terry Nation's first Dalek story the previous year had been such a success that a sequel was the obvious move. And this was the story that really ushered in "Dalekmania" – a different kind of invasion, one of kites, water-pistols and lunchboxes taking over the schools of Britain. They were also deemed worthy of Doctor Who's first-ever location filming – the sight of Daleks trundling around Whitehall, Trafalgar Square, Westminster Bridge, Albert Embankment and the Royal Albert Hall made for some of the most memorable sequences in the show's history. Seeing these awful creatures transplanted to your doorstep must have been a terrifying prospect at the time. Although it also must be said that the appearance of the defeated Dalek, its forlorn eyestalk drooping down, is very funny. (Sadly, last week saw the death at 84 of Raymond Cusick, the man who brought the Daleks to terrifying life. While Nation invented them, it was Cusick, as a BBC production designer, who came up their iconic look, one that has remained largely unchanged in 50 years.)

Behind the scenes

In the DVD commentary for The Dalek Invasion Of Earth, Carole Anne Ford explains her reasons for leaving the show. "I think we've all mentioned the fact that we arrived somewhere, and we split and got into trouble etc etc, and it did get to be rather the same thing, and I got to envy the [guest] characters coming in because they seemed to have more interesting things to do than I was. And I was growing up but I wasn't going anywhere."

Producer Verity Lambert added: "When we started Doctor Who … the whole idea that we would run something for 52 weeks seemed astonishing, so I was always felt that maybe at a certain point actors would say: "We're going to be in similar situations [every week] and as much as we've enjoyed it we are going to want to go on to pastures new." But, having said that, you've got a team of people who've worked incredibly well together, all the characters worked and bounced off each other and had their own place, and it was sad to see Carole go, obviously."

Lambert added that she faced a practical problem, in that the show had been set up as being about a man travelling with his granddaughter. "Obviously we couldn't just find another grand-daughter, so we had to have a completely different kind of relationship."

Fragments

• Here's the iconic scene of the Daleks going over Westminster Bridge recreated for the 50th anniversary docudrama An Adventure in Space and Time. The film gets curiouser and curiouser. I'd initially thought it was just about the origins, but apparently not…

• This was the second TV story to be remade for the big screen with Peter Cushing, in 1966, as Daleks' Invasion Earth: 2150 AD.

• This story featured the show's first of many visits to a quarry – although this time, John Hole's Quarry was actually meant to be a quarry and not an alien planet.

• According to the DVD special features, William Hartnell had become just as grumpy and protective over his special chair as Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory.

• The Doctor made good on his word to one day come back, but we never saw it on screen. But Susan was reunited with the eighth Doctor in a 2009 audio play, An Earthly Child.

• Does anyone have any idea what the Slyther is meant to be for?

Further reading

• Here's the official BBC page for the story. The "goofs" section is particularly fantastic: "Jenny and Barbara have to hold their neck manacles in place."

• TV Tropes and "future noir" memes

Next time

We're shooting forward to probably my favourite Doctor, as Patrick Troughton awakens the Tomb Of the Cybermen. Classic doesn't even begin to cover it.