I n the trailer, Dr Who invited the audience to join him and his companions in a strange new world: “I cannot promise your safety but I can promise you unimagined thrills…”
Despite reimagining ‘Susie’ as a tiny science swot, Barbara as Who’s other granddaughter, and Ian as Barbara’s bumbling boyfriend, Subotsky’s screenplay remained remarkably faithful to the source material. The TV Doctor’s first line on stepping out into the petrified forest of planet Skaro, for example, was repeated verbatim: “The heat must have been indescribable…” The movie’s budget did, however, allow things unseen on TV to be depicted – the vertiginous cliff face climbed by Ian, Barbara and the Thals in order to infiltrate the Daleks’ city, for example.