Monday, 17 July 2023

Revelation Of The Daleks: Ranking - 125

     Revelation Of The Daleks

(Season 22, Dr 6 with Peri, 23-30/3/1985, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Eric Saward, writer: Eric Saward, director: Graeme Harper)

Rank: 125

  'Welcome to Tranquil Repose and the DJ playing all your favourite hit songs to help you pass the time while you, uhh, pass. Let's see what the shuffle button has for you today...'Knockin' On heaven's Door', whoops no better not, you might get the wrong ideas... 'Ice Ice Baby', no better not Davros likes to get up and dance to that one and if he hurts himself he'll blame it on me...'The Doctor Who 'Talking 'Bout My Regenerations' whoops no that's been banned from up high...Let's try some classical music...Hmm 'My tiny hand is cyrogenically frozen', no can't play that ne either...'





 


 Colin Baker’s only Dalek story is a really unusual and quirky tale. Usually the Dalek stories, at least in the original 20th century series, are the DW stories that most follow a formula: a lot of shouting, a lot of escaping, a people in danger and a big finale. This story isn’t like that though – the Daleks are cunning, exploiting such human concepts as death and grieving as an excuse to lay a trap for he timelord. This is also a story very unlike any other Colin Baker story. Generally the stories from his all-too-short twin seasons in the Tardis follow a routine too: lots of pontificating, big epic speeches, blustering into a situation where he’s the focal of attention (I mean, what else was he going to be in that coat?) and pretending he knows everything, then trying to rescue either Peri or Mel who have invariably got lost somewhere along the way – usually without him noticing. Then there’s the usual Eric Sward scripts: heavy on the action, big on the battle sequences and as violent and bloodthirsty as anything seen in the series (even if most of them are meant to be anti-war diatribes). This one isn’t like that either: the death all happened long before the Tardis arrived and its a plot that’s about considering what it means to really be alive, rather than whose going to snuff it before the end credits. Most Dalek stories, Saward-era stories and most 6th Doctor stories between them are grandiose, big on drama and action and do-gooding speeches and low on subtlety. Not this one though which against all the odds is more thoughtful and reflective, where even the seemingly larger-than-life characters (like Davros, the DJ and even the Doctor himself) are shown to have a more melancholic, vulnerable side to them. Time and again this story does the opposite to what you expect. Far from being central to the story the Doctor and Peri don’t even arrive at the plot until halfway through and when they do far from being the big high adventurers of old she’s spooked by being on a graveyard planet (the nicely if falsely named ‘Tranquil Repose’ on the planet Necros), he’s deeply depressed by seeing what he thinks is his own gravestone (even more so when it apparently crushes him to death in the cliffhanger) and their only way in is to clumsily clamber over a wall. Hardly a big dramatic arrival. Of course, as things turn out, its all a big Davros trap, but one that shows a lot more forethought and cunning than the Daleks usually have – usually they just blindly assume they’re going to win despite all the past stories to the contrary but in this one they assume from the first that they’re going to lose. In some ways it all makes sense: one Doctor or another are always turning up to cause havoc and disrupt his plans so getting them out the way with a false adventure that gets the timelord exterminated is a great idea from a Dalek point of view. The problems is though...how do you set a trap for someone who keeps changing their face and passes time in the wrong order? Did the Daleks litter this planet with statues that looked like all thirteen Doctors? Did the 6th Doctor just happen to stumble on the right one that looked like him? Fair does if he doesn’t recognise his future selves, but he has a one in six chance of stumbling across an earlier Doctor and recognising them first. Peri gets the more interesting sub-plot with Alexei Sayle’s DJ, one of the better bits of JNT-era unexpected stunt casting as Sayle’s up to the challenge of being both wild and wacky (like his stage persona) and boringly normal (like, so its said, his real shy self), even if his only job in the script is to play records and shoot Daleks; not a bad day’s work all in all but hardly the deepest role in the galaxy (they asked Ringo and Roger Daltrey for the role too I hear). I love the dark and cynical reasoning behind the radio being played to a load of cyrogenically frozen dead bodies who will never hear it, which is only hospital radio taken to a logical conclusion, but I’ve always wondered why would anyone agree to pay for this? Money’s never really been a thing for daleks but they must have some set aside for story to work. Have they successfully plundered other worlds off-screen or has Davros been doing oil of ulay adverts in his spare time to pay for all this? Since quitting his job a year down the line Eric Saward’s commented a lot on how he thought the sixth Doctor was a ‘mistake’, from casting to character to costume (he wears a blue cloak over his pathcwork coat for a lot of this story) and you get the feeling he’d fed up of him to be honest and is far more interested in his supporting cast. Which is a shame because the best bits of this story are still the moments between the Doctor and Peri, a softer warmer more kidding than killing relationship than we’ve seen from them in the past. Also because that supporting cast is, Alexi aside, pretty limp: Eleanor Bron might be one half of the inspiration for ‘Eleanor Rigby’ after appearing in a film with The Beatles but here she needs more than ‘Help!’ to make the one-dimensional Kara come alive, Clive Swift is as awful as he was in ‘The Voyage Of The Damned’ 22 years later and his not-really-a relationship with Jenny Tomasin is pretty unconvincing too (goodness knows what she sees in him, he’s like Davros’ nastier younger brother, only not quite as handsome). Like so much of mid-1980s Who you can’t help but feel that the script is going for dark, cynical and edgy and the cast are going for light, fluffy and colourful, resulting in a story that feels weirdly off-kilter, like you’ve just seen a dark and gritty drama about custard-pie flinging or a postmodernist take on capitalism and death that’s supposed to be about, erm, Barbie dolls. For all that, though, the script’s a good one: lots of people are scheming against everyone else, there are lots of action sequences that aren’t just moments to break up the dialogue but which really advance the story and it really feels as if the Doctor might lose this battle. It is a plot, so people say, nicked wholesale Evelyn Waugh’s ‘The Loved One’ which the writer admitted reading on holiday, but other than the hospital-that-isn’t-a-hospital-but-a-morgue setting, it isn’t really (Waugh’s story is about a posh dude slumming it at a pet cemetery, which isn’t how I tend to think of Davros). Most of all, though, Necros feels like a ‘real’ world that existed long before the cameras started rolling, with lots of clever touches that make the planet and its people come alive, from blue being the national colour of mourning (as it is in most of the universe aside from Earth apparently), to the Davros-created mutation who comes out of the swamp at the start and proves to be more Human than any of the Humans we actually meet (John Nathan-Turner, always a producer with an eye for publicity, heard that Laurence Olivier was a DW fan who wanted to be on the show but wanted a part without anyone knowing it was him until in case he got laughed at by his RSC peers and the producer tried really, really hard to get him to play this role, even though it mostly consists of grunting and rolling around swamps). Overall while it lacks the final emotional punch of ‘Earthshock’ otherwise this is easily Eric Saward’s best work and in many ways Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant’s too, with lots of neat touches in design and costume and story (‘Vengeance On Varos’ is its only rival). Though it’s a little too quirky and convoluted to be one of the true Who classics and with a cast who should mostly have been exterminated and replaced, it’s still very very good, a neat twist on Dalek stories that are always about death and destruction by having most of the body count dead before we even reach the planet and raising a lot of interesting questions about how humans live their short lives and what they spend their money on during the long time they’re dead.


+ The DJ has the ‘skulls and roses’ poster for the Grateful Dead on his wall. Fantastic, this means the Dead exist in the DW universe and one day I might yet get my dream episode set in Haight Ashbury in 1967! Yippee!!!


- The ending is a bit of a cop out and for once the Doctor has precious little to do with it. As well as the Davros-Daleks on Necros a bunch of ‘purer’ Daleks from Skaro turn up and blame the others for not being Dalek enough, with the plot basically tuning into a gang war fare between two rival tribes. They have a point - I mean, the Daleks we’ve been following have been meddling with human concepts like grief after all - but it does come a bit out of nowhere in the final episode. The last we see of Davros in this story is him being wheeled off to stand trial on Skaro. Which is at least better than just having the Doctor shoot at him, like most Saward scripts, but for all it matters to the plot the Tardis needn’t have landed on Necros at all really – he and Peri are observers here, rather than active participants.

 

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