Victory Of The Daleks
(Series 5, Dr 11 with Amy, 17/4/2010, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Mark Gatiss, director: Andrew Gunn)
Rank: 251
'If you are going through Skaro, keep going. Exterminate them on the beaches, exterminate them on the landing grounds, we shall exterminate them in the fields and in the streets, when running up and down corridors of space and time. Just watch out for the lack Kornovista of depression...'
Back when they were promoting this story on BBC America, as part of Steven Moffat’s plan to make Dr Who big in America, the writer was asked what might happen when The Tardis had landed in every single important place and been to every single event around the world. Moffat said that it wasn’t his problem as the series had ‘a good 500 years yet’ before that was true. Even so he seems to have helped delay that little problem by commissioning yet another story set in WWII. There was a time, in the classic series, where it was the only place the Tardis wouldn’t land. It was too soon, within living memory of a lot of the parents and grandparents watching and it was unofficially considered bad manners in the production team to have The Doctor fight Hitler on the same level as Daleks and Cybermen (you wouldn’t believe the amount of unsolicited stories about the war that script editors used to get in all eras). Only when Andrew Cartmel came along did Who break that trend, with ‘The Curse Of Fenric’ in 1989, as he considered that in Sylvester McCoy’s darker edgier portrayal he’d finally found a Doctor worth fighting Hitler – and even then ‘Fenric’ ended up being less about the German Nazi troops than the Russians. In the 21st century series though they just can’t keep away and Moffat himself will set two stories there (‘The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances’ and ‘Let’s Kill Hitler!’) ‘Victory’ was Moffat’s idea too, inspired by taking his two boys, Joshua and Louis, round Churchill’s real-life war cabinet and watching how fascinated they were with the exhibits. However he already had his stories mapped out for the year so he gave this one over to his great friend Mark Gatiss, who was himself a war buff. ‘Write me something in Churchill’s bunker with Daleks that will keep children every bit as fascinated as my pair’ he said.
But here’s the thing:
Churchill’s war cabinet rooms are fascinating for all sorts of little reasons
and details, as a time capsule from the 1940s and as evidence of just how few
resources our leaders were working with back then but for one overwhelming big
thing: it’s a true story. World War Two might well have gone a very different
way had it not been Churchill sitting in that war room making the decisions he did
surrounded by the staff he hand-picked. The rest of the country, the rest of
Europe, were affected by decisions made in that room that still reverberate to
how people live today. ‘Victory Of The Daleks’ however is not true. Not one
line of it. We have multiple eye-witnesses who gave interviews and left diary
entries that have no mention of a Professor Bracewell inventing ‘Ironside’
soldiers that helped win the war before turning out to be part-Dalek himself.
There’s nothing in the history books about the fact that ‘The Battle of
Britain’ was actually ‘The Battle Of Britain and Skaro’. We’ve moved a long
weay from the early days when the 1st Doctor implored Barbara not to
alter history ‘not one line!’ – never before has a Dr Who historical, set on a
verified fact-checked era of British history, messed around with time as much
as this one does. And that cheapens everything. Suddenly the war hero is no
longer the lone British bulldog with the weight of the world on his shoulders –
he’s a man who gets advice from a travelling alien timelord. Suddenly our
spitfire pilots are fighting not just for King and country and freedom but
because there’s an alien spaceship in the sky. Suddenly the plucky Brits in
their finest hour are no longer battling an unknowable war against an
implacable merciless foe but extras in a Dr Who story that we know is all going
to work out fine in the end (because, let’s face it, they weren’t going to be
brave enough to let the Daleks or the Germans win were they?) Everything that’s
so powerful when you walk into that cabinet room and see the history is
cheapened because it didn’t happen like that. (Ah you cry, but this year’s
mystery the crack in the wall wiped everyone’s minds. But can it change diary
entries? And how come it’s so selective with what it wipes? Honestly it’s more
a way round the fact that everyone in the Davies era knows about aliens and
Moffat wants to go back to basics while being a plot point in the season finale
and nothing more).
To be fair to Gatiss, it
was a terrible commission and he uncharacteristically struggled with it at
first, before figuring he would simply make a ‘war movie’. But what war movie
to make? At first he returned to a story he’d come up with for season 3 but
which Russell had rejected, in which an alien artefact makes items in The British
Museum come to life (probably rejected on grounds of both cost and the fact it
resembled the film ‘A Night At The Museum’, a big hit in cinemas the year
before). But how to get The Daleks in? There’s a really good Dr Who story to be
had in WWII, where The Doctor supports rather than takes over, where you really
feel the despair and hopelessness if this war is ever going to be over,
especially in late 1940-early 1941 when this story is set, when the Germans
(who had been preparing for a war far longer than Britain or France) have a
headstart and The Americans are late to the party. Hitler only began losing
when he became over-confident, deciding to fight the Allies on one side of Germany
and the Russians on the other at the same time (the turning point of the war
and surely the most obvious way to do a WWII story, with an equally
over-confident alien whispering in his ear). You could have had an alien
whispering in Churchill’s ear, increasing his depression and doubt and making
think he’d lose, especially if they were the reason he lost the election, to
the surprise of everyone (including Atlee, who took over from him after a
campaign run more in hope than certainty). However putting Daleks in the story
can only make it go one of two ways: either they hep the enemy or they pretend
to be helping ‘us’.
Mercifully Gatiss chose the latter, less obvious version but even then he’s backed himself into a corner. We know, as well as The Doctor, that The Daleks are evil and have to be stopped. We also know that everyone else won’t believe him. That’s the story right there and watching people gradually learn something we already know does not make for good drama. So Gatiss switches gears halfway through and throws in the idea of a ‘humanised’ Dalek being a bomb, which is better – it gives us a chance to go back to basics where The Daleks are the opposite of humanity, breeding out all feelings except hate (even if that’s more of a Cyber-thing really). This must be the only time in Dr Who where a walking Human bomb ends up making a story better rather than being obvious padding. But it’s still never quite enough. Because how could it be? Dambusters and Dalek Thrusters don’t mix. The Daleks don’t belong in a WWII story, not directly. Which is weird when you think about it. After all Terry Nation based them on Nazis. He became a writer purely because, as a child, he had nothing to do in his Welsh family bunker than make up stories to himself (his dad being at the front and his mum being an RP Warden).’The Dalek Invasion Of earth’ is clearly based on what The Nazis never got to do (complete with Heil Hitler salutes with their plungers). But they’re a metaphor. They’re not meant to be in a story featuring real Nazis any more than ‘Warriors Of The Deep’ should have been set in ‘our’ cold war or The Slitheen should have been using the ‘real’ weapons of mass destruction in the Iraq War. Mixing fact and fiction like this just feels wrong. This ends up les the battle of the Somme than just some battle and all the poignancy and heartbreak of a real situation gets lost in the need to tell a Dr Who story.
Churchill doesn’t feel
quite right either. While Matt happily talked to journalists about how it made
sense that he was old friends with The Doctor, given they were both intelligent
peaceniks, that’s not true. Churchill was happiest at war: it’s partly why he
got booted out of office when peace was declared (The Doctor, of course,
famously runs away rather than fight unless he has to). Though he was rightly
hailed as a hero who got Britain through their darkest hour he shared more
similarities with Hitler’s racism and prejudice than a lot of historians were
happy to admit at the time, though a lot have written about them since his
death (in 1965 during the broadcast of ‘The
Romans’). His published letters and diaries reveal a man very of his time,
a generation or so older than even William Hartnell, who believed in the
superiority of Britain and her empire above all else, while the deaths of
non-Europeans/American immigrant Europeans were inconsequential (even his
Russian allies, which might help explain a lot of the cold war metaphors in
this book). He’s the sort of person that The Doctor would normally take down
from power, with very different values. But of course The Doctor has to be on
Churchill’s side (he can’t very well be on Hitler’s can he?) so Gatiss gives us
the clichés from the school textbooks: a plucky even-tempered battler always
with a wry smile and a decent bloke doing the right thing that bears no
resemblance to the real, very complex, often depressed anxious and very ‘Human’
man at the heart of the war. It’s a waste: the best Dr Who historicals take
something from history that you thought you knew and goes the extra mile to
show why an outcome that seems certain now was once in flux and why the people
we know from our textbooks as all ‘good’ or all bad’ were really somewhere in
the middle, as all Humans are. The classic example is ‘Marco Polo’, with a title character who is
mostly good but understandably suspicious of The Doctor and confiscates his
‘flying caravan’ leaving him a prisoner while the mighty Kublai Khan turns out
to be a nice old man who likes playing backgammon. While that sort of
characterisation is much harder to pull off in 45 minute plots than the olden
days (‘Marco Polo’ runs to nearly three hours!) nevertheless a scene or two of
Churchill confessing his inner doubts, or appalling Amy with a racist comment
(when she thought he was better than that) would have done wonders to make this
story ‘real’. Instead this version of Churchill feels flimsy and has about as
much in common with Winston Churchill as Churchill the canine mascot from the
car insurance ads (the one Amy is aping when she goes ‘oi,
Churchill, oh yes!’)
It would have helped too
if The Daleks were worthy foes in this story, but they’re not. There were two
moments during the run-up to the comeback series when fans breathed a collective
sigh of relief that maybe it would turn out to be alright after all. One was
when it was confirmed that the Tardis would stay a blue police telephone box,
the other when The Daleks were only going to be given cursory re-touches rather
than redesigned (one of the reasons the 1990s comebacks never happened between ‘Survival’ and ‘The TV Movie’ were the leaked ‘alien
spidery Dalek’ designs that were openly ridiculed in fandom). However the
‘iron’ Daleks have been introduced for a while now and Moffat wanted to put his
stamp on the series so they were an obvious thing to change. Even though there’s
no obvious reason why The Daleks ever should change (it’s in character for the
Cybermen to keep upgrading themselves but The Daleks always think their God’s
gift to the universe and perfect already. It feels at one point as if the plot
is going to equate them with the Nazi ideal of ‘supermen’ but then Gatiss
realised they’d already done that with Cybermen in ‘Silver Nemesis’ and audiences mostly
thought that was stupid too). He really liked the Peter Cushing film Daleks
that came in a variety of bright colours (back when they were only
black-and-white on TV of course) and asked for a similar design for his new ‘paradigm’,
in multiple colours that were big and bold. Moffat and Gatiss then spent all
the time they should have been working on the script together emailing each
other ideas in the middle of the night what jobs the different coloured Daleks
could do (the full list: orange Daleks are ‘scientists’, blue Daleks are
‘strategists’, red Daleks are ‘drones’ even though it’s a fact in an annual
written by Terry Nation himself that Daleks can’t see the colour red – so did
they stumble on the colour by accident and they think they’re invisible? - white Daleks are ‘supremes’ (even though they
don’t look much like Diana Ross their new singe ‘Halt In The name Of Love Or
You Will Be exterminated’ is out soon on Skaro Records) and most confusingly of
all the blue Daleks are ‘eternals. A Moffat suggestion as ‘it’s a cool sounding
name, though I don’t know what they’d actually do,I bet it’s something really
important’. Quite. Nobody seemed to work out what the Yellow Daleks were and
while there were plans for Green Daleks they were thought to look ‘silly’. All
this was meant to be explained in a sequence where The Daleks come down the
ramp and are ‘introduced’ by the supreme white Dalek to The Doctor, but this
was dropped when people couldn’t stop laughing at the readthrough and it was
considered to be more like a ‘Miss Universe’ contest).
While they were at it The
Daleks were made bigger: the ones in ‘Dalek’ were designed to be Billie Piper’s
height as she looked at one in the eyestalk so these ones were re-designed to
fit Karen Gillan’s taller height (even though it’s a weird quirk of both this
script and ‘Asylum Of The Daleks’ that Amy
never meets The Daleks face to face so this ended up being entirely unnecessary).
Unfortunately that also meant they had to be wider and chunkier with a planned
for explanation that this would be where the Daleks stored ‘weapons’, like
Thunderbirds craft, had they had another episode but for now makes them look as
if they need to check into interplanetary weightwatchers. Moffat also went back
to an original unused design that had an eyeball visible at the end of an
eyestalk. Model versions of these Daleks were given a real publicity push with
half an eye on being that year’s big Christmas toy (after the Cyber head
changer toy, released to almost no fanfare whatsoever, became the surprise
seller of 2007) and even got their own Radio Times cover (only thing being
election week they only printed the ‘red’ ‘blue’ and ‘yellow’ ones for Labour,
Conservatives and the Lid Dems, the three biggest parties in 2010. In a
betrayal that mirrors the story and surprised absolutely no one the truce
between the blue and yellow ones resulted in the extermination of the red ones
and then a further betrayal saw all of the yellow policies exterminated in
favour of austerity measures even Davros would have considered too rightwing).
However the Daleks were a huge flop. Fans thought they were stupid (especially
the bigger size which led to many jokes about Daleks going on diets) and while
Whoivians are generally happy to buy stuff that features examples of Dr Who at
their most imaginative and bold, crass commercialism for the sake of it is the
sort of thing lesser franchises do. The toys filled up bargain bins for years
to come and to date they’ve only been seen sparingly since, by popular demand
(there’s a beaten up yellow one in ‘The
Wedding Of River Song’ and a patriotic hybrid red white and blue one in the
crowd scene in ‘Asylum Of The Daleks’). Although
I’m mostly annoyed that they passed up the chance to use the joke that they
were mistaken for ‘Shearman tanks’ (see ‘Dalek’
for the writer who brought them back).
It doesn’t help either
that the plot is a combination of multiple other Dr Who plots stuck together.
The obvious one is ‘Power Of The Daleks’
from 1966, Gatiss’ favourite story according to some interviews, where The
Daleks were being sneaky and pretending to be good, helping out a Human colony
with the cry ‘I am your servant’. Given that it’s the story where The Doctor changes
his appearance for the first time it’s a clever means by original script editor
of making the viewer doubt everything and then root for The Doctor when they
turn evil and prove he really was right all along. So Gatiss has them do the
same here, chanting ‘I am your soldier’ rather than servant in a twist that
every fan would have seen coming a quadzillion rels away even if they hadn’t
seen ‘Power’ or read about it in guide books. The Daleks are only pretending to be on the British side, just as
they were only pretending to be on the Vulcan settlers’ side, even though they
are really after…well what are they after exactly? They are trying to revive
the Dalek army, we know that much and laying a trap for The Doctor so I suppose
it makes sense he would pop in to see Churchill at some stage, but why here?
Surely they’d be better off invading The Powell estate and hurting The Doctor
that way? And why pretend to be good nd work for Churchill, when they could
just be bad and work for Hitler and help destroy the Earth into the bargain?
Gatiss thankfully knows he can’t keep up that subterfuge forever so changes it
midway through, but the idea of The Daleks being able to create Human doubles
has been around even longer: ‘The Chase’ in
1965 in fact. Planting a bomb inside a character has been around since ‘The Ark’ the same year. And the Doctor’s
attempts to keep Bracewell alive by making him think of the pain and suffering
of being Human? That’s almost verbatim from ‘Earthshock’
where it was the 5th Doctor lecturing The Cybermen (though it makes
no sense here: the bomb is a physical part of him. Thinking shouldn’t be able
to change a thing if the timer countdown has been set off. And why does he even
have a timer? Surely they could have triggered it the minute Bracewell saw the
Tardis arrive?) For all the extra budget and grander effects there isn’t one
thing ‘Victory Of the Daleks’ does better than any of these stories and most of
it is far worse.
There’s nothing new or
imaginative here, nothing radically different to anything that’s been done
before. Even Amy’s reaction to being back in time and meeting celebrities is
just a poor re-write of the similar scenes in Gatiss’ own ‘The Unquiet Dead’ where Rose ends up
meeting Charles Dickens in Victorian Cardiff (though Amy never does anything as
interesting as Rose, hanging around with the big guys rather than talking to
the little ones at the bottom of the payroll). That story worked because Gatiss
had done his research and knew exactly how to use it, making a trip to the past
feel real, having Dickens become a fully three-dimensional complex human being
good and bad and had a monster that made perfect sense given the setting of
gaslights and hot air. Here it all feels false and fake, re-creation rather
than the real thing, Churchill is a cardboard cut out hero who’s only vice is
his cigar (actually a prop as you weren’t allowed to smoke on location!) and
The Daleks are here because they’re a known ratings winner. Putting the
spitfires into this story, an emblem of British pluck, and having them fight a
Dalek spaceship also seems tailored for the ‘next time’ publicity trailers and
not much else: it doesn’t fit the story, the Daleks would destroy them in
seconds if this was ‘real’ and it’s really there as a way of Gatiss giving
himself a cameo (to date he’s still the only person acting out words he wrote
himself and was credited for in a Who story. Although there is actually a Dr
Who link: they were designed by Bill Dunn, who was the father-in-law of Who director
Douglas Camfield and who’s daughter played Petra in ‘Inferno’ amongst other smaller roles).
It’s all very cynical: Dr Who has the most elastic series format in series
history and can do anything. True fans mostly want to see the series doing new
things, or at least old things in new ways,
even if it leads to more risk. But there’s no risk here: WWII is
popular, The Daleks are popular, bung them together and see what happens. Oh
and get some brightly coloured toys into the shops before Christmas too. You
wouldn’t know it from some of the reviews of the Disney era I’ve seen online
(with some people clearly not understanding the first thing about any of the
stories) but Dr Who fans tend to be smarter than your average scifi fan, people
who’ve read every textbook going and twice if it’s to do with history. They
know this stuff isn’t real. They know when they’re being treated as purchasers
rather than viewers.
So does ‘Victory Of The
Daleks’ get anything right? Well, yes. Given that this is a Dalek plan we’re
talking about here it’s nicely simple and plausible for the most part (no
digging through the Earth’s crust and replacing the core with a motor engine in
this story!) Given how hard the rest of season five can be to follow at times
(albeit easier than any of the Moffat seasons to follow) it’s good to have a
story that doesn’t keep whizzing about across time or having The Doctor subvert
his own timelines by doing something clever and nonsensical. There are some
nice lines dotted along the way, such as Amy realising (surprisingly late given
what happens in the previous two stories) that time travelling won’t always be
fun and that The Doctor being the good guy means bad guys hate his guts. No one
else reacts to the developments in the wear normally at all, but Amy reacts
just as a young woman whisked across time and space by her imaginary friend
would react. Her interception when The Doctor is trying to get Bracewell to
think about being human, by making him focus on love rather than pain, is a
very Amy moment and gives her the chance to look doe-eyed at The Doctor when
she asks if he ‘ever loved someone he wasn’t meant to love’ making her love
triangle arc far more subtly than other stories this year (although her
acknowledging this makes the ‘linking’ scene between ‘Time
Of The Angels/Flesh and Blood’ and ‘Vampires
Of Venice’ even weirder in retrospect and Murray Gold’s latest pompous
angel choir takes what should have been a tiny sweet moment and beats you over
the head with a spitfire). Churchill equating The Daleks with how he talked
about The Russians in real life (that any enemy of his enemy is his friend) at
least makes him seem less gullible and stupid than he might have done. The ‘ironsides’
name for the Russell T Daleks is cute and exactly the sort of nickname they
would get in a war. There’s a particular fine scene, sadly dropped in the final
edit, where she worries that The Doctor won’t make it out and that she’ll be
trapped in WWII (‘I was getting married in the morning. I’ll be 91 years old on
my wedding day. And I hate spam!’) The
ending, too, is actually pretty brave: this must be the only WWII re-creation
where the ‘bad guys’ win! For the ‘Victory’ in the title is true; The Daleks
know that The Doctor will rush off to save Earth rather than stopping them and
they get away (though goodness only knows what these weirdly coloured Daleks
get up to off screen as it’s a whole different bunch in ‘Asylum’). Their
gloating, while The Doctor runs away to save a life, is a gorgeous
juxtaposition and easily the best scene in the story (not least because this
unpredictable Doctor’s next move is to punch Bracewell, as the first thing he
can think of to save him).
It also looks fabulous
and any sense of reality you get from this episode comes from how it looks not
how people act or what they say. While the production team tried and failed to
get permission to film in the actual war-cabinet that inspired the original
story (which would have been too cramped for even a modern film crew in any
case) there was another almost as god right around the corner. It’s a measure of
how much Wales had taken Dr Who to it’s heart in this era that a camera crew
were allowed into the bunker of the ‘Joint Resilience Unit’ in Swansea, a
secondary unit created in case London was ever over-run in the cold war, and a
new headquarters had to be established at speed. Though strictly speaking it
was created in the 1950s and had an anachronistic war table (way too big to fit
in the London model!) the addition of a few extra props and the safe removal of
a few others means you would never know the difference (mostly it was being used
in 2009 when this story was filmed as a training centre for medical teams in
case of a mass invasion/accident). Other scenes were shot in Brackla Bunker. The
costumes, the set dressing, even the hairdoes are all accurate in a way that
only BBC costume dramas can be. The re-creation of the night sky over London
lit up before a Luftwaffe invasion with a Dalek spaceship hanging in the sky is
a triumph for the FX department, even more so than the similar scene in 'The Empty Child' (although there are
way too many barrage balloons). Seeing a model Dalek being moved around a war
table also feels ‘right’ too, the one time the Skaro scaries feel like they ‘fit’
here. The acting too makes up for a lot of the shortfalls. Ian McNeice doesn’t
act that much like Churchill really, but he gives his all and looks the part
(he was hired after playing Winston in a 2008 play about Harold MacMillan ‘Never
Had It So Good’ and had already been in a Dr Who audio for Big Finish, ‘Immortal
beloved’, in which he played the God Zeus. Yep, it’s one of those audios…Churchill
must have felt like a slight demotion after that). Bill Patterson, one of the
bigger names to be cast in Who in this era, gives his all as Bracewell too,
although it’s not a part anyone could have played that well (basically it’s mad
inventor turned guilty becoming romantic lead. We really needed a tag scene of
him and Dorabella too).
Even so, it’s a poor
episode in most respects. Far from being back to the scheming manipulative hard
to defeat monsters of ‘Power Of The Daleks’ these
are a bunch of simpletons sniggering at the back, waiting for teacher to turn
up when they’ve played a practical joke. There’s no gravitas, no weight, no
sense that the Earth is in deadly danger if The Doctor doesn’t sort it all. It
doesn’t help that Gatiss has very little about the new Doctor to go on: he
watched as many series starring Matt Smith as he could, but none of them had
characters much like The Doctor and by his own admission Gatiss went for ‘generic’,
in his first draft, writing for The Doctor as if he was a straightforward dashing
hero like Pertwee. Dr 11 does things in this story he never does anywhere else,
including shushing Amy the way Dr 3 once did to Jo. This one isn’t a dashing
authority figure though of course: the whole ‘joke’ of the era is that Matt
Smith is an old man in a young person’s body, a young pinup that happens to
have the eccentricities of an OAP. He’s not the sort of Doctor to out-yell a Dalek
platoon and physically attack them with a wrench (not least because anger is
the one thing Matt’s a bit shakey on, while Matt is notoriously clumsy and
accidentally used a real wrench in the scene where he attacks the Dalek rather
than a lightweight prop, giving the Dalek operator a ringing head!) They only
needed an extra re-write and they could have really used that sense of who this
old-young Doctor that no one takes seriously at first but who has clearly been
through so much here, in an era when children were growing up fast and facing
mortality at too young an age. But then this is a story by someone born more
than twenty years after VE Day, when the war never seemed in doubt and when the
good guys were always going to win. It’s a trip round a war room exhibit, not a
real attempt to actually make history come alive, the way Dr Who was designed
to do in its early days. There’s no way David Whittaker would have let a story
this clumsy and in many ways patronising through quality control. After all,
having The Doctor save the day takes away from the people who really did. Amazingly
as ‘photostrip’ version of this story was released, purely for schools, to help
children get an interest in history despite this being the least accurate Dr
Who historical of them all (needless to say, it wasn’t very popular and they
never did another). As a WWII story it fails because it’s inaccurate. As a Dr
Who story it fails because we’ve seen it all before. As a war film it’s sort of
passable, mostly thanks to the scenery and the acting, but it’s also one of
those dumb B-movie ones that’s spent longer working on the effects than the
dialogue or story. This isn’t a victory then, it’s a lost battle that should never
have been fought, the sort of recycled history-changing (both human and Dr who)
that fans all feared might happen when Dr Who came back and which a lot of the
abandoned revivals in the 1990s were panned for doing. To give them both
credit, though, Moffat and Gatiss will both learn from this and never do
anything quite as careless, clumsy or cynically commercial again. They still
get to win the war.Daleks? With Churchill? Oh no no no no no no no…
POSITIVES + At least
there’s one bit of recycling that comes off: Just like ‘The Face Of Evil’ The
Doctor threatens to blow The Daleks sky high with his ‘deadly weapon’. It’s a
Jammy Dodger, which The Doctor happily munches when his enemies see through his
ruse (in the original, of course, it’s a ‘deadly jelly baby’).
BEST QUOTE: Dalek: ‘I am
your soldier! I am your soldier! I am your soldier! I am your soldier! I am
your soldier! I am your soldier! I am your soldier! I am your soldier!’
McNeice as Churchill turned up again in the 7th
Doctor story ‘Subterfuge’ (2020), number #262 in Big Finish’s main range, a
story which covers one of the saddest times in Winston’s life. Though the man
who won the war, a fierce campaign by his labour rivals meant Churchill wasn’t
trusted with keeping the peace and to everyone’s shock he finds himself out of office
after the 1945 election, bizarre as that seems now. The Dr Who version says
that’s because of The Meddling Monk who ran a campaign that’s based on fake
news and untruths: they don’t quite paint their lies on the back of a bus like
the ‘Brexit’ campaign did but it’s pretty close! Other excitements include an
unexploded bomb, an assassination attempt on King Edward VIII’s life and a stem
crystal. The story ends with The Doctor unable to change the timelines back
again completely, leaving an utterly miserable Churchill out of office claiming
that his friend has let him down and they are bitter enemies from now on. A
thoughtful story.
Finally, ‘Operation Hellfire’(2020) is a Big Finish
story from volume six of ‘The Third Doctor Adventures’, with Tim Treloar a
decent Pertwee alongside Katy Manning’s Jo. Jonathan Barnes’ story nicely captures
the feel of a mid-Unit caper, what with devils being raised from the dead in
crypts and two superpowers colliding with each other head on. The difference
between this and a more nuanced complex story like, say, ‘Frontier In Space’
though is that there’s clearly a wrong and right and The Nazis, so often
treated as a joke in other Dr Who stories (especially ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’)
are at their most threatening and evil here, soldiers happy to commit genocide
if it brings them the respect of their leader. Of course because it’s a Pertwee
story there has to be a maguffin too and the story goes a bit downhill when the
‘amulet of the wastelands’ turns up, an alien artefact that enables its finder
to mass hypnotise entire populations. Of course Hitler is the one who finds it.
Churchill doesn’t get much to do in this one, McNeice only turning up at the
end of episode two, pleading with The Doctor to take the amulet away to another
planet – which he does. Eventually. A bit of a muddle to be honest that’s more
of a cut-and-paste job than usual (sweet and kind-hearted Jo is totally the
wrong character to use with the most corrupt regime in Earth’s history, for
instance).
Previous ‘The Beast Below’ next ‘The Time Of The Angels/Flesh and Stone’
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