Resurrection Of The Daleks
(Season 21, Dr 5 with Tegan and Turlough, 8-15/2/1984, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Eric Saward, writer: Eric Saward, director: Matthew Robinson)
Rank: 269
He has risen! Oh wait, that’s not until ‘Remembrance Of The Daleks’…my bad.
The first of my truly controversial rankings maybe? Brave heart reviewer...
You see, this is a
popular story with fandom. After a season of pontificating after the Black and
White Guardians and Timelords in funny hats I can see why this one stood out as
much as it did. This isn't one of those thoughtful, cerebral Who stories, it's
more of a whizz bang whallop action affair where everyone is doing something in
every scene - more often than not with a loaded weapon in their hand. It's
Peter Davison at his most 5th Doctory and the Daleks at their most Daleky. In
other words they're scheming, evil and nasty and he's a goody-two-shoes who tries
to find a peaceful way then kills everyone anyway. It’s got Davros, exploding
Daleks being thrown from a warehouse, a contemporary London docklands setting
and more double-crossings than a railway line built across Spaghetti junction.
If you’re the sort of fan who watches scifi for the action, who has a complete
set of James Bond films on your shelves, think ‘Star Wars’ is the height of
science fiction and won’t watch television that doesn’t have explosions every
few minutes then this is probably your favourite Dr Who of the 1980s. If you do
then good luck to you, I won’t spoil your party.
But for me there has to
be a reason behind all the noise and chaos and ‘Resurrection’ is effectively an
empty Dalek shell, with nothing inside but smoke and gunge. It’s a Dalek story
in name only: after five years away no one on the production team had actually
worked with the metal meanies before (well, only John Nathan-Turner as a unit
production manager) and people forgot to treat them as anything other than an
immediate ratings booster. Following ‘Destiny Of The Daleks’, rewritten from
Terry Nation’s original script to be somewhat sillier by script editor Douglas
Adams, their creator had basically taken his ball home to America and refused
to let anyone play with it ever again. You can’t blame him for not wanting
anything to do with the series that made his name any more: even The Doctor
spent that story poking fun at the Daleks and being locked in a stalemate with
Boney M extras was not what Terry envisioned when he first created The Daleks
to represent everything relentlessly Nazi and oppressive about them. However
Terry had spent the last five years in the doldrums: his move to his beloved
America, home of all his favourite TV shows, had never quite come together:
he’d had commissions for pilots, even the odd episode of other people’s
creations, but by 1984 Terry was beginning to eat into his savings and needed a
quick buck or two. More with hope than certainty JNT sent him an invite to one
of the first big American Dr Who conventions in America and, with nothing else
to lose, Terry went along and was astonished by the standing ovation and love
he got from the crowd. After years of being treated as a nobody it was a
‘resurrection’ and he began to think of his old show a bit more fondly. He
started up a correspondence with JNT again and while he wasn’t quite up to
writing a full script he maybe wouldn’t say no to someone else writing one.
That someone was script
editor Eric Saward who was handed this script as a fait accompli and was urged
to do another ‘Earthshock’, making
another old monster contemporary again. For the longest time the script was
known as ‘The Return’ with The Daleks another first cliffhanger shock reveal
intended to get audiences talking. It was also intended as the finale of the
1983 season (when it would have been the season finale following ‘The King’s
Demons’) until the technicians strike that hit both that story and
‘Enlightenment’ meant it was postponed for a year. However, while Eric had a
grudging respect for The Cybermen, by his own admission he didn’t understand
The Daleks at all. He’d gone away and watched the surviving stories (while
reading the scripts for the missing ones) and came to the conclusion that they
were just talking tanks who liked war without the ‘subtleties’ of
cyber-conversion. He found them grating as characters, with the way they talked
in a monotone and though he wasn’t planning to use him again stuck Davros in
just to give him someone to talk to The Doctor. This is, if you’ve read any of my
other Dalek reviews, Possibly the biggest mis-reading in this book. The Daleks
aren’t interested in violence except as a means to an end: really they’re
racists, out to rid the universe of ‘inferior’ life-forms which very much
includes humans but they have no more respect for ‘us’ than they do for anyone
else (making their plan to wipe out Earth a bit weird) while they simply fight
in this story because that’s what Daleks do: they don’t have a ‘cause’, however
twisted, the way they do in every other Dalek story. A good Dalek writer, too,
knows that their monotone is their whole point: they’re a species that sees
things in black and white, in Daleks and not-Daleks; it’s the contrast of that
relentless bark when pitched against the range of life fighting against them
that brings in the contrast. In ‘Resurrection’ everyone we meet is a soldier or
at any rate working for soldiers and they end up talking like Daleks.
All except the regulars
of course. Except…This is where another fundamental misunderstanding comes in
because even they start acting like soldiers. Yes they’re fighting for their
lives so don’t have much time to stop and moralise, but remember who this
Tardis crew is: you’ve got Tegan who, for all her angry barbs and fierce ways,
is a big ol’ softie underneath, someone who wants peace first and foremost.
You’ve got Turlough, a self-confessed coward who wouldn’t fight if he can run
away. Somehow both end up taking arms across this story and while that’s not
completely unique during their time in the Tardis, what is unique is the sense
that they do so automatically without sobbing that they have no other choice or
wondering what they’ve turned into. You could excuse this for some hurried
rewrite due to the new timeslot…but these characters were both in the 1982
version of the script. If Anything Saward should know them better after an
extra year writing for them. Both are
badly used in their last and penultimate story respectively, Tegan mostly
confined to bed and Turlough running round corridors. Then there’s the 5th
Doctor. You know, the softly spoken one who stays polite even when people are
threatening to execute him and would rather look and sad and pitiful rather
than rant (even though, deep down, the 5th Doctor is surely the most
bloodthirsty of all The Doctors – a side effect perhaps of Eric Saward being
his script editor; the 6th Doctor talks about violence more and got
into trouble for it too but the 5th Doctor is quicker to actually
turn to a gun, usually before sighing that ‘there was no other way’, when all
of his predecessors would surely have tried longer to find one). The Doctor
seems to have been transformed into a gun-toting warrior throwing Daleks out of
windows, shooting Daleks, shooting Dalek mutants and holding a gun to Davros’
head, seconds away from pulling the trigger before being talked out of it. It’s
a real shame this Doctor, the polite charming wishy-washy one less like a Dalek
in pure personality, never got a rematch
as they ought to be a good contrast (certainly the Davison Dalek stories on Big
Finish are some of their best). This, however, is not like the 5th
Doctor at all – not even one pushed to his limits as Saward seems to think he
is. He isn’t acting like any Doctor we’ve ever seen really. Not since he nearly
smashed in a caveman’s skull with a rock in very first story ‘An Unearthly Child’ have we seen The
Doctor commit violence when his or someone else’s life isn’t immediately at
stake Forget ‘Resurrection Of the Daleks’, this story is really about a
resurrection of violence.
In case you hadn’t
noticed ‘Dr Who’ is, give or take ‘The Dominators’, a pacifist series. The
Doctor fights only to support people defending against oppressors and never
glorifies in violence. He comes equipped with a screwdriver not a weapon and
would rather use his wits than a bomb anyday. This is a character who might
join a revolution until it becomes too bloody but would never join an invading
army. Saward got away with it in ‘Earthshock’ because he was saving people from
cyber-conversion (a fate worse than extermination?) and the Cybermen plans were
so far along there was no alternative, though he looked mighty sad when
murdering them even so. Here the Daleks are mostly hiding out in a warehouse,
their plans undiscovered, while he doesn’t actually know what their plan is and
doesn’t stop to find out. We also had a storyline to go with it. Not here: the
plot is B-movie stuff designed to fill in time between constant explosions; two
of them in fact given that each are pretty flimsy on their own. On the one hand
The Daleks want to kill off all Humans with a virus (you know, just for a
change, like they did in ‘The Dalek Invasion Of
Earth’ ‘Planet Of the Daleks’ and ‘Death To The Daleks’). Why? Erm, got me. Maybe
they want to pilot our planet like a spaceship again. Cue lots of people dying
horribly, a proper foam-filled death. Davros included (Maybe. Sort of. For
now). Then there’s the other plot, about The Daleks creating duplicates of
Humans to infiltrate our governments. You know, like they sort of did in ‘The Chase’. Why? Uhh, not a clue. Though it does
at least lead to the story’s best line when the Supreme Dalek comments about
how he isn’t really defeated because he’s left some duplicates in power to
which The Doctor, deep in the heart of Thatcher, stares at the camera and says
‘They’re too unstable, surely? They’d get noticed!’) Even more than ‘Attack Of The Cybermen’, which always gets
the flak for being a ‘collage’ of old stories but at least had some new ideas,
everything in this story is recycling. And The Daleks aren’t built for recycling.
In reality all this second storyline means is that we don’t just see
practically all the supporting cast bumped off in gory gruesome gunfire/Dalek
gunfire, we get to see their duplicates die as well. The ‘About Time’ book
series reckons there are 74 individual deaths seen on screen – that’s nearly
one death a minute – the highest body count of any Dr Who story when judged
that way (obviously ‘Logopolis’ kills
off a large number of planets but we don’t see those people suffer the way we
do here). That makes this story the closest to a Dr Who snuff movie and while
other episodes have gorier or more brutal death scenes they’re there to make a
point. These are mostly gratuitous in a sombre bleak brutal story that’s low on
humour and lightness, perhaps Saward’s reaction to learning about Terry Nation’s
reaction to the silliness of ‘Destiny Of The Daleks’ (there’s only one, brief
moment of comedy, when a cat is mistaken for a Dalek mutant blob). The thing is
though, you can meet in the middle somewhere and have a Dalek story that’s
generally brutal with moments of lightness. As Tegan says in horror when she
leaves ‘it’s stopped being fun Doctor!’ I know how she feels.
Everyone suffers horribly
in this masochistic story, even the survivors, which is a blatant
misunderstanding of what ‘Dr Who’ is about. While it’s a formula elastic enough
to let any writer make it do anything they want, 99% of the stories in this
book are about the joy of being alive, the importance of helping those around
you, the way that life is better if you treat those around you with kindness no
matter the gender, species, skin colour or quantity of heads they might have.
Now, officially Eric too says that ‘Resurrection’ is an anti-violence story.
That The Doctor has a change of heart at the end when he realises he’s gone too
far and that is the reason why Tegan leaves, in a sudden moment of conscience. However
compare this to every time The Doctor has a crisis of confidence in other
stories: in ‘Planet Of The Spiders’ the 3rd
Doctor goes to his death meekly. In ‘Androzani’ a
tired 5th Doctor despises it all yet still fights to save Peri’s
life. In ‘The Two Doctors’ (the only
story that comes close for gratuitous deaths) the whole point is that the
monster Shockeye acts as if his victims’ pain doesn’t matter – he has to feel
pain in return for that vegetarian story to work. But this one? The Doctor is
defiant, mumbling how he wishes there had been another way but that he had no
other choice. There’s no great speech as added by Terrance Dicks in ‘Planet Of the Daleks’ for the survivors to
never glorify violence and talk about those who won’t be coming back; there’s
no moment akin to ‘Waters Of Mars’ where
The Doctor realises he’s gone too far and deserves to be punished; there’s no
great philosophical debate the way there is in ‘Genesis
Of The Daleks’ about whether killing murderers makes you as bad as they are.
Instead The Doctor looks like a sulky child who’s just been told off for
bullying ad can only answer with the lines ‘well he started it…Okay so he
hadn’t actually done anything yet but he did before so I thought he would
again!’ For all that Saward told interviewers that he was moved by past Who
pacifists like Bob Holmes and Malcolm Hulke it still feels more as if this story
(and Earthshock) glorifies war, giving us battle after battle each one of them
fought because someone somewhere thought they were a good idea. The men who
fight them seem like 'heroes' in the afterglow of missiles and gunfire, even if
ultimately most of them sacrifice themselves for nothing. Though there’s a
space to tell a sombre violent Dr Who story, this was not the time: we needed
hope like never before in 1984. After all, we’re deep into the era of Thatcher
and Raegan now and Dr Who is telly’s one last stand for ‘being kind’ against
the ‘dog eat dog’ principles we were being encouraged to take up. Having a
story that sided with violence, during the ‘star wars’ era and two years (one
as planned of course) after the Falklands War was asking for trouble. The
result is a little like watching one of those 1940s/50s war movies about ‘how
we can never ever put ourselves through something like this again’ which has
just spent three hours showing every death in glorious loving close-up: you
can’t just tack a message on the end and spend a minute despairing of having to
live through the other ninety-nine. Saward even misunderstands the timelords,
having The Doctor comment to Turlough in the last scene that he left Gallifrey ‘precisely’
because of their attitude towards violence, when he blatantly didn’t (he left
because he was bored and they were all too passive). These are the sorts of
things all writers make from time to time and which script editors would
normally fix, but this story is by the script editor so nobody picks up on
it. Which is a real shame.
You see, the thing is
this story is brilliantly made and looks amazing. The reason this story is so
loved is precisely because of those action sequences, director Matthew Robinson
amongst the best the show ever had in terms of things happening. He pioneered
the idea of multi-camera shots and quick cutting between scenes and using
multiple ‘zoom’ shots back when this
sort of thing was unusual on television, making the story feel as if its constantly
moving, with zooming and the impression that a lot more is going on than there
really is. Alas Robinson only ever worked on this one story, falling foul of
the growing JNT-Saward feud with a big row that nearly saw him walk out early (when
he dared to query a shot directly with the writer rather than going through the
producer). It works, this once. If you think that other ‘classic’ era Dr Who
stories are a tad slow then…BOOM!...this story is…BANG!...the one for you
because…WHOOSH!...there’s always something every few mi…[Big Explosion]…nutes. After a few talky stories (though predecessor
‘Frontios’ was pretty action packed too) it makes a nice change. To give Saward
credit too, it’s not the direction creating it all: he was one of the paciest
writers Who ever had and really good at laying out stage directions in his
scripts so that rather than just the usual ‘The Doctor fights The Master’ line the
director gets to see the entire vision and recreates it in detail, action by
action, so no wonder he spent longer lingering on those shots than the talky
emotive scenes. The story’s starting point was Saward walking past an old
warehouse on London’s dockyards (Butler’s Wharf) and figuring it would make an
interesting place for a Dr Who monster to hide, to the point where he only sat
down to write this story after getting permission to film there first,
tailoring his scenes to every nook and cranny (would that most Who writers
spent that much time visiting their locations!) Initially it was hoped that the
‘street’ scenes would be shot in London’s Whapping Street but it was too full
of people even early in the morning so got switched to the back-up plan, Curlew
Street, opposite the Thames but slightly further out the way. It does indeed
look magnificent and gives the story a contemporary edge. Viewers, who hadn’t
seen a Dalek invasion of Earth since 1964, were struck by the fact they were no
longer something ‘over there’ but now here, in a place a lot of them visibly
recognised. I would add, too, that seeing these empty warehouses – once a
bustling thriving hub of London’s metropolis – is such a potent symbol of what
had gone wrong in the 1980s that it made hat line about unstable people in
government running the show hit even harder that it was meant to. No wonder The
Daleks are in control here: they might as well be for all the difference it
would make.
However we don’t get
‘that’ story (one equating The Daleks with Thatcherism would have been
interesting). We get a story where fighting back is hopeless, where even the
good guys turn out to either be duplicitous bad guys or die horrible gruesome
deaths and even though The Doctor technically ‘wins’ there’s no joy in his
having to fight this time. And what good guys: this story goes out of its way
to cast at least two people viewers would think of as inherently ‘good’ as they
can, just to show up how fighting changes people. There’s Rodney Bewes, an
unlikely pick from ‘The Unlikely Lads’, struggling as the seemingly timid and
softly spoken Stien. There’s Chloe Ashcroft, the nice one (or at any rate less
scary than Floella ‘she would make a good Davros’ Benjamin one) from
‘Playschool’ as a scientist who’s never killed before but is forced to fight
back. Rula Lenska plays Styles somewhere between her usual glamorous roles and
as GI Jane. They even put that nice Mike Tucker from The Archers, Terry Molloy,
in the new Davros costume/mask (a most excellent one this time I’m pleased to
say, that actually moves with the actor’s face,
made by the very talented visual effects designer Stan Mitchell – hello
if you’re reading this, Rita!) All four are unlikely casting and have mixed
success it has to be said (Bewes struggling the most, especially when the
script asks him to unleash his ‘inner Dalek’). Once again we have a fundamental
misunderstanding of why ‘Earthshock’ worked, as if someone looked at that story
and decided the best thing about it was casting cuddly comedian Beryl Reid as a
hard-nosed spaceship captain (it, umm, very much wasn’t). Whoever cast this
story needs their head examining at least as much as Davros. Against all odds,
though, Molloy is rather good: he actually did his homework, taking the
best-selling talking book of the ‘Genesis Of The Daleks’ soundtrack (released
in 1978) to the set with him and practising speaking along with Michael
Wisher’s words to get the tone right (if you’re wondering Michael, who’d agreed
to appear in the cancelled version in 1983, reluctantly turned it down after a
stage play he was in, ‘The Dame Of Sark’ – about real Nazis not just Dalek ones
- got an extended run). Though it’s a performance that can’t quite match
Michael Wisher’s mesmerising original it’s as close as you’re going to get
another actor to do and Molloy ‘feels’ like the same person (especially one
that’s been cryogenically frozen for 900 years – that’s bound to do something
to your voice and mannerisms) without just being a slavish copy. Most viewers
miss all of that bit of stunt casting though because they see two names who
only became big later who are both playing up to type as hardmen: Maurice
Colbourne as the unflappable Lytton (someone Saward enjoyed writing for so much
he was given a reprieve from dying with the rest of the cast – he’ll turn up in
‘Attack Of The Cybermen’) and Leslie ‘Dirty Den’ Grantham enjoying his first TV
work (he took up acting late in life, in prison for trying to rob a taxi driver,
inspired by a troupe of actors that used to come in between jobs and pass on
their skills in the hope of keeping them from re-offending; one of these good
Samaritans was Louise ‘Leela’ Jameson who was so impressed she tipped off her
Dr Who team for the next time they needed a ‘hardman’. This story’s director
was impressed enough to give him his Eastenders role). Although true Whovians,
of course, know him better from his role on ‘Fort Boyard’ alongside Tom Baker,
the Lidl own brand version of ‘The Crystal Maze’ if everyone making it was on holiday
and indeed on drugs (and the reason why a generation of fans always add ‘the
doors!’ every time someone on Torchwood says ‘Jack’). For those who never saw
it ‘Resurrection’ is kind of the same…if you imagine Kiston being followed
around by a midget with a massive key, a tranqulised looking Tiger in need of a
hug and Melinda Messenger wearing a costume Peri would have rejected for being
too revealing. The only members of the cast who do well are the last minute
Dalek replacements (as Roy Skelton was busy too): Royce Mills and Brian ‘Mr
Smith I Need You’ Miller (real life hubby of Elisabeth Sladen), who both acquit
themselves well despite being the least Dalek-like people you could ever hope
to meet in real life.
The cast all try hard but
another problem with ‘Resurrection’ is the dialogue: I don’t care how many
Baftas or Oscars you have nobody would sound good asked to say some of these
lines. Just take Stien’s dying sacrificial words, so visibly spoken by Bewes
through gritted teeth and glaring looks off-side to his agent: ‘Hello boys,
just in time for the fun!’ It’s hard to single out a single worst bit of Dr Who
dialogue but if that doesn’t deserve a place in the top I’ll eat my gone-off
1980s Dr Who Easter Egg. People change sides so often in this story it makes your head
spin like an infected Kroton – it’s so hard to work out what’s going on at any
one time even on re-watches. There
are no little scenes that move you, no sudden revelations (even the one that
Stien is part-Dalek is laboured so early you’ve spotted it long before The
Dalek does). There are plotholes galore: How come Davros, who didin’t even believe
in life on other planets a couple of years ago, now know all about timelords
(did he have an audio book of something like ‘The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The
Galaxy’ encyclopaedia to keep him
company in his freezer?) Equally The Doctor now suddenly knows all about the end
of the Movellan war which was still in stalemate last time he saw it. Does he
get the intergalactic Times or something? Why do the Daleks need a time
corridor when they used to travel in Dardises? Why are they so interested in
what to them is such a backwater planet? (At least in ‘Invasion Of Earth’
our planet had resources they were after but there’s no reason given here, they
just invade because we’re next on their ‘hit list’. Here did Davros get his
handy serum from if he’s been in the freezer for nine centuries since we last
saw him? How come The Daleks have doubles of this particular group of
travellers all ready to go when The Doctor’s a time traveller, they could meet
any Tardis team (and the Daleks have never met any of them before, well not
looking like this in The Doctor’s case anyway). You think they’d at least have
a spare Nyssa around, given that she’s only just left a few stories before. Saward
also keeps changing his mind on who is ‘good’ and who is ‘bad’, so that the
double agents even keep up the pretence when they’re all alone and muttering to
themselves. This is a
weird prison ship, almost psychedelic in colour. You wonder if solitary is neon
orange or something.The virus sub-plot
is derivative and the doubles one is worse (though makes more sense if you see
it as originally planned, as part of season twenty: award’s never said but
surely the duplicate theme would have at least touched on Kamelion, the Tardis’
resident android). There are no bits of humour to lighten the load the way
other grittier stories have, no sense of dark and shade. For someone like me,
who couldn’t care less about explosion and is here for the characters and the
message, there’s just no point in watching. It ends up as empty as the
warehouse it was filled in.
‘Resurrection’ is exciting enough when you’re watching it – and it’s better than a lot of badly written and boring stories yet lower in my rankings – but the real excitement in Dr Who comes from the ideas and the people, not the things going boom. The real ‘killer’ for me though is the violence: some in Dr Who is necessary but the camera lingers just a little too long and a little too lovingly. Weirdly the violence only picked up one very minor complaint (Mary Whitehouse must have been watching ITV these two nights) but Dr Who did get into trouble for people smoking in case children copied them: because y’know, growing up to be a Dalek mercenary in a dusty warehouse is every kid’s dream when they grow up. Predictably, Terry Nation hated it and tried to get it stopped, but he’s read the draft script so late in the day that the show was already in production by the time he tried and, needing the money, he reluctantly let it go. Then again Saward isn’t any more fond of it, regretting writing it and calling it his weakest story in various interviews, however much most fans adore it. The thing is though, this isn’t one of those stories they should never have tried though: there’s nothing an emphasis on the need for peace, a few extra laughs, a greater understanding of Dalek history and better casting couldn’t have fixed. More than anything else Saward needed another writer to help him (though I’m surprised Ian Levine didn’t at least make him get the Dalek character right). After all, the direction and pacing are all there, it’s the details that let this story down so badly and makes this easily my least favourite Dalek story from the ‘classic’ era. Alas, as broadcast, it’s a story that’s as flimsy and insubstantial as any in this book, for all the big publicity push that this story was somehow ‘important’. Although at least it’s a well made bit flimsy and insubstantial story.
POSITIVES + Throughout
her time on the Tardis Tegan's been the fall-girl, the only Human in a crew of
four with a quick temper that's mocked and misunderstood and who quickly
becomes a pale shadow of the feisty, bolshie character she started with. By the
end she’s so far out of her comfort zone you wonder why she stays travelling in
the Tardis at all. Here in her last story (perhaps because it was originally written
for the younger Tegan of a year earlier) she's back to being our human
representative and conscience again, the way she always should have been, the
only person who isn't numb to all the needless death and destruction. The moment
she calls the Doctor out on his actions and leaves comes suddenly but is still
the perfect end for her character as Tegan uses her short temper and outrage in
all the right ways, standing up even to those she loves. Her sad tearful ‘brave
heart tegan’, as she offers comfort to herself, is poignant indeed (and,
improvised, much better than the panned exit where she sneers at a dead Dalek
casing in disgust) It was Janet Fielding’s penultimate scene (her last is
meeting up with Turlough) and she was emotional, with lots of tears amongst the
cast who’d worked together for so long. Legend has it she worked herself up
before filming by kicking the spare warehouse boxes, scaring the production
crew sent to keep an eye on her!
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Not really,
but some of the characters turn up again so go see ‘Attack Of
the Cyberman’ for the hell
of it.
Previous ‘Frontios’ next ‘Planet
Of Fire’
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