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unsung star of this episode – the haunting, unrelenting caterwauls of the jungle, the scraping of the TARDIS door and even the sound of the TARDIS scanner all aid the storytelling in abstract ways. Meanwhile, Tristram Cary’s discordant, subtly menacing music is creepy and alien. Then – and just as important – there are the contrasting moments where they decide not to use sound: the camera that follows Barbara, the city-doors that close silently around her... moments like these are the most effective in an episode that, fittingly, ends with a treated, echoed scream climaxing in darkness.
    The Survivors (The Daleks episode two)
    R: This marks the Daleks’ first appearance, so it’s clearly a very momentous episode (even if part of its charm is that there’s no way anyone making it can know that yet). But watching it back, there were two little reactions that really stood out for me, amidst the bombast and significance.
    One of them is the way that William Russell, playing Ian, reacts with such relief and delight when he begins to get feeling back in his legs. He’s paralysed by a Dalek gun at the top of the episode, and spends the majority of the next 20 minutes, in macho hero way, insisting he can walk (and then collapsing onto the floor) and beating at his thighs in anger. By the time he recovers, it’s too late to help him – Susan has already been sent out into the mutant-filled forest, and Barbara and the Doctor are nearly dead from radiation exposure. Still, there’s that moment of pride when he discovers he’s on his feet again, able to move one leg in front of the other. He takes a few steps with growing confidence – and then doubles over, clutching his stomach as the full force of his own radiation sickness hits him. If it’s not one thing, then it’s another! It’d be almost comical, were the reaction not so very human, and it only helps to reinforce the desperation of the situation.
    The other is the laugh that Susan gives when Ian and Barbara solemnly ponder whether there are any little men hiding inside the Dalek machines. It’s a real gurgle of a laugh, too, just responding to the bizarreness of it all – and although I’m sure it was scripted, it almost feels like Carole Ann Ford is corpsing. Ford has had a tough job since An Unearthly Child, simultaneously playing an ordinary teenage girl who at times screams so much, she falls over the set, and also someone alien and futuristic and unknowable. That single laugh is the most natural she’s been since her introduction, and it’s terrific – partly because the Daleks, for all the brilliance of their design, the elegance of their movements and that wonderful staccato voice, are ultimately ridiculous-looking pepperpots. And it takes that laughter, that suggestion that someone in the story also thinks they look funny, that somehow makes them more credible. They’re the first Doctor Who monsters, gawp at ‘em, have a chuckle – and now you’ve done that, look at what they’re doing and what they represent.
    And the Daleks aren’t necessarily the villains of the piece yet either. Their treatment of the TARDIS crew is unfriendly and opportunistic, but at least they can be reasoned with, unlike the cavemen of the Tribe of Gum. At this stage, they’re hardly more callous than the supposedly “good” characters we’ll meet later in the season, like Marco Polo or Arbitan, who also blackmail or imprison our heroes for their own ends. It’s clever that the cliffhanger still suggests that although her fellows are dying in a Dalek cell, it’s Susan who may be the one in greater peril, having to journey through a forest that may be home to worse monsters still. The stronger of these Hartnell episodes are the ones that focus upon a moral dilemma, just as The Forest of Fear asked us to ponder whether or not the ends justify the means in allowing a caveman to die. That Ian is here obliged to ask a terrified Susan to risk her life for the greater