Target: Death to the Daleks

Another candidate for my favourite Target, and one of the earliest ones I read - for many years I pictured Tom Baker's Doctor in this, as I didn't know about the Pert/Sarah era. The screen version ran a poor second when I finally saw it.

Terrance Dicks' Exxilon is a spacious place of grey sand dunes and green fog, not a claustrophobic set littered with standing stones (though there is the one that gets the oil lamp placed on it). Sarah gets some proper clothes on when she goes back to the TARDIS.

It's never struck me before, but the Doctor goes off-page as well as off-screen when he negotiates with the Daleks. I can't believe TD resisted the temptation to write that scene. I'd love to have seen the Doctor coming to an agreement with his disarmed, deadly enemies.

The Dalek arithmetic adds up properly in the Target - there are 3 unseen Daleks left on the ship, and four who are initially seen. One blows up when the Exxilons attack, two get zapped by the City probe (one in the tunnel, one in the pit) leaving four at the end. The one guarding the mining area does not die of depression when Jill escapes, it commences a 'frantic search' instead.

As TD doesn't have to worry about the safety of the extras, he has the first Dalek blow up while the Exxilons are battering it. Several of them are killed.

The Surface Exxilons don't speak 'English' at all, not even the priest. Or rather they don't get any speeches - they talk a kind of 'pigeon [sic] galactic' but it's very debased.

Bellal wears clothes. He has a third friend (Jebal) who spies on the diggings. He doesn't take a gun to the City with the Doctor.

When the Doctor tells Sarah that, if necessary, she should go back to Earth with the expedition, he thinks 'At least it would be her own planet, if not her own time.'

Terrance gives us some Dalek facts: they 'take no interest in the finer points of interior decoration' and 'have so little imagination that it is almost impossible to hypnotise them'.

The City sequence is really well done on the page - all gleaming white walls and a sense of being trapped. On screen there are alternative paths (eg just before the tiles, and the sanity assault room has two entrances), which I feel lessens the menace. Not having a gun, Bellal tries to strangle the Doctor in the hypnosis room. I thought the book did refer to the control room figure 'watching' their progress, but I can't find such a reference.

(One thing I do like on screen is the skeleton in the sanity assault room - on the page there are none after the first room. I really like the suggestion that one Exxilon in centuries was clever enough to get past all the tests except that one.)

Galloway is a 'glory hunter', not a 'glory seeker'. He draws a 'deep shuddering breath' before pressing home the plunger on the bomb. (I always imagined him as a young red-headed bloke, but that just shows I didn't read Terrance's description of him properly.)

The story ends, not with the '699 wonders' line, but with an extra bit where the Doctor is still going on about Florana, and Sarah tells him to forget it and get her back to Earth instead.