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Planet of the Daleks

Doctor Who serial

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 11, 2026
Entity authorityQ1029967 ↗
Source-derived summary

Planet of the Daleks is the fourth serial of the tenth season of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which was first broadcast in six weekly parts on BBC1 from 7 April to 12 May 1973. It was the first Dalek story to be written by their creator Terry Nation since 1965’s The Daleks' Master Plan.

Continuing from the events of the serial Frontier in Space, the story involves a small team of Daleks plotting to revive an army of Daleks which are being kept in suspended animation on the planet Spiridon.

Plot

The Third Doctor has been wounded after being shot by the Master. Jo helps the Doctor into the TARDIS, where he sends a message to the Time Lords before he collapses then falls into a coma. The Time Lords direct the TARDIS to the planet Spiridon, where Jo leaves the TARDIS in an attempt to find help, and encounters a party of Thals, the Daleks' oldest enemy. The Thals rescue the Doctor from the TARDIS, the outside of which has been overtaken by a lethal fungus, and explain to the Doctor that the Daleks have set up a research base on the planet to gain the native Spiridons' power of invisibility.

The Thals take the Doctor back to their ship, but the Daleks arrive first, destroy the ship and capture the Doctor. He presumes Jo to be dead, but fortunately she had already been removed from the ship by a Spiridon named Wester, having become infected with the fungus, which Wester cures. As the Doctor is held captive in the Dalek base, another party of Thals arrives and informs the first group that their intelligence had been mistaken; there isn't just a small research team of Daleks on the planet, but an army of ten thousand, which will form a galactic invasion force.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Planet of the Daleks” as doctor Who serial. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA dependable orientation record for establishing vocabulary, names and a first evidence trail. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1973, 1965—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1973-04-07. The account is most persuasive where Planet, Daleks and Doctor can be independently traced.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as doctor Who serial. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1029967. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1973 and 1965.

Critical limits

A concise general-reference account can conceal disagreements about scope, terminology or the weight assigned to individual sources. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Planet of the Daleks” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.