I must say, I wasn’t sure where this episode was heading at first. The Doctor’s search for his Tardis leads him to an antique dealer’s shop, where he and Jamie get transported back in time. It turns out the owner is from Victorian times and the Daleks have provided a time machine to capture the Doctor and lure him back. The Daleks were accidentally brought from their planet Skaro by a scientist experimenting with mirrors or something, and they’ve used him to capture the Doctor, and forced the house owner, Mr. Waterfield, to co-operate by capturing his daughter.
Their plan is a bit contrived but I can go along with it. They need the Doctor and Jamie so they can explore “the human factor”, the unique thing that made them fail to conquer humanity in the past. With the Doctor’s arm twisted, he succeeds in isolating this human element and implanting it in three Daleks, who end up turning into child-like playful creatures, their sense of menace and obedience erased.
This is all just a ruse, however, as the Daleks merely wanted to isolate this factor so they could create an anti-factor of sorts, a ‘Dalek element’ that they would force the Doctor to disperse over Earth (hence the need for his Tardis) and turn all of humanity into obedient Dalek slaves.
I did find this story a little bit drawn out at seven episodes long, however everything comes to a head in the final episode when they’re transported to Skaro and we see for the first time the Dalek Emperor. The Doctor does a clever capsule switch and makes a load of Daleks become human-like, and so a big battle breaks out between the two sects, causing their Dalek city to collapse, and what looks like the Emperor being destroyed. Alas, since the video was lost to deletion, it’s hard to make out, and it’s a shame it’s missing, because it sounded pretty epic. The Emperor looked big and imposing too.
This was a passable serial which ended up having a pretty excellent ending. Allegedly the end of the Daleks for good, says the Doctor (we know otherwise!). It’s also the end of the ‘season’, whatever that meant at the time. Waterfield died in the Dalek rebellion, but his daughter Victoria survived and would appear to be joining our heroes on their adventures.