Daleks In Manhattan/Evolution Of The Daleks: Ranking - 220

  Daleks In Manhattan/Evolution Of The Daleks

(Series 3, Dr 10 with Martha, 21-28/4/2007, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Helen Raynor, director: James Strong) 

'Well, here I am in a Whoverville camp, homeless after spending all my money buying the same old Dr Who episodes on the new format green-ray. I'm sharing my tent with an Ood who refuses to help with the washing up, a p'Ting whose given me fleas, a Slitheen who snores all night, an Ice Warrior who insists on keeping the place cold and I think The Silence was in there too but, honestly, I've forgotten.'

Ranking: 220

In an emoji: 🐷

America is a pretty big place. The Earth is bigger still. The universe is even bigger than that. Even after 320 stories there are still aeons of planets and civilisations out there that Dr Who hasn’t had time to show yet. So why does this story see the second invasion of The Empire State Building by Daleks? It’s not as if there aren’t other places in the world (or indeed other monsters), the building’s stature as ‘tallest building in the world’ was gone by 1970 (that’s as long ago as ‘Spearhead From Space’ if you count dates in terms of Dr Who stories, like I do) and you’d have thought one super natural entity with a head for heights in ‘King Kong’ was enough without Daleks wandering around the lift shafts spouting ‘elevate’ to the operators. If I was feeling charitable then I might say that this return was to plug a continuity point about why The Daleks ever landed on it for about five minutes during 1965’s ‘The Chase’. Except they don’t properly do that. It looks to all the world as if a second writer in Helen Raynor was given a vague setting and sat down to write a story around the building, showrunner Russell T Davies only later going ‘blimey, that fits in quite well that does’. So it turns out that the Daleks designed the building, hypnotised a bunch of Humans to build it for them, carried out genetic experiments on them that turned them into pigs and made it the tallest building in the sky to absorb gamma radiation from the sun to use as energy for their experiments and hired humans to build it. A New Deal, but with Daleks if you will.All this would make more sense if Dr Who had been given special dispensation to film in New York and they’d set the story around that – but they haven’t, not yet (that will come with ‘Angels Take Manhattan’). Instead they have to mock the Empire State building up in a studio (not all that successfully) and have rainy Wales stand in for New York. At times this story looks ridiculous, with British actors wandering around trying to talk in American accents and failing (not one of them sounds as if they actually come from new York, even the ones who apparently do). And at other times it looks very ridiculous, what with human-pig hybrids serving a human-Dalek master. Even in an era when Dr Who has way more budget than it ever use to have in the 20th century it was never going to work, so what made them even try? 

 The poor writer doesn’t seem too sure either. You see, she was given one hell of a limiting brief for this story, which is the downside of one person having such control over every aspect of a season. Helen Raynor had done superlative work during the comeback’s first two seasons as script editor (not like the olden days of the job as Russell still had final say-so over decisions, but still a big job on a series this big and epic, with so much research to get right) and had been rewarded (if that’s the right word) with the chance to write an episode of ‘Torchwood’ . ‘Ghost Machine’ was one of the better, more cerebral episodes of that series (a relative measure, admittedly – it’s the one about an alien stopwatch device that shows people incidents from the past) and it was Russell’s favourite of the first season (so much so he may well have nicked the pocketwatch idea for ‘Human Nature’) so despite her relative lack of scriptwriting experience he decided to give Helen a shot at the big series. Only he had lots of demands: the Daleks had always been in contemporary Britain and the future so he wanted the past but somewhere vaguely exotic and came up with a 1930s New York setting, with plans for docklands, Daleks and pigmen! He probably had in mind the most famous Star Trek story ‘City On The Edge Of Forever’, when the gang are stranded in this very timezone and end up involved in a mafia ring and working in soup kitchens. Only there had to be no speakeasies (not in a series for children), no prohibition and decidedly no jazz (Russell has always admitted having a strong hatred of all things jazz, which makes you wonder how he copes when Courtney Pine turns up to play the Cybermen to death in re-watches of ‘Silver Nemesis’). Oh and then the dockland idea fell through anyway because of cost and problems of having a location that had a New York skyline. That didn’t leave an awful lot. 

 Helen had never been to America (her first trip was for the ‘confidential’ behind-the-scenes programme which is when a skeleton crew tagged along and filmed the backgrounds, editing out any anachronistic buildings in post-production). This was not her specialist period by any means. She was not a natural fit for the sort of story Russell was looking for and given that his ‘shopping list’ of instructions was more a guide of what not to do it didn’t give her a lot to go on. There are hints, in a lot of the guidebooks that have come out since this story went on, that this story was in a lot of trouble for the longest time with nobody quite sure how to make it work but unwilling to give up on it either. However, Raynor’s a great researcher as well as a writer, though, and got stuck into the period, finding new ideas at the last minute. It was her research that turned up the idea of shanty towns, ‘Hoovervilles’ named for the president who didn’t seem to be doing much to help out working class men suddenly out of work and penniless and there was indeed a huge one in Central Park, just the sort of big recognisable location they need (though the problems of this era were hardly Hoover’s fault, his laissez faire I’m-alright-Jack persona didn’t exactly endear him to many people either).. It’s the idea that the government has abandoned these people and that so many are struggling that they don’t have time to care for others that makes this story soar – especially the quiet dignity of those at the bottom of the pile compared to the top and seeing it all through Martha’s more caring eyes. While Russell was probably expecting a different kind of script, full of gangsters and mobs, Raynor turns in a story that’s arguably much closer to the heart of what it was really like to be alive in this era: hard. The Wall Street Crash that had caused the great depression of 1929 was really beginning to bite. So many people were out of work and those that were in it knew that one fell swoop and their livelihood too could come crashing down, with millions of people competing for the same old jobs. So instead of a story about the Daleks this becomes a story about humans, how ordinary people can be pushed to be wicked out of difficult circumstances and juxtaposing their desperate fight for survival against that of The Daleks. This is a pig-hybrid-eat-pig-hybrid world out there and there are losers, especially the people who deserve to come out on top like Solomon who, you suspect, could solve the world’s problems in an instant if her were in charge but instead he’s the unofficial unelected head of a bunch of homeless people, solving their problems with tact and fairness, the last person left who still cares about anyone besides himself. He’s clearly named for the character in the Bible who solved problems of the poor (his most famous bit is telling two women fighting over custody of a child that he would cut the baby in half so they could both have a bit – and correctly guessing that the women who then gave up her child was the real mother because she wouldn’t want to harm her infant). It’s ever so nearly the perfect timing too for a world facing another great recession, the worst in so many ways since 1929, when the credit crunch caused similar feelings of misery and desperation, a crash that started being felt in…February 2007, two months before broadcast and far too soon for this to be a real influence. Spooky and proof that the Dr Who production team really do have a time machine of their own. Parts of this story really hit home much harder than anything else in the modern series’ third season and there are some great scenes as men who would normally be kind become monsters, just like in real life at the time a few months on from first transmission. ‘Manhattan’ is one of those stories that’s got better with age than it ever felt at the time. 

 Mind you, it was kind of in the air. They say that the first places that feel the bite of an economic crisis are those in the ‘luxury’ or ‘entertainment’ areas, that there’s a downturn in budget and that inflation means money just isn’t going as far as it used to. I certainly noticed as a journalist of the time that people were buying less newspapers and the money in season 3 really doesn’t seem to have stretched as far as the first two either (or maybe they just spent it all on the wizened old CGI Doctor in ‘The Sound Of Drums’?) Either way, it’s a great fit, like the best of Dr Who historicals making you see the parallels between then and now and how all time is related, the ripples of the past continuing to wash over the present and into the future. What Raynor does so cleverly in her script is not just make this lot a bunch of comedy hobos and tramps (the way the 3rd Doctor era would) but gives her incidental characters some dignity, hinting at the bright promising young lives they were leading before the financial crash. She also adds in their desperation: in normal circumstances they would never allow themselves to be taken for a ride for a pittance in unsafe working conditions the way the Daleks expect them to, but in this era human life is expendable and people have got to eat. Most of all also captures the burning injustice and anger of good people who have been thrown to the wolves for doing nothing wrong and the burning hared they feel for Hoover’s big vanity project, the construction of The Empire State Building, the tallest structure in the world, which is costing a small fortune. The shots of the Hooverville camps, poor beyond redemption, set against the skyline of the towering building is a great way of showing the divide in this world between the haves and have-nots and giving people a voice who don’t have one is exactly what Dr Who is for, even if the outrage comes eighty years too late to do any good. This is a story about the struggle for survival and being cut off from home whoever you are, Human or Dalek and how sometimes the two are closer than you might think even before you go fiddling with their DNA. More than anything, this story fits the ‘vibe’ of the time, when entertainment was full of Godzilla and King Kong and forces bigger than you getting their comeuppance in a tale of people having an even worse time than you were. Had this stayed a story about the economic woes of a cruel period, with the Doctor overthrowing a human tyrant, then I’d have been all over this story. 

 Only Russell T had, by his own admission in Dr Who Magazine, never heard of Hooverville camps. He’s still obsessed with his roaring 1930s story involving Daleks becoming Human via experiments with pig DNA and wants to place all the emphasis there, a story that’s far less interesting and far less, well, Human. There’s just no rationale given as to why the Daleks are here. I mean, it’s written that they somehow fell through time and landed here in 1930 New York, but why here? I sort of get that the Daleks need to build a colossal tower in order to stick on a radio mast and basically ‘phone home’ to Skaro for assistance – it’s as plausible a reason for the Empire State to be built as any (seriously, I’ve read around the subject like Raynor too and I still don’t know why it was built when it was as it’s the oddest response to a financial crisis until Davros and Margaret Slitheen’s lovechild David sodding Cameron squeezes public services so his mates can hoard money and crashes the British economy all over again). And why is it never explained, even in a throwaway line, that the Daleks of ‘The Chase’ found their time machine arriving here because of a distress call they made from the mast (it would have been very in keeping with Dalek nature to have ignored it after finding they were back on the path of the Tardis)? Not even a ‘gee, I wonder what would ever happen if The Daleks ever returned to 20th century America? I guess their dalekanium core would make them come straight here’ reference. In a series where there’s rarely such things as coincidences it all seems a bit odd. Plus…Didn’t anyone notice? Besides The Doctor I mean? Shouldn’t there be a folklore story about the half-pig, half-men that went missing in New York in the 1930s? It wasn’t exactly an out-of-the-way place, even during the Great Depression. And the Empire State Building was used for transmitting TV and radio broadcasts across America – didn’t anybody notice that? (Or is that how Fox News started, created by Daleks? Actually that would explain a lot). Most of all this sort of long-term plan, which demands a lot of patience even with workers being pushed to the point of death, just isn’t the Dalek style at all. They’re built for exterminating, not local politics. I would love to imagine a cut scene of the Daleks turning up to a planning meeting, elevating up the lift shafts and attending sessions with human planners where they explain why Dalekanium is the best metal for the job (all with glasses on the end of their eyestalks and ties). 

 Perhaps it’s because these aren’t your everyday Daleks but ‘The Cult Of Skaro’ in another sub-plot that goes a bit wonky. Dalek Sec is not like other Daleks. Perhaps it’s the sudden responsibility without a controller whispering in his ear (or whatever equivalent Daleks have thinking about it) or maybe it’s hanging around in 1930s America but he’s gone a bit doo-lally and thinks he’s forming a new religion. This is another angle they could have played up (it’s an odd quirk of human nature that desperate people reach out for divine guidance and far more likely to pay for it even when they have less to spare) but that gets lost in the mix too (perhaps because religions’ still the last no-go area in the show now sex and violence have turned up in greater numbers, though ‘gridlock’ had a bash at this so it’s not that prohibited). He’s become convinced that the way forward for the Daleks is to become a Dalek-Human hybrid and developing all those wonderful nasty little human feelings of envy, anger and hate that he senses, apparently learning nothing from his own kind’s similar fall in ‘Evil Of The Daleks’ when they tried just that. To that line he’s been trying out some similar experiments with pig hybrids. I see where they were going – pig DNA is the closest to human DNA of all the animal kingdom and it saves the old problems of ‘how are the daleks going to cope on a world where you needs hands to survive problem that’s already seen the creation of the Robo-men and Ogrons before this. It might even be a bit of an in-joke: the ‘heavies’ in British television doing the dirty physical work for their intellectual superiors are often called ‘grunts’ – and what better ‘grunt’ can there be than a pig hybrid? It’s also perfectly in keeping with the Dalek metaphors that were written in from their earliest days, that the Daleks are Nazis. Having them carry out the sort of human experiments to better perfect themselves as a ‘master race’ just like Joseph Mengele carried out in Auschwitz is exactly the sort of uncaring inhumane thing the Daleks would do, the twist that they’re even more mutated by the end a slab of irony worthy of terry Nation at his most cynical. But frustratingly these points both get lost in the mix so unless you know your genetics (and a lot of the target audience are too young to know it) you wouldn’t get why. Instead you’re pointing at the television laughing and going ‘but that just looks stupid!’ That goes a quadzillion for Dalek Sec himself too, who comes dressed in a pinstripe suit just like the Doctor’s as if he’s at a cosplay convention (it doesn’t help that what could have been a shocking cliffhanger was given away by the Radio Times, not in a small page detail that most people would have missed but a whacking photo on the front cover!)

 There’s a really interesting script hiding in here somewhere, but it’s been lost, the good bits buried under the bits that couldn’t work or which are just less interesting. Had they hidden all mentions of Daleks in this story till the first cliffhanger and just given us the economical background until part two, building up the idea that the people behind these monstrosities are evil before revealing it’s the Daleks, then it could have been great, but they go and spoil it by giving us hints all the way through, filling us up so much with cookie mix that by the time the whole cake comes out the oven and the script properly needs them we’ve had our fill of Daleks already. The Broadway setting, which they went to the extent to film a big showcase for, also could have been in the plot more – there have been very episodes in Dr Who about actors, despite you know featuring actors, and the stage could have been the backdrop to this story the way it was in ‘Talons Of Weng Chiang’, a place where everyone is real pretending to be fake, fighting monsters who are fake pretending to be real (it’s also a world the writer knows far better after her decade working as a theatre director). Plus the publicity made great play on the idea of ‘art deco Daleks’, someone in the marketing department clearly picking up on a period detail and putting an obvious two and two together that no one making this story actually did (there aren’t any – even though they sound great). Ironically for someone whose day job was to nurse all these scripts through to fruition and make the most of it, this one is missing the touch of a Helen Raynor to make the most out of it all. Oh well, at least this is a rare Dr Who story that doesn’t just rip off a plot element from Quatermass. No, instead it’s a rip off of the ‘other’ favourite source: H G Wells and his novel ‘The Island Of Dr Moreau’ with its own human-animal hybrids. Oh and ‘Frankenstein’ of course – it isn’t quite a lightning strike that wakes up the half-human but it’s close! 

 The thing is too, it’s all so unbelievable. Not the Hooverville shanty towns: they really do look for all the world as if everyone went out to New York for several weeks of filming rather than a few hurried background shots in a few snatched hours before getting the plane home. No, it’s everything else that comes off like one of those 1980s Hollywood homages starring Madonna where everyone talks in comedy accents that feel wretchedly impossibly wrong (‘Shanghai Surprise’ or ‘Dick Tracy’). Some Dr Who historicals really do feel as if you’re stepping back in time to the past, as if this is as close as it could possibly be to the ‘real’ life of the time period. In theory a setting within the past century in a recognisable location that’s not a million miles different to Britain culturally should be one of the easiest thing to film. But it isn’t. Nothing here feels real, ever. Maybe it’s the fact we’ve got hyamsn not quite being humans and Daleks not quite being Daleks. Maybe it’s the fact that the Doctor is all over the place too, actively asking the Daleks to exterminate him at one point as part of his big plan even though it’s clearly going to achieve nothing (since when do Daleks keep their word about the custody of other prisoners? And would the Doctor really risk stranding Martha in such a difficult time sixty years before she was even born?) ) Maybe it’s the wonky accents, with everyone talking as if they’re in ‘Bugsy Malone’ rather than an accurate historical drama (which is where Tallulah gets her name from even though it would have mighty unusual indeed for any real American women to have been named that in this era, plus most of the accents seem to be Southern rather than Northern American). Maybe it’s because rainy Wales was never going to cut it no matter how hard they try. Maybe it’s because the pig costumes just look awful – pig DNA might be nearer to our own than cat DNA but the prosthetics department don’t cope as well as they did with New York’s future successor ‘New New York’ in ‘New Earth’ and the fake teeth, particularly, look they’ve been bought form a joke shop. Maybe it’s because the writer is so desperate to tell us about her research that we get long great scenes of exposition, of the Doctor filling Martha in on what a bright girl like her probably knows already, rather than properly exploring this world beyond Central park and a single building. Maybe it’s the fact the incidental characters are written in using broad brush strokes so they never quite feel alive (Diagoras, for instance, is a tyrant every bit as cruel as the Daleks who deserves his comeuppance when he comes up against them, but there’s no back story for why he’s quite this cruel: it would have helped a lot if they’d painted him out to be desperate too, with a wife and 42 children to feed or something). Maybe it’s the way nobody reacts to the Daleks the way normal people would (I mean, Diagoras’ reaction to a Dalek is to ask ‘you’re in charge?’ rather than ’what the hell are you?!’ as if he’s been seeing metal monsters his whole life). 

 What doesn’t help the script is that in the middle of it all they make it a love story. There never has been much room for romance in Dr Who, the Doctor and various companions aside, and I think that’s a shame. It’s a worthy sub-plot to throw antidote to all the hate of alien invasions and gives humans a motivation for fighting back that doesn’t need to be explained, but this is surely the weirdest romance ever seen in the series – and I don’t just mean because one of them’s a pig either. Even before then Laszlo and Tallulah are a weird couple. He’s a quiet shy dignified man trying to live his life quietly and simply whose biggest character traits are his persistence and perception. It’s hard to pull the wool over Laszlo’s eyes and for all the Daleks put him through an intelligence test and turn him into a grunt he’s often the smartest person in the room (because the Daleks judge by pure booksmart cleverness rather than the wisdom that comes from being round people?) There are a lot of swines in this story ironically, Laszlo isn’t one of them. Tallulah is an extrovert dancing girl in a Broadway show, in period slang she’s a broad, a dame. What the hell is he doing hanging round her dressing room? And why is she letting him? And how come Tallulah risks her life for someone she knows so little she doesn’t even recognise his voice when he’s a few feet away from her and she’s looking for him (sure Laszlo’s silhouette has changed but his voice sure hasn’t). These relationships aren’t unique I guess (I can point to lots of couples where opposites attract – and in the Whoniverse I could cheekily point to this pairing being a dead ringer for Peter Davison and Sandra Dickinson, right down to the squeaky voice and fake American accent!) but never, at any time, do we ever see any affection between them or a speech about what the other means to them. Instead it feels as if they barely know each other and haven’t got past the ‘leaving roses in the dressing room’ stage of their acquaintance; certainly Tallulah doesn’t know enough about Laszlo to even know where to start looking for him. For him to risk everything to come back and see her as a pig, when he’s likely to be locked p by scientists and dissected at best, is portrayed as being a sign of sweet romance when really it’s bordering on mental illness. It doesn’t help that the actors have absolutely zero chemistry and don’t even seem to be looking out for each other by story’s end. Although it’s still less annoying than Martha still making gooey eyes at the Doctor and one of the most perceptive people in the universe still being entirely oblivious to it (as for the modern gag about him being ‘into musical theatre’ i.e. gay, I’m amazed that one got past a showrunner so keen on representation in his show. For a start it’s wrong for the 1930s when the theatre was the only place hot-blooded men could see women showing off legs and cleavage without getting arrested). 

 The story also feels a tad unfair. The 1930s are a time of real human suffering, the first real time in modern civilisation when people began to think that their leaders were uncaring monsters who treated them as expendable rather than clever rich people who were better than you who were doing a hard job in difficult circumstances and things would all work out in the end. Making out that the misery of New York, at least. The lessons learnt following the Great depression, especially into the 1930s when things got steadily worse and nobody seemed to be able to do anything, was one of the hardest things mankind ever went through. The poverty, frustration and anger led to riots, fascism, World War Two and simmers to the present day is diluted when you give that s scifi twist. Especially one as obvious and everyday as having the Daleks involved. This is one of those historical stories that would have been so much better had it remained a strict historical all the way through, a story about what monsters man can be rather than Daleks. 

 Considering they’re in the title and have a whole pair of episodes to themselves without sharing room with gameshows and Cybermen and Rose as a God for the first time it’s frustrating there aren’t more actual Daleks here too. They get precious little to do except scheme against each other in a Dalek type way and while there’s a mass extermination at the end if you were new to this series and somehow missed their earlier appearances nothing in this story would have you scurrying behind the sofa. Instead the worst they do is nuzzle humans with their plungers to give them an intelligence test – which, if you were of the right age to be sitting your SATS exams when this story went out, seemed a far less painful and unfair process than the real thing all round. And they could have been doing lots: they are, after all, just as displaced, homeless and rudderless as the Hooverville shanty Humans, this is Daleks in uncomfortable territory but instead they’re being treated the same as ever, just with religious vibes. Giving the names also seems deeply wrong: I mean Dalek Caan, Dalek Sec, Dalek Thay and Dalek Jast sound like a K-pop (kill-pop?) band not the biggest killers in the universe. They really should have made more of the differences between Solomon and Diagoras too, how two people who’ve lived through much the same past take two very different routes, one becoming kinder and one becoming crueller, a plot element that’s sitting on a plate that everyone seems to miss. Some Daleks are so well drawn on screen that they get real ‘cults’ built up around them, but as hard they try to make Dalek Sec into a character he just never feels plausible. Even for a Dalek that’s gone a bit mad he’s, well, gone a bit mad and you would have thought the other Daleks would have exterminated him long ago before his idea of human hybrids got this far. By Dalek standards not a lot happens at all in part one: you’d think we’d get some running down Empire State corridors at least, but no: the only ‘action’ is the Daleks trundling in to Hooverville slowly. Instead we get a torturous finale set around the roof of the building and the Doctor trying to do clever things with a radio mast, something they make run twice as long by throwing in a scene where he drops his sonc screwdriver and thinks it’s all over till Martha somehow catches it and brings it back to him. We’ve had this before: ‘Logopolis’ and ‘The Idiot’s Lantern’ both featured big finales up towers and the last one of these was less than a year ago. In an elastic series, with an unlimited amount of scope for different plots, it’s bizarre we end up in the exact same scenario again – and the Doctor doesn’t even comment on it. And what about Martha? The plot relies on her understanding the psychic paper (which she’s never seen) and what the Doctor’s plan is (that he never tells her), somehow convincing a security guard to let herself, a showgirl still dressed in her dancer’s outfit and a pigman inside the president’s pet building project when everyone knows there’s an angry mob in the distance who think the workers on it are scabs and would gladly tear it down brick by brick. Even the Doctor never gets the psychic paper to work that well – what on earth did it say on it? 

 No wonder, then, that this is a rare modern Dalek story that generally comes bottom of the polls, give or take the odd Jodie Whittaker entry to come, but it’s not without worth. There are some scenes that really take flight here, particularly the understated, emotional ones unusual for a Dalek story. The shanty town scenes are excellent, brimming with tension and shame, and it helps that the best two guest actors are in these roles. Hugh Quarshie brings a quiet dignity to Solomon and a pre-‘Spiderman’ Andrew Garfield (who happens to be best pals with Matt Smith – this story is good practice for battling human-animal hybrids in upstate new York) is clearly one to watch, doing a lot with a very empty role. This is a strong episode for Tennant’s Doctor to do a lot of rushing around while spouting gobbledegook and looking noble, while the Doctor’s horror at the Daleks surviving and getting power when he loses everything works well in a story about the haves and have-nots of a topsy turvy world where the monsters often seem to win. He’s aghast at what Dalek Sec’s done to himself though, more for the Dalek than humanity and Tennant gets to show a quiet compassion even towards his greatest enemy that even Christopher Eccleston never had. Martha is the quiet heart of the episode with Freema Agyeman as under-rated as ever as she becomes the only ‘normal’ person in a crazy mixed up world, characteristically sweet and empathetic as she tries to be a Doctor and help everyone. It’s her response to Lazlo’s plight that helps calm the Doctor’s usual no-holds-barred response when he hears a mention of the name ‘Dalek’. Ryan Carnes copes admirably well with the thankless task of portraying Lazlo as a person not a man in a pig mask (he couldn’t believe it when he got offered the script: he’d grown up on a pig farm in Illinois and was legitimately the one-time under tens pig caller champion of his state!) and Miranda Raison just about gets away with Tallulah despite the fact that no real American ever talked like that. Eric Loren has the toughest job, doubling up as human architect Diagoras (surely named after the Olympic athlete of ancient Greece who, uniquely for the tie didn’t want to be praised as a divine vessel of God for his abilities but wanted to promote his DNA by having his children match his achievements) and Dalek Sec and trying to make them both sufficiently different. Which he does, but only by dint of making them both broad caricatures. Still what else could he do with a script like this? There are a lot of people going the extra mile to make this work, which might be why it just misses rather than one that’s utterly wretched like some stories at the bottom of my list. 

For once though, and perhaps the first time in the Russell era, the script is where it all goes wrong and it’s an idea they never should have tried, or at least not like this. I don’t think its Helen Raynor’s fault either - if anything she brought Russell’s brief to life more than an idea like this deserved to be. He throws in some great lines too: before Tallulah even knows what happen she’s providing us the ‘beauty and the beast angle’ by telling us ‘some men are real pigs I know, but not my Laszlo’, before we cut to the poor man transformed. The line that the Daleks ‘have no concept of worry’ when they clearly do (if only about the mental state of their leader) juxtaposed against the humans pretending everything’s fine, honest is also a great under-rated little line. There’s a lot of thought gone into this story about how to paper over the cracks of the idea and make it work. But you can’t make a purse out of a pig’s ear, even when it’s a pig-human hybrid. Sometimes a bad idea is still a bad idea however many good people try to make it work and while there’s a lot to love in these episodes there’s a lot that’s deeply frustrating too, from the showgirl scenes that seem to be there purely so Murray Gold gets to write another wretched song ‘My Angel Puts The Devil In Me’ (it’s a sign of the slapdash approach to this story that Russell insisted on Cole Porter’s ‘Anything Goes’ till it was pointed out that song wasn’t written for another four years after the 1930 setting and Murray had to write a song to a similar beat to fit the carefully choreographed number planned) to the pigmen to the finale that goes on a good ten minutes too long. This is a story that could have been so much more: had they ditched the pigmen and maybe even the Daleks this would have been a vastly better story with a lot of worthy things to say about humanity then and now. It’s a story that still has a lot of worthy things to say in fact, but those are scenes slotted in between the ‘real’ story, a story that’s just plain stupid. Most of all they miss the one reason there could have been for doing this story: explaining what the hell was going on in ‘The Chase’. Maybe that means there’ll be a third story in another thirty years or so explaining the events of this one?! 

POSITIVES + Dalek Sec is no Davros, but the idea of a half Dalek half Human mutant is a strong one and gives a whole new area for Dr Who to explore away from the usual ‘giving Daleks emotions directly’ plot. The fact that the other Daleks disagree and bicker and debate about whether it’s against Dalek oath to exterminate their leader make for a neat mirror with what’s happening in the shanty towns (as above in the Emprie State building, so down below) and throughout Raynor ‘gets’ that the Daleks better than many writers who treat them as evil tanks. These Daleks are intelligent scared jealous children with a chi on their shoulder baubles, annoyed that the world is getting something that could be theirs and who haven’t learned to share. The headpiece is one of the series’ more gruesome designs and the voice changer Dalek Sec toy was a surprisingly big hit considering his short time on TV. 

NEGATIVES - Dear Americans, we know you don’t really speak like this, either now or in the 1930s. Please just remember that there aren’t that many American actors over here willing to work for BBC wages and understand that this is how we feel every time an American actor, usually the baddy, fakes a British accent in one of your shows. To this day many casual American viewers don’t know that this story is meant to be in America and wonder which British county talks in that weird accent while having mini versions of Central Park and The Empire State Building in their neighbourhood. And why is it always raining in every scene as it we’re in Wales? 

 BEST QUOTE: ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses and maybe the odd pig-slave-Dalek-mutant-hybrid, too’. 

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