Doctor Who/Recap/S2 E2 The Dalek Invasion of Earth

We are the masters of Earth! —A Dalek

The title of the story says it all really. After the runaway success of The Daleks in season one, the Green Blobs in Bonded Polycarbide Armour are back.

It's the future - some point after 2164 - and the story focuses not on the invasion itself (still a little beyond the budget and capability of 1964) but on a world ruled by the Daleks and their robotised slaves ("Robomen").

The Doctor and the others fall in with a group of resistance fighters led by wheelchair-bound Dortmun, and discover that the Daleks are digging a huge mine in Bedfordshire of all places. It turns out that they are planning to plant a bomb in the Earth's core which will hollow out the planet, so they can replace the core with an engine and pilot the planet around like a spaceship.

Ian rigs up a barrier in the mineshaft which detonates the bomb prematurely, conveniently destroying the Dalek mothership and most of the Daleks in the process, not to mention creating a new volcano in Bedfordshire. Susan, the Doctor's granddaughter, has meanwhile fallen in love with resistance fighter David Campbell and the Doctor leaves her behind to make a new life with him.

The Doctor : "One day, I shall come back. Yes, I shall come back. Until then, there must be no regrets, no tears, no anxieties. Just go forward in all your beliefs, and prove to me that I am not mistaken in mine. Goodbye, my dear. Goodbye, Susan."

Watch it here.

It was adapted as Daleks – Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D., the sequel to Dr. Who and the Daleks.

Tropes

• After the End: Most of the human race is dead, their cities are deserted and the survivors are more concered with just staying alive than fighting back.
• Almost Kiss: Susan and David actually start, but the sudden appearance of The Doctor from off camera cuts it short.
• Apocalypse How: Class 1.
• Black Market Produce: An old woman reports the main characters to the Daleks and is rewarded with food, including an orange. "I haven't tasted an orange in years..."
• Bond Villain Stupidity: Instead of just Exterminating Barbara and Jenny, the Daleks leave them to die in an explosion. They live.
• Characterization Marches On: For many this is considered the moment when the Doctor truly becomes... the Doctor what with his Badass Boast of promising to defeat the Daleks and casually waving off being their captive.
• Darker and Edgier: Much more so than previous serials.
• Day of the Jackboot: Draws overtly from World War II occupation tropes with La Résistance and Les Collaborateurs.
• Early Installment Weirdness:
  • While better than the last time we saw them, the Daleks seem to have a lot in common with the Cybermen this serial. They also get overpowered by a mob of humans and robomen. Later Daleks would have just exterminated the lot easily.
  • Susan (a Time Lady) choosing to live on Earth. Justified since, at this point in time, the idea of Time Lords had not been developed with a few hints suggesting that Susan and the Doctor were humans from the distant future.
• Easily-Thwarted Alien Invasion: Well with the Doctor's help anyway. Once the Dalek flagship is destroyed, the invasion is magically over.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Earth has been invaded by the Daleks.
• Exty Years From Now: It's some point after 2164. Later ancillary media would suggest it's 2167.
• Fake Shemp: William Hartnell was injured during filming of the third part of the serial, and so suddenly passed out without explanation at the start of the fourth (something that tended to happen throughout the Hartnell era, whenever he was unable to appear for whatever reason), with body double Edmund Warwick playing the Doctor in this episode.
• The Future Is Noir
• Great Offscreen War: How the Daleks actually invaded and conquered Earth. It's mentioned that they used meteorites to surreptitiously bomb Earth with a plague that wiped out most of Africa, Asia, and South America before a cure could was found.
• Hand Wave: As the first (of very many) examples of attempting to explain how the Daleks can still be around despite being totally destroyed in their last appearance, the characters decide that this must be an earlier point in history, and they really were destroyed forever last time.
  • The novelization offers the (far more plausible) explanation that there were other Dalek cities on Skaro.
  • The questionably canon sourcebook, The Official Doctor Who & the Daleks Book, offers the theory that the group of Daleks that was previously encountered were descendants of mutated Kaleds who'd survived the Thal bombing and come to inhabit what was a prototype Dalek city that Davros eventually discarded.
• Heroic Sacrifice: A ton of them. If there is a character that's not The Doctor or a companion, there is a 1 in 2 chance they will die trying to protect someone. And most of the others die anyways.
• Idiot Ball: The Doctor shows a rare case of it on the Dalek spaceship. After discovering that his cell contains exactly what they need to escape captivity he tries to escape. It turns out it was an intelligence test to find suitable slave labor.
• Mayfly-December Romance: David and Susan becomes this retroactively due to the later development of the Time Lords.
• Monumental Damage: Though not seen, it's mentioned New York City was destroyed by the invasion.
• Name's the Same: This serial's Jenny's not the Doctor's daughter, or a Silurian's assistant/lover, or the mother of the Family of Blood.
• A Nazi by Any Other Name: While The Daleks had elements of Fantastic Racism, here the Dalek = Nazi parallel becomes overt.
• Newspaper Dating: The TARDIS crew discover the is 2164 (or later) via a calendar in an abandoned warehouse.
• No Peripheral Vision: The Doctor avoids the Daleks by pressing himself up next to a door. It works.
  • Slightly justified as later we get a Dalek POV shot that reveals the limitations of the eyestalk. It still doesn't excuse the Dalek who looks right at The Doctor. And you.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Wells uses this against the Daleks in his first scene.
• Plot Hole: Once the show developed its back-story and mythology, the Doctor leaving behind Susan on Earth, even a future one, seems a bit strange considering she's doomed to outlive David and age much slower then everyone who knows her, and change appearance once she's close to dying......
  • It's implied in Last of the Time Lords that a Time Lord can chose not to regenerate.
• Sound-Only Death - As Susan and David crouch in a corner hiding from the Daleks we hear a man in the street begging a Dalek for his life before he gets killed.
• Too Much Information: One sign which appears in shots it shouldn't appear in reads "It is forbidden to dump bodies into the river."

The Doctor: "Stupid place to put a poster. Right under a bridge where nobody can read it or see it."

• Wham! Episode:
  • This was the first time a previous story's antagonist returned.
  • This was the first time the TARDIS crew changed at all, with Susan leaving at the end of part six.
• The X of Y