Doctor who: The survivors

The story

Barbara has been taken by the Daleks and the others find a room filled conveniently with Geiger counters telling them about the radiation. Elsewhere the Daleks have exposition conversations.

Thoughts

The doctor admitting to sabotaging the Tardis so he could see the city made me laugh. It takes Ian a moment to realise how mad he is about this even though he’s just laid out how awful the situation is.

And they’d just had a conversation about what forms intelligence can take. Ian being worried about the intelligence of the unknown beings in the city and the doctor saying it doesn’t matter. It seems he should have been more worried about the form the doctor’s intelligence takes considering the doctor has all the knowledge and Ian very little. It’s how you use your intelligence that matters. In the doctor’s case that’s to get what you want regardless of everyone else.

They have to send someone back to the Tardis to get radiation drugs and the obvious choice is to send Susan. Or at least that’s the choice the writers want because she’s not as badly affected as the others and Ian has been injured by the Daleks after making a bit of a pathetic run for it.

Susan’s running through the jungle to the Tardis is tense. With all the strange shapes, it being in black and white and the flashing light of the lightning it’s hard to see what’s what and we don’t know what a Thall looks like. Although I could have done without the hysterics and the strange head movements.

You do feel for her though when she reaches the Tardis and then realises she’s only completed half of her journey and she needs to go back through the jungle in the dark. She may be terrified but she’s quite brave.

This episode was quite good considering not much happened in it. Susan runs through a jungle and the others wait around getting sicker.

Previous Doctor who episode – The dead planet

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