The A-Z of Classic Who | Death to the Daleks: How To Get Literally Nothing Right in Eight Easy Steps

After a real-life induced break, The A-Z of Classic Who returns, although given the subject today, I rather wish it hadn't.

Sometimes when rewatching these stories, you get pleasant surprises. Castrovalva wasn't anything like as bad as I remembered it for instance. Sometimes, they'll be exactly the same - Black Orchid still induces rage in me like nothing else, while City of Death will never be anything but a classic. And sometimes, they get much, much worse. Which brings us to Death to the Daleks.

This one is almost baffling in it's dreadfulness, which means a slightly different approach. Yes, The A-Z of Classic Who presents How To Get Literally Nothing Right When Making A Doctor Who Story In Eight Easy Steps!

Step One: Make the Production Values worse than they've ever been

This story looks terrible. Everything looks fake as shit, the makeup on the Exxilons is pathetic, the studio-location transitions are painful and the sets always look terrible. I've said it before and I'll say it again, that if you're watching Classic Who for the production values you're going to be disappointed 9 times out of 10, but there's a certain standard that this story miserably fails to reach. Everything looks either dull or bizarre, and there's nothing that doesn't look cheap and uninteresting. 

Real convincing stuff right there

Step Two: Make the Daleks completely useless

Steven Moffat (rightly) get a lot of flak for ruining the Daleks, but never once under his guidance were they quite as useless as they are here. They turn up, get promptly rendered useless by the power drain that affects everything (although there's no actual explanation given for why they can still move and talk, given there's clearly some electricity involved in that), when they and the humans get ambushed they stand around for a while and then get blown up by idiot primitives with sticks, fit themselves with machine guns that they use to enact some complex and boring plan involving spreading a plague, go bumbling into the Exxilon city and get beaten by guard-things who have literally no weapons, before getting blown up because they didn't check their ship for stowaways. It's really quite amusing seeing the 'ultimate being of the universe' getting bested by literally everyone and everything, and being about as threatening as the talking frog from series 11. 

ARGH! GUYS IN UNCONVINCING COSTUMES HITTING US!

Step Three: Make the Human characters dull, characterless and unsympathetic

Compare this story with Colony in Space, where most of the human characters were fleshed out, sympathetic and generally pretty good characters. I can't even remember the names of the characters in this story. There's the beardy one, the girl and the bland guy? I think? Their motivations are really foggy at times, and the attempt to make one into a bad guy, only for that to kind of disappear instantly, is stupid. It makes much of the story very flat, and the human characters completely irrelevant.

Step Four: Make Sarah completely useless

It takes a lot of talent in shit to make Sarah Jane Smith useless, but the makers of this story managed it alright. She does nothing except get menaced by Exxilons, nearly sacrificed, bumps into a group of Exxilons who end up being crucial to the plot and then leaves the Doctor to the rest of the story on his own. Poor use of a very good companion.

The Doctor was dismayed to find Sarah didn't have 50p for the meter

Step Five: Put in three shit cliffhangers

Cliffhangers can save a Doctor Who story sometimes - when they work at their best, they can give a story the jolt up its backside it needs to get into gear. This is not the case here - all three cliffhangers are really bad, with the third one being especially terrible. Picture the Doctor and his annoying Exxilon friend walking along a corridor, and suddenly the Doctor sees a bit of floor that's different to the rest. Cut to credits. Pathetic.

Still better than a Moffat cliffhanger

Step Six: Make half of the first episode a bizarre horror segment

This is more bizarre than awful, but a big chunk of the first episode involves the Doctor and Sarah being hunted by Exxilons at night. It wold be terrifying if it wasn't so lame, and quite disturbing if it wasn't confusing, bizarre and tonally jarring with what the episode had started with and what it would be for the remaining three episodes. 

Step Seven: Make the plot bloated, dumb and incomprehensible at times

I'm not still not entirely sure what this episode was about. The humans are here for some material that cures a plague, but the Daleks are here for the same material that apparently causes a plague? Also it's never made entirely clear why the city is taking everyone's power away, which is the starting point of the entire story, and while most of the stuff with the Exxilons is explained, it's all through an exposition dump instead of natural story progression. It's all overly complex, and nothing is every made all that clear. The Dalek's motivations shift like the wind and the Doctor meanders along through the plot making the perfect solution up on the fly as a reaction to the plot's next sudden and weird development. 

The Daleks were dismayed Death to the Daleks had set back their plans for galactic domination.

And finally, Step Eight: Avoid any kind of tension whatsoever

God, this story is dull. Despite everything, some excitement was possible to be produced, and would have helped the story a lot, but the way everything is put together removes that - it's all as dull, sterile and slow as possible, and it's pretty difficult to keep interest in what's going on. The conflicts are always unengaging, the Daleks slow things down rather than add excitement, and nothing feels like it's every going anywhere. I'd say there's not enough plot to stretch out the episode given the amount of irrelevant and uninteresting scenes, but with so many undeveloped storylines and plot points, I'm not sure that's honestly the case. It probably needed a complete rewrite and rethink that never happened. 

So there we are! The complete guide to making a shit Doctor Who with basically no redeeming features at all, aside from Jon Pertwee and Elisabeth Sladen trying their best and the light grey Daleks looking better than the usual colour scheme of the era. That's not really enough to make a Doctor Who story worth watching in any way, shape or form, and I very much doubt I'll ever watch this one again. 

Once you've followed this guide and made your shit Doctor Who story, make sure to send it to Chris Chibnall, who'll probably think its too exciting and engaging, and dumb it down a bit to his usual standard. 

(If I didn't bash NuWho, you wouldn't think it was me, let's be honest)

Final Score: 1/10. Don't bother.

Next Episode: Delta and the Bannermen