Day 48: Day of Reckoning

The Daleks kill people. This is a fact that can be forgotten from time to time, as we turn them into pepperpots that can't climb stairs, but they are secretly ruthless killing machines, set out to destroy all that you hold dear. The writer, Terry Nation, plays a wonderful and cruel trick when the Daleks kill someone. We meet them just before they're killed. We have a brief conversation with them, and they run off to go and help. In other serials, that might be the last we see of those characters, but we assume that they found help. With this, we see that they don't, and they have no hope, instead they are killed mercilessly. One of my favourite scenes in this episode features Dortmun, the wheelchair bound scientist have one final attack against the Daleks. He has developed a bomb that can supposedly destroy them, and he launches one final suicidial effort to buy his friends time to escape. The bomb fails miserably, as do most plans in this episode, and he is exterminated, cruelly. This episode is full of failures. We might think we have a hope against these creatures, but we don't. Because the Daleks don't just kill people, they exterminate them.