Listen very carefully, I will exterminate you only once (251/365)

[white_hart]

I've been continuing with my occasional watch-through of classic Doctor Who, and just watched The Dalek Invasion of Earth. I don't thiy I'd seen the original serial before, though I'd read the Target novelisation and also saw the Peter Cushing film, so was familiar with the plot.

What surprised me, watching it, was just how much it resembles a WW2 film. The Doctor and his companions are the British party, landed in enemy-held territory; the resistance could so easily be the French Resistance; the women who betray Barbara and Jenny in return for food are so familiar from war films.

(It's also a bit startling that the serial starts with the Doctor ticking Susan off as if she was quite a young child, and ends with him pushing her out to marry a man she's only just met.)

Comments

[sir_guinglain]

It's very World War Two, yes - parallels have been drawn with the film It Happened Here, though this had not been released when Nation was writing the script.

[hilarita]

(It's also a bit startling that the serial starts with the Doctor ticking Susan off as if she was quite a young child, and ends with him pushing her out to marry a man she's only just met.)

I think (having recently rewatched this serial and the ones before it) that it's meant to be pointing up how the Doctor doesn't really think Susan has grown up, when it's really obvious to us as watchers that she's not a child. It comes off the back of the Sensorites, where she starts to assert her independence from the Doctor. It comes across extra weirdly now, because of how our views of child-raising have changed, plus of course if you've not seen the previous serials recently, it gives it all some extra WTF.

And the Nazi thing - well, yes, there are many explicit Nazi parallels with the Daleks (also to be seen in Genesis of the Daleks), but the way they wander round key London landmarks giving Nazi salutes with their plungers is Not Subtle. I mean, it will have gone over the heads of kids hiding behind the sofa, but their parents and grandparents would probably take the point.

[white_hart]

That does make sense, re Susan - it's certainly felt, in previous serials, as though the Doctor in particular, but also Ian and Barbara, were treating her much more as a child than she really appeared to be. (Last weekend the Peter Cushing Doctor Who and the Daleks film was on - in that, Susan is played by a much younger actress, who really is a child.)