This story, conventional wisdom holds, is the reason why we’re still all here. Without The Daleks (aka The Dead Planet) Doctor Who might have been nothing more than a vaguely remembered curiosity in a junkyard along with the likes of ‘Pathfinders to Mars’ and other SF forays from the earlier days of television.
But over the course of seven weeks The Daleks metastasized the public awareness in Doctor Who, beget Dalekmania, and indelibly etched Doctor Who into the public consciousness. Terry Nation was certainly a writer with his own set of quirks and his style maybe not to everyone’s liking, but he knew (or was in the process of learning) how to write a thriller story, which, along with the truly alien nature of the Daleks themselves, made The Daleks so compelling, and allowed 50 years of stories to gratefully follow
The final contribution before the 50th are an improved set of caps from The Daleks. Classic Capitology now takes a well-deserved rest but will return in the new year.