Destiny Of The Daleks
(Season 17, Dr 4 with Romana II, 1-22/9/1979, producer: Graham Williams, script editor: Douglas Adams, writer: Terry Nation, director: Ken Grieve)
'If you're supposed to be the superior race in the galaxy, why don't you try climbing after us? Oops...memo to self, Doctor only use this quote on The Daleks and not the Cybermen or any race with legs. Aaaaagh!'
Perhaps the two most famous writers to ever script a 20th century Dr Who story (at least to the general public) combining forces on a story about the show’s most famous creation. This is going to be great right? But alas it’s a recipe for near-disaster instead. This is, you see, a Terry Nation script - his ninth and his very last for the series that made his name - and, as all Who fans know, this means the episode could go either way, usually depending on the poor script editor whose job it was to take the great starting points the Dalek creator made and elongate them into full stories. In this era it was Douglas Adams and, well, let’s just say that while the two men were as close to genius as Dr Who writers came in their own ways those ways are poles apart. Douglas, by his own admission, thought the Daleks were boring and stupid. Terry, despite starting life as a comedy writer, wasn’t exactly known for his humour. So the pair end up seeing eye to eye about as well as Erato and a p’ting: there’s a universe of difference in their approaches and what they thought this series was for: escapist action or high-falluting thinking and whether you were supposed have escapist fun or learn something about the human condition. So the most serious and humourless of all Dr Who villains end up returning in an era when the show was at its most comedic, when producer Graham Williams was under orders to tone down the violence that had got his predecessor into trouble and when Douglas Adams, high on the success of the first two Hitch-hikers radio dramas and at the beak of his joke-telling, was in charge of editing the script. And when Douglas got going nobody was safe from his humour, up to the Daleks. Honestly, it’s a wonder they weren’t dressed as clowns. Poor Terry: there he is, defensively protecting his biggest creation from being made a laughing stock in outside media (which is why Daleks never appeared in other franchises or adverts until after his death) and there the Daleks’ own series is mocking them and making fun of how they can’t climb stairs. It’s no wonder he took his toys away after this and never gave them back (although he did cautiously license the more bloodthirsty script editor Eric Sward in bringing them back in the 1980s).
The result is a script that’s full of the usual Nation derring-do and action, with the very natural ending point for a writer who started making up stories about Nazis from his war shelter: an underground bunker. Terry still has new things to say about his greatest of creations, imbibing them with the usual Nazi ruthlessness but also going out of his way to make Davros a ‘Napoleon’ figure (who even quotes from his speeches, as the Doctor points out), too consumed by his own ego and abilities to see the twist that his own creations will turn on him (yet again) and effectively ;’failing’ as a Dalek by selling them out to save his own skin (or what’s left of it anyway). And then places them both in a cold war stalemate by having them fight the Movellans, a race of robots (but are America or Russia the robots or the bubbling lumps of hate? We never find out!) Griping stuff! Only script editor Douglas Adams doesn’t see it that way. To him the idea of two colossal super powers fighting each other – one of whom has been defeated by the Doctor eleven times already and a creator whose still somehow proud of his creation - is just daft. Far from being the most powerful being in the universe, Douglas sees Davros as a frail old man desperate to hang on for life. What I think Douglas was trying to do with this story is show how humour makes us better than Daleks, because we can stop to laugh at ourselves and not take each other so seriously, and how doing something odd and illogical is often the best thing to do in a situation that seems hopeless. But I’m not sure Terry agrees. To him people are Daleks underneath. Given half a chance at power everyone would be out for themselves and not think twice about who they step on to survive. And that’s no laughing matter. Terry and Douglas were more similar than they first appeared: sensitive only children who turned to writing as a way of coming to terms with a crazy world they never did fully understand. But the difference is that terry became a writer in the Anderson shelters of WW2, seriously expecting to be blown up at any second. He’s lived a life of war and felt helpless while it was going on. Born in 1952 Douglas has never had to face the real dangers of war firsthand – his take on war is an intellectual’s take, as befits a student at Cambridge University who mixed in circles that were likely to have been the generals safe in the bunkers rather than the men at the front fighting anyway. These two liked each other by all accounts, but in an opposites kind of a way – they never truly understood each other. As a result there’s a gulf between those two extreme points of view that’s never quite resolved in this story. Or indeed in the script in general: in between the set pieces that are clearly Nation’s work ‘Destiny’ royally takes the mickey out of what we’ve just seen with the usual Adams brand of cerebral humour.
Nobody in this story, from the director to the actors, seems to know quite how they should play it from scene to scene, for drama or laughs, because the two writers can’t decide either. Generally speaking nor can the audience: ‘Destiny Of The Daleks’ sits there unloved in the Dr Who catalogue, a stalemate war between two superpowers that’s both a tragedy and a comedy, in a story that’s seen as either a joke that’s not funny or an action piece that’s interrupted by too many laughs. The thing is, it could have worked had both men been in a better frame of mind: this is the closest we ever came to a Douglas Adams take on The Daleks (given that he never wrote a story himself) and across the script he’s spent more time thinking about Terry’s own creation than he had. What did it mean for the most powerful beings in the universe to not be number one? How did they sleep at night knowing they weren’t master of the universe but locked in a stalemate war with their equals? Had the script leant a little more into the crisis of confidence of the Daleks at having met their match with the robot Movellans (when the Daleks pride themselves on being as relentless as robots, but are too emotional all round) then this script could have been fascinating. Equally had Terry Nation realised the layers that Douglas could have given his darker stock-in-trade motifs about fear, paranoia and survival and how Douglas’ way with language might have added to his action sequences and made the Daleks even more of a threat for looking into their darkest phobias then this might have been the Nations script to end all scripts. Unfortunately, though both men are fed up of Doctor Who by 1979 and both seem to have come to this story with a sense of ‘yeah. That’ll do’ before moving on to projects that interested them a lot more. Anyone who says comedy and tragedy are two signs of the same coin have never seen this story where the gulf between the two are so big you could fly a Tardis through it, a cold war stalemate between the two writers that no amount of compromise was ever going to solve. ‘Destiny’ is more than a bit half-hearted then and too often dismissed; however timelords have two hearts and the other heart is still rather good.
Five years on from ‘Genesis Of The Daleks’ and a full sixteen from the Daleks debut and Nation is still finding new things to say with his creations. During the years Terry was away he was more than a little angry to find scriptwriters turning the Daleks into robots as opposed to one-minded xenophobes, so he gets his own back here by setting them up against some ‘real’ robots who are so 1979 disco it hurts and showing up the differences (they recorded ‘Top Of The Pops’ next door to DW for years and I’ve always wondered if the costume designers saw Boney M in the canteen one day and went ‘I’ll have a bit of that!’) The Daleks, written by Nation as substitute Nazis, try hard to be emotionless but they can’t be when they’re so single-mindedly driven by hate – until now their need to survive at all costs has meant they are more ruthless than anyone they know, but who is more ruthless than a robot? Equally the Daleks pride themselves on being amongst the most intelligent beings in the universe, but what can be more intelligent than a robot, who can predict every move they make. And so we end up with two super-powers in stalemate, in a war that can never be broken, because both sides can so easily anticipate what the other will do.
For, like a few other Terry Nation stories (especially ‘Dalek’s Masterplan’) this story isn’t so much about the last war as the one that might be to come. We’re at the end of Jimmy Carter’s term as president when – depending how you looked at it – relations between Russia and America had either thawed or ended up in a sort of unbreakable cul-de-sac. There was already talk about how Carter’s replacement was going to have to be tough, to defeat the Russians at their own game, etc etc and actor Ronald Reagan defied all logic to become American president mostly on the back of promising to give the communists hell. There was a lot of talk in the news of the ‘star wars’ programme of missiles aimed at Russia to make them back down if they refused to tow the line. Given the moral of ‘The Daleks’, that some things are worth fighting for even for pacifists, it’s easy to see how Terry would have been on the Reagan-ites side. But this is a situation without easy answers and nowhere to compromise down the middle. Russia felt much the same about America: for all the talk about gentler relations they were still mucking around with all the countries around Russia, inflaming their already overgrown paranoia that one day there would be an out and out invasion. The cold war seemed to be about to get frosty again even though it was heading into a fourth decade. For many people it was too much: the general mood, on both sides I think away from the ‘official line’ of both halves of the hemisphere, was ‘get on with it already if you’re going to kill each other, just do it now instead of talking about it!’ That sense of despair is what comes over most in ‘Destiny Of The Daleks’, the sense of hopelessness that there will ever be an end to this war when both sides are so equal and yet so opposite, with the revelation that this war has lasted for centuries without a single shot being fired (because both sides know it would be a waste of expensive weaponry). It’s clearly something on Terry’s mind too: one of the reasons he doesn’t write for Who again is that he’s busy creating another series for the BBC, ‘Blake’s 7’, about a group of rebels locked in constant war with the cruel tyrannical federation and like that series there are no easy answers here: until the big brave ending, at Christmas 1982 when (mega spoilers, seriously if you want to watch this series look away now) our ‘heroes’ all die and the bad guys win, this is a stalemate too, neither side prepared to compromise (Blake’s 7’ is pretty much unique, by the way, in presenting a group of terrorists as the goodies, only they would call themselves ‘freedom fighters’ and a lot of the best episodes of that series comes from ‘rescuing’ people who don’t want to be rescued and just want to get on with their lives, oblivious to whose in charge, more interested in survival than politics in a very Terry Nation way).
That ought to have been a strong starting point, but the trouble is no one is taking that plot seriously. I don’t know what Terry’s original draft looked like (other than ‘short’ according to those who saw it) but I’m willing to bet that Douglas added a few touches of his own that weren’t in the original. For a start the Doctor thinks a war between robots fighting half-robots (because that’s how Douglas, at least, seems to have viewed the Daleks), when neither side can outwit the other, is silly. His best means of fighting both of them is to take a leaf out of the World War Two manual and do something utterly illogical that the other side can’t be expecting – because nobody wins at chess better than someone whose treating it as a game of tiddlywinks (a theme I’m willing to bet is Douglas’ invention, given that its half the plot of next story ‘Creature From The Pit’ as well. Then again, it was the second half of the plot of ‘The Armageddon Factor’ too, making this the middle of three stories in a row with basically the same plot). It might be significant, too, that the chief Dalek in this story is ‘black’ and the Movellans are dressed all in ‘white’ – not, so some reviewers have wondered, to signify good and evil I don’t think (robots don’t have concepts of good and evil), more to emphasise the fact that this is a planet-wide chess match with Daleks and Movellans as pieces. That’s, ironically enough, what Russia did against Germany in their breakthrough in WW2. Only to do that it means the Doctor and Romana have to find the whole idea utterly absurd. Which it is: repeating the same things over and over and expecting a different outcome is the medical definition of madness – there’s no way this war can end fought like this. The only serious thing to do is to be silly. But neither side can possibly do that, because they’re robots and robots aren’t silly. Which is just silly. So the Doctor makes flippant remarks to catch both sides off guard, threatens to blow himself up along with Davros in a kamikaze moment and eventually defeats the Daleks not in battle but by throwing his hat over the Dalek’s eyestalk so they can’t see. Terry is said to have hated what Douglas did to his script, refusing to write for the series again (although he did confess to finding the gag about not being able to climb stairs funny); I wish, though, that an intermediary (like Graham Williams, who was usually so very good at human disagreements like this) had sat both writers down like a headmaster and said: ‘look, you’re both coming from the same place here really, you both think an eternal stalemate is ridiculous, so Douglas, just cut some of the jokes down and Terry lighten up for goodness sake’.
As with Terry’s usual all-Gold selection box scripts there’s jeopardy and lots and lots of action, as to Nation the easiest way to sympathise with characters in a short space of time is to put them in danger and see how they cope. What there isn’t is any lightness of touch and great character moments the way David Whittaker, David Spooner, Terrance Dicks and Robert Holmes brought to Nation’s stories (because instantly rounded recognisable characters experiencing full-on emotions isn’t a hallmark of Douglas’ writing either). There also isn’t, though, is any tension, as the Douglas Adams jokes simply won’t let us have any – it’s hard to take a threat seriously at home if even the Doctor won’t. In the right hands comedy, especially Douglas’ brand, can lighten even the darkest scripts. Nothing makes you side with a character more than when they make you laugh and it’s an instant way for a short script to get people to empathise with characters in a short space of time. Nobody knew this better than Douglas either: comedy is how he humanises the characters in ‘Hitch-Hikers’ and ‘Dirk Gently’ alike. Unfortunately the two writers are so extreme there’s almost no middle ground and the closest Douglas can get to doing his usual thing is by making the comedy poke fun at what the characters are going through as a shared bonding experience, which isn’t the same thing at all. That makes this story almost unique in Dr Who terms, a spoof story (almost because ‘The Greatest Show In The Galaxy’ does it too but in a much darker way, while charity special ‘The Curse Of Fatal Death’ is deliberately silly and doesn’t pretend to be anything else).
Usually I love humour in Dr Who and especially Douglas, but the jokes fall flatter than usual and really aren’t all that funny, because they seem to be laughing at the show rather than with it. This is the story where Romana suddenly decides to regenerate and tries on a series of increasingly silly costumes/bodies without any explanation in the script as to how she can do this before choosing to copy Princess Astra’s from preceding story ‘The Armageddon Factor’ (a by-product of the speed with which Mary Tamm left the show and a production team who were convinced they’d be able to change her mind before filming, finding out too late that they couldn’t). Which goes against everything we know about timelords and looks daft: there are so many better ways they could have covered this off in the script, such as an accident off-screen, or a bit of last minute revenge from the Black Guardian, or some sort of mystical equilibrium in the universe that meant there had to be someone to fill that person’s role in the universe (because, if you haven’t got to that review yet, Princess Astra is really the sixth key to time and effectively ‘dies’ when the Doctor needs it to save the universe –not that, technically, she ever really was alive but she thought she was, which in Dr Who amounts to much the same thing morally). Or better yet simply bring Mary back for a single episode, which she said many times she was more than willing to do (what a season opening episode that would have been if they’d kept it quiet!) Instead everyone goes with the easiest solution, making it the punchline to a joke. This is also the story where K9, a robot not a real dog remember, develops laryngitis out of nowhere and it’s never explained (in real life because the prop won’t cope with the quarry terrain outside): again he could have caught space plague or been an attack from the Black Guardian, or suffering after effects of being miniaturised in the previous story, but nope: it’s the punchline to a joke. It’s also, notoriously, the story where the Doctor points out that the Daleks can’t climb stairs so aren’t all that threatening (and they couldn’t, back then), even though honestly it’s long been assumed by fans that they could (out of shot, of course): otherwise there’s no way they’d have climbed the stairs of the Marie Celeste in ‘The Chase’ to name just one. But no, that means research, so instead it’s the punchline to a joke. Oolon Calluphid, the mystic atheist philosopher from Douglas’ Hitchhikers books, gets a random mention too, as a punchline to a joke you even need to know another series to get! A lot of fans find Douglas’ humour across this season irritating, but at least in other stories like ‘Creature From The Pit’ and especially ‘City Of Death’ the gags feel earned, a way to throw the baddies off balance long enough for the Doctor to get the better of the wrong ‘uns’. Whereas in this story the Doctor only needs to do one illogical thing; spending the rest of his time laughing at two sides without a sense of humour just makes him look as if he’s having a jolly holiday.
It might have helped if the mood in the room/quarry was lighter, but it isn’t. Despite being transmitted as the first story of the season this was the third to be made and finding themselves back in a freezing cold gravel pit (Winspit Quarry in Devon) a week after being in Paris was a sobering experience for the regulars. Tom Baker and Lalla Ward, so loved up during the filming of ‘City Of Death’ seem to have had a bit of a falling out. Tom Baker is more than a little bored too and as close to going through the motions as he ever does, in a story that seems very under-rehearsed. Most notorious is the moment he sees the Daleks and means to shout ‘back off!’ but gets the words muddle in his head so they come out as ‘spack off!’, a line that has gone down in fan folklore as being this impossibly rude and shocking bit of swearing known only to timelords! Lalla Ward tries hard to make Romana a second Doctor, right down to including a white scarf of her own in her costume, and where Douglas is writing he supports that: this second Romana is much less haughty and more personable all round, with a mischievous smile and an awareness of the absurdity of life that makes her Douglas’ go-to spokesperson to say what the script editor’s thinking more so than the Doctor in this era. Only Terry Nation is still writing for her as the stereotypical female companion whose job is to get rescued by the Doctor and Douglas can’t avoid that without altering the scripts entirely. So what we get is, again, a compromise between two ideals that seem to contradict each other (it feels like an early trial for Clara’s story arc where she thinks she can be like the Doctor but can’t because she’s an inexperienced human – which would have worked with the first Romana maybe but not this one). Alas Michael Wisher was busy touring in Australia and New Zealand – although its odd why the production order, already changed, wasn’t flipped again to enable him to appear - so in his second appearance Davros is played by David Gooderson. It’s always a thankless role stepping into the shoes (well, wheelchair) of another actor: do it right and nobody notices the change, do it wrong and it’s blindingly obvious. He tries hard in impossible circumstances but he’s nothing like Michael Wisher and lacks the grating voice and sudden switches of mood that comes from years of playing Dalek voices or the sense of ruthlessness. He’s also hampered by the fact that his mask is the one made for Michael Wisher recycled so it doesn’t fit his face properly and, besides, was now five years old and in poor condition (it really does seem to be random what props the production team held on to and what they didn’t!) As for the Movellans actors they make even robotic characters seem robotic, playing their roles in a very bland lifeless way. The only actor having a great time in this story is Tim Barlow’s stranded Earth pilot Tyssan and he has an uphill struggle breathing life into a character whose biggest single trait is that he’s ‘human’ (and not a Dalek or a robot) caught up in the middle of a war he just doesn’t understand.
You only need to look at previous Nation/Davros story ‘Genesis Of The Daleks’ (edited by Robert Holmes) to see where it’s going wrong. Even though I’m not one of those fans who think it’s the greatest ever Dr Who story by any means it does at least have a sense of tension and drama that this story lacks. Of course this is a very different era of the show by now: Mary Whitehouse has seen off Phillip Hinchcliffe and there’s no way Graham Williams or Douglas Adams are ever going to allow a bloodbath on their watch so of all the Dalek stories of the 20th century this one feels the most sanitised and diluted (and the director Ken Grieve, at least, very much had Whitehouse on his mind: the scripts sent o the cast and crew included a doodle of a Dalek family having nightmares about Mary Whitehouse exterminating them!) Where everything in Genesis feels utterly, scarily real, this story seems false. Where ‘Genesis’ is brutally tough this story is flimsy. Where ‘Genesis’ is old testament, the timelords meddling from afar because it’s fated and using the Doctor as a vengeful God destroying all Dalek life, ‘Destiny’ is new testament, with less sense of moral outrage. The comparison might not have struck many fans given the long gap, were it not for the fact that BBC records had just issued their famous LP of a 40 minute reduction of the soundtrack from ‘Genesis’ in the break between seasons, s for the first time fans could give a direct comparison. It’s hard to imagine anyone issuing ‘destiny’ as a record or replaying it over and over: there just aren’t as many memorable moments in it.
I’ve yet to see a Dr Who story that was bad all the way through though (even if one or two have come close!) and what impresses most about this production is how well put together it is. There are so many inventive camera angles that find new ways to make yet another quarry look good and of all the stories outside ‘Tomb Of The Cybermen’ it’s used best of all, with Movellans and Daleks suddenly appearing over mounds of rubble (even if the poor Movellan extras look a little too…Human in the way they try to keep their balance climbing over them). Director Ken grieve goes to the extra expense of having three cameras filming most every scene, thus giving him a better choice of shots in the cutting room: this speeded up filming no end but slowed down editing; if nothing else it does mean we get the full effect and the most of every shot. Best of all is the groundbreaking use of a new piece of technology, the steadi-cam, for which Dr Who was yet again picked by the BBC to be an early ‘guinea pig’. Compared to other Dr Who stories of the year, heck compared to anything else on TV in 1979, it looks good, with having so much of this story shot outside removing the need for frail sets and having monsters basically be humanoids with funny hairdos painted a funny colour removing the need for rubber looking monsters. Although not every shot works even here: Romana, for instance, seems to be trapped in the deadly plastic tube of death (those Movellans: no sense of aesthetics!) while the Kaled mutant is all too obviously a tube of children’s putty (Tom Baker had a very surreal hour where he was asked to choose the best out of ten variations and went with ‘worm’!) Another shot was nearly a disaster too: a mistake meant the Dalek that crashes through a wall went too early before the intended three cameras were set up – luckily a cameraman managed to see what was happening and grabbed footage just as the Dalek was beginning to fall, making the violent jump-cut seem like the most thrilling moment in the story (there’s no way on this budget they would have been able to have rebuilt the wall for another go!)
To be fair, too, in between the jokes that don’t work are some cracking bits of dialogue that get overlooked too. The line that ‘the living are just the dead on holiday’ is particularly memorable, but even though it sounds like a Douglas Adams-ism its actually an ad lib by Tom Baker, a saying by one of his favourite writers Maurice Maeterlinck. Another great line that is Douglases and proves that he captured the flippant 4th Doctor better than probably any other writer: ‘Davros! You don’t look a day older than the last time I saw you – and then I’d hoped you were dead!’ Although the best gag of all is a throwaway one that Arcturus came first in the Intergalactic Olympic games (and if you haven’t read either of the ‘Peladon’ reviews yet then they’re heads in jars and not exactly the most athletic or mobile of creatures!) With so many robots and one-note Daleks to play off Douglas gives his two leads the gift of the gab like never before as they run rings round the two villains and having the Daleks and robot Movellans being beaten with intelligence, rather than weapons, is the way to go for this series. A lot of Terry Nation stories fizzle out n the second half, as the writer uses up all his ideas, but this one gets better episode by episode as Douglas learns how to adapt nation’s style. I just wish he’d then gone back to the beginning and done another draft, that’s all.
There’s nothing a re-write and a go-between couldn’t have cured in other words. Terry Nation might not be a natural at character or dialogue but there’s an urgency to his action sequences that no other writer could match. Had Douglas been taking this story a little more seriously there’s much he could have enjoyed too, with a sense of hopelessness at human weaknesses always getting in their own way (even if transposed to Daleks and Movellans) that’s actually very much the sort of illogical logic that Douglas specialised in. Had there been yet another script editor sitting above the pair of them taking the excessive jokes out this could have yet been a cracking little story. After all, for the longest time you really don’t know how the Doctor is going to solve this one and defeat two unstoppable forces at the same time and of all the many Dr Who takes on the cold war this is one of the best in theory, pointing out the ridiculousness of the war compared to the Daleks’ old fashioned WW2 battles. Instead ‘Destiny’ comes across as a story that’s been patched up rather than written from inspiration, from the Douglas Adams bits that cover up what he sees as Terry Nation holes to the five prop Daleks that have been stuck back together again from odds and ends because the BBC are too skint to afford new ones. Everyone is making do with the best they have. Rather than one of those stories that’s hopeless in every way, though, it’s just the tone that’s wrong here, but alas it’s that tone that seeps into everything and corrupts it from the top down as surely as Skaro radiation. The ratings for this story set a new record at the time, partly because of an ITV strike but also partly because the BBC really pushed the Daleks’, return, with more trails than normal (although another strike during ‘City Of Death’ two stories later meant it never held that record for very long). Normally that would be a great thing but I can’t help feeling as if that ended up being to this series’ detriment: to curious newbies or people who hadn’t watched this series for a while it seemed as if Dr Who hadn’t changed at all, being yet more Daleks in another quarry in a story that seemed childish and laughing at itself, without much sign of all the mass inventions and innovations there’d been over the past fifteen years while, as a whole, the ratings never recover, with viewers dropping off alarmingly afterwards, while the production team realise that half-hearted getting away with it stories seemed to go down just as well as the really creative ones. This story is the start of a downward slide that’s seemingly destined to end in the 18 month hiatus and cancellation, the only logical result unless something changes. And that something won’t change until the people making this show change with it.
POSITIVES + Watch these stories in order and this is the one that makes you sit up and go 'ooh, this looks modern'. The main reason for this is that first ever use of the steadicam on TV, certainly in Dr Who and quite possibly on the BBC in general. This way actors could really ‘act’ with cameramen staring them in the eye close-up rather than filming them on giant remote cameras from several yards away and made the camera easier to manipulate too, leading to all sorts of unusual angles which breathe new life into yet another quarry location shoot. It makes a bigger difference than you might think, with these story seeming much more vivid and believable – with the sound down so you can’t hear the script, anyway.
NEGATIVES - Though he only ever played the part once and we’ve had four other actors in the role now there will only ever be one Davros, his originator, Michael Wisher. Everyone else is just a poor copy. David Gooderson tries so hard to ooze menace in the same way in this story but Wisher had played Dalek voices for so long he understood them inside out and got their nuances and quirks down pat, making Davros seem like both a real person and a part-dalek and as such a colossal threat. Goodersen is good but his Davros is just another shouty villain.
BEST QUOTE: ‘Well, I can see your long rest hasn't done anything to cure your megalomania. Have a jelly baby’.
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Unusually the new series of Dr Who was advertised not with a trailer but a specially shot scene that leads directly into this story. Where the timelords warn a sleeping Doctor that the Daleks are back…then immediately wipe his memory again! The Doctor then hears disembodied chuckling, gets spooked then hangs a ‘do not disturb till September 1st’ (the date of the first episode) sign on his Tardis. A most odd scene, performed in front of some very plastic looking trees in a corner of the studio they’ve turned pink, you might find yourself stumbling across this trailer on the ‘Destiny Of the Daleks’ DVD and the season 17 blu-Ray. Forewarned is forearmed after all…
Additionally the season 17 blu-ray includes ‘Davros Rises’, a special sequel that features David Gooderson doing a voiceover waiting to be re-discovered by his creations in ‘Destiny’ sensing ‘the return of my children to their ancestral home’ while we see shots of Skaro looking very scarred before a CGI Davros slowly comes into view. Easily the weakest of the blu-ray specials so far, it’s still highly impressive ho quickly Gooderson gets back into character after decades away.
The short story ‘The Lying Witch In The Wardrobe’, part of the ‘Shot Trips; Companions’ anthology (2003) gives a truly bonkers version of why Romana ‘borrows’ the form of Princess Astra to regenerate into. It turns out that the Romana we see in this story isn’t the real Romana at all but the Tardis jealous of all the companions that takes over Romana’s body at the point of regeneration and took over the body it last remembered, sheepishly giving her control back again at the end when it realises ‘he doesn’t look at you much either!’ It’s every bit as odd as it sounds.
Thanks to their
blink-and-you-miss it appearance in ‘The Pilot’ Big Finish commissioned two
Movellan stories in 2017. ‘The Movellan Grave’ (2017), part of Big Finish’s ‘Fourth
Doctor Adventures’ series, is the better of the two and sees Andrew ‘Full
Circle’ Smith stepping back into the shoes of the 4th Doctor and Romana
II and giving everyone’s favourite Boney M robots their own story in the spotlight.
It turns out that The Movellans once made it all the way to Earth, with a
Movellan power pack dug up alongside Iron Age artefacts on a 1980s dig. It
turns out that there’s a crashed Movellan spaceship buried under England,
complete with an unexploded bomb from their war with the Daleks. Once again,
though, they’re overshadowed by a far more interesting invention: The Chenek,
the Movellan equivalent of an Alexa. Not the best thing in the series by any
means but a decent listen.
‘Alien Heart’ (2017), meanwhile, features more
of the Dalek-Movellan war and has the 5th Doctor and Nyssa arrive in
the middle of it in Stephen Cole’s rather flat adventure (#224 in the main
range). Once again the plot makes an about turn partway through and is less
about The Movellans and more about green coloured arachnoids! The Movellans
need a better agent…
Previous ‘The Armageddon Factor’ next ‘City Of Death’
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