Remembrance Of The Daleks: Ranking - 88

      Remembrance Of The Daleks

(Season 25, Dr 7 with Ace, 5-26/10/1988, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Andrew Cartmel, writer: Ben Aaronovitch, director: Andrew Morgan)

Rank: 88

   'Now where did I put the hand of Omega? Ah yes here it is - in between the nose of Rassillon and the toe-nail clippings of Borusa'

In 1988 Dr Who turned 25 years old. A quarter of a century! Even though, as all good DW fans know, time is relative it seemed extraordinary that this daft little series about rebellion and outsiders, that was only thought might last 13 weeks, had itself become an institution. This big birthday should have been a big occasion, a huge spectacle that made the world notice it again, but somehow it wasn’t. BBC controller Michael Grade’s continuous sniping at DW (nothing to do with marrying Colin Baker’s ex Liza Goddard from ‘Terminus’, oh no), the much publicised 18 month ‘rest’, the refusal to put anything in the advertising budget (the show was passed over for a Radio Times cover even with the mega-sales of the 10^th and 20^th anniversary issues – something tells me Michael Grade had a word there too!) and putting the show on against Coronation Street meant that the viewing figures had really fallen off to the point where only diehard fans were watching by now – mostly because diehard fans were the only people who still realised the show was on. (Well, the diehard fans and me! Episode one is where I came in and the first DW I ever saw. Only I was too young and the Daleks going up stairs in the cliffhanger gave me nightmares so I wasn’t allowed to watch another for years. Trust me to come in at the point where many fans agree things started getting scary again). Even though nobody saw it, though, DW was really finding it’s feet again in season 25 and ‘Remembrance’ does everything it possibly can to remind people of how brilliant this show is at its best. Had people tuned in for the first time in a while they’d have seen surprised at how this series still had all the hallmarks of the show they remembered (Dalek battles! Eccentric timelords! Davros!) but also how many differences there were (this companion only sprains her ankle after leaping out of a science classroom having beaten up a Dalek with a baseball bat!) For once JNT, usually so very very good at publicity whatever his faults in other areas, really messed up: even when the papers did pick up on the show’s 25^th anniversary the ‘official’ story for that was was ‘Silver Nemesis’ (because Cybermen are silver y’see) rather than ‘Remembrance’. ‘Nemesis’ is an under-rated story in its own right that tries to break a lot of new ground – albeit only some of it successfully – but ‘Remembrance’ is a real celebration of everything DW and features everything people think of when they think of DW from all eras: there’s our first return to Coal Hill School (setting of the first story ‘An Unearthly Child’) since 1963, there’s a Dalek Invasion of Earth like one of the most seen (and talked about) DW stories from 1964, the school ends up as one more base under siege where a surviving outpost of humanity take their last stand like the Troughton days of 1966-1969, the Dr befriends some local soldiers like the 3^rd Dr days and Davros turns up again, just as he had for Drs 4 through 6. However the best parts of ‘Remembrance’ are the parts no one could remember because the show had never thought to do before: this is our first real sign of the 7^th Dr as a scheming chess-player, several steps ahead of his enemies and with an eye on the bigger picture, prepared to use the people around him as pawns if need be, Sylvester McCoy’s comedy jester replaced by a Dr with a cruel and ruthless streak. The companion, too, is no wallflower – this is only Ace’s second story but she already gets the definitive DW companion battle scene of them all, with baseball bat. She’s not just a fighter though: ‘Ace’ feels like a real teenager too, with a complex troubled background that makes her actions almost as unpredictable as the Doctor’s. This story is about more than just nostalgia too though: if there’s a central message to ‘Remembrance’ its about how (to quote JNT from another context) ‘the memory cheats’: for many fans 1963 had come to be seen as a ‘golden age’ full of exciting possibilities before the world went flat and DW went flatter; in reality it was really just another age in transition. As cosy as it might have been to have made 1963 a paradise for the 25^th anniversary, this is the 1963 before The Beatles (and indeed Dr Who) became big and moved the world from monochrome to technicolour, bringing hope and possibilities and togetherness. This is a poverty stricken England still suffering from the after-effects of WW2 and the people we meet are as divided as any people we ever meet living under Dalek occupation, still counting the cost of everything they’ve survived in much the same way as the Thals back in the early days. The strongest moments of this story aren’t the high octane action ones but the character moments as the Dr and Ace wander round London in 1963 interacting with people. Ben Aaronvitch's script packs no punches: Ace is horrified at all the casual racism (unlike her era, where most people are open-minded but there’s always a few causing all the trouble) and the amount of prejudiced right-wingers openly walking around, which makes for a fitting comparison with the Daleks and their obsession with purity (their creator Terry Nation always equated them with Nazis). After all, only in 1988 did technology come far enough to show a Dalek climbing upstairs – something that DW had been much mocked for down the years (and which most people assumed had been invented by new-Who in 2005; like I say, not many people were still watching this series by 1988). There’s a swagger about this story, as if it knows it can get away with things previous eras of DW could only hint at and not say out loud, Ben Aaronovitch’s ambitious script finding a likeminded soul in script editor Andrew Cartmel. Had this been the pilot for a whole new series, rather than the latest ignored story in a series that had fallen out of favour, it would surely have run for another 25 years easily – there’s just so much going on across these four episodes working on so many different layers for old fans and newcomers like me alike. All that said, ‘Remembrance’ is not perfect. This is the era when scripts were too long and detailed to fit into 100minutes and this one suffers from that more than most. As great as this story is for the Dr and Ace, its not such a good one for the Daleks who despite being able to levitate now are just another tin-can army stuck in their ways rather than the giant threats of yesteryear or tomorrow – if you were new to all this there’s nothing in this story that shows why the Daleks are any greater a threat than, say, The Gods Of Ragnarok, Gavrok or The Kandy Man to choose the surrounding baddies, maybe not The Kandy Man...). Just watch it back to back with the next Dalek story (called, umm, ‘Dalek’) which re-introduced the Skaro metal meanies for a whole new audience by showing just how damage one of them could do – here a whole army don’t actually get to do that much. The plot element of the ‘Hand Of Omega’, so its hinted planted by the 1^st Dr in 1963 before Ian and Barbara barge into the Tardis and he takes off in fright kick-starting the series, ought to be the single biggest revelation since we found out the Dr could regenerate: instead its a minor script element, never properly explained and rather fudged away (I mean, he’shad six regenerations where he could come back and put it right since then and it makes it even weirder that he should be so annoyed with two schoolteachers that he should kidnap them rather than try to stall for time). The Dr’s ruthless extermination of Davros and Dalek army, while in keeping for this darker regeneration, feels out of place amongst the back-slapping celebrations and most of the showdown with Davros takes place off screen anyway with a touch of the Dr’s latest gadget (a particular shame because of all the Dr’s foes Davros is perhaps the most single-minded and straightforward; seeing him up against the most complex and devious Dr ought to be something to savour). For the longest time it feels as if the Coal Hill School, setting is going to be more central to the plot than it is; instead it just ends up being the place where the action happens (and that’s not the same thing at all). More than that, this story loses a lot of the whimsy, imagination and courage that were the only things making it worth watching across season 24 (old Who’s most difficult season to sit through in so many ways). Even so that’s all overshadowed by what this story gets right compared to where the show was at just ten months earlier: Andrew Cartmel has been able to craft his ideas from scratch rather than playing catch-up and his vision for the show deserved to rescue it from the doldrums: this is a Dr whose unpredictable and more than just a comic stooge, with a companion who (with no offence to Bonnie Langford, well OK a little) feels real and multi-dimensional, an empathic lost little soul whose learnt how to cover up and be tough (in much the same way the Daleks have), running amok in a script full of surprises, explosions, emotion and humour that both celebrates its illustrious past sincerely and shows why the show might now be better than ever. The chasm between previous story ‘Dragonfire’ and this story is big enough to fly a Tardis through. Inside out. In other words I couldn’t have chosen a better story to start with. Even the nightmares were worth it.

+ That first episode cliffhanger, which was scary enough the first time but hits differently when you’re not six and new to the Whoniverse. You think Ace is safe. She is, after all, the one with the baseball bat and she’s not afraid to use it. All she has to do to escape it is run up a flight of stairs. But Michael Sheard’s headmaster (and yes, he was the headmaster on ‘Grange Hill’ too; this is another story that had fans totally thinking The Master was about to turn up!) has been possessed and locks Ace in. We still think she’s safe as long as she can duck. Then behind her the Dalek then, almost nonchalantly, does something we’ve never seen them before and which even the 4^th Dr used as a gag to beat the Daleks over the head with: after all, how can a creature without legs climb stairs? It elevates. Even Ace, the toughest of the tough, the coolest of the cool, looks petrified. As well she might. That’s not the only invention either: the new-look ‘extermination’ effect (which reveals people’s skeletons for the first time) is particularly nasty and a huge improvement on ‘Revelation’, the last Dalek story from three years earlier.

- The much lauded ‘Special Weapons Dalek’ is touted as the be-all and end-all of Daleks. It looks more like a tank and less like a Dalek than any of the others we see, as if somebody has crafted a Dalek out of chunky lego and then sat on it. There’s a whacking big gun where the plunger should be and a row of lights on the squat dome that just look silly. I mean, I know they’re the most ruthless species in the universe, but there’s also something almost subtle about a Dalek: its power comes from its ruthlessness and its arsenal of weaponry; it isn’t as physically imposing as a Cybermen or an Ice Warrior. This version loses all of that. So far other DW attempts to alter the perfect Dalek design (The Emperor Dalek, The Glass Dalek, Davros) have all been successes but this one...isn’t. Mercifully we’ve only seen it fleetingly since. Also, Ace’s taste in music as played on her huge ghettoblaster is disappointingly middle-of-the-road given what we know of her (I totally had her down as a fan of something louder and more rebellious. Like ‘The Who’. No not Dr Who, Roger Daltrey and co. You know ‘Talking About My Re-Generation’).