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Plague of the Daleks arrives like the sound of tyres screeching at the end of a really good road trip. You know that feeling. You have had vibes. You have had themes. You have had melancholy time loops and existential dread and villagers who know they are trapped and make peace with it anyway. And then suddenly it is DALEKS. Again. Blundering in like the worst possible guests at the afterparty, tracking mud everywhere and demanding attention. This is the final part of the Stockbridge trilogy for the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa, and on paper it should feel like a culmination. Instead it feels like someone tripped over the reset button and landed face first on “generic base under siege”.
The setup is actually solid. Far future Earth. Mostly uninhabitable. Humanity clinging to life in carefully curated pockets, one of which is Stockbridge, preserved as a tourist destination. A living museum of early 21st century Britain for wealthy offworlders to wander around and gawk at like it is a theme park called “England Experience”. There is genuinely fertile ground here. The idea of regional culture frozen and commodified, of history turned into set dressing, of people living inside a performance of their own past. That could have been sharp. Satirical. Sad. Very Doctor Who. The story gestures at these ideas, waves at them briefly, then immediately abandons them in favour of yelling.
Because the Daleks show up. Their master plan is to contaminate the rain with spores that transform humans into Dalek-controlled minions. Yes. Weaponised British weather. You could almost admire the efficiency. It rains constantly. Why not make that lethal too. Conceptually it is fine. In execution it is painfully rote. Corridors. Panic. Soldiers. People getting infected one by one. A lot of shouting. A lot of running. A lot of “we must hold them here”. You can feel the script hitting every expected beat with the enthusiasm of someone filling out a checklist.
What really hurts is how little this story actually needs Stockbridge. Strip out the name, swap the location for literally any other future human settlement, and nothing changes. That is deadly in the context of a trilogy built so carefully around place and memory. Stockbridge was meant to matter. Instead it becomes wallpaper. The emotional resonance built up over the previous two stories just sort of evaporates, replaced by blaster fire and plot noise. It feels crowbarred in. Obligatory. Like the Daleks were contractually required.
Performance wise, everyone is doing their best. Peter Davison is reliably excellent, bringing warmth and urgency even when the material is thin. Nyssa remains smart, capable, and emotionally grounded, which only highlights how little she is actually given to do beyond react and endure. The Daleks themselves are… fine. Loud. Threatening in the abstract. Weirdly dull in practice. There is no new angle here, no fresh horror, no conceptual twist that makes them feel dangerous again.
The theme, if there is one, seems to be about stagnation and decay, but it never coheres. Tourism as cultural embalming is hinted at and then ignored. Humanity’s future feels underexplored. Everything interesting is sacrificed on the altar of familiar monster antics. As a trilogy capstone, it is profoundly unsatisfying.
Final Thoughts
Plague of the Daleks is not terrible. It is worse than that. It is forgettable. A flat, noisy ending to a trilogy that deserved something braver and stranger.
2.5 out of 5 contaminated rainclouds permanently hovering over England.