The Evil of the Daleks - Episode 2

The second episode of this story is sadly the only one that exists on DVD. At least we get to see Deborah Watling’s first appearance. It’s clear that the double act of the Doctor and Jamie is starting to come along. The first scene with them in the Antique shop shows this when the Doctor tells Jamie to be careful and then knocks something over with Jamie giving him one of those looks. I am quite sympathetic towards Edward Waterfield. Even though he’s working for the Daleks, it isn’t out of choice as we will soon learn.

Jamie and the Doctor are more active in this episode than in the first. Though Jamie is less active than the Doctor. He gets knocked out, wakes up and has a chat before being knocked out again. It seems that Victoria needs to get involved in the story sooner so that Jamie can hand over the knocked out duties to her.  Patrick Troughton gets a lovely speech about how the Daleks will take great pleasure in killing everyone and that their greatest pleasure will be in killing him. It’s a short yet impressive speech.

After a short period of time in the antiques shop, the story shifts to Victorian London and we get to meet Edward Waterfield and Theodore Maxtible 100 years in time to June 2 1866. Maxtible is quite an imposing figure but he does come across a bit of an arrogant person and he’s some rich guy who’s got too much money and its his money that has got him into his mess so its hard to warm to him unlike Edward Waterfield.

Maxtible’s lab is very impressive and is very much quite like I would love every lab to be like with test tubes and bubbling jars and the such. It’s almost clichéd. We finally get to learn a bit more about the goings on and learn that Waterfield and Maxtible’s experiments are what caused  the Daleks to arrive. It’s nearly seven minutes before the Daleks get a scene with the Doctor. How its done is quite good because its timed perfectly. Their first scene is quite good because the last time the Doctor met the Daleks he was still trying to get over his transformation and now he’s more able to stand up to them just as the Doctor should.

The way that we are introduced to Victoria is quite low key. She has been kept prisoner of the Daleks and compared to how other companions have been introduced in the past this has to be one of the grimmest. It’s hard to believe that she will soon be travelling through time and space. It was a blink and you’ll miss it performance but its long enough to tell us what she’s going to be like but more time is spent talking about her than talking to her.

I thought that this was a better episode than the first as it seemed like the story was moving on a bit more and we got a bit more meat to the pie of the story. I think that this is where the story starts really as we now have more to enjoy. It is just a shame that this is the only one of the story that exists because this would work really well as opposed to just existing on audio.