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| "It's Springtime for Thal-dom and Germany..." |
Okay, that’s a bit reductive. But if you take this episode on the surface, it is mostly our crew planning a prison break in their cell. That doesn’t make it necessarily boring.
For one, Nation has a couple of reveals up his sleeve, starting with the appearance of the Thals. We’ve been teased with how the Thals are these mutated aberrations only to find that they are....very, very white. I would go so far as to say they’re quite...Arayan. All of these characters are tall, well-built, mostly barechested blonde gentlemen and ladies in geodesic cloaks who seem to be vaguely hippie-ish and peaceful who hope to open up a trade relationship with the Daleks so they don’t starve to death.
And the Daleks do the equivalent of ‘Let’s just pretend to agree, so we can get them into our city and kill them’ because the Daleks are dicks.
And there’s also the big reveal that the Daleks are not mechanical beings but things in what amounts to ambulatory tanks. Director Richard Martin blocks the revelation until we see the episode’s final shot...where something clawed and decidedly not human peeks out from under one of those Thal Geodesic Cloaks.
But it’s in this episode more than the ones before it that are indicative of the original remit of the series was educational. The bulk of this episode is composed of our four leads extrapolating, theorizing, planning and carrying out their escape. Everybody has their part in fashioning the plan and contributes to its execution. I particularly like how Nation takes advantage of the tension between the Doctor and Ian in such a way that when they fake a fight I’m not quite sure how sincere it is. Sure, I call bulldookey on big ol’ William Russell fitting comfortably in a Dalek shell and knowing how to operate it almost immediately, but it’s a nit I don’t need to really pick.
Watching the serial like the audiences did, one at a time, no more than one daily, I appreciate how Nation’s script tries to give us one Big Beat per episode. Sometimes it doesn’t quite work--I point you to how the previous episode degenerated into Susan recreating the Corridor Chase choreography from ‘An Unearthly Child.’ But the story continues to move forward and I see something new snuck into each half-four, I’m sort of encouraged. I can see why this is the defining serial that made the series into an institution that has lasted over half a century.
Of course, we have four more episodes to go in this story, so there’s a distinct sense of another shoe getting ready to drop. We’ll see.
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