Terry Nation is a man who
knows just how to make a quick buck with an idea. Working for the BBC had him keeping the
rights to use the Daleks and in late 1967 he took his creations which couldn’t
be used in Doctor Who again and took them to America. He pitched “The Destroyers” a pilot for a
science fiction show about the Daleks conquests of the galaxy in a time where Star Trek was just getting started. Details on the entire series remains scant
and Big Finish did make a Dalek spin-off a reality with Dalek Empire, but the script for “The Destroyers” does survive and
was adapted in the same set as Prison in
Space because it would have aired around the same time as Prison in Space. Terry Nation may be a good idea man, but
sadly he suffers when it comes to the actual plot of his pilot. He takes Sara Kingdom and gives her a story
about her first encounters with the Daleks before The Daleks’ Master Plan. It’s
a bit odd however as she doesn’t really understand how evil the Daleks are in
that story while here she gets the full force of their evil right to her face.
Jean Marsh however is
great here, I mean it is Jean Marsh she can’t not be great and Sara Kingdom is
an extremely interesting character. She
doesn’t have the baggage of killing her brother Bret as she would in The Daleks’ Master Plan and I feel that
if it wasn’t for the fact that when this was recorded Nicholas Courtney had
contracted the cancer that took his life, Bret Vyon would have made an
appearance here. Instead David Kingdom
is used and let’s be honest he really doesn’t make an impression at all. Alex Mallinson plays David Kingdom and is
alright as the character but he really feels like there isn’t much to him. The same can be said for Chris Porter as
Jason Corey, the brother of Mark Corey from Mission
to the Unknown. The question is why
are all the characters changed as this takes place before any of the events on
Kembel? Well it is probably because of
the fact that an American television network will not be interested in already
established characters. If that is the
case however then why is Marsh as Sara Kingdom included? She only appeared for two months on Doctor Who
and really only had her death be her defining feature as the show went on. I really don’t know why any of this story
turned out the way it did. Mark Seven however
is a really good idea of the future giving us an android that is the perfect
human, but still acts like your stereotypical android, not understanding human
colloquialisms or clichés. It’s Doctor
Who does Kryten from Red Dwarf just
not very well. Nicholas Briggs however
is great as the Daleks. The Daleks here
are the ones seen in Mission to the
Unknown and The Daleks’ Master Plan
as totally ruthless killing machines with no regard for any life other than themselves. They are murderous and are planning to create
the Time Destructor which is where I think the series would have gone if it was
actually sent to series. It does however
lead nicely into Dalek Empire.
To summarize, The Daleks: The Destroyers is a story
that really shows the flaws in Terry Nation’s writing. It’s a pilot that never would have been
picked up for a series as the science fiction being presented on television in
America was of an optimistic future while Nation is trying to make a
dystopia. The adaptation is an
interesting little time capsule and it’s got some good moments but really there
isn’t much here that wasn’t done better in Nicholas Briggs’s own Dalek Empire. 50/100
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