Day 75: Journey Into Terror

Interesting episode, this week, as the TARDIS lands in a house whereupon they meet Count Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster and the Grey Lady. They escape in the nick of time, accidentally leaving behind Vicki, but the audience gets to see some horror monsters destroy Daleks. Let's start with the accidental leaving behind of Vicki. In leaving her behind, she is forced to stowaway on the Daleks' ship, which makes for a compelling concept. Danger now lurks at every corner even more so, and if she is captured then it is quite clear that she will be killed. The audience doesn't know what will happen to Vicki, we don't entirely know if she will make it out of this story alive. To see a character's life put in danger, not knowing that they'll survive, is a fearful concept, but one that is done reasonably well here.

Now to the beating up of the Daleks. It's interesting that they decided to show the Daleks as weak here, compared to the offerings that would have featured strongly in cinemas at the time, as it clearly makes sense to show the Daleks as supreme, conquering all lesser races. And yet, they are being destroyed, and shown as weak. But perhaps it's a comment on their very nature. It is revealed that these horrifying monsters are not real, but just amusement park attractions that have been abandoned, thus meaning that they are fictional. So the Daleks are being destroyed by fiction itself, in effect, the very conceit that they are not real. The thing that makes things terrifying is plausibility, it's why monsters get less scary as you get older, because you learn to see through the cracks and find how these things can't exist, and so for the Daleks to be confronted by things that are implausible, acting as mirrors to their own selves by showing them to be implausible metal monsters, it makes sense that they are destroyed, as they lose their edge, in the battle against implausibility.