From the people who brought you Flight Through Entirety.

Saturday 23 February 1974

Death to the Daleks

Goon Daleks

Taranium Core, Episode 8
Sunday 4 October 2026

It’s Doctor Who at its most typical this week, as a stranded space expedition is sufficiently beset by natives and Daleks to fill four episodes with daring sacrifices and human escapes until the generically mandatory explosion comes along to set everything to rights.

Nathan’s first encounter with Doctor Who was when his friend Luke showed him The Second Doctor Who Monster Book (1977) sometime in the first half of 1978. It covered the stories from Tom Baker’s first three years, nearly all of which Nathan would have been able to see on repeat on ABC-TV before the end of the year.

While discussing Meglos on Flight Through Entirety, Nathan proclaims a ban on all future Doctor Who scenes involving the imminent sacrifice of the Doctor or a companion. That’s in Episode 69: By the Power of Bad Acting, starting at 18 minutes 37 seconds.

H Rider Haggard was a nineteenth-century British writer of adventure fiction, often set in Africa. His most famous book was King Solomon’s Mines (1885). If not a direct influence on Nation, this book is certainly the start of the lost civilisation subgenre whose tropes abound in Nation’s scripts, particularly this one.

Just over a year after this story aired, the first episode of Terry Nation’s series Survivors was broadcast on BBC 1. Its lead character was played by Carolyn Seymour, who you might remember as an evil leaper in Quantum Leap and in her three appearances in Star Trek: The Next Generation — Contagion, First Contact and Face of the Enemy.

Arnold Yarrow, who played Bellal in this story, died in 2024 at the age of 104. He became the oldest living actor to appear in Doctor Who when Earl Cameron, from The Tenth Planet, died in 2020 at the age of 102.

Death to the Daleks got a special VHS release in the UK in 1987. The story wasn’t generally available on video until 1995.

Flight Through Entirety discussed Death to the Daleks in Episode 29: Sand in Your Parrinium, released on Tuesday 19 May 2015. And we returned to the planet Exxilon for a commentary episode in Episode 115: The London Commentary Quartet, released on Sunday 18 June 2017.

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And more

You can find links to all of the podcasts we’re involved in on our podcasts page. But here’s where we’re up to right now.

Over on The Three Handed Game, the second episode of the triptych Back to the Bassinet has just dropped. It’s Mr. Teddy Bear, in which Cathy Gale tries to set a trap for a notorious assassin, using Steed as bait.

In this week’s episode of Untitled Star Trek Project, Nathan and friend-of-the-podcast Joe Ford watched an impressively unambitious episode of Star Trek: Enterprise, unimaginatively called Cold Front.

Taranium Core, Episode 8: Goon Daleks (Death to the Daleks)

Recorded on Sunday 19 July 2026 · Download (64.7 MB)
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Transcript