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
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 stories that most follow a formula: a lot of shouting,
a lot of escaping, lots of things exploding, 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 the
timelord. It’s a comedy, of sorts, laughing at the oddities and quirks of
human, though admittedly with great swathes of the cast exterminated most
people aren’t laughing by the end. It’s also a largely metaphorical,
existential tale where the Daleks exterminating people are really just a
backdrop to Davros’ desperation to cling on to life and by extension why the
rest of us do it too, with a story that (like ‘Attack
Of The Cybermen’ but more so) looks at the 1980s trend for rich people
cryogenically freezing themselves. Why bother, the story asks with a grim
chuckle, when you’re only going to die eventually anyway. Even The Doctor, so
used to ‘cheating’ death, comes face to face with his own mortality when his
own gravestone (apparently) galls on top of him (and it’s of his current
regeneration so he doesn’t have long left!)
Which writer could
possibly have created such an original quirky story? Well, that’s the real
‘revelation’ of the story because good gracious, no it can’t be…It is…Eric
Saward, the script editor responsible for writing the most formulaic 1980s
Dalek story of them all ‘Resurrection Of The
Daleks’. Saward, despite not liking the Daleks at all (or, indeed, Dr Who
much in this era when he keeps clashing with producer John Nathan-Turner)
offered to write another story: ‘Resurrection’, for all its faults, had been a
huge ratings boost and Dalek creator Terry Nation, though horrified at the
story, was pleased with the extra love and attention he was getting and happy
to let Eric write it. Saward felt it was unfinished business too: he’d been an
extra two years in the job now (given that ‘Resurrection’ was written for the
1983 season though not broadcast till 1984) and understand both the series and
The Daleks that much better and wanted to have another go. I do wonder, too, if
it was atonement of sorts of having the highest death count in Dr Who (78): this
story kills nearly as many (50ish?) but actually stops to mourn them and think
about what happens when we die and what that does to the people around us,
rather than being something that ‘happens’. Due to the strangest of
circumstances it ends up being the last script Eric writes for Dr Who (at least
on telly) and is easily his maturest and most thoughtful script, taking a leaf
from the man who had now become his favourite Who writer, Bob Holmes. To be fair,
too, both ‘Earthshock’ and ‘Resurrection’ were written under duress, at the end
of difficult years that had involved much re-writing, whereas ‘Revelation’ was
written under much gentler circumstances. You see, there was a problem: BBC
rules meant that script writers weren’t allowed to commission themselves and while they sometimes got away with it
(pleading difficult last minute circumstances if a script fell through) the
heads of the new writer’s guild were rather sticklers for following rules. New
heads that just happened to be Eric’s bête noirs Pip and Jane Baker, who would
have been only to eager to shop him after the clashes that went into making ‘The Mark Of the Rani’. So the production team hatched a plan, waiting
till Eric’s script writing contract ran out at the end of the year and giving
him three weeks off till issuing him a new ne. Eric was now, briefly, both
freelance and ‘free’ again and with nothing to stop him took off for s much
needed holiday on the island of Rhodes, with some reading material and a
notebook and pen to hand.
That reading material is
significant because it ended up inspiring quite a lot of what made it into the
story. It was Evelyn Waugh’s fairly obscure 1948 novel ‘The Loved One’, about a
Brit moving to Hollywood and being surprised at the differences in culture, all
centred round a pet cemetery. Not the most obvious reading it’s true, which
might be Saward nicked so much of it so freely, expecting nobody else would
notice: lots of the characters in this story have equivalents in the book, with
‘Joyboy’ the Brit turning into ‘Jobel’, with a sort of love triangle with a
plain girl called ‘Aimie’ turned into ‘Tasambaker’. Why Tasambeker? Well, Eric
also got lots of his character names and traits from the things he came across
on Rhodes: Tasembeker is the local saint on Rhodes, to whom childless couples
prayed for fertility (which makes sense if you twist the concept slightly to
someone so desperate to be loved they end up pushing people away). Orcini,
meanwhile, was inspired by the ‘Knights Hospitaller’ who ruled Rhodes in the 14th
and 15th centuries who Eric saw as fiercely independent and
relentless in their pursuit of their goals, much as Eric saw the character.
‘Stengos’ was the name of the man who ferried Eric around the island. The DJ
was inspired by a bored disc jockey Eric listened to during late night drives
during the ‘graveyard shift’, who acted as if he was talking to himself as no
one else was listening. ‘Necros’, the name of Saward’s new planet, is the Greek
word for ‘corpse’. Change the pets to people, throw in some Daleks and a DJ and
you basically have the same story: which, to be fair to Eric, is how a lot of
Holmes’ stories were made too (just with more obvious Hammer Horror elements).
The biggest influence,
though, is the feeling: like many a Waugh book it’s a satirical piece that can
either be read as it stands or read as an attack on a false way of human
living. ‘The Loved One’s big message is that it doesn’t matter how much tinsel
you put into the funeral ceremony or how great a person you were in life, death
is the great leveller and once you’re dead, you’re dead, no redos or
regenerations available. Notably no one in Hollywood will even refer to death:
they use euphemisms because thinking about the harsh inevitabilities of life
doesn’t fit the way they act and behave, but deny it all they will its there
waiting for them eventually. The people dead in the ground don’t know or care
what you’re doing on the surface and the traditions that go along with funerals
are for the people living more than the dead. It’s also a book that laughs at
the pointless rituals we have while we’re alive: Aimee stands out in the book
because she’s the only one brave enough to be ‘herself’ and everyone mocks her
for it, to the point of (spoilers) forcing her into suicide, just like
Tasambeker (the only character open about her feelings) sort-of does. She’s a
far more honourable character than any of the others though, who are all
two-faced, pretending to like people to their face then stabbing them in the
back. This spills over into Saward’s script, a world where everyone pays
audible tribute to the dead but is really living off their corpses. The script
is full of people who are only ‘pretending’, a neat and more intelligent twist on his usual ‘body double’ idea (of
both Cyber-converts and Dalek duplicates): Jobel strings people along and drops them when
they’re no longer needed with hints that he’s acting arrogant and being a hot
catch because he knows he’s a balding tiny ugly odious little man (his death
sequence reveals he’s wearin a wig), Kara acts like Davros’ perfect lackey but
really she’s toppling to overthrow him, the DJ (talking to an empty room full
of cryogenically frozen corpses who are fast asleep) has a ‘professional voice’
he keeps for work complete with fake American accent and even Davros himself
isn’t quite what he seems to be, playing the part of ‘The Great Healer’ despite
aiming to kill as many people as possible (spoilers: the head in a jar is all
for show). This makes the Daleks back to being cunning and ruthless again,
something Eric understands much better now than in his last script and they run
the show, pushing people into doing their bidding, with Davros even luring The
Doctor to Necros as part of an elaborate trap based around his own death (which
turns out to be one big red herring). That’s a clever way of doing a Dr Who
script and it’s well thought out, with by and large everyone ‘pretending’ in
episode one and revealing their true colours in episode two.
This is also the perfect
place to drop the 6th Doctor. He is, of all the regenerations to
date, the one who most seems to be ‘hiding’ his true self, with an inner
insecurity hidden behind layers of anecdotes boasts and theatrics someone who
wears a coat of many colours mostly because he’s afraid without it he won’t
stand out from the crowd. Saward was critical of both the coat (one of the best
features of his world-building is giving Necros a mourning colour of blue –
actually it was meant to be white, but it started snowing on location and the
cloak just disappeared on screen. Since quitting his job two years down the
line Eric’s commented a lot in interviews (including a famously damning on in
‘Starbust’ where everyone involved in Dr Who winds up sounding psychopathic) on
how he thought the sixth Doctor was a ‘mistake’, from casting to character to
costume and you get the feeling he’s fed up of him to be honest and is far more
interested in his supporting cast, so he keeps the regulars out of the action
for half the story, preferring to write for his incidental characters and even
has his ‘newbies’ be rude to the Doctor (such as Jobel claiming it would take
more than a hundred foot tombstone to ‘crush an ego like yours’, while Peri’s
comments on The Doctor’s weight were reportedly real things Eric overheard JNT
say to Colin; this was not a happy place to work in 1985). Which is a shame
because the best bits of this story are still the moments between the Doctor
and Peri. However that’s a shame because Colin is more than up to it and gives
one of his most rounded performances, gentler in his spats with Peri (which is
now more like gentle teasing from siblings who are fond of each other, rather
than bitter enemies), with a sad melancholic opening full of existential
despair as The Doctor ‘retires’ and takes up fishing, horror at Davros’ plan
and a real sense of mourning and loss when he fears Peri has been killed far deeper and more ‘real’ than any action
he’s been called on to give before (certainly far different to anyone’s
reaction in ‘Resurrection’); the faker the people around him go the more ‘real’
The Doctor gets. They should have trusted Colin with this sort of thing
earlier. As for Peri, she doesn’t get as much to do but at least she’s back to
being a rounded person again rather than a cipher. Saward gets in a great joke
about fakeness there too (‘Is that your real accent?’ asks The DJ ‘I hope so’
says Nicola Bryant nervously), while Peri finally gets to use her botany skills
and bond over American music with the DJ.
Ah yes, good old rock and
roll. Something that very much wasn’t in Waugh’s novel (not least because it
hadn’t been ‘invented’ yet) Saward writes it in as a symbol of everything
that’s ‘real’. There’s no pretending in rock music (and it’s very much rock not
pop for a change, though weirdly there’s a bit of jazz in there) – the best of
it is pure feeling that makes you feel ‘alive’. Much as some fans don’t
understand why a DJ has been hired to play music to a bunch of dead corpses,
that’s the ‘joke’ – only the dead are listening anymore to what it means to be
truly ‘alive’. And that’s a very Dr Who message that isn’t in the Waugh novel.
The fact that the music is turned on Davros via a ‘sonic beam’ and rock and
roll socks it to the man (well, the Kaled mutant I guess) is a great moment.
There’s a sense here too, though, of the hippie dream in decay, now that we’ve
reached the mid-1980s and the era of Thatcherism and Reaganism is beginning to
bite (the nemesis of the 1960s dream in so many ways). You might recall, if
you’ve read any of about half the Hartnell reviews that touch on it, that Dr
Who started as a sort of safe discussion middle ground between kids and their
parents about what sort of a world they were going to inherit. Was the fact
they were moving away from armies and invasions towards peace and kindness a
good thing or did it just make them all wimps? (see ‘The Space Museum’ for an example of the
former and ‘The Dominators’ for
the latter). Though not as bald a metaphor as ‘The Greatest Show In The Galaxy’
will be, this story gets there first by pointing out the joyous tolerant equal
universe Dr Who promised us really isn’t happening. A generation turned out to
be ‘day trippers’ paying lip service to such ideals and had allowed the ‘wrong’
people to get into power. Even The Beatles, in this era, feel as far away from
their young selves as they ever were: John’s dead (the general view is he was
murdered by a ‘fan’ in a sign of the hippie community broken down, who wasn’t
really a fan and never owned a Beatle album till the week he did it), George is
a recluse, Ringo’s an alcoholic and Paul has just released ‘The frog Song
Chorus’. Nobody but nobody, witting down to watch ‘An Unearthly Child’ after
playing the latest Beatles record, could ever have imagined we’d have ended up
here just twenty years later. We’ve become a nation, a generation of people
kowtowing and paying lip service to ideals we don’t believe in, because in a
time of recession it’s the only way to keep our jobs and food on the table.
We’ve stepped away from everything the 1960s once stood for and become a nation
of race riots (The Daleks are back talking about ‘purity’ again), of
capitalists (everyone turns a blind eye to the fact that everyone is literally
eating the dead here on Necros) and warmongers (while ‘resurrection’ seems to
relish death, despite being an ‘anti-war’ story, there’s no glamour about death
here: all the soldiers, including the Daleks fighting a civil war, have put
their beliefs ahead of their respect for life). Death comes cheap in this
world, where everyone is looking for number one – the opposite of rock and roll
and it’s shared sense of community (though they can’t get the rights to the
Grateful Dead it might be significant they use a poster, perhaps the biggest
musical ‘community’ of the 1960s based around one band; the music they do use
include ‘fake’ Elvis covers, fake Beach Boys covers, weirdly enough the real
Ted Heath Orchestra and surprisingly enough real Hendrix – on first broadcast
and in the blu-ray anyway, it’s replaced for the VHS and DVD, all tracks
treated to some extra Radiophonic Workshop ‘whooshing’ noises to sound more
‘alien’. For once the ‘fakeness’, due to licensing costs, only adds to the
message of the story about not being ‘real’). Rock and roll, that once real
thing, is a dying brand spoken only to the dead now – to survive on this
ruthless planet where nothing is as it seems and everyone wants your job you
have to be fake or die. Though we’re on an alien planet in an unspecified date
in the future (enough of a future for Humans to have spread across the universe
anyway) this couldn’t be more like
Thatcher’s Britain if everyone was clutching an unemployment form and dressed
in neon leg-warmers and shoulder pads.
This story, then, has a
very different feel to any of the stories around it: only ‘Vengeance On Varos’ is telling anything
like the same sort of damning portrayal of contemporary society and that one’s
not subtle about it the way this one is, a story that makes you work for what
it’s trying to say. Generally the stories from Colin’s all-too-short twin seasons
in the Tardis follow a routine: lots of pontificating, big epic speeches and
the 6th Doctor 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
either: the death mostly 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), while
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. Traditionally
fans tend to love the first episode (when everyone’s acting oddly) and aren’t
that keen on the second (when things go back to normal) but for me they’re a
pair: the whole point of this story is that you can’t pretend to be someone
you’re not forever. Everyone in this story gets penalised for pretending to be
something they’re not – even The Doctor, if you count the brief moment he
really truly honestly thinks Peri is dead this time. The moral of the story?
Always be yourself.
Of course, as things turn
out, it’s 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 fifteen-and-counting Doctors? Did the 6th Doctor just
happen to stumble on the right one that looked like him and there are others
looking like Hartnell or Ncuti out there just out of shot? Fair dos 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. There are a few
other issues too: I love the dark and cynical reasoning behind the radio being
played to a load of cryogenically 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 seem oddly obsessed by it here, using dead bodies to
make moolah, though equally they don’t seem to have been here long enough for
such fripperies as radio broadcasting. They must have some set aside for
this 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? Equally how did Davros
escape from the Movellan virus that had definitely killed him, honest in ‘Resurrection’?
Alas, too, this script
doesn’t really come over on screen. Like ‘Resurrection’ this story is oddly
cast with a very mixed success. It’s great to see Eleanor Bron back again,
another of the story’s close Beatle links (she was the love interest in their
second film ‘Help!’) but she’s playing against type as a ruthless backstabber and can’t quite get
the part (nice to see her properly after her cameo at the end of ‘City Of Death’ though). Alec Linstead, as
Stengos, is odd casting (you might remember him better as Osgood Senior in ‘The Daemons’). Hugh Walters, playing
Vogel, is even weirder casting (you might remember him as William Shakespeare
in ‘The Chase’).Colin Spaull (Lilt) ditto (you
might remember him as Mr Crane from ‘Rise Of The
Cybermen/Age Of Steel’). Also
Trevor Cooper (Takis) who makes a much better Friar Tuck in ‘Robot Of Sherwood’. Clive Swift is just awful, missing all the
subtleties in the script (no surprise if you come to this after his interview
damning Whovians – see ‘Voyage Of the Damned’
for more). Terry Molloy continues to be a decent Michael Wisher substitute and
gets the most out of Davros, making him more mobile this story, with Roy
Skelton back for the Dalek voices so at least they ‘sound’ right. It’s Jenny
Tomasin as Taswembeker who gets the most mixed reaction: certainly Jonathan
Powell (taking over from Michael Grade as head of BBC serials) thought she was
awful and demanded a newe edit that cut some of her scenes out. But isn’t she
meant to be? Tasembeker is, surely, a candidate, for one of the most thankless
roles in Dr Who ever: she’s meant to be a whiny, passive, pathetic creature,
one worships Jobel so only that she can’t see that it puts him off her. What
else are you supposed to do with a role like that? (Although, admittedly, you
don’t feel the sting of her ‘revenge’ as deeply as you should, as Jenny plays
it in the exact same way, rather than the moment Tasembeker finds her
‘voice’). 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. There was nearly another unexpected
cast member too, at least in JNT’s head: he’d got talking to none other than
Lawrence Olivier, who was by now semi-retired but admitted he had used to love
Dr Who and might be coaxed out of retirement for one last cameo, assuming it
was small, was filmed on location (he hated the way he looked on TV studio
film) and that there was no advance publicity. JNT cooked up just the thing: a
horribly disfigured mutant who came out of a freezing cold pond to cough up
some plot exposition and rolled around in a swamp before dying. Officially
Olivier never gave a reply; unofficially he laughed and turned the idea down
(he wasn’t getting in a lake for anybody!) This sequence is, incidentally, the
last bit of Dr Who taped on film until the McGann TV
Movie and the last time we have a story that switches between the two
standards of indoor and outdoor broadcasting, a true end of an era that
stretches back all the way to the show’s first year.
There’s one bit of surprise stunt casting that actually works for once. JNT realised early on that the DJ part was a role ripe for publicity and offered it to all sorts of actor-musicians and comedians: David Bowie, Jasper Carrott, Rik Mayall, Roger Daltrey, even Ringo just to ram that point about The Beatles home; Jimmy Savile was considered but, thankfully, not asked. They were getting rather desperate by the time they offered it to Alexie Sayle and JNT was more than a bit nervous: he’d read Sayle’s hilarious article ‘Why I Should Be The New Doctor Who’ about the importance of having a Marxist in the Tardis published in the November 1984 edition of ‘Foundation’, a left-wing publisher and taken it seriously rather than tongue-in-cheek. For what it’s worth the point Sayle was making, as a long lived Whovian, was heartfelt: the series had betrayed its ‘roots’ by becoming another safe adventure series, casting ‘celebrity actors’ like Peter Davison and Colin Baker rather than unknown subversives like Tom Baker, with stories that had moved away from the 1960s ideal of socking it to the man. However it was done in an affectionate, jokey way: K9, for instance, is described as ‘the one true Marxist character’ (because he always tells the truth), while timelords were referred to as ‘typical rightwing authority figures’, while the closing promise to ‘march to TV studio 8 at BBC TV centre with a bunch of mercenaries, unemployed Daleks and revolutionaries’ was never intentional. Sayle, who loved any and all science fiction could also be seen spoofing ‘Time Tunnel’ on his TV series, renamed ‘Drunks In Time’ as he fell through time and space in a drunken heap after one too many nights out with his friend (played by another scifi actor friend, none other than Peter Capaldi). JNT, though, famously, didn’t have much of a sense of humour. Saward persuaded him though, recognising that this was exactly the sort of story Sayle belonged in and that his article was saying much the same as this story: that Dr Who had got lost somewhere along the way since the 1960s (if only because the world had got lost too). He’s a, well, a ‘revelation’, nailing both the shy ‘real’ DJ born too late for the ‘good old days’ (a rare actor believable in both hippie garn and the sort of rocker leathers Christopher Eccleston will wear as the 9th Doctor) and the OTT exaggerated performance as the DJ (he was too shy to perform this way in rehearsals, panicking JNT so much he was nearly replaced). Given that the DJ is a reminder of everything humanity once stood for and all that was lost, yet still takes a stand and socks it to Davros even though he knows its going to get shim killed, makes this the perfect character for him to play.
The result, then, is a
really strong story that somehow never quite comes alive on TV, thanks to the
arch performances, weird costumes and the bonkers sets (by now budget was
running tight so the sets for Tranquil Repose’ were cobbled together out of
anything handy). On the plus side 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 to Davros’ supporting ‘team’ who all secretly want his job (is it
going too far to say that Davros is Thatcher for the purposes of this story?)
It all looks really good, filmed in Portsmouth (Bolinge Hill Farm, Queen
Elizabeth County Park, Tangmere Aerodrome and the IBM North Harbour Building,
which became ‘Tranquil Repose’ with the ‘Garden Of Fond Memoires’ located in
their car park, with actors and crew chaperoned to make sure they didn’t pinch
any ‘secret technology’; they gave their filming fee to a local school where
Colin Baker later presented the cheque in person during his time off) for a
change and making good use of a sudden unexpected snowstorm one that meant the
diesel in the BBC trucks froze over and their usual equipment had to be taken
by tractor).It’s a decent story for Davros, The Daleks aren’t in it enough but
are at least back to their scheming best and The Doctor and Peri, though late
to the party, are well catered for. The serious message at the heart of this
story too is the sort of thing Dr Who had never done before and which still
felt like the sort of thing it should be doing (and even if much of it is down
to Waugh rather than Saward it’s still a less blatant steal than, say, ‘The
Brain Of Morbius’ is from Frankenstein).
However there’s still
something hollow deep down in this story, as it’s hard to care for any of these
characters or feel for them when they snuff it. The story starts off being
about cryogenics (and saward’s starting point, of wondering why you would want
to live in a world where you were out of touch with everything, from technology
to people and whether that would be living) turns into as gruesome horror show
and then a backstabbing crime thriller, without really getting to grips with
any of the three stories and not always that smoothly. Davros has lost his head
and not just because it’s in a jar – he doesn’t act the way we’re used to,
becoming a capitalist factory boss more than a megalomaniac scientist. The
trouble with doing existential stories is that you still need a physical threat
for the cliffhangers. In a story with only one it has to be good and while the
gravestone toppling onto The Doctor is a brilliant meta moment in a story about
wondering about mortality, the resolution to it the next week (oh it was just
made of plyboard) is one of the biggest cop outs the show ever had (it could
have been worse: it was shot with blood – fake blood as it turns out – but JNT
panicked about Mary Whitehouse type responses and cut it out). In pure
emotional terms ‘Earthshock’ is better and sells the threat more, while
‘Resurrection’ is better made, for all of Graeme Harper’s good ideas (such as
filming The Daleks from below or above, to make them seem spooky, while the
Glass Dalek looks really good – it’s actually a David Whittaker invention from
the first ever Who novelisation ‘Dr Who In An Exciting Adventure With The
Daleks’ they’ve never been able to afford to put on television before). The
overall theme, of people becoming food and cannibalism, was done better and
more horribly in ‘The Two Doctors’ just two stories earlier (though nothing
else about that story really ‘worked’) while more than a few people pointed out
the similarities to 1973 film ‘Solyent Green’, which is basically the same
story of food as fuel without the Daleks (though Saward claims to have never
seen it and I believe him too: it’s the sort of plot more than one writer could
come up with and Who does it better). The pacing, too, isn’t quite there: you
have to sit through long periods of nothing happening (especially in episode
one) then so much happens you can’t keep up with it (there’s a reason why this
was the last episode broadcast in 45 minute chunks – it never quite worked).
For all the flaws though,
‘Revelation’ is easily Saward’s best work, a story that might not always get the
details right but asks the awkward difficult questions this show should always
ask even with the occasional lame bit of dialogue and is so much better in so
many ways than his other two it’s hard to believe they’re by the same writer. 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, a story
that’s even more original and damning of the 1980s). 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. It is, indeed, a
‘revelation’ (a title Saward picked after his original ‘The End Of The Road’
was turned down in the wake of the hiatus announcement and someone – probably Ian
Levine - pointed out that both ‘Genesis’
and ‘Resurrection’ had Biblical titles. Thankfully they’ve dropped this strand
before we get, say, ‘Letter To The Corinthian Of The Daleks I’ although I for
one am itching to write ‘Deuteronomy Of The Daleks’ for the title alone). Though not a top tier classic it’s still a
blooming good story and shows that Michael Grade’s decision to ‘rest’ the show
(actually an outright cancellation, till 80,000 fans blocked the BBC phonelines
in protest; friends were roped in from everywhere to answer calls, including a
passing Patrick Troughton) was completely wrong: Dr Who had found its feet
again. Unfortunately, once it’s put on ‘trial’, things are about to go wrong
for real and instead of going to ‘B….’ at the end of the story (intended to be
‘Blackpool’, to lead into the already written ‘Nightmare Fair’ – see ‘The
Mysterious Planet’ for more about the season we might have got, but
freeze-framed when the show’s future was in doubt; the actual last shot was
intended to be the Doctor and Peri walking off into the sunset, but the snow
was so bad that shot had to be dropped, symbolically) now everything about he
who was up in the air. Including its future, it’s freedom and it’s quality.
After all ‘Revelation’ is the last book in the Bible…
POSITIVES + The DJ has
the ‘skulls and roses’ poster for the Grateful Dead on his wall. Fantastic, this
means the Dead exist in the Whoniverse and one day I might yet get my dream
episode set in Haight Ashbury in 1967! Yippee!!!
NEGATIVES - 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 (and
while I’ll buy the theme of ‘Dr Who can’t put things right the way he used to
in his old days’ it’s an idea that doesn’t quite work).
BEST QUOTE: Dr: ‘But
did you bother to tell anyone they might be eating their own relatives?’
Davros: ‘Certainly not! That would have
created what I believe is termed consumer resistance’.
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: There
was one bone thrown Dr Who’s way when the show was ‘rested’ – a radio series
broadcast roughly four months after the broadcast of ‘Revelation’. It was,
well, a revelation: odd to say now there are hundreds if not a thousand Big
Finish Dr Who audios but it had never been done on radio before and a lot of
people wondered if it would even work without all the visuals. There had been a
standalone vinyl record in ‘The Pescatons’ and a very obscure radio broadcast
‘Exploration Earth’ not to mention the best-selling chopped-up TV soundtrack of
‘Genesis Of The Daleks’ all 4th Doctor stories from the 1970s, but
they all felt like spin-offs, extras to the main course. At the time of
‘Slipback’ fans weren’t all that sure Dr Who was going to come back on TV at
all; this felt like the future as well as a bit of a downward step. Inevitably
‘Slipback’ became something of a whipping boy for fandom, mostly because it didn’t
quite sound like Dr Who. It was broadcast in the then children’s slot ‘Pirate
Radio Four’ at a time when the show was at its most adult, so that was weird.
It was broadcast in six ten minute chunks after the TV series had extended the
running time from 22ish minutes to 45, which felt even weirder – every time the
story gets going there’s a cliffhanger. And the whole style was most peculiar:
it’s the one TV story of the 1980s where the creative team didn’t have John
Nathan-Turner breathing down their necks so script editor Eric Saward gets to
indulge in copying one of his favourite writers – no not Bob Holmes
surprisingly but Douglas Adams, with many fans commenting that Slipback’s
comedy computers and ironic guards sounded as if they came straight out of
‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’ (while little did anyone know it at the
time but it’s a dead steal of the interactive computer game Douglas was trying
to get made, ‘Starship Titanic’, which was finally released in 1998 and very
confusing it is too; even when Terry Jones’ novelisation came out I still
couldn’t work out how to get past halfway through the game when the talking
bomb kept not quite blowing itself up and I got sat on by a parrot. Yep, one of
those games).
With all the love in the world Eric is not the next
Douglas (just as he isn’t the next Bob) and the storyline, about a
schizophrenic computer that’s taken over a starship and tried to take it back
to the time of the Big Bang while everyone is on the run from a ferocious
animal called a Maston, feels deliberately made to feel confusing and
disorientating. In the context of the time, when fans were calling for Dr Who
to be bigger and more adult, this little peace offering was only ever going to
stir the flames. Time has been kind to this quirky little oddball though. We’re
more used to hearing Dr Who rather than seeing it So much 1980s Dr Who is stiff
and trying a bit too hard but ‘Slipback’ is a breeze, a lot of fun that’s never
meant to be anything other than silly. Because everyone important is looking
the other way ‘Slipback’ manages to do things they could never have gotten away with on telly: there’s a whole
scene where the Doctor and Peri get blind drunk on the drink Voxnik for
instance, a dead crib of the Fitzroy Tavern near BBC centre where Dr Who alumni
traditionally hung out. Colin Baker proves to be a brilliant audio Doctor far
more comfortable than he is on telly – where he sometimes seems awkward in
person he really knows how to throw his voice at a character and seems far more
nuanced, with a much happier relationship with Peri, more like the one’s we’ll
get across ‘The Trial Of A Timelord’ (it helps that we can’t see the 6th
Doctor’s coat). Nicola Bryant is having a lot of fun being exasperated too,
while the main guest star Valentine Dyall as the baddy Slarn is far more subtle
and entertaining than The Black Guardian ever was (sadly the veteran actor died
a mere fortnight after broadcast, with this his very final acting part in
anything). No ‘Slipback’ is not the future and from the title alone is indeed a
‘slip backwards’ and would never have been a future that would have lasted very
long, but it’s quite an entertaining cul-de-sac if you’re not expecting
anything special. Eric wrote a novelisation of it for Target in 1986 that at
one time used to be the easiest way to find this story (despite being reportedly
one of Target’s lowest sellers, along with some later Hartnell stories) and
given the extra space expanded on the story quite a bit without the need for
endless cliffhangers, so it remains in many ways the definitive way to
experience it if you’re after purely the story. However the story was finally
issued on CD in 2010 so it’s much easier to find and hearing the ‘right’ voices
and the weird sound effects is much more fun (my old battered copy was a
cassette double-pack with ‘Genesis’ released in 1988).
‘Davros’ (2003) is the straightforward name given to
number #48 in the Big Finish main range and was his first appearance away from
the BBC version, played by Terry Molloy just as in ‘Revelation’. The story is a
sort of prequel, set between ‘Resurrection’
and ‘Revelation’ with Davros imprisoned by The Daleks and executed early in the
story (now there’s an opening!) He’s not quite dead though, just in a coma, as
a couple of corpse stealers find out to their cost (one of whom is Wendy Padbury,
doing a good job of playing a character about as far from Zoe as its possible
to get). There’s a clever bit of continuity where Davros is rebuilt by his
acolytes imperfectly, with a faulty larynx (which is why he doesn’t sound like
he did when he was Michael Wisher or David Gooderson!) Meanwhile who should
arrive but the 6th Doctor, apparently pre-‘Revelation’ too after
leaving Peri on some unspecified planet, oblivious to the fact his mortal enemy
is hovering about Skaro in a spaceship, accidentally waking him when Davros
hears and recognises his voice. A new regime is on Skaro now and on waking Davros
has become legendary, greeted as the planet’s saviour. Unable to make anyone
listen to his worries about who this patient really is, The Doctor decides to
work undercover as Davros’ assistant (!), subtly sabotaging his work rebuilding
Daleks while secretly manipulating his enemy into becoming his assistant (and
even making him tea at one point!) The story then follows ‘Genesis’ to the
letter, a tale of politics, power
struggles and exterminations, until Davros’ inevitable fall from grace where he
ends up fighting for his life again (and quite possibly dead, or so The Doctor
thinks to maintain the continuity). It’s quite a wordy audio adventure as Big
Finishes go, with no Daleks for once in a Davros story, yet not actually that
much Davros either despite the title: he’s asleep for the first quarter of this
story and more of a ranting caricature than, say, the three-dimensional
scientist of the superlative ‘I, Davros’ range. It’s great to hear Terry back
in the role though and his scenes crossing swords and words with Colin are the
highlights of an uneven adventure.
Finally it’s
a fond farewell to our old friend ‘Time and Time Again’ (1993), the
time-travelling 30th anniversary comic strip from Dr Who Magazine
issue #207. The 7th Doctor is trying to retrieve items from his past
to make sure that his timelines stay intact when The Black Guardian tries to
change them. His meeting with the 6th Doctor at the start of ‘Revelation’
is the easiest of the lot, catching him by the river side. The 6th
Doctor’s in a grumpy mood. ‘Can’t I even catch a grumblejack in peace?’ he
sighs, down in the dumps and morosely asking if having the timelines changed so
he’s stuck on Gallifrey would make much difference. The 7th Doctor tells him that the
alternate future results in ‘terrible things’ but the 6th Doctor
thinks his older self is ‘selfish’. ‘You just think it’s up to you to save the
universe’ he says before the 7th Doctor retorts that he’s not the
one going around killing fish. ‘You hunt for much bigger game’ retorts Sixie
‘And we both use live bait’. The 6th Doctor hands over one of his
cat badges from the lining of his coat but adds rather sadly ‘The universe
would go on you know, it would just be different. What’s wrong with that?’
Previous ‘Timelash’ next ‘The
Mysterious Planet’
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