Death to the Daleks - Episode 4

As I started to write this I noticed that they had put episode two of this story on the Horror Channel. If only I had started this marathon two days later then I could have watched it whilst it aired on TV. Chances of this happening again are remote but that all depends on Horror. I was less than excited to go through the previous episodes cliffhanger where the Doctor simply says “Don’t Move”. Now everytime I watch this episode I hope that somehow the reveal would be better but sadly this isn’t the case. The problem with this episode is that it starts off very slowly. Despite the Daleks following the Doctor and Bellal, there seems to be no really sense of urgency. There are a few moments which do cause a bit of interest when Bellal turns against the Doctor and when two figures appear and try to stop the Doctor from destroying the city. The parts of the episode with the Doctor were very dull and I found nothing exiting about it.

It’s weird that the Sarah Jane part of the story is more interesting but sort of damning with faint praise really because even the stuff with Sarah Jane isn’t particularly exciting. The only good thing about her portion of the episode is that she is involved with swapping the Parrinium with sand. That’s quite inventive for a companion but shows that Sarah Jane isn’t your dumb companion.

Another thing about this story is that you could have taken the Daleks out and replaced it with any monster. There is nothing special about the Daleks in this story and we get nothing new from them. The Dalek over reacting when he notices that Jill has escaped is sort of the problem with their involvement in this story. The Daleks decide not to kill the Doctor, Sarah and the earth people which makes no sense. Why wait to fire a plague bomb when they could just kill the Doctor there and then? This is one of those things that comes up in every Dalek story or even when the Cybermen and the Master are in a story.

The idea of Galloway sacrificing himself to destroy the Dalek ship is perhaps the only good thing that is done in the entire story. Galloway had always seemed to be on the outside but soon showed why he had been put into the story. I thought that throughout the four episode Duncan Lamont has played Galloway really well and has been the strongest of the supporting characters. Sadly the rest of the supporting characters are quite bland and don’t really stand out and I never found myself wanting them to get of the planet and when I don’t really care about the good guys then I know that the story isn’t working.

It’s not a very good episode but then again the whole story has been something of a disappointment. This is by far the weakest Dalek story that there has ever been and I really think that this season is going to be a disappointment and after the previous season that’s really disappointing. The only good thing to say about this story is that was four episodes instead of six.