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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 isto
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 atby
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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