Into The Dalek: Ranking -241

 Into The Dalek

(Series 8, Dr 12 with Clara, 30/8/2014, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writers: Phil Ford and Steven Moffat, director: Ben Wheatley) 

Rank: 241

'Ach-ooo! I think this Dalek might have caught a cold. Maybe I should send for a Doctor. Wait did I say Doctor?!? Exterminate!!!'

Exfoliate! Yes, this is the episode in which we get to see the Doctor and Clara within the inner workings of a Dalek and the Doctor makes it come clean - sort of. As you can probably tell from that description ‘Into The Dalek’ is not like most other Dalek episodes, which is both its great strength and its great weakness. Concentrating on one Dalek and contrasting it against the Doctor is a clever idea, repeating the formula of ‘Dalek’ that worked so successfully reintroducing the pepperpots to a new generation and here, as the 12^th Doctor’s second story, it’s a good opportunity to see him up against his old enemy, now that he’s become battle-weary and grumpy with a cynical personality that’s impatient with the people around him and in danger of becoming like a Dalek himself (if looks and insults could kill then this Doctor would have been the best exterminator around in debut ‘Deep Breath’!) This is the 23^rd full Dr Who story on television to have the Daleks in it, not counting cameos or flashbacks of end of story cliff-hangers (looking at you ‘Frontier In Space’!) and they do rather fall into a pattern: namely big noisy exterminations, whatever planet we’re on. It’s nice to have a story that does something a little more subtle with the Daleks, exploring their psyche and what makes them tick rather than just having them as mass killing machine without resorting to the usual cliches. So many stories are about the Daleks invading the Doctor’s ‘personal space’ too that it’s nice to see him ‘invade’ theirs for a change! On the downside, there’s not much plot to replace the usual runaround with and this is a very static sort of an episode, sure to disappoint everyone who tunes in specially for the Dalek-on-Dalek action. In short, it all looks a bit cheap: one single casing (until the sudden arrival of other Daleks right near the end), a boring space station setting and a tiny incidental cast: Dalek stories tend to be the big epics of the season kept for special occasions as a finale – having a story this small, in all meanings of the word, feels a bit weird.

You can tell, I think, that this story started life as a computer game, designed to lure fans to the BBC’s Dr Who website. The last great invention of the Russell T Davies years, designed to soften the blow between telly stories, Steven Moffat was enough of a fan to keep the range on and pushed it further than his friend ever did. By 2011 there had been six increasingly ambitious ‘Adventure Games’ online, two of which (‘City Of The Daleks’ and ‘The Gunpowder Plot’) have scripts the equal of anything being made as an actual TV episode, ambitious and funny and tense. It looked as if the series would run and run, but by 2012 the superhuman workload was beginning to wear out even a writer as enthusiastic and prolific as Steven Moffat and the games took a back seat to the sheer effort of simply getting a season out on TV. ‘Into The Dalek’ was Moffat’s pitch for what became ‘City’ (as the game developers naturally wanted a Dalek story of their own), the player controlling a miniaturised Doctor as they were shrunk to the size of a pea and made to swim across the hazardous insides of a Dalek. Moffat got carried away with his submission, added lots of details and then got thinking: only a few players ever got to see these games and wasn’t this a strong enough idea to save for the series proper? (It might be, too, that the game developers were hoping for exactly the sort of Dalek-on-Dalek fights Moffat was trying to avoid repeating on screen). Alas the games have become something of a ‘lost media’ these days: the games moved to ‘Steam’, the online player library, in 2014 and were taken down from the website then dropped quietly in 2017 when the contract that game developers Legacy Games had with the BBC lapsed, both sides agreeing not to pursue anymore. I’m astonished that they were never released on disc, especially as the five mini-games from 2010 and one maxi game from 2011 between them amount to a really full disc (plus there’s in-built rewards for extra game-playing, what with the different ‘Doctor’ and ‘companion’ cards to collect – I only ever found about half, despite looking really really hard).

The thing is though, what’s good for one media isn’t necessarily good for another. ‘Into The Dalek’ would have been great as a computer game, as a sort of scifi version of ‘Frogger’ with Dalek antibodies shooting at you and the need to get to the other side before a Dalek wakes up. No doubt, knowing Moffat and how his brain works, by the time the game had finished there would have been another hundred incidental characters to save, multiple complex levels all demanding different skills and a philosophical debate about the nature of reality thrown in there somewhere too in order to make it even more involving. On TV though it’s a bit of a letdown. There’s only once scene that people are waiting for – the Doctor inside a Dalek – and they pad it out with all sorts of filler inside it. While a lot of 21^st century stories borrow heavily from earlier ones this is also a nudge too far: the central idea is a direct steal from ‘The Invisible Enemy’, in which a shrunken Doctor and Leela fight an alien virus, albeit without the giant prawns and robot dog. Really, though this story is more about going ‘Into The Doctor’ and his psyche. The debate of who the Doctor is and whether he is a good man or would make a good Dalek is also lifted wholesale from Robert Shearman’s ‘Dalek’  a story then just nine years old. It’s a worthy debate about the Daleks being everything the Doctor fears of becoming and the Doctor as an accidental war hero being everything the Daleks want to be, one worth having twice, but there’s nothing new to go on and far less satisfying. In that story every move, every line, felt like a chess game that could end with the extermination of humanity. This story feels more like 'Battleships', with random shots fired in the dark from both sides that never coalesce into a fully functioning threat. Also, this early on in the 12^th Doctor’s run (his second ever story) that we can’t answer the Doctor’s questions about whether he’s a good man or a good Dalek: we don’t know him any better than he knows himself yet and if K9 was here he’d be saying there was insufficient data to be going on for that debate just yet.

Moffat, perhaps sensing that this might be a harder commission than he realised, handed his basic idea over to Phil Ford and asked him to have a go. Ford was used to working with different media after writing for the animation ‘Dreamland’ as well as ‘Waters Of Mars’ and various episodes of ‘The Sarah Jane Adventures’ and was an obvious choice, not least because his natural style is very different to Shearman’s he’s big on scares and epic ideas and painting in broad strokes, without the same philosophical bent. He’s also a very different writer to the incredibly (some would say ‘over’) imaginative Bob Baker and Dave Martin, who crammed ‘The Invisible Enemy’ full of so many ideas it fairly groaned at the seams (and one where they gave K9 all the best lines on his first appearance). Getting Ford to write this story should have been a chance to take the same ideas in a very different direction to both – but ‘Into The Dalek’ has nowhere else to go, no other stories to tell. Instead it’s just blatantly the two stories stuck together, the Dalek standing in for the giant prawn and the discussion of the good or bad in the Dalek transposed to a situation where it’s ‘broken’ and needs a Doctor to fix it, leading to a debate between the Doctor and Clara as to whether a Dalek can ever be a force for good or not (itself a debate taken wholesale from David Whittaker’s ‘The Evil Of The Daleks’ where the Doctor tinkered with three of them to be exactly that. The part about the new Doctor not being sure who he is, against a foe who know exactly who he is and just want to kill him, is a trick used in the first ever regeneration story, Whittaker’s other Dalek adventure ‘Power Of The Daleks’). The gloomy atmosphere, meanwhile, and the opening with the Doctor desperately trying to save strangers from Daleks when they’re more afraid of him is lifted direct from ‘Night Of The Doctor’, the 8^th Doctor story from the 50^th anniversary, stretched out from ten minutes to forty-five. Oh and the second adventure of a new Doctor features the cast inside a giant monster being covered in gunge, which is a bit weird given that no other Dr Who stories ever do this (see ‘The Beast Below’ where the ‘monster’ turns out to be ‘good’, too). There’s nothing here that ‘Into The Dalek’ does any better than that sextet of stories, no great insights of its own and the conclusion (that the Dalek had a head trauma from radiation that sent it ‘good’ the way it might send a Human ‘bad’) while the Doctor is ‘only Human’, capable of good and bad, comes as a surprise to precisely nobody.

Or rather, there’s almost nothing here. The Dalek antibodies are a really clever addition to the script and a clever way around the fact that for thirty minutes, you don’t actually have a Dalek on screen at all. After all, what is a Dalek except a great big antibody, programmed to exterminate anything it sees as being ‘impure’? The idea of a Dalek’s nervous system being so close to the surface driving them on relentlessly in not so much of a fight or flight but an ‘exterminate or be exterminated’ response is a really good idea and shows how different to ‘us’ they are (not least because my vagus nerve feels like it's exterminating me half the time so I sympathise). I love the idea that all life, all Human bodies are carrying the Dalek’s natural xenophobia against anything that isn’t a perfect replica inside them all the time and that in a Dalek rather than use it to keep them healthy, the way it would say a Human, it’s used to keep them purely evil. I’m not buying the radiation explanation for a second (why would radiation make a Dalek kind rather than dissolve their casing or make them sneeze…a Dalek with flu, now there’s my submission to the next series!) but the idea that the Daleks are Humans inside out, everything in their immune system designed to keep them angry and cruel to be healthy, something we tend to associate with being ‘off-colour’ and a bit ill in Humanity, is a clever one. Had the script made more play on this, had we had a sub-plot about whether humans are good or bad with our biology re-programmed the other way round, the story might yet have found new paths to explore. Instead it’s an off-hand detail while the Doctor mopes around wondering if he’s good or bad, doing the right thing while being grumpy.

The trouble with that is we don’t have any answers yet: this is an arc that’s going to take the full three seasons of Capaldi’s run as the 12^th Doctor to tell, by which time he’ll have earned his stripes, sacrificing himself to save other people without question or rancour (thus making him, at the end, a ‘better man’ than either the 10^th or 11^th Doctors who raged at the injustice of dying). We also just spent 75 minutes discussing the exact same thing in ‘Deep Breath’ and don’t need to do so again so soon. For now we don’t know the answers anymore than the Doctor and you want to scream at him to get on with things and do something so we can find out for him, instead of bickering with everyone around him and being sulky. Peter Capaldi doesn’t know this character yet and he’s written a bit differently to how any other writer created him so he doesn’t know quite how to pitch it: more than any other story he’s basically Victor Meldrew in space (the ‘other’ Doctor in ‘The Empty Child’ if you’ve forgotten), the sixth Doctor’s self-pity without the arrogance. The Doctor is quite unbearably, un-sufferably rude and unlikeable in this story, often for no reason and particularly to Clara, his only friend (for some reason he seems to think she’s old and ugly this episode -‘you’re not a young woman anymore…well you don’t look it!’-  which isn’t how the 11^th Doctor viewed her at all; he must have those memories of her actual age surely even if his judgement and values system for beauty has changed? A companion, rather than a mother-in-law, slapping the Doctor would be unthinkable in any other story but he deserves it in this one – the only surprise is that Clara didn’t slap him sooner).

To be fair Phil Ford wasn’t going to know either: like many a Dr Who author asked to write the early incarnation of a Doctor he hadn’t got a clue who was going to be cast for the first draft and even when he did for the second he had no past footage to go on, just an audition tape and some scribbled notes from Moffat. Ford’s solution, on being told this alien was going to be more distant and less friendly than the 11^th Doctor, was to write the part as if the Doctor was still Tom Baker, distant and alien, removed from proceedings and blithely commenting on it. That ought to be a good fit – the Doctor is the always the same person underneath after all – but somehow it isn’t: Tom Baker was an actor born for brooding and commenting on the action with an eye on the absurdness of it all, but Capaldi as an actor is a thinly veiled tantrum waiting to blow. His most famous roles, in ‘Local Hero’ and ‘The Thick Of it’, make good use of the fact that emotions pass so freely over his face and while he can do subtlety when the script calls for it (his best role by far is in the fourth series of ‘Torchwood’, ‘Judgement Day’, as the troubled minister in charge with sacrificing children to visiting aliens for ‘the greater good’) there’s no subtlety in this script (once Peter had been cast Moffat advised Ford to ‘write for an angry Billy Connolly’ in his next draft!) Capaldi is a variable actor: sometimes he’s great, sometimes he’s ghastly and this is not one of his better ideas. The insults don’t land, the comedy just misses and he hasn’t quite got the fast-paced scifi patter of a show like Dr Who down yet. At his best he is the Doctor and owns the part, just as all of the others are the Doctor at their peak, but here he feels like he’s in a fan produced series ‘cosplaying’ at the Doctor. Specifically the ‘Hartnell’ Doctor, without quite understanding the need to have the twinkle in the eye as well as the grumpiness. To be fair to him, as the second story in production and with a new writer’s patter style to wrap his head round, he’s new to the role and still feeling himself into it as well – and Capaldi was a fan, equal with David Tennant in how much he loved this series and always wanted to play this part (legend has it that he was so desperate to see the Dalek battle at the end being filmed he turned up on his afternoon off and kept getting under the feet of the camera crew!), so naturally there’s going to be something of a ‘fans producing fans’ feel about this story. He’ll learn and very quickly too but this script relies a lot on the Doctor being magnificent first time out and engrossing us with so much chemistry and charisma we overlook and forgive the insults, but he’s not quite there yet.

That said Clara’s been round a while and Ford struggles to write for her too; in fact most writers do that aren’t her creator Moffat, pushing her just too far into being smug or condescending. The main plot of this story has the Doctor being nasty about soldiers and refusing one entry to the Tardis at the end on the grounds that soldiers aren’t good people (which is a bit rich, honestly, after all those years as UNIT’s ‘scientific advisor’ but it’s not that out of keeping with the rest of the series). The subplot is the new man in Clara’s life, the maths teacher Danny Pink whose just arrived and has taken up teaching after quitting the army. There’s a clever scene whereby we cut direct from the horrors of the spaceship Wasp Delta filled with soldiers fighting Daleks to a close-up of Danny: we assume he’s another one of them, but it becomes clear he’s shouting instructions not to a bunch of soldiers but to a bunch of children in a military cadet academy (in Coal Hill School of all places – don’t tell Ian and Barbara!) Danny’s story arc this season is whether a soldier can ever truly be reformed and whether he, too, is a good man or not. One of the pupils in his class asks him about the thrill of war and whether he shot a man but Danny is more anguished than thrilled; we don’t find out yet but we know from later episodes that he killed an innocent boy, which is what made him quit the army in disgust and that (spoilers) his story arc has him still atoning for his ‘crime’, sending the boy back to live in our world rather than coming back to life himself the way Clara wants him to in ‘Dark Water/Death In Heaven’.  They don’t meet yet but the Doctor will be prejudicied against him on sight for being a soldier – but Danny is not a natural soldier. In fact Clara’s a far more natural soldier: future stories this season will have her as the adventurous one putting innocent people in danger while he’s rational and calm and out to save as many lives as possible. It’s a fascinating sort of ‘hate triangle’ with Clara becoming what both the Doctor and Danny don’t want her to be and blaming the other for it, but that’s not here yet. Instead what we get is some of the cheesiest stupidest silliest lines in all of Dr Who as Clara and Danny’s eyes meet and she flirts quite aggressively and this hardened soldier gets flustered and tongue-tied. While it’s clearly there to make Danny more than just a stereotypical soldier none of it feels ‘real’ and the scenes of her watching him bang his head on his desk (something he does often) while thinking of all the things he should have said to her, are excruciating, like something from a bad romcom. It would help if we had any inkling that he liked her back, but we don’t: on screen it’s just Clara being Clara and pursuing what she wants aggressively without thinking of how it impacts other people and all but demanding he date her on first meeting when she doesn’t even know what he is as a person yet (he really should have learned to look beyond first appearances by now; and just imagine if the ganders had been the other way around, we’d be talking Danny as a ‘predator’ but for some reason because it’s coming from Clara it’s okay). This series never once considers things from Danny’s point of view, just Clara’s, deciding she needs a life outside the Doctor and not wanting to give her a family life with parents and brothers and sisters again after Rose, Martha, Donna and Amy. So far so good but…Danny’s not her type. She loves bouncing abstract ideas round the room and challenging people just for the sake of  playing mind games. Danny is direct, used to either giving orders or obeying them. Danny’s also come to school for a quiet life and Clara wants a big noisy one: they’re a match made in hell for each other (despite their denouement taking place in a sort of Heaven at the end of the year). She should have learned by now, after her travels with the Doctor, not to start dating someone before she even knows what their character is yet based purely on looks and after being in the army Danny should be so over dating because a pretty face told him to – and yet here we are. Over and over again. For the whole of series eight.   

It would have helped if the pair had shared charisma but despite being friends who’d worked together for years on ‘Emmerdale’ you wouldn’t know that from Jenna Coleman and Samuel Anderson’s performance here. In fact Clara has more charisma with Rusty the Dalek than she does Danny (now if she’d dated a Dalek that would have made sense of the Doctor getting so uncharacteristically grumpy about it later on in the year!) Samuel is a good actor, he adds a lot to Danny that isn’t here in the script, making him softer and with a melancholic air, but he’s not right for this part and never believable as a stern schoolteacher, never mind a soldier. The real problem is the writing though: no two writers this year can agree on whether Danny is the sort of teacher you run to with your problems or the one you run away from because they’re the cause of your problems! This episode particularly isn’t sure and makes Danny boy both, sometimes in the same scene. I know a lot of fans had trouble with the idea that a soldier would ever become a teacher but actually that’s common for soldiers invalided out of the army: schools in the 1950s and 1960s were full of them (Chances are all the male teachers at Coal Hill in 1963 older than Ian and Barbara would have been war veterans; they were the exceptions being so young not the norm). The thing is, though, he wouldn’t be a teacher like this: he’d either be strict and no-nonsense or soft and indulgent, he wouldn’t be both. Not even with ptsd or flashbacks, something it seems odd in retrospect that the series didn’t give him to contrast with the one-note aggression of a Dalek and to make sense of how much his character changes. Originally this story was to take place three months into their dating life: I wish they’d kept it like that because this is all very rushed and really doesn’t give the pair long together by the end of the year for Clara to be quite as distraught at (spoilers!) Danny’s death as she ends up being. We badly need an ‘introduction’ scene too, of Danny on the battlefield faced with an impossible decision and waking up in a cold sweat afraid he’s taken the ‘wrong’ one – instead we have to piece that together across a few episodes, by which point we’ve lost the contrast with this story’s main storyline on first viewing. Clara, meanwhile, is an unpredictable teacher too, the sort who teaches from her moods so that you’re never entirely sure if she’s suddenly going to announce a half holiday or give you extra detention because she’s in a bad mood. The poor kids at this school no wonder they’re all a bit…weird (see ‘The Caretaker’ and ‘In The Forest Of the Night’ for more on this). In short, ‘Into The Dalek’ clearly needed something extra going on in the plot. But this fake love story really isn’t it, at least not this episode.  

The real problem with ‘Into The Dalek’ though is that there aren’t nearly enough Daleks in it. Yes we spend most of the episode inside one but walking around it’s tummy and hearing its voice really isn’t the same thing at all and, a brief skirmish at the end, this story doesn’t do any of the traditional Dalek things. Frankly it needs to do something to fill up the time rather than re-making ‘The Fantastic Voyage’ inside a Dalek. One other thing this plot could have done is explore ‘Rusty’ the Dalek further. We’ve covered the Daleks from so many angles but never from this one before, the series really ‘getting into the head’ of a Dalek and working out what makes them tick. The un-named Dalek in ‘Dalek’ was too good an idea to have in just one story and given that he committed suicide at the end of that episode this close replacement is the next best thing. Except we never get to know Rusty anywhere near as well as his predecessor. ‘Dalek’ was full of philosophical angst, about what the ‘last Dalek’ with no orders to follow  would do to it and whether it could actually be good left to its own devices. ‘Into The Dalek’ is about a radiation storm making a Dalek mentally ill and good, until the Doctor fixes him and makes him bad again, which is less satisfying all round. It would have helped if we’d seen the battle that left him stranded in space, his casing cracked where the radiation got in, so we could have understood him more. While the idea of good and bad being just a replacement part away fits with everything we know about Daleks, it doesn’t lead into that greater discussion of nature and nurture and what it means to be good or bad, with most Humans somewhere on the spectrum in between (with the exception of most conservative MPs). It’s disappointing when Rusty clicks back into lace and starts killing indiscriminately again with normal business resumed: it felt for a while as if this story was going to go a bit deeper than that. The coda of the Doctor talking to him about beauty and divinity, reminding him of what he used to be, is better but having Rusty simply do what the modified Daleks in ‘Evil’ did, slaughtering his own kind instead, really isn’t the ‘right’ solution for this story at all. I was hoping for a self-questioning Dalek, ‘I exterminate therefore I am’ instead of a soldier switching sides.

Two of the funniest ideas to pad out this episode sadly ended up on the cutting room floor: a scene of the Doctor trying to make the Dalek laugh by fiddling with its insides and tickling it (only to be told sternly that even good Daleks don’t laugh) and Danny overhearing Clara on the phone to the Doctor talking about saving the universe from monsters and assuming she’s a gamer, babbling away to her as she pretends that absolutely that’s what she was talking about and she knows all those things he mentioned, honestly, oh yes goodness.    

I’m kind of mixed over how things ended up on screen. Uskmouth Power Station is used a lot better than it was in ‘The Doctor, The Widow and The Wardrobe’ and rather than the ‘Hand Of Fear’ tradition of actually using it as a power station is used the same way they used to shoot Blake’s 7 as a futuristic military complex that’s clinical yet spacey, full of futuristic looking gadgets. It’s all a bit dark though: by which I don’t mean grim I mean in a ‘why does every film crew in the 21^st century forget to pack their lightbulbs?’ kind of a way. Seriously it’s an epidemic that’s particularly bad here: if ‘classic’ Who lost a lot of its atmosphere from being so over-lit we could see every last set crack and monster seam then ‘modern’ Who goes the opposite way and films things that might well be really exciting and dynamic, only all we get on screen is a lot of grunting and the odd splash of colour. Holton Primary School in Barry is just enough like the shots of Coal Hill in ‘An Unearthly Child’ though and makes for a nice ‘second home’ across the course of this year. Indeed having Clara teach at a place so big in Who folklore is an inspired move I think: even if she’s not a natural teacher by temperament we needed one companion to come from this school again and the emphasis on a companion’s home life in parallel to the trips in the Tardis is a good idea that ‘roots’ them into the real world.  
All that said, if ‘Into The Daleks’ ends up being a little disappointing that’s only because it starts from a place of such promise. We’ve seen the Daleks from so many angles now that a journey inside them, both physically and mentally, is a neat idea at doing something new. It’s somewhere vaguely new to take the Doctor too: after all, the 10^th and 11^th Doctors both regenerated  quite angrily, against their will, resentful of being put in such difficult circumstances and hoping for peace with their next bodies: the Doctor would be having a complex over their morality (or lack of it by now) and be inside his own head by now (although, technically, he’s in the head of his enemies physically). Clara’s conclusion, that he’s an average man who at least tries to always do the right thing even if people sometimes get hurt because of it, is a worthy conclusion to come to.

Unfortunately this isn’t enough for a full plot and the basic idea is still better suited to a computer game than a TV story, with nowhere to go and an awful lot of time spent either warning us about ‘the most dangerous place in the universe’ for ten minutes (when Dalek antibodies really aren’t that much of a threat) or arguing this week, often in the face of urgent Dalek-related danger, which makes you want to scream at everyone to 'just get on with it'. Dalek stories can be many things: weird, silly, repetitive, quirky. None of them have ever been boring before though – well, maybe ‘Planet Of The Daleks’ just a little. ‘Into The Dalek’ spends so long philosophising and self-questioning, while saving the inevitable big battle sequence at the end, that it almost doesn’t seem like a Dalek story at all. Which is a real waste of such a superlative creation even with 22 earlier Dalek stories to watch. For all its faults, though, there are some great little scenes and individual lines here ('Put the gun down' 'Why?' 'You might shoot me!', the idea that Clara is the Doctor’s carer rather than his assistant who ‘cares so I don’t have to!’ and the line about Danny being a ‘ladykiller’ back when Clara doesn’t know about his military past) and Nicholas Briggs somehow finds new things to do with his Dalek voices, giving Rusty a distinct character even compared to the self-aware Dalek in 2005. At least if this story is going to recycle ideas aimlessly then at least it recycles really good ones, ideas that a lot of the viewers in 2014 might not have seen before. Certainly it’s not the worst Dr Who story around, with nothing that a re-write and moving this story further down the run wouldn’t have rescued. I wish we’d gone into ‘Into The Dalek’ that bit deeper, that’s all.  

POSITIVES + We've come such a long way since ‘The Invisible Enemy’ in 1977: this time the effects are astonishing, with believable Dalek anti-viruses lurking round every corner (as opposed to something that looks like a giant prawn) and rather than play the idea for laughs it all feels incredibly tense and serious.

NEGATIVES – The supporting cast of soldiers are a weedy, sorry bunch. It’s taken as read that they’re just fighting the Daleks in a war because that’s what people do, but there’s  no back story here, no sense of how this skirmish came about, whether these soldiers are conscripts or volunteers risking their lives to save their families and whether the Daleks invaded their homeland or whether they’re fighting them because they’re different and fighting is what soldiers do. As a result it’s hard to invest in the Doctor’s refusal to allow soldiers on board The Tardis because we don’t know what sort of soldiers they are: are they offensive, defensive, on a moral crusade, a religious crusade, fighting for empire or their homes? The circumstances behind why you fight makes each battle very different and we’ve had our share of all of them in Dr Who in the past.  

BEST QUOTE:  ‘I see into your soul, Doctor. I see beauty, I see divinity, I see hatred’.

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