Genre – Sci Fi Drama Serial
Movie Total Runtime – 2 Hours 57 Minutes
Spoilers – Yes

So, having just spent eighteen hours watching a show about a Superpowered Cephalopod threatening to destroy the world, what next on the docket?

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A show about Superpowered Cephalodpods thretening to destroy the world. Okay, okay, so Dalek superpowers are limited to supergenius, tech, and plot armor that prevents their permanent extinction. But still, more tentacle-brains?

We are once again with the Second-Best Doctor, Patrick Troughton. Along with him we have a very classic theme song. I like it so much that I accidentally trigger it several times trying to get the correct episode to start the serial. First I accidentally loaded Evil of the Daleks into the playlist, then realized it looked awfully familiar. I switched to the correct serial only to accidentally start the last episode. Finally I got the very end of “The Faceless Ones” where Jamie and the Doctor are running across Gatwick Airport in pursuit of a truck hauling off the TARDIS. I bet it’s Galifreyan Repo men. That wasn’t the Doctor’s property to begin with.

After an Abbot and Costello routine with a maintenance guy, they find that J. Smith signed for the box and hauled it off. Peeping Smith watches Jamie and the Doctor after they leave and decide to follow the maintenance worker on the basis that his overalls were too small. Our human antagonists are in the business of selling Victorian antiques in 1960s England.

After Peeping Smith confronts Maintenance Man about him having been followed, Maintenance Man refuses to join in the ambush on Jamie and the Doctor, so Peeping Smith clobbers him with the lead pipe instead. Saved the firm £75, even if it means dealing with a body. No, wait, he’s alive according to the Doctor. Anyway, not caring for a two to one fight, even from ambush, Peeping Smith sneaks away while the Maintenance Man’s unconscious form distracts them. No, wait didn’t save the firm any money, in fact, left £250 lying there with the unconscious Maintenance Man. Peeping Smith is bad at this whole villainy thing. Maintenance Man waked up, grabs his cash and bolts.

Antiques Dealer orders Peeping Smith to lay low pending future utility. Though from past performance, he won’t provide much. Antiques Dealer sends a different Lackey to get the Doctor back on track to where the Antiques Dealer wants him to be. Peeping Smith decides to break into the Antiques Dealer’s office out of a surplus of curiousity over his overall oddity. He finds a secret room with advanced tech and promptly begins playing with the unlabeled buttons. Proving why it is such a bad idea to push random buttons, this action summons our titular source of Evil, and the Dalek exterminates him. This was not the utility the Antiques Dealer intended.

Searching the Antiques Dealer’s shop, the Doctor and Jamie find that his products are all brand new, and the Doctor declares that they are not reproductions. Jamie eventually declares this to be only possible if the Antiques Dealer has time travel. The Antiques Dealer in the meantime has his hands full having found the body the Dalek left him and getting in a bit of a verbal disagreement with said Dalek, who reminds him how little it cares for non-Dalek life before disappearing in the advanced tech, which we can safely assume is the time machine. Other Lackey arrives and the Doctor confronts him about Maintenance Man and Peeping Smith. They find the corpse of the latter in the inner office. Other Lackey makes the sensible decision to go contact the police, leaving the scene.

While snooping, the Doctor and Jamie trigger a gas trap and the Antiques Dealer whisks them through the time machine to the 1860s. We know it has to be the 1860s because they’re not visiting a specific event and the rule of narrative round numbers makes a century almost obligatory. The Doctor wakes up in the house of a mister Maxtable or however it’s spelled. I’m not looking it up. Maxtable is a Marx looking man who tries to speak civilized. Marxtable does confirm that it is 1866, as he’s aware of the time machine. Marxtable goes into vague quasi-expository mode while the Antiques Dealer indicates that his daughter Victoria is being held hostage. We get a brief scene with her in Dalek custody before going to Marxtable’s alchemy lab.

Marxtable takes the roundabout blathering of the frustrating expositor who never gets to the point. It turns out his experiments accidentally caught the attention of the Daleks. One of which emerges from the cabinet to order the Doctor to conduct an experiment on Jamie. The parameters of the experiment are not detailed before it rolls away into the cabinet and disappears. Marxtable speculates that they are looking for the “Human Factor” to improve their own design.

Side characters wake Jamie and bring him up to speed enough to not have to have another “this character is confused scene” later, only for a Callous Footpad to club him on the head and drag him off. Callous Footpad delivers Jamie to Confused Gentleman, who doesn’t remember ordering the retrieval of Jamie, but pays him anyway. Confused Gentleman gets brain interference and loses another chunk of memory. When the Doctor finds them, Confused Gentleman uses this as an opportunity to remove himself from the scene.

Marxtable spends an all too long scene establishing Mute Henchman’s strength before posting him on guard duty as part of the pending test. The Daleks state that they are after the “Human Factor” and have three blank Daleks for it to be imprinted into once isolated. Confused Gentleman has another confusing scene where he argues with Jamie. This is followed up with an argument where the Doctor uses transparent psychological manipulation to put the idea of rescuing Victoria into Jamie’s head.

In the stables, Callous Footpad steals the keys to the house and decides to go about a little larceny. He instead finds the Daleks, and meets a predictable end. I suppose it was included to fill the extermination quota for the middle of the series. Can’t forget that the Daleks are Evil, can we.

Jamie reaches the Mute Henchman’s guard post. They fight and Jamie gets the upper hand, causing Mute Henchman to tumble out a window and dangle from the edge. Rather than let him die, Jamie throws him a rope and helps him back inside. In the meantime, a Dalek plants Victoria’s handkerchief where Jamie is liable to find it and be killed by a trap. Mute Henchman saves him from the trap as repayment for being saved from death by falling.

Having a body to dispose of and a shortage of hands, the Daleks order Marxtable and the Antiques Dealer to deal with Callous Footpad. Antiques Dealer has a crisis of conscience about their acceory after the fact, so Marxtable secretly recovers a revolver from a desk. He tries to shoot the Antiques Dealer in the back, but Confused Gentleman intervenes without the potential victim finding out. Confused Gentleman takes over corpse disposal duties sending Marxtable back inside.

Having found Victoria’s location, Mute Henchman proposes being a decoy, but Jamie rejects the plan. While they think over how to get past the Dalek guards, Confused Gentleman interrogates the maid for being out and about. Marxtable is wasting his time trying to get payment from the Daleks in the form of knowledge. He fails to understand the nature of their ‘deals’, or suspect that they have no intention of keeping any promises made. I called Marxtable’s lab an alchemy lab because he is looking to turn metal into gold. This was a spoiler I knew before watching, but he exposits it now. By 1866, Chemistry had moved on.

Taking out two separate Dalek guards with a rope, Jamie and Mute Henchman reach Victoria’s cell. Yes, a rope. This was before power creep had made them nigh unstoppable. Getting to the cell doesn’t make things all that much better as they end up barricading themselves inside. It does buy time to dialog and exposition. We find that the mental problems of Confused Gentleman is the result of Dalek Mind Control implants, and that Marxtable has been hypnotizing people to make them forget odd occurances and protect the plot. He gets the maid to leave the plot by hypnosis. Marxtable also exploits Confused Gentleman’s mind control to dispatch him to snatch Victoria via a secret door.

The Doctor has completed a “Human Factor” and encoded it on positronic implants to put in the dormant Daleks. Antiques Dealer has another attack of conscience, but the Doctor talks him down from reckless violence. On the other side the the house, reckless violence is battering down the cell door as Confused Gentleman snatches Victoria. Jamie and Mute Henchman find the secret door and pursue. Jamie ends up in a sword fight with Confused Gentleman. Fortunately, this is an area where Jamie has some skill, having fought the English on the side of the Scots in one of their various on again off again death matches. The animated choreography is more laughable than the zero budget choreography must have been in the original. The fight ends because of Confused Gentleman’s mental issues. The mind control device was apparently not actually implanted, as the Doctor removes it by just taking it of Confused Gentleman’s inside pocket.

Mute Henchman runs into the Daleks and is ordered to carry an unconscious Victoria into the cabinet. Shortly thereafter, Jamie and the Doctor reach the lab and the dormant Daleks wake up, having yet to have any memories. The Daleks play like the small children they are – lacking the normal Dalek pre-conditioning. To keep track of them, the Doctor marks the chassis of these three. They declare that all Daleks are ordered to return to Skaro, and promptly roll into the cabinet.

Marxtable and Antiques Dealer get into a fight while the Daleks arm a bomb to blow up the evidence of the house. Most of the secondary cast had already been sent away by this point. Marxtable retreats through the cabinet as the Daleks head in the same direction. The cabinet locks behind them, so the Doctor, Jamie, and the Antiques Dealer take the time machine to escape the explosion. Because the plot demands it, this route also delivers them to Skaro for the final act. Marxtable tries to make demands of the Daleks, and gets bullied by trash cans only to be saved by an intruder alarm, which gives the Daleks something more pressing to attend to.

I’m surprised at how long Mute Henchman has lasted in this story. He’s exactly the kind of character they tended to use as fodder to demonstrate seriousness in these types of stories. Anyway, the Daleks capture the Doctor, Jamie, and Antiques Dealer. They are brought to Emperor Dalek. The daleks reveal that their plan was to further refine their existing strengths by isolating a “Dalek Factor” to be used on humanity rather than applying the “Human Factor” on Daleks. They test it by tricking Marxtable to walk into a transmutation arch which applies the factor. In the meantime, the Daleks begin a witch hunt for the test subjects who’d been humanized.

Later on, Marxtable lures the Doctor into the arch with a promise of aid in reaching the TARDIS. The Doctor begins acting in the same clipped manner as transmuted Marxtable. He fiddles with the various positronic capsules, swapping the Dalek Factor capsule for one he had in his pocket. The Doctor recommends that the Daleks find the deviant Daleks by processing all of their number through a transmutation arch with the Dalek Factor to factory reset them. With the swapped module, this produces a swarm of Human Factor Daleks, creating a mess. The two factions of Daleks begin a shooting war in the city.

Antiques Dealer gets another attack of conscience and goes to try to deal with Marxtable. The end result is he gets caught in the crossfire and exterminated.

The Doctor and surviving humans retreat, leaving the Daleks to their civil war. Marxtable attacks them on the cliffs and pushes Mute Henchman off. Before he could attack the others, Marxtable responds to a Dalek recall order trying to bring reinforcements to the Emperor’s chambers. This does not end well.

We’ve had the discussion about Classic Who pacing before. Some of you can’t stand it, some of you can. You don’t need me to recommend this serial one way or another.