The Stolen Earth / Journey's End

Chapter the 300th, Multiple ex-regulars and spin-off personnel - Assemble!

Plot:
The Earth has disappeared from its usual position in space, and the Doctor and Donna cannot find it. On the planet, Sarah Jane Smith and her son Luke use their alien supercomputer Mr. Smith to investigate what's happened; also investigating are the Torchwood Cardiff team of Captain Jack, Gwen and Ianto, and UNIT New York where Martha Jones is working. They all come to same conclusion by looking out of the window: the Earth has been moved across space. This has been done by the Daleks who quickly descend on the planet. All hope seems lost, but the different groups are brought together on a hidden subwave network Zoom call by former prime minister Harriet Jones. The only person who can't connect is Rose, who has come over from her parallel universe and met up with Donna's family. The Doctor and Donna travel to the Shadow Proclamation for help, then find the tracks of bees fleeing the planet Earth before it was moved, and follow them. They still can't find the missing planet until the subwave network sends a signal. This allows the Daleks to track Harriet Jones and exterminate her. The TARDIS finds the Earth and 26 other missing planets that the Daleks have arranged as a cosmic engine. Doctor talks to the others on the subwave network, but then Davros breaks into the chat and taunts the Doctor. The TARDIS materialises on a London street, and the Doctor and Rose see each other from afar. They run towards each other, but a Dalek moves out of the shadows and zaps the Doctor. Captain Jack uses a personal teleport to travel to them, and destroys the Dalek. Jack, Rose and Donna get the Doctor into the TARDIS and he starts to regenerate.

Before he changes, the Doctor aborts the process by transferring the regeneration energy into his lopped-off hand in a jar, which he keeps in the TARDIS. Martha teleports to Germany using a UNIT prototype to prime a superweapon. Sarah Jane leaves Luke behind and goes out onto the streets where she almost gets killed by the Daleks. She is saved by Mickey and Jackie, who arrive from the parallel universe. They allow themselves to be gathered up with other humans that are taken onto the Dalek's mothership. The TARDIS is forcibly brought there too. The Doctor, Rose and Jack step out, but Donna is still inside when the Daleks attempt to destroy the TARDIS by dropping it into the reactor that powers their ship. Hearing a heartbeat in her head, Donna reaches out and touches the lopped-off hand. It glows with energy and grows into another Doctor, with only one heart, who puts on the main Doctor's spare blue suit. The Daleks test their reality bomb; the 27 planets are powering a device that will unravel all matter in the universe, leaving only the Daleks as survivors. To stop them, the Doctor's companions threaten the Daleks. Sarah-Jane has a bomb that will blow up the Dalek ship; Martha can destroy the world to disable the engine powering the reality bomb. Davros taunts the Doctor some more about how he has fashioned his friends into killers, and the Daleks transmat all of the companions to them, neutralising any threat. Blue-suit Doctor and Donna materialise with plans to stop the Daleks, but they too are stopped, with Donna zapped by Davros and knocked to the ground.

The countdown to reality bomb detonation begins, but when it reaches zero nothing happens. Donna now has the Doctor's intelligence and has deactivated the device. The 'metacrisis' that created the second Doctor also made her half-human half-time lord, leaving the powers latent until her body got the shock of Davros's attack. The Doctors and Donna work to return the planets home; they manage to do this for all except Earth, but they can use the TARDIS to get the planet to its proper place. The blue-suit Doctor, much to the brown-suit Doctor's displeasure, destroys all the Daleks. Working together, with help from Torchwood, Luke, Mr. Smith and even K9, everyone pilots the TARDIS back to Earth's proper coordinates towing the planet behind them. Mickey decides to stay on Earth with Jack and Martha. The Doctor returns Rose and Jackie to the parallel Earth, and Rose stays there with the blue-suit Doctor. Left alone with the brown-suit Doctor, Donna starts to break down. A human brain cannot cope with time lord knowledge, so he has to wipe her memory of all her adventures with him to save her. He takes her home and leaves her with Sylvia and Wilf to look after. He leaves, sad, in the rain, and Wilf salutes him.

Context:

Watched these two episodes from the iplayer accompanied by two of the children (boy of 14, girl of 12) over two weekends in May 2024. Various events in our lives meant there was a whopping great two week gap between watching the first and second parts. This didn't bother either of them unduly; if were me, I'd have been desperate to see the next episode after that cliffhanger (more on that moment in the Deeper Thoughts section below).

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. This post marks the completion of another season, the 25th out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing), classic seasons 1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 12, 14-18, 20, 21, 23-25, and new series 2, 4, 6, 7, 9-11, and 13).

First Time Round:

This still felt new to me, despite it being a lifetime ago (literally in the case of my eldest child who was a toddler when this was first shown but can vote in his first election in 2024). The first David Tennant and Catherine Tate era (the 2008 season starring them as the Doctor and Donna respectively, following Tate's one-off guest appearance in the 2006 Christmas special) was fresh in the mind because of their return for the 2023 specials. Everything resolved in The Star Beast was set up in Journey's End, 15 years earlier. At that time, the Better Half and I would have put the aforementioned child (our only one at that time) down to sleep, then watched The Stolen Earth go out live on BBC1. In between the two episodes, I was at a screenwriting festival in Cheltenham. I remember that at the end of this event, two day's before the broadcast of Journey's End if memory serves, I was sitting with a group of screenwriters in the nearby hotel bar waiting for taxis to arrive and discussing how that cliffhanger would be resolved. Later the same day when I was back home, I went online to a forum called Roobarb's and clicked on a message with a spoiler warning (don't do this, kids!) in which someone had posted leaked details that not only laid out exactly how the cliffhanger would be resolved, but also gave away the details about the new Doctor growing from the lopped-off hand, and Rose going off with that new Doctor at the end.

Reaction:

As the latest new Doctor Who is now a streaming show first and foremost, one of the peripheral pleasures / pains of online fandom, worrying about ratings, is denied. Yes, tabloids will gripe about viewing figures plummeting based on the incomplete picture of overnight UK ratings, but it remains true that some of the metrics upon which Who is now being judged will not be publicly available. The second part of the saga of the Daleks stealing the Earth, Journey's End, was the first Doctor Who story ever to top the ratings charts in the UK. The BBC's iplayer was still a relatively new invention in 2008; Netflix had only launched its streaming service the year before, its primary business remained mail-out DVDs. Disney+ was nothing back then bar the daydream of a futurist. Television was still all about sitting on the sofa and watching something at a specific time, and Doctor Who was owning that. We won't know how well things are truly going with the Ncuti Gatwa era of Doctor Who until a recommission is announced, and as its already commissioned for a run in 2025, that could be a while. There might be another way to tell sooner, though - if Doctor Who gets any spin-off shows. Another signal of 2008 Who's success was that there were no less than two long-running dramatic spin-off shows (Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures) being broadcast alongside the parent show. Before coming back to the showrunner role, Davies went on record that he felt Doctor Who should have an extended range of spin-off shows in the mold of the Marvel Cinematic Universe; it's easy to see why, as he'd done it on a smaller scale himself when he first ran the show. As he himself said, that was perhaps ten years too early: Iron Man had only just been in cinemas when Davies was putting out his own version of Avengers: Endgame.

The story revels in the comic crossover approach of putting together combos: Rose with Wilf and Sylvia, Sarah Jane with Jackie and Mickey, Captain Jack and Donna. The structure of the fourth series of Davies's relaunched Doctor Who cleverly teed up the guest stars that would appear, even if one hadn't seen their previous episodes / other shows. It included episodes that featured Martha Jones and Rose Tyler before they returned here, and also namechecked the heroes of Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures. It set up the mystery of missing planets and missing bees that would be paid off here, and teased at the dark destiny for Donna that would be revealed at the end. Beyond all the year-long threads being weaved together, it still pulled some surprises related to plots from longer ago: Harriet Jones unexpectedly popped up in the first part, and Jackie and Mickey in the second.The show resolved dangling threads concerning characters from the very first episode of Who, with Mickey, Jackie and Rose all happily set up in their lives, the last of those paired up with a human version of the Doctor to grow old with. It neatly completes the ongoing arc plot about the Doctor's residual angst from the Time War. His blue-suited alter-ego born in turmoil once again chooses to commit genocide, destroying all the Daleks (the Doctor himself having come to realise this was the wrong choice when he was Christopher Eccleston) and gets to be healed by Rose once again. Featuring Davros (it's a lovely moment when Davies capitalises on the coincidence of a character, Sarah Jane, being present who appeared in Davros's first ever story) is the icing on the cake, and the Daleks could have never appeared in the series again, such is the closure that is established here.

It feels like such a complete ending to a full era that it took almighty cleverness from Davies to spin out the narrative threads sufficiently for a few more specials in 2009, and they do feel a little tacked on. He could have left after this story (and there was a rumour going around at the time that he had planned such a thing). If it was at any point expected to be his swansong, then it was apt that Davies showed us the Shadow Proclamation (another callback to the very first relaunch episode Rose in 2005) and featured one of his most popular monster creations, the Judoon (the Ood are also namechecked). There's a surprise cameo from K9 in there, and Bernard Cribbins having fun shooting a paintball gun at a Dalek's eyestalk ("My vision is not impaired"). With everything going on, it could have seemed too busy, but it never feels that way. My favourite moment is a relatively quiet scene when Martha has travelled to Germany, to find a station in which to use her doomsday weapon, the Osterhagen key. There's been an audacious and funny moment where the Dalek voices are translated into German ("Extrmineiran! Extrmineiran!"), but then she meets an old German woman. The woman talks, haunted and hauntingly, about the glamour of London when she visited many years before. Then, knowing what Martha's planning, and what the key does, the woman pulls a gun on the Doctor's companion. The exchange is not subtitled, but she accuses Martha: "You are the nightmare, not the [Daleks], you! I should kill you now". Martha fronts it out, and the woman cannot bring herself to pull the trigger. It's a beautiful scene, a nice character moment but building up the tension.

All the different companion plotlines come to nothing regarding the defeat of the Daleks, only there to showcase the Doctor's preponderance for making other people do his fighting for him. This is accompanied by more fan service, with a clip montage of characters since 2005 who've died in the Doctor's name (Yabe the Tree! Lynda with a Y! A bloke from the werewolf one!). The one who saves the day is Donna. In an echo of Rose in Bad Wolf / The Parting of the Ways, she attains superpowers at the risk of her own life. The sad fate of having her world view narrowed again, forgetting all the adventures she's had with the Doctor, is a signature note of melancholy from Davies, and the scenes of the family Noble at the end are some of the best material in the story. Wilf talking to the Doctor as he stands in the rain by the TARDIS is a wonderful moment to end this epic of hope and of sadness. It's 16 years on, and I have watched and enjoyed it again. Before streaming, Who had an extended life on DVD and Blu-ray, and video before that, and international (and less frequently, domestic) repeat screenings before that. Stories have always managed to work through a 'long tail'. It's rarely ever been purely about sitting on the sofa and watching something at a specific time. Heck, the next story I'm covering for the blog is The Monster of Peladon. If people like me are still watching that story 50 years on, then the current run of programmes isn't going to disappear either. The shot in the arm given to this patient by the relaunch and creation of all the different characters featured in The Stolen Earth and Journey's End shouldn't be underappreciated, but Doctor Who in some form will always endure.

Connectivity:

Despite the plethora of different elements in The Stolen Earth / Journey's End, there isn't much in common with The Devil's Chord; this is perhaps indicative of the desire of the showrunner and the production team to make the new era with Ncuti Gatwa's Doctor distinct from what came before. Nonetheless, both stories are written by Russell T Davies and feature a Doctor with a single female companion visiting an Earth that's been changed (spatially in the Tennant story, temporally in the Gatwa one). The surging choral number at Journey's End's end when the Earth is towed back to its proper place is something like The Devil's Chord's big closing song (but non-diegetic, of course).

Deeper Thoughts:

And on that bombshell... The Stolen Earth / Journey's End is full of big stuff, in fact it's all big stuff. The biggest thing to happen of all, though, is what takes place at the end of the first episode. I kid you not, at the time there were news articles with headlines along the lines of "BBC Confirms Doctor Who is Not Going to Regenerate" prompted by that gap between part one and part two. In my opinion, it's one of the best and certainly one of the most audacious cliffhangers in the show's history. This set my deeper thoughts going about why I'd never written in the Deeper Thoughts section about cliffhangers before. Doctor Who was conceived from even before its very beginnings as a series of serials. In the very first outline of the proposed sci-fi series that will eventually become Doctor Who, drawn up by C.E. Webber on 29th March 1963 after a meeting three days earlier, it's stated that the programme will last "at least 52 weeks, consisting of various dramatised SF stories, linked to form a continuous serial". This was before the Doctor or the TARDIS were dreamed up, when the show was briefly envisaged to be about a trio of Earthbound "troubleshooters". In a redrafted document the following month, Webber further details that the series will be made up of stories of six or seven 25-minute episodes each, and the episodes will end on a cliffhanger. By this point, "Dr. Who" and his "machine" are part of the outline, but cliffhangers came first. The shape is inspired by the Saturday morning cinema serials shown in the early half of the 20th century, and the serial fiction of writers like Charles Dickens before that. It's interesting to note that this structure remained unaffected in the series outline when everything else about the series changed. Those Saturday morning serials did range widely in terms of genre and subject matter.

Perhaps I've not written much about them before because cliffhangers seem to me to occupy a liminal space in story theory; they are so ubiquitous as to seem important, but are fundamentally inessential. Indeed, they can sometimes be damaging. If you stopped at the most interesting part of an anecdote and told people to come back in a week to hear the rest, I'd forecast that you would not have a very happy audience. If a serialised story reaches a cliffhanger and forever stops there (which happens a lot in TV when programmes get cancelled), it can feel incomplete as a story. Books don't have to come in chapters, and plays don't have to come in acts, but they tend to do so. Why? All story theory proponents agree that any mainstream story's structure as a minimum has to have a beginning, a middle and an end; stories therefore tend to be structured in sections that follow a standard approach. Paraphrasing and combining many different experts' takes for the sake of brevity, these would be as follows: an event that throws the protagonist's world out of balance, increasing complications, crisis point, and finally resolution. To take a four times 25-minute Doctor Who story as a template, one might think that part one would cover the imbalance event, part two would be about the complications, part three the crisis point, and finally resolution in the last part. But these story structure sections are very rarely paced such that they fall neatly in to equally-sized chunks. Do you want to keep an audience waiting for 25 minutes before anything out of the ordinary happens to the main character? Could you really sustain the crisis point for a full 25 minutes, or the resolution?

It's always satisfying when an episode of any serial drama ends at a key story reversal, a big event where the fortunes of the protagonist fundamentally change as part of the overall story structure. This would be the so called game-changer cliffhanger. The most talked-up of these was the ending to A Good Man Goes to War in Matt Smith's second season as the Doctor. Scheduling decisions had meant that there was a mid-season break, and the writer of the story and showrunner of the time Steven Moffat took advantage of this to provide a big cliffhanger leading in to the gap, which he wouldn't have used if the viewers had to wait a year to discover the outcome. This turned out to be the revelation that River Sing was Amy and Rory's daughter grown-up, and - for this viewer at least - it was a bit disappointing. It doesn't change the game. I suppose it does fundamentally change Amy and Rory's lives, as it means they will never get their baby back (as history already dictates that River will grow up independently of her parents albeit under their noses). This isn't made clear until the following episode, though, and the emotion of it is never explored effectively. The biggest game changing cliffhanger is probably the end of The Tenth Planet part four, when the Doctor regenerates for the first time. Again, like with the Matt Smith, it's at the end of a serial, rather than in between episodes. The end of The War Games's penultimate part, with the Time Lords arriving on the scene, is probably the biggest game-changer cliffhanger within a story. Realistically, this sort will not happen that often; the reason why is built in to that original 1963 document. Doctor Who is an ongoing series where the regular cast move on at the end of one serial to start another: they can't be too radically changed or that format couldn't be sustained. If Amy and Rory truly faced up to the trauma of losing their child, would any of the usual weekly larks matter to them anymore?

What else, then, can a writer use to make up their cliffhanger quotient? The most common is the bisected action sequence from where the phenomenon gets its name. For the literal cliffhanger, the protagonist has fallen down a cliff but managed to grab on to something such that they are left hanging. The action sequence could then continue to show them do something very clever to climb back up to safety, but the sequence is cut in half: the audience is left to wait, asking themselves 'How will they get out of that?!'. There's an example of a literal cliffhanger in the second ever Doctor Who story: Ian is connected by a rope to a Thal who has fallen down an abyss, and the weight is pulling Ian closer and closer to the edge. Also literal but less successful is the end of Dragonfire's first episode. The Doctor is hanging over a cliff, hooked on by only his umbrella, but his grip on the umbrella is loosening and he's slipping down. It doesn't work for two reasons: first, it's directed badly such that there seems to be no obvious pressure exerted to cause him to get in the predicament; second, the following week it turns out that there's an unseen ledge below him where someone can help him down. Of course, it was a standard of the Saturday morning cinema serials to cheat the following week, so anything like this could be seen as a homage. The 'How will they get out of that?!' cliffhanger is the most commonly used in the series, though rarely involving actual cliffs. The end of The Stolen Earth definitely falls into the category; it also is resolved with a bit of a cheat. The Doctor uses a previously unmentioned talent to transfer the regeneration energy into the old lopped-off hand that he keeps in the TARDIS. 

There are a few other types of cliffhangers that Doctor Who has employed over the years, but I've run out of space here, so cue the Eastenders drums: doof doof doof-doof-doof doofer doofer - To Be Continued!

In Summary:

An excellent part of Doctor Who's enduring legacy, with an audacious cliffhanger in the middle.

Genesis of the Daleks

Chapter the 278th, where critiquing one of Who's biggest stories ever is like critiquing Hamlet: nobody wants my opinion, and probably someone's said it before me anyway. Nonetheless, I'll try... 

Plot:
The Time Lords intercept the Doctor, Sarah and Harry when they are mid-transmat travelling from the Earth to Nerva Beacon. They have dragged them off course to Skaro in the past, around the time of the Daleks' earliest beginnings, to give the Doctor a mission to avert the creatures' creation. Skaro is towards the end of a thousand-year war that has destroyed the planet and transformed the people. Both sides, Thals and Kaleds, feel they cannot now stop until they've achieved the total annihilation of the other. Sarah gets separated from the Doctor and Harry, is captured by the Thals, and press-ganged into loading a missile with dangerous explosive. Meanwhile, the Doctor and Harry are captured by the Kaled military ("Why, that's an anagram of -! How interesting."). The military are not really in command on the Kaled side, as the power is held by an elite group based in a separate bunker away from their main dome, and the Doctor and Harry soon find themselves imprisoned there. The leader of this group is a scientist called Davros. The Kaled Elite have forecast that the mutations caused by the weapons of this war will only get worse. Davros's research has therefore focussed on building a travel machine that will be used by the mutated forms that the Kaleds will eventually become; he calls this machine a Dalek. He has created many mutated lifeforms to test these machines, but others in the bunker are worried about his work: instead of just accelerating the mutation, Davros has genetically-engineered the embryonic mutants to remove emotions and make them more aggressive, essential - as he sees it - to their survival.

One of the Elite helps the Doctor and Harry to escape, and they go to the Kaled government and persuade them to halt Davros's experiments. They then travel to the Thal dome to rescue Sarah. Hearing of his government's moves against him, Davros goes to the Thals and gives them a formula that will help their rocket destroy the Kaled dome. He would rather sacrifice every Kaled outside the bunker than stop working on the Daleks. The Doctor gets everyone out of the launch area and then tries to sabotage the rocket, but is knocked out by a guard. When he awakes, the Kaled dome is destroyed and the Thals are celebrating the end of the war. He helps a Thal called Bettan escape when Davros's new Daleks arrive and start exterminating the Thals. The Doctor goes back toward the Kaled bunker, meeting Sarah and Harry en route. On re-entering the bunker, the TARDIS trio are captured by Davros, but later released by the anti-Davros contingent of the Elite, who are now in the majority. While these rebels confront Davros, the Doctor wires up the embryo room to explode, but has second thoughts wondering if he has the right to interfere. The Daleks return from the Thal dome and exterminate all the rebellious members of the Elite, but they don't stop there. They also kill those loyal to Davros, and even Davros himself. Bettan leads a resistance group of survivors who blow up the entrance to the bunker, just seconds after the TARDIS trio escape. Travelling back to the TARDIS using a Time Ring that the Time Lords provided, the Doctor muses that even though they did not stop the Daleks from being created, that they didn't really lose as some good will come from the Daleks continuing existence, but he's fooling himself really.

Context:

I couldn't get anyone in the family interested in watching this with me, and then I had a couple of false starts when - after everyone had gone to bed - I pressed play on the blu-ray disc (from the very first collection box set for season 12, released in 2018) and after a few seconds of theme tune decided I was too tired and went to bed. In the end I watched it over a couple of late afternoons and evenings during a rainy week in late September 2023. The Better Half sat in for the first couple of episodes, but this was mainly because she was feeling under the weather and couldn't find the energy to leave the living room. Wrapped in a blanket, she sat on the sofa making the occasional comment. The most interesting was an observation that you never see electricians or plumbers at work in science fiction stories, but they must be needed. She has a point. I could only think of the one scene in The End of the World that contradicted her assertion, and that was a last minute addition to pad out the running time. I then started to wonder who does the plumbing for terrestrial military bases during conflicts. I'm guessing that they didn't get Iraqi contractors in to fix the toilets in the Green Zone, and instead it would have been members of some mechanical engineering corps or other, but I don't know for sure. Maybe this is a topic for future study. The reason why will become more clear in the Reaction section below, but it is instructive to understand that these musings only occurred to me during the early episodes; by the end, I wasn't thinking about plumbing.

Milestone watch: This post completes season 12, which is the 14th out of the current 39 series of Who new and old for which I've blogged all the stories. It's the fifth of seven Tom Baker seasons completed, with only two of his many, many stories remaining to cover. Gosh!

First Time Round:

In the early days of the Doctor Who VHS range, from its beginnings in the 1980s up to around 1991 (the year that Genesis of the Daleks was released), one could not guarantee that one would be able to find a shop stocking the tapes on their day of release. Just finding the things at all was reward enough, the timing was secondary. As the 1990s progressed and the range established itself, things became more reliable and - for this fan at least, and I suspect from behaviour of others that I've witnessed over the years that it isn't just me by a long way - obtaining the story as early as possible became very important. This is one of those things that fans get obsessive about maybe even despite themselves. Thinking back about the early 1990s, I am probably projecting myself indulging in this behaviour, which I was definitely doing by later in the decade, before I truly did. Reading old diaries I recently rediscovered (see blog posts passim) made it clear that funding and personal organisation did not always allow this. In early October 1991, Genesis of the Daleks came out in a double pack with preceding story The Sontaran Experiment, and on the same day another classic Tom Baker story The Deadly Assassin was also separately made available. And I didn't purchase them for months afterwards. The reason for this, and a broader explanation of some of the obsessive behaviour of fans, I will cover below in the Deeper Thoughts section.

Reaction:

As the anecdote goes, Barry Letts - the outgoing Doctor Who producer who commissioned this story before Philip Hinchcliffe took over in the role - read the initial storyline that writer Terry Nation had submitted, and in a script meeting said to Nation "It's great; the only snag is that you've sold it to us twice already". This refers back to a brace of Dalek stories Nation had written in the previous two years. Both were straightforward adventure tales where Daleks and Doctor would land on a hostile planet full of perils overcome one by one, with an arbitrary plot eventually foiled. It was the basic formula for every Nation-penned Dalek story after his first couple in the early years; only the locales would really change. This time, Letts wanted something different. To his credit, Nation took this with good humour, and he, Letts and outgoing script editor Terrance Dicks brainstormed together and came up with the idea of showing the Daleks' origins. Watching the early episodes of Genesis of the Daleks, I wonder whether some remnants of that original storyline made it into the final product, though. There are tell-tale signs of the sort of Saturday morning cinema serial plotting that Nation loved to sample, and which was a major inspiration for early Doctor Who. Such plotting is never very joined up. A wasteland features in episode one that's dangerous with explosions, gas and gunfire; by episode three and four, people cross it with ease. Soldiers talk about how they must conserve ammo, and then seconds later are spraying bullets all over the place. Sarah has to load a rocket with dangerous material that will definitely kill her one week, but when she's finished loading the rocket it resolutely doesn't kill her the next week. In fact, she suffers no ill effects at all, and that danger is never mentioned again.

This sort of logical inconsistency wouldn't matter as much if it was just a simple adventure plot. Indeed all those scenes work in isolation, probably because they are staged and shot with gusto by director Davis Maloney and the crew. From the opening sequence of a brutal slo-mo attack on masked soldiers onwards, Genesis of the Daleks looks and feels excellent. There's a very generous eight and a half minutes of film before the first studio set, and even what's in studio is made, dressed and lit well. Production fell to the new team of Hinchcliffe and incoming script editor Robert Holmes, and they gave Maloney the latitude to bring more darkness (both literal and figurative) to proceedings, as well as - presumably - a bit more money than other stories that year. This is essential, as the remainder of the script apart from the perilous adventure stuff needed to be treated more seriously than the brighter and more colourful house style of the Letts and Dicks years would probably have allowed. It is after all a story heavily influenced by the horrors of the Second World War that examines the morality of eugenics during a major conflict. This subtext is laid on so thick you could almost lose the sub- and just call it text, with the Kaleds wearing Nazi-style uniforms and giving Nazi-style salutes (Nyder even wears an iron cross in the earlier episodes, before someone realised that was a bit too much and it was removed). For many years, people believed such material was probably suggested (maybe even written) by Robert Holmes, so different is it to what Nation usually delivered. But Nation was a very good writer, he just tended towards a certain expediency when scripting Doctor Who. When given a challenge, he needed no help, and the character of Davros and the narrative of the Daleks' creation is his best work for the series.

If Genesis has a significant flaw, though, it is that mix between the external, environmental threat of the adventure stuff, mostly in the earlier episodes, and the interpersonal and philosophical threat of the later material with Davros and the Kaled elite, mostly in the later episodes. The story is equal parts Buster Crabbe and Josef Mengele. That's an odd mix to begin with, but then those logical lapses in the earlier material make it even less likely to gel by undermining the later material. If this is a dangerous story universe where Davros's experimentation needs to be taken seriously, then you just can't have a toxic material illogically turn out not to be toxic at all. It's also a bit tiresome - at least to an old and jaded viewer like me who's seen the story a number of times before - to have scenes of exciting escapes and chases that turn out to be pointless as escapees are captured again and put back exactly where they were. I accept this, though, as part of Doctor Who; it's exciting for people watching the first time, it provides nice cliffhangers, it makes the story reach its six episodes in length - fair enough. There's no excuse for the toxic material stuff, though. It's frustrating. Either it should have been removed altogether, or Nation ought to have worked in some antidote. Instead, he seems to just assume viewers will forget what happened the week before. Genesis of the Daleks gets away it, though, as it's just so well made, and the later material so good, that these inconsistencies are forgiven. While intellectually, I can see I might enjoy a four-part version of this story that just concentrates on the Davros material, I know in my gut that it wouldn't be nearly as popular as the poll-topping behemoth that the story became.

What makes Genesis of the Daleks so good that its flaws are forgiven, apart from the way it's shot and designed? The most obvious thing is the conception and character of Davros, and Michael Wisher's performance bringing life to the Dalek creator. Wisher's work has long been celebrated, and I'm not going to contradict what's obvious: he is superb. The soft, sly delivery when he's being a political plotter, the brittle terse exchanges when he's dealing with people he knows to be his intellectual inferiors, the ranting where he sounds more and more like one of his creations - all these choices are so good they look obvious in retrospect and set a template from which nobody who'd play the character later could possibly deviate; it is impeccable and indelible. The mask and make-up are first rate, and the ideas that underpin all this are perfect. The Dalek travel machines are based on a similar life-support and wheelchair he's designed for himself. He sees the Daleks as an extension of himself ("We - I - will go on") which makes the irony of the ending where they turn on him, as he's programmed them to hate anything unlike themselves, even more powerful. This wouldn't work if he was the hackneyed mad scientist character - the story and the ending works better because his point of view, although extreme, is rational: in order to survive, he feels the Daleks must be the apex predator of the universe, and cannot afford to have any qualms about that. What's also refreshing is that - probably uniquely in classic Doctor Who - Davros as the villain wastes no time in disbelieving the Doctor is who he says he is, a time traveller from another world, and instead turns it immediately to his advantage.

The interesting POVs provided for the characters facilitate another big strength of the story, some big scenes. Aside from the ending (which continues after Davros is killed with a magnificent BCU of a Dalek - the new power on Skaro - facing right into the camera, ranting its credo of universal domination), there are two that are rightly famous. Whenever they occur, it's similar to when a production of Hamlet reaches 'To be or not to be'. Firstly, the Doctor and Davros in conversation, with the Time Lord trying to persuade the Kaled that his creations are like a virus that will eventually wipe out all other lifeforms. Wisher has Davros picturing the scene vividly, and even chillingly acting out the holding of a capsule containing the virus "To know that the tiny pressure on my thumb, enough to break the glass, would end everything: yes, I would do it!" and snapping his fingers closed, already bringing about galactic devastation in his warped imaginings. The other scene is the Doctor poised with two wires to touch together, asking if he has the right to change the future. Just those would be enough to push this story to the top reaches of fan polls, but there are so many great lines and moments (my favourite is Nyder's line about the Doctor and Harry "We'll find out what's different about them... by autopsy"). The performances aside from Wisher are all top drawer: Peter Miles, Tom Georgeson, Dennis Chinnery, Stephen Yardley, Guy Siner...

The regular actors are solid too, though at this early stage Nation hadn't quite got a handle on their characters. Baker's Doctor as written is a bit more lightly rather than broodingly eccentric, and Harry is written as solid and intelligent, without the humorous ineffectuality he had elsewhere. These are minor things, though. A clumsier bit of scripting is that scenes towards the end have to be broadcast on convenient screens so that characters who aren't present can still be aware of what happened. This might have been okay once, but unfortunately Nation has to pull the same trick twice as he's written himself into a corner. The introduction of the Thal rebel leader character Bettan feels a bit tacked on; she should have been featured earlier in a slightly bigger role given how she becomes the leader of another significant alien race in Doctor Who history (it's interesting and important - for a fan at least - to see the origins of the other tribe that lived on Skaro too). The story is remarkable for slotting neatly into established continuity without contradicting what came before. The origins as retold in the very first Dalek story are consistent with what we see in Genesis, bar a misremembered name or detail; only that those very first Daleks couldn't move outside the metal floors of their city does not fit, and that hasn't fit with any Dalek story made since - Nation must have cursed himself for ever including that limitation in 1963. Anyway, minor continuity issues, clumsy moments of plotting, or sub-optimally integrated character introductions cannot seem to dent enjoyment of this story, nor its reputation,

Connectivity:

Both Genesis of the Daleks and The Witchfinders feature at least one character appearing near the beginning in a mask, and each story sees the baddies attempt unsuccessfully to execute the Doctor; that's about it.

Deeper Thoughts:

Blue about Blu - the emotional perils of collecting. Genesis of the Daleks is one of those stories that has been analysed rigorously over the years, both in terms of the content (was this the opening salvo of the Time War?!) and the making of. As such, I am going to concentrate instead on a topic I come back to again and again, probably as a form of self-therapy so apologies in advance: the mentality of the collector and the fan. In some ways, I think it is an addiction, and that I am an addict. Let me tell you the story of the Collection, the range of classic series box-sets, each containing one season of Doctor Who, on Blu-ray. This range started with Genesis of the Daleks and the other stories from season 12 coming out in an elegant limited edition box in the summer of 2018. This was obviously not the first ever range making Doctor Who available to buy. From 1986 onwards, I collected all the available Doctor Who stories on VHS tape, until the range was complete in 2003. By that time, it was also possible to collect them all again on shiny disc, most of them on DVD, but also a few more as audio CDs of the soundtracks, which existed even when the moving pictures were lost). Every classic story was released eventually, and many of them had included animated episodes to plug gaps, married to those surviving soundtracks. The DVD range petered out around early 2014, with only one single surviving episode that existed in the archives not yet released. In late 2015, when I'd started this blog, that final episode was included on the DVD release for The Underwater Menace. I wrote about it here, thinking it would likely be the last classic series physical media release ever (streaming and non-physical pay-to-own looked to be the models that would take over completely then).

There was a definite sense of relief. I'd already taken a big step in combatting my addiction by declining to collect a new and expensive magazine partwork that had started to come out a month before The Underwater Menace (see the Deeper Thoughts of another early post for more details). Would I finally be able to kick the habit altogether? In short, no. It took a year, but a new source for collectibles on shiny disc was found - wholly animated stories. The first full story to be animated was The Power of the Daleks and jolly good this new version was too. I collected that one, as it was something brand new and interesting; I also knew that any other stories animated in the future I would be compelled to collect, but there didn't seem much harm in that. Realistically, they weren't going to be able to produce more than one or two animations per year. In 2018, though, came the Collection. As well as one or two animations a year, there would be up to three box sets of full seasons on Blu-ray to buy. It would mean collecting all the classic series episodes yet again from scratch, on yet another medium. Did I have the stomach for it? Most of Who made before the 21st century was not going to look that much better on Blu-ray as it wasn't captured in high definition. It would give another opportunity for restoration, though, and techniques improved year on year. The episodes would look better even though it wouldn't be the sort of leap in quality as that between VHS and DVD. There would also be new extras. Was that enough to tempt me? I ummed and ahhed, and eventually the presence on that season 12 set of a feature with Tom Baker that had only previously been available on VHS swayed me (see the Deeper Thoughts section of this blog post for more details).

I might have left it that, but the next set (season 19) was a run of stories that was particularly close to my heart, so I plumped again. By then, the BFI events had started up that tied-in with each box set's release, screening episodes from the sets (often in special editions with updated effects) and featuring panels of people starring in or working behind the scenes on the sets. The events were always a fun way of meeting up with fan friends, so we would usually go. If I was attending, it seemed wrong somehow not to also get the set being advertised. This could just be an example of the addict making any excuse to indulge in his addiction; but, alas, I think it's worse than that. I actually do feel at some level that it would be cheating. It's a completely irrational thought and yet it's one I can't quite shake off; clearly it's part of my individual fan pathology, and it might just be me. Every fan's got something, though. As I touched on in the First Time Round section above, many of us get bent out of shape if we don't get our new Who purchases on the day of release. A glance down the social media feeds of fans on a release day will show you, barely concealed, a collective angst along the lines of  'If I don't get this shiny new thing now, and everyone else does and is watching it and commenting on it when I can't, I will die'. This scenario did indeed happen to many, myself included, for the box set release in the third week of September 2023.

After I had collected a few of the box sets, a tipping point was reached, and I was committed (at least in my own mind) to seeing things through. The sunk cost of purchasing every new set as they've come out since 2018 has made it increasingly more difficult to just stop. The sets are also limited editions, and at first there was no hint that they would ever come out as standard versions once the initial run was completed; this put even more pressure on me to get each new set ordered as early as possible. The sets are now being rereleased in less deluxe packaging, but I've collected 14 of the limited versions now; if you think that I'd be able to accept having a set in amongst them on the shelf that didn't match, then you possibly will never understand Doctor Who fandom (or at least my particular version of it). I hope some of this explains why on 18th September 2023, after having pre-ordered the thing before the ink was even wet on the press release announcing it was coming out, it was a far from fun experience when my Season 20 set did not arrive. Other fans on social media were reporting that they were going through the same thing, or worse that their orders were being cancelled altogether. Amazon were not helpful, and after talking to their Customer Services I became convinced that my set wasn't going to arrive at all. In a panic, with visions of a line of irregular spines looking ugly on a shelf, I ordered the set from another retailer, and now I have two. One has been left in the sealed wrapping so I can return it, but I've opened the other and started watching some of the content. A few extras feature the cast (Peter Davison, Janet Fielding and Sarah Sutton) just sort of mucking around, being friends joshing with each other, brought together by Doctor Who, and sharing some of that love and joy with fans. This is an indication of the more positive foibles of fandom.

Why did I wait so long in 1991 to buy Genesis of the Daleks? In October, I started at university in Durham, many many miles away from my home on the south coast. I travelled up with one suitcase of stuff (accompanied by friend and fellow Doctor Who fan Zahir). I can't remember the exact date term started, but even if it was after the videos came out, it would have not been worth buying them and carting them northward up the country, as I didn't know I'd have had anything to play them on (one of the first friends I made in college Mike was soon discovered to have his own TV and video and a single room, so viewings became possible later, as recounted many times previously on the blog). I also had new expenses I didn't have when living at home, and there were no more videos scheduled for release that year (the next ones came out in mid-January 1992). As best I can recall therefore, I would have bought Genesis when back home for the Christmas holiday, and would have left The Deadly Assassin until later (as another friend made in that first term David had lent me a home-taped copy of that later story). December 1991 was the first time I'd seen Genesis of the Daleks, as I'd somehow missed the summer repeat of it in 1982. I remember my friend Alex telling me all about it when we were back at school in September. It's no coincidence that memories of watching these stories is tied up in memories of old friends like Alex, Zahir, Mike and David. I hope that makes up somewhat for the ridiculous obsessiveness. A collection might seem like just a bunch of things, I know, but they're things that spark happy reminiscences.

In Summary:

Equal parts Buster Crabbe and Josef Mengele.

Destiny of the Daleks

Chapter The 183rd, where robots from the last days of Disco meet the Daleks and their creator; that actually sounds fun, but it isn't somehow.

Plot:

The Doctor and a newly - and sillily - regenerated Romana arrive on Skaro. They leave K9 in the TARDIS as the robot dog has - sillily - developed laryngitis. A spaceship lands nearby crewed by a bunch of silver disco robots called the Movellans. The Doctor and Romana don't realise they are robots at first even though it's blindingly obvious. They are silly. Anyway, the Daleks are back on their ancestral planet using enslaved humanoids from various parts of the galaxy to mine for something. They are using slaves even though they could do it much quicker themselves. This might be because they have, somehow, become coldly logical robot creatures exactly like they haven't been previously; but, they are manifestly rubbish at being logical. From his previous visit to the Kaled city, the Doctor remembers a short cut to what he thinks the Daleks are after: Davros. The Daleks' creator has been abandoned but kept alive by suspended animation technology in his chair for the centuries since the original Daleks thought they had killed him. This has clearly affected him a bit, as his voice is different and his face has changed so it looks like a mask that doesn't quite fit properly. Funny that.

The Daleks need Davros to help in their war with the Movellans, which is at an impasse because the fleets and battle computers of both sides are too logical to make any offensive move. The Doctor gets the slaves freed in exchange for letting the Daleks have Davros, then makes a break for it. With the help of the freed slaves, the Doctor and Romana defeat the Movellans (the robots have some serious design flaws). Davros's Daleks, each with multiple bombs attached for a suicide attack, approach the Movellan ship, but the Doctor goes back to the Kaled city and finds Davros, and uses Davros's remote control to blow the Daleks up before they do any harm. Davros is imprisoned to be taken off for trial. The freed slaves commandeer the Movellan ship, and the Doctor and Romana continue their wanderings through time and space in the TARDIS.

Context:

Watching the four episodes of Destiny of the Daleks from the DVD for the blog, I was not transported back to 1979 but to almost a decade later and the dark autumn weekday evenings of the late 1980s. The reason for this is that, despite its featuring what would seem to be the popular draw of Tom Baker with Daleks, I could not interest any of the family in watching with me. I had to find time when everyone else was out of the living room to catch up with each episode on my own. It was very reminiscent of how I watched every Sylvester McCoy episode in the 1980s when my family of that time were similarly not interested, somewhat furtively and definitely alone.

First Time Round:

I first saw this story from the VHS, which was released in early July 1994. This was around the time I graduated from university in Durham. I'd got my results and then stayed around, with all my stuff packed up, in a college room for a week or so between the end of term and the ceremony, which was held shortly after everyone else had gone home. It was an odd time as a graduand having nothing to do for a brief pause, except arrange the hire an expensive robe and hat and wait for another phase of one's life to begin. As such, I'm pretty sure I didn't buy and watch the story until I was back home in Worthing a little later. The one memory I have of watching it is not a memory at all but a lack thereof. Either I was tired or I'd had a little too much shandy while watching, or - just maybe - the story itself contributed in some way to this effect by numbing my brain - but I watched it, thought 'yeah, okay', then the next day could not remember how it ended, specifically regarding the fate of Davros. Had he appeared again for a resolution scene at the end? All I could remember was a blur of wonky Daleks with garlands of bombs round their domes squawking and blowing up. I had to fast forward to watch the last few minutes again, for which I had previously zoned out.

A clearer memory was my first reading of the novelisation. For some reason, a friend of mine, Andrew, invited me to meet him in Portsmouth for a day out. We went there a couple of times, as I remember, and this visit must have been sometime in the spring or 1988; I recall seeing a poster advertising Morrissey's first solo album Viva Hate when we went to the shops there. I travelled on the train to meet him, and read the Destiny of the Daleks novelisation on the way. The trip there and back was sufficient time to complete the slim volume. Both of us lived in Worthing at the time, so I've no idea why we went all that way and why we didn't travel over together. Perhaps he was staying with family for a visit and wanted an excuse to get out of their house for a while. That would fit. I don't want to get too Marcel Proust about it, but aside from Terrance Dicks's prose, I can only remember fleeting impressions: that Morrissey poster, Strawberry Switchblade playing at a funfair on a green by the seafront, and my buying and eating a roast almond Yorkie. They don't make the almond version of this UK chocolate bar anymore, and it was a favourite of mine at the time. Anyway, the book was much more exciting to read than the screen version was to watch years later. 

Reaction:

If I had to summarise Destiny of the Daleks in a word, I'd be torn between a choice of two: 'tatty' or 'threadbare'. I'm not talking about the production design though, I'm talking about the script. Some of the production design doesn't help, that's definitely true. Where they are saving money by reusing old elements, it shows: the original Davros mask from Genesis of the Daleks four years earlier is showing signs of wear and tear; it also doesn't fit actor David Gooderson, replacing the original Davros actor Michael Wisher who proved unavailable for the recording of Destiny. The Dalek props too are aged and could do with refurbishment. The Movellans are well turned out, though; whatever you think of the choices involved for hair and outfit, which look they might have been made for some high concept Hot Gossip routine, they are done to a high level of quality. The Movellan ship set too is gorgeous. The sets for the Kaled city on the other hand look like the money had run out; perhaps it had all been spent hiring the Steadicam, used here for the first time on a Doctor Who, giving us a few stand-out gliding shots. Even the more conventionally filmed location sequences are excellent, though, with Winspit quarry in Dorset being well used to give some interesting landscapes. The hit rate of the look and feel then is about on a par with any other story of the period. The script though...

Whoever was responsible for the story that ended up on screen (see Deeper Thoughts for more details), it contains much that doesn't work. The central conceit that the Daleks and the Movellans have reached a logical stalemate, each side anticipating the other's every move and therefore locked into immobility, is an interesting one, but is a bad fit for Daleks. They aren't emotionless robots, and have never before been characterised as such. It's heavily implied that they are no longer organic creatures in protective shells, but have dispensed with the organic component altogether. The Doctor and Romana both refer to them as being robots, which is just not the case before or since this story. Even if one accepts this is somehow true, or at least metaphorical (they have got so used to their way of operating that they act like robots, say), I'm still not sure that the stalemate idea hangs together. Couldn't one side or the other just use a random number generator subroutine to choose what to do? How would the other side anticipate that? The scene where the Doctor, Romana and the Movellans play Scissors Paper Stone to demonstrate the difference between machine and human intelligence is cute (goes on a bit, though), but doesn't really make sense. The game involves making a random choice between three options, with no factors to dictate any particular order to favour one of the three options over the others, so there's no reason for a machine to play them in the same order as another machine.

The script also has problems of logic, and lack of follow through typical of other Nation stories. In one episode, the Daleks find the concept of self-sacrifice so illogical as to be unbelievable, in the next episode, a platoon of them have been easily persuaded to strap bombs onto themselves and do a kamikaze run at the Movellan spaceship. In the first episode, it's established as vital that the Doctor and Romana take regular does of anti-radiation drugs, and the Doctor sets a timer for when they'll need the next dose. By the time the timer goes off, they have been separated. The Doctor takes his pills, but can't give any to Romana who by that time has been captured. Romana shows signs of being ill and swoons. But the faint is a feint: Romana's just pretending to be dead as part of an escape plan. She's successful, and meets up again with the Doctor. He doesn't give her any drugs, she's perfectly fine anyway, and it's never mentioned again. Sure, I can tell myself they must have taken the necessary medicine later off screen at some point, but that's a hell of a cop out. The fuss about the levels of radiation set up at the beginning also begs the question of who's giving tablets to all the Daleks' slaves, either before or after they're freed? Why do the Daleks need the captured humans at all, except to provide the Doctor with a rebel fighting force later? It can't be a logical decision; as Romana points out, they'd do the job a lot quicker with machinery. So they're doing it out of spite? If so, how does that stack up with them as robotic slaves to logic? 

Even scripts with lots of plot holes can have exciting action moments. Here, though, Destiny also fails to deliver. The Daleks are portrayed too often as weak. The Doctor jokes about them not being able to climb, he puts his hat over one Dalek's eye stalk and it has a hissy fit. The pepperpots talk a good game, endlessly chanting their repetitive slogans, but there's hardly any extermination. They only kill one character in battle, and a couple more prisoners are lined up and zapped. Davros is literally pushed around by various characters. As he is essentially a wheelchair user, the optics of this did not look so good to me on this latest watch. I know he's evil and all, but he should be allowed to be in charge of his own propulsion. The Movellans are a bit of a pushover too; you just remove their easily accessible power source and they do a bit of community theatre spaced-out hands in the air acting, and then kark it. Peasy. Again, one wonders where a non-robot race could place its most vulnerable point that would be more illogical than the super logical Movellans managed. None of these flaws on its own is that big a deal, but they mound up until they blot out the light of anything good. If there was a bit more pace then maybe one would not have time to think about it: take out an episode's worth of padding and tighten it up a bit, and switch your brain off, and a three-parter Destiny of the Daleks would be an engaging enough, though superficial, season opener.

Connectivity: 

Both stories that open a new season of Doctor Who and feature an alien race landing on a fairly barren celestial body in order to search for someone. 

Deeper Thoughts:

Adams Nation Damnations! In the Deeper Thoughts last time on Russell T Davies, Douglas Adams and Terry Nation were a couple of the contenders I considered but discarded as competition for Davies's crown as the biggest TV writer ever to work on Doctor Who. Destiny of the Daleks was the only time they worked together (in the loosest sense of the term as we shall discover), Douglas Adams as Script Editor, Terry Nation as writer. Well, maybe Nation wasn't the writer, even though he was credited as such. Adams later claimed that Nation did not deliver full scripts for any of the episodes, just what amounted to storyline notes, and Adams himself had to write the lion's share of the story. It's difficult to know how much this is true. Director Ken Grieve backed up Adams's version of events, putting the amount contributed by Adams at 98%; it is also not the first time in Doctor Who's history that the criticism had been raised of Nation's work needing heavy rewriting. Adams's reported woes are consistent with, if a bit more extreme than, those of a few script editors on Doctor Who working with Nation before. It seems unlikely though that the BBC would have had to pay Nation had he not produced actual screenplays for all four episodes, though they would likely still have paid him if they were slim and under-running. It's likely that some exaggeration has crept in to the telling of the anecdotes in the years since.

It's definitely on record that Nation's scripts came in late. The production team wanted to start the season that year with a Dalek story, the metal meanies' return with a bang after four whole seasons without them. Nation had agreed as long as he was able to write it, but he wasn't available to do this such that the story could be recorded first that year. It was dropped to third slot in the production order, making it a tight turnaround to get the episodes made in time for broadcast. When Nation's scripts came in later than expected even on that schedule, it must have necessitated that the in-house script editor had to do any rewrites rapidly rather than everyone wait for the back and forth of Adams' teasing the necessary changes from Nation's pen. It's definitely clear that Adams contributed some material. There is a sequence where the Doctor is reading a book on the origins of the universe by Oolon Colluphid, a reference to an established minor character from Hitch Hiker that can only have been put in by Douglas. Additionally, there's the sequence at the beginning where Romana regenerates. This is of course a standard thing for a script editor to do, writing the sections necessitated by cast changes in the wider production, unconnected to the story of the week provided by the commissioned author.

The sequence at the start of episode one annoyed lots of purist fans at the time, and probably has annoyed more such fans since and to this very day. Without being too po-faced about it, I do think these people might have something of a point. It takes what was one of the most dramatic and significant devices in the history of the show - regeneration, meaning the change of one lead actor for another, a significant and rare event in the show's history - and uses it for a throwaway comedy five minutes. Romana has been recast and this is played out as if the wearing of bodies for Time Lords is like the wearing of clothes for us mere mortals. If it was side-splittingly funny, it might be worth it, but it's smile humour at most, somewhat witty and whimsical but overlong. Crucially, it seems padded out. Other moments that one suspects could have been contributed by Adams are similarly drawn out and not that funny. He could have been having an off day, but - if Adams really did contribute 98% of this material -  I'd expect it to be a lot funnier and much more interesting.

Lots of the material, as mentioned when talking about the story above, is standard Terry Nation serial peril-to-peril plot, without any effort towards surrounding coherence or escalation. There's slaves, and radiation poisoning, and countdowns, and planet destroying bombs; all these crop up again and again in Nations's work, but seem too humdrum to be things that would preoccupy Adams's psyche. Then again, if Nation had written the basic storyline, one wouldn't have thought he'd base it on his creations being robots, nor continually refer to them as such, as he should know if anyone should that they aren't. Even the reason why K9 doesn't appear is contentious and up for interpretation; depending on who you ask, either it was because Nation didn't want the K9 to upstage his creations (which suggests that he was shaping the story as author), or that the production team believed use of the K9 prop would be a nightmare in the quarry location (suggesting that the script editor was dictating elements that could be used for practical reasons).

The final point that suggests Adams contributed a lot to the episodes is that Nation was reportedly aghast at what ended up on screen. I say 'reportedly', as I've seen it relayed as fact in many reputable sources, but I don't believe I've ever seen a direct quote from Nation to back it up. It's true that after his contribution to the 1979/1980 series, Nation didn't work on Doctor Who again, but the same is true of Douglas Adams. They both moved on to bigger and more lucrative things that would take both men eventually, separately, to the USA. If Nation's last Who script never reached the screen as he intended it, neither did Adams's (see the blog post on Shada for more details). And both men died in California after an insufficiently long innings (Nation was 66 years old at the time of his death, and Adams a heart-breakingly young 49). It's almost 20 years since Douglas's untimely death (the anniversary of that sad occasion will be the 11th May this year) and at the time of my writing this it's but a few days to the 24th anniversary of Nation's death (9th March). It doesn't therefore matter therefore exactly what part of the story was written by whom. Both writers contributed greatly to Doctor Who during its history, and I'd be tempted to watch a story by each to celebrate their contributions on those milestone dates. I just won't ever pick Destiny of the Daleks for either of them, that's all. 

In Summary:

Tatty script with some threadbare (and, to be fair, some good) visuals.