The Dalek Invasion of Earth

[WillsBabe]

I got the dvd for my birthday back at the start of the year and I broke open the wrapper today. To be honest, I'm not sure if I've seen it before or not. I watched 4 episodes this afternoon and really, really enjoyed it. I was so impressed and caught up in the action and the mileau and the atmosphere that I wanted to ask here what other folks think of this serial. I have seen very few of Hartnell's stories and was very impressed here.

My favourite scenes/moments:
The robotman stumbling into the Thames
The Doctor asking Ian if he doesn't want to know what happened to London and Ian saying "no"
Barbara and the other woman pushing the wheelchair through London
Susan talking about not belonging anywhere.

I love the character moments, in particular. Terry Nation contributed greatly to sf in this country and I think we're poorer for his passing.

I haven't seen the remainder of the serial (I ran out of time today) but I'm really looking forward to it.

ETA: My apologies, by "this country", I meant the UK. Forgot I was amongst international friends for a moment.

 

[wamdue]

if this is the one where Susan leaves, I think I have this one on DVD

 

[WillsBabe]

^ I didn't know that. (Although I can't expect to stay spoiler free after nearly 40 odd years!)

 

[The Mule]

^^i'm sure WillsBabe appreciates that big spoiler.

 

[The]

I didn't know this was available on DVD! Has it only been released in the UK?

 

[Brendan Moody]

No, it's available in the US, and has been for about four years.

 

[wamdue]

WillsBabe said:
^ I didn't know that. (Although I can't expect to stay spoiler free after nearly 40 odd years!)

oh yeah sorry about that.

 

[The Nth Doctor]

Oh, the irony...

 

[The]

Brendan Moody said:
No, it's available in the US, and has been for about four years.

Unbelievable. I just went to Amazon.com after I read your post, and sure enough there it was. Sometimes, I really wonder if I partied just a little too hard in college.

For some reason, I simply had no idea this was available on DVD. Thanks for the (obvious) update. I just ordered a copy on the spot (along with Troughton's Tomb of the Cybermen just for fun ). :thumbsup:

 

[Peacemaker]

This would be a good story to revisit, but from a different perspective, as an example of the Doctor choosing not to change history. He could arrive "in the near future" of Earth at the beginning of the invasion. He could fight and lose, or, alternatively, choose not to defeat them in the very end, leaving it to his past self.

 

[wamdue]

Emh said:
Oh, the irony...

yes I noticed that.

 

[Lindley]

peacemaker said:
This would be a good story to revisit, but from a different perspective, as an example of the Doctor choosing not to change history. He could arrive "in the near future" of Earth at the beginning of the invasion. He could fight and lose, or, alternatively, choose not to defeat them in the very end, leaving it to his past self.

No, he couldn't. Due to temporal weirdness, this invasion never happened, because the Daleks no longer exist in any time.

Which raises the question of how the timeline gymnastics required to make this work affected Susan.

 

[Guy Gardener]

ah.

This show has been available on vhs from the 80s on till "the fall of Video" with it being one of the very few episodes to survive the BBC Archive purge and continued circulating the world on TV.

 

[Stevil2001]

Lindley said:
No, he couldn't. Due to temporal weirdness, this invasion never happened, because the Daleks no longer exist in any time.

The show has never stated this-- and in fact, implies the opposite, since people like Captain Jack and the GameStation inhabitants knew about them!

 

[The Nth Doctor]

About both the Daleks and the Time Lords. The Time Lords were a legend. It's a little more complicated than that...

 

[Quist]

I've loved this one since I first saw it as part of a "repeat" season in the eighties. It's one of the few from the period that still stands up today, mainly because it concentrates on character and human survival than SF concepts and gadgets...

 

[Lindley]

Steve Mollmann said:

Lindley said:
No, he couldn't. Due to temporal weirdness, this invasion never happened, because the Daleks no longer exist in any time.

The show has never stated this-- and in fact, implies the opposite, since people like Captain Jack and the GameStation inhabitants knew about them!

It's heavily implied. If there were pre-time-travel Daleks hanging out at some point in history, the Cult of Skarro would have tried to travel to that time and upgrade them to time-traveling models, rather than bothering with the whole "human Dalek" project.

Bugger the paradox, they'd find a way around it.

I know it doesn't make sense for people to still know the name if they don't exist anymore, but that seems to be the case anyway.

 

[DWF]

This was a fantastic story I saw it again recently as well and it still holds up rather well and the story was so good they turned it into the second movie.

 

[Turbo]

Lindley said:

peacemaker said:
This would be a good story to revisit, but from a different perspective, as an example of the Doctor choosing not to change history. He could arrive "in the near future" of Earth at the beginning of the invasion. He could fight and lose, or, alternatively, choose not to defeat them in the very end, leaving it to his past self.

No, he couldn't. Due to temporal weirdness, this invasion never happened, because the Daleks no longer exist in any time.

Which raises the question of how the timeline gymnastics required to make this work affected Susan.

Not to mention Ian, Barbara, Katarina, Sara Kingdom, Victoria, Tegan, the Master, UNIT, Davros, Skaro, and in fact the most of the rest of the Whoniverse.

I think I'd prefer to believe that the Time War caused the Daleks to simply wink out of existence during the 51st Century. (Based on Jack's description of what happened - "One minute, they were the greatest threat in the galaxy, then suddenly, they were gone.")

 

[David cgc]

But the... french fry... frankenstein... bat... people...

You know what, just a minute.

But the Krillitanes, indigenous to the early 21st century, also knew about the Time War. Not to mention the Gelth in the 19th century.

I think this all makes a weird kind of sense if you consider that "big ball of timey-wimey... stuff" thing. There's time, which the Doctor travels through freely, and then there's, for want of a better term, meta-time, which actually is more-or-less linear. Different parts of real time plug into different parts of meta-time. So even though the Doctor, Captain Jack, and the Daleks are all from different historical periods, when they meet up they're in-sync as far as history goes because they're from the same area of meta-time: after the Time War, when the Daleks and Time-Lords wiped each other out.

Here's the tricky bit, though. Since time and meta-time interact so oddly, you can get apparent paradoxes, like the entirety of "Blink," or (hypothetically), a 51st Century Time Agent knowing that the Daleks are destroyed in a Time War, but then pre-Time-War Daleks later invade 52nd century Earth. In meta-time, the 52nd century invasion actually took place before the 51st century time-agent learned of the Daleks' destruction.

The TARDIS and the Doctor are probably both instinctively aware enough to avoid twisting up meta-time the way they twist up real time. It's entirely possible that the TARDIS simply won't go anywhere the Daleks went in history before they were destroyed. It would also explain how he rarely encounters fellow time-travelers out of order (I don't know of any exceptions other than the multi-Doctor stories and the whole Harold Saxon thing, which were all extraordinary cases).

Of course, if you don't have any knowledge or control of time-travel, you're totally ignorant of meta-time, or time-wars, or anything of the like, so the Daleks just show up when they show up. Nor is there any apparent reason to your eyes why the Doctor who shows up to stop them must be a tow-headed gent with celery in his lapel and not a curly-haired guy with a scarf, or a U-Boat captain.