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 Dr Who fans know, time is relative it seemed extraordinary that this daft little series about rebellion and outsiders, that was only thought might last thirteen weeks by the people who worked on it (and less, quite frankly, by the people who commissioned it), had itself become old enough to be an institution – old enough now, in fact, to have historical stories set during its own lifespan. This big birthday - a milestone very few series ever reach - should have been a huge occasion, a huge spectacle that made the world notice it and celebrate it again, but most ignored it. BBC controller Michael Grade’s continuous sniping at Dr Who (nothing to do with marrying Colin Baker’s ex Liza Goddard from ‘Terminus’, oh no), the fact his replacement Jonathon Powell was basically a malfunctioning Grade clone, the much publicised eighteen month ‘rest’ that got more attention than an anniversary story ever could, 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 10th and 20th 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 Dr Who 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).
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 25th anniversary the ‘official’
story for that 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 the perfect
anniversary story. On the one hand it’s a real celebration of everything Dr Whoy
that no other show could offer and features everything people think of when
they think of the show, from all eras: there’s our first return to Coal Hill
School (setting of the first story ‘An
Unearthly Child’) since 1963, there’s an attempted Dalek Invasion of
Earth like one of the most seen (and talked about) Dr Who stories from
1964, the school ends up as one more base under siege where a surviving outpost
of humanity take their last stand like in the Troughton days of 1966-1969, there’s
the return (or so we think…) of ‘The Emperor Dalek’ for the first time since ‘Evil Of The Daleks’ in 1967, the Doctor
befriends some local soldiers like the 3rd Doctor days, there’s a traitor
called ‘Mike’ nobody’s expecting (see ‘Invasion
Of The Dinosaurs’) and Davros turns up again, just as he had for Drs 4
through 6, we have the return of lots of old faces (Peter Halliday as the vicar
most remember as hapless henchman Packer in ‘The
Invasion’, Michael Sheard as the Headmaster who actually wrote in and asked
for the job after seeing himself in the early Who VHS release ‘Pyramids Of Mars’ and Pamela Salem
returning for the first time since stealing the show in ‘Robots
Of Death’ as soldier Rachel) and Ace even picks up a school textbook about
‘The French Revolution’ (apparently the one Barbara offers to Susan in the
first episode before she got, erm, distracted). There’s a whole lot of
nostalgia at seeing our modern heroes walking old streets we thought we would
never see again and fighting the same old fight of good versus evil, while the
story itself acts as a sort of sequel to the first one, an explanation of just
what The Doctor was doing in London all those years ago and finally getting
round to his (Cartmel-written) masterplan after a quarter century of procrastination
and travel. There’s even a reference to a new programme starting on Saturday
teatime announced as ‘Do…’ that gets cut off before we can hear what it is (but
we’re all thinking the same thing: Dr Who is home).
But where ‘Remembrance Of
The Daleks’ differs to other nostalgia-fests like, for instance, the most
recent time they tried this (‘Attack Of The
Cybermen’) is that we’re not just getting old plots recycled and stuck
together is that ‘Remembrance’ has more to say about ‘now’. Though the story is
set in November 1963 when the series was taking its first baby-steps this story
is all about the ways the series has learnt to walk (and run! So much running…)
since and how far we’ve come together. Ace is near-enough the same age as Susan
(sixteen to her fifteen) and does indeed sprain her ankle (as Susan was
repeatedly seen to do). But look at why: Susan hid behind her grandfather and
spent most of her time hiding from monsters, getting a sprain by running away
more often than not; Ace is a streetwise kid who won’t let anyone, even her
best friend the mysterious time-travelling timelord, tell her what to do and
sprains her ankle after attacking a battle-fleet of Daleks with a baseball bat.
Try and imagine even her predecessors Mel or Peri doing this: you can’t. Not
without being exterminated anyway. They can actually do big action sequences
without looking silly now, with a big ol’ fight between two factions of Daleks
that was so realistic panicked local residents, who’d somehow missed the
leaflets about filming in their area, called the fire brigade assuming a bomb
had gone off, leaving a most confused bunch of fireman scratching their heads
as the Daleks appeared out of the smoke (the only time something like this
happened, or even could happen, in old Who given how small-scale most of the
explosions usually had to be). Oh and Daleks can climb up stairs now, in a
special effects showcase we could only dream of in 1963 (admittedly one sort of
flies in ‘Revelation Of The Daleks’ too but
it’s a woeful and unconvincing shot: this one couldn’t be better and comes
right at the part when Ace has convinced herself she’s safe). The story doesn’t
see the 1960s through rose-tinted glasses either: the scene that script editor
Andrew Cartmel was proudest of across his three years is the scene where Ace
half-falls for handsome soldier Mike, the nice kid who belongs to the family
who runs the local motel. But she’s disgusted when she sees the ‘no coloureds’
scene (a scene Cartmel insisted that head of serials Mark Shivas rewind and see
when he got a phonecall in the middle of their meeting, even though nobody
usually paid the first attention to Who anymore; the reply was that it would be
better if Ace had torn up the sign). There’s an even better one though, the ‘café’
scene, where The Doctor discusses family heritage and racism in metaphors using
nothing more than sugar-cubes with the only other intelligent person (other
than Ace), someone everyone else is avoiding because he’s black. All these
things don’t seem unusual for 1988: it’s only by sticking them in 1963 that it
screams how much the series – and the audience – have changed. And 25 years
really isn’t that much time to have all these changes: were they to try this
today then the ‘nostalgia’ story would be set during the millennia. Have there
been any serious pop culture changes since then? If so I haven't noticed
any.
This story is about more
than just nostalgia for a better time: 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 and Merseybeat (there are two Beatle songs on the
soundtrack – or at least there were on first transmission and on video, though they
cost too much for the DVD and i-player, replaced by stock music and a Billy J
Kramer and The Dakotas cover; till the final edit ran over there was a Bob
Dylan song too – Dylan, apparently, was a big fan and waived his royalty fee.
Unlike The Queen who refused permission for one of her speeches to be heard.
Huh, typical!) before the world went flat and Dr Who went flatter; in reality
it was really just another age in transition, partway out of the dark but still
in the shadows. As cosy as it might have been to have made 1963 a paradise for
the 25th 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 Aaronovitch’s script packs no punches: Ace is
horrified at all the casual racism and the amount of prejudiced right-wingers
openly walking around.
But the again, is it
really so different? There’s a clever mirror to what the fascists are up to in
this story and what The Daleks are up to in an era of Enoch Powell speeches and
riots and the first steps towards civil rights. They didn’t come from nowhere:
they were Terry Nation writing from childhood memories of hiding in bunkers
from the Nazis afraid of what might happen if the Nazis came to Britain. Even a
quarter century on they still signified what so many good kind people were
afraid of, in an era of Thatcherism and race wars and growing poverty and
mistrust, society breaking down without a common enemy to fight. They feel
contemporary in a weird way that they hadn’t for some time. They belong in the
late 1980s full of chaos and people rising to power on dog-eat-dog principles.
Though we haven’t heard it much since Terry Nation stopped writing for the
series once again The Daleks have become pure racists. The difference is that
this time they’re attacking themselves, with two halves both convinced the
other are the anti-Dalek: the ‘Imperial’ half remain loyal to their creator
(someone we think is The Emperor Dalek, looking more like it’s TV Century comic
form self than the last time we saw it on TV in the 1960s but is really…spoilers…Davros),
another known as the ‘renegade’ group have rebelled and broken away. Both assume
the other is ‘impure’ and want the other destroyed, that only they can be the
one ‘true’ Dalek. But of course you can: even Daleks aren’t all the same and
have different yet valid reasons for being alive. Though apparently a war
started by events at the end of ‘Revelation Of
The Daleks’ it also recalls ‘Evil Of The Daleks’ and it’s ‘final end’ battle
between pure Daleks and those with the ‘human factor’ questioning orders. It’s
all meant to seem ridiculous: sure these Daleks might have slightly different
metal casings, but a Dalek’s a Dalek right? Inside they’re the same green
tentacles blobby things as each other. And then it hits you: so are Humans. I
mean, some of us are more green tentacled blobby things than others than others
if I’m honest, but we are all the same with just slightly different coloured
casings. That’s the message of ‘Remembrance’: racism is stupid. And far from being
a pure nostalgia fest, about where we used to be, the story becomes a story
about how much further we still have to go as a species. That’s powerful
writing, very in keeping with where the show started but also showing that,
even after a quarter century, this series still has so many powerful things to
say.
You can tell that this
story is written by a fan, someone who isn’t just writing about what they
fondly remembered this show as but what they wanted it to be saying now. Ben
Aaronovitch is, multiple graphic novels and books later, one of Dr Who’s
biggest success stories, one of the few writers who were ‘discovered’ by the
show and went on to be big elsewhere. He got the job after sending in unsolicited
stories to BBC general script editor Caroline Oulton. This was an era when few
new writers wanted to write for Dr Who and when the JNT-Eric Saward feud meant
that a lot of the old writers were…unpopular. So Caroline wasn’t expecting much
of a response when she suggested sending a script into them but Ben was
thrilled. He cobbled together a story titled ‘Nightfall/Knightfall’(sources differ
on the spelling) which Cartmel found a bit wordy and way over budget from the
large cast alone. Another half-go was ‘Transit’, about a portal that opened up
top hell (that became one of the better ‘New Adventures’ novels instead). However
he was impressed by the writing itself and quickly commissioned Ben to write a
‘proper’ script. ‘Storm Over Avallion’ was considered too close to ‘Silver Nemesis’ with its Arthurian
legends (it’ll regenerate into ‘Battlefield’
the following year) but by now it was
clear to Cartmel that his new friend was just what he was looking for: someone
bright, quick, good at rewrites and who knew the show’s history better than he
did. So he asked Ben if he would help get him out of a hole: JNT had noticed,
during his work with multiple Doctors, that first seasons always did well with
the gimmick of a new lead but that audience ratings fell away for the second
year. What they really needed was a boost and, just like in every year past,
the obvious thing to do was to have another Doctor-Dalek showdown. Only it was
a tricky slot to fill: it meant hanging around for their creator Terry Nation
to take first refusal (it seemed unlikely he would write any more scripts,
having officially retired to his beloved America) and any inevitable changes
he’d want. At first Ben though it was a joke, that no way would he get a Dalek
story first time out. But it became the obvious answer: he knew the Daleks’
folklore better than anyone.
Perhaps best of all is
what Ben came up with for the new-look Doctor, in a co-ordinated plan with McCoy,
Cartmel and the other writers of the year. Reacting to feedback that the season
twenty-four Doctor had been too much of a clown to take seriously they made him
darker, taking the opportunity of having a new companion better able to look
after herself to make this Doctor dark and brooding. Far from the loony who
played the spoons just four stories earlier in ‘Time and The Rani’ this Doctor
is now dark and scary, with an eye on the bigger picture happy to manipulate
his enemies into falling into his trap and exterminating themselves if it keeps
the world safe. The Doctor is no longer a passive visitor to these places
afraid of changing history ‘not one line’, he’s a schemer, ready to sacrifice
people to keep the universe safe. Most earlier stories had The Doctor re-acting
to events, putting right things that other people but wrong, but for this story
to the end of his run McCoy is as likely to be pulling the puppet strings on
his enemies as they do to him. It’s hard to imagine any previous actor being
able to re-model themselves to such a degree (only when Patrick Troughton and
Tom Baker are playing ‘dark’ versions of themselves do we see such a
difference) but Sylvester repays the faith everyone has in him a hundredfold. The
companion, too, is no wallflower – this is only Ace’s second story but she
already seems more fully-formed and rounded than pretty much any companion
since Romana, maybe Leela. She’s not hanging around waiting to be rescued, she’s
busy blowing things up. She’s not just a fighter though: ‘Ace’ has a heart and
a moral compass every bit as strong as The Doctor’s. In ‘Dragonfire’ she could
have gone either way, a caricature troubled teen in an opposite way to ‘head
girl’ goody two shoes Mel, but here she’s a ‘real’ person, contradictory, rawly
emotional but full of intelligence and panache. Sophie Aldred, too, revels in
the chance to get her teeth into a deeper character than the one she was hired
to play and perfects practically every line, as well as doing most of her own
stunts (though Sophie is also the source of my favourite ever Who outtake, included
on the DVD and blu-ray, where she accidentally starts beating up a ‘real’ Dalek
with a man inside rather than the prop one and they have to get her to stop, at
which she gives way to giggles). There’s a real trust between these two
characters who know each other’s flaws and foibles, summed up even in minor
lines of dialogue that make them feel as if they’ve been travelling together
forever (‘Ace, give me one of those cans of nitro-nine you always say you’re
not carrying!’)
The supporting cast, too,
are excellent. Dursley McLinden would surely have been a huge star had he not
died so tragically young (see prequels/sequels below), able to make Mike believable
as both a hero and a villain. Simon Williams is a decent enough no-nonsense Brigadier
substitute, nicknamed ‘chunky’ by the cast after his misunderstanding that the description
in the script was about the size rather than an obscure make he’d never heard of
– it became such an injoke McCoy worked it into the dialogue (he has quite the
Who alumnus too so it’s amazing he hadn’t been in a Who before: his wife was
Lucky Fleming the most likeable of the bunch in Terry Nation’s ‘Survivors’
series, his sister-in-law was Kate ‘Rani’ O’Mara, his brother-in-law Nigel ‘Mr
Sarah Jane briefly till he turns out to have sold out his soul to the trickster’
Havers and his son plays one of the children seen hanging round the school,
alongside the daughter of the director Andrew Morgan, the son of costume
designer Ken Trew and the sister of Jamine Breaks who plays the Dalekised
little girl. Pamela Salem steals the show, though, as the unruffled Rachel,
UNIT’s early scientific advisor who plays it the way we all wish Caroline John
had been allowed to play Liz Shaw, out manning the men with a strong line in
sarcasm. All in all they’re not a bad UNIT substitute (and listen out for yet
another Quatermass reference, when their intended boss, ‘Bernard’ from the ‘British
Rocket group’, isn’t able to meet them (an in-joke that Dr Who was in many ways
the child of and TV substitution for Quatermass, the BBC’s first scifi show
back in 1958-59. Though admittedly its creator Nigel Kneale for one would have
denied the paternity test results). This might be Michael Sheard’s best role,
so different to his ‘regular’ headmaster role in Grange Hill that it took many
fans by surprise. Terry Molloy (credited as ‘Roy Tromelly’ in the Radio Times’
so as not to give the Emperor Dalek twist away) gives the best of his
performances as Davros, even if he can’t match Michael Wisher’s original, with
old hand John Scott Martin back in the Dalek chair and Brian Miller (the ‘real’
Mr Sarah Jane Smith, married to Elisabeth Sladen for most of their adult lives
last see in ‘Snakedance’) is one of
the Dalek voices . Even the smaller parts, of which there are many (what was
that about Cartmel rejecting Aaronovitch’s first proposal again?!) are all
played for accuracy, rather than what had become seen as ‘Dr Who acting’ across
most of the 1980s. This story feels as if it matters, that everyone is pulling
together to fight the bigger threat of The Daleks, because if they lose the
results would be unthinkable. That’s true drama.
No one would have blamed
the Dr Who team for giving up with the way the show was being treated, with even
longterm fans attacking season twenty four left right and centre (especially
John Nathan-Turner who handed in his notice, twice, but was persuaded to stay)
but they turn round and make the things working against them into strengths. A
shorter season? Great, more time to plan what’s there! Less episodes a year?
These stories had better be good then! Less budget? We wanted an emphasis on
stories anyway. Oh so you want to cancel us? When we can do a programme this
good? Written by a star of the future who might not even have been a writer
without this programme? When we still have so much to say? We double dare you.
In two sets of Daleks. Against all odds, when everyone else had pretty much given
up on it (certainly the wider public had) there’s a swagger about this story,
as if it knows it can get away with things previous eras of Dr Who could only
hint at and not say out loud. 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. Even though practically nobody saw it,
though, Dr Who was really finding its feet again in season 25 and while this
isn’t my favourite of the last one or even necessarily the best it is the most ‘Dr
Who-like’, doing what the series always did, though doing it better (for the
most part). The details are astonishing too: they found the right shape milk
bottles (from a museum), tracked down period newspapers, used the right period
music (at least originally) – if only they’d got the right design for the Emperor
Dalek and spelt the owner of the junkyard as ‘Forman’ rather than ‘Foreman’ (an
unforgivable continuity error with so many Whovians on the team!), but those
two mistakes aside there are no shortcuts here in bringing the period to life.
Apart from being in colour this story seems more authentically 1963 than either
of the Dr Who stories made that year in fact.
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
(even with ten minutes of extras on the DVD – most of it extended rather cut
scenes though so it’s probably half that really) it’s hard to follow in places.
Due to the cut budget some of the effects are actually worse than they managed
in 1963: all the Daleks, rescued from stock and fans, wobble so badly they seem
at their least threatening while the Dalek spaceship (the single biggest prop
in the ‘classic’ series? I’ll have to get my tape measure against the spaceship
in ‘The Sontaron Experiment’ but
it’s certainly close) looks like it’s a toy made of plywood rather than the
battle cruiser of the scariest creatures in the universe. As great as this story is for the Dr and Ace,
it’s 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 (well, 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 and mostly fight each other. Presumably this is why the story’s
biggest critics was always Terry Nation, who baulked at the first two draft
scripts and tried to have it pulled (though by then the story was so far into
production it was impossible; JNT smoothed things over – another of his better
days a producer). For the longest time too it feels as if the Coal Hill School
setting (actually St John’s School in Hammersmith: we never did see the
exterior in ‘An Unearthly Child’ as it was all indoor sets in those days) is
going to be more central to the plot than it turns out to be; instead it just
ends up being coincidentally the place where a lot of the action happens (and
that’s not the same thing in scripting terms at all).
There are a couple of
elements to the plot that are also, if not questionable, then at least a bit
out of character. The story centres around the ‘Hand Of Omega’, an object so important
to the all powerful Timelord founders that…they’ve allowed The Doctor and Susan
to run off with it to a backward planet most of them have never heard of (The 3rd
Doctor is exiled there as punishment, after all, not to be in the hub of the
universe). While it does fit in with why this incarnation is acting so shifty
when we first meet him it doesn’t fit with anything else: The 1st
Doctor didn’t for the right moral thing when we first met him and certainly not
for the kind he’s run away from, even in his most callous regeneration would
not have hidden the hand near a school where innocent people would be hurt and
would never ever have risked Susan’s life and would not have abandoned such an important
plan, kidnapping two school-teachers along the way because he’s so adamant of
hiding his whereabouts. Plus in twenty-five years and six regenerations he
never thought of going back to it? Even though The Doctor knows how often he
skirts death and that without using it The Daleks continue to exist bringing destruction
to the universe time and time again? (It could be he’s procrastinating to avoid
another ‘do I have the right?’ dilemmas as in ‘Genesis Of The Daleks’, but the
7th Doctor suddenly seems very sure of himself if so. What changed?)
As much as this story needs a big climax, this one shouldn’t have been it and
even then they seem to get cold feet and fudge it: what ought to be one of the
biggest changes the series has ever seen since we found out The Doctor could
regenerate, a revelation of pre-history (‘I’m more than just a timelord’ The Doctor said to Davros in an
infamous and, mercifully cut, line) that turns everything we thought we knew
about The Doctor on its head, is just a line that gets lost, never referred
back to and never properly explained. More than this, though, The Doctor’s
ruthless extermination of Davros and the Dalek army feels out of place even
when you know the 7th Doctor’s darker side through later stories but
especially when it comes here, on the back of ‘Dragonfire’. We’ve moved long
past the point of this series dishing out karma like sweets to people who do
the wrong thing: now The Doctor is punishing his enemies simply for being his
enemies, before they’ve had the chance to do anything that bad. This might not
be so bad in another story (that darker cunning edge is the making of a story
like ‘The Curse Of Fenric’) but it feels particularly
out-of-place here amongst the backslapping celebration and the theme of ‘gee,
isn’t it great how far we’ve come into a kinder society? Ish’. It’s all solved remarkably easily too, with a
press of The Doctor’s gadget and Davros on what looks like an early Skype call,
tidied away in a single scene: a particular shame because of all the Doctor’s
foes Davros is perhaps the most single-minded and straightforward; seeing him
up against the most complex and devious Doctor ought to be something to savour
but it feels more like phoning up your Granny.
Even so, even Dr Who’s
biggest critics couldn’t miss that this was an honest-to-goodness decent story,
one where everyone is pulling their weight to make it work, from writer to
script editor (Aaronovitch and Cartmel are a match made in Heaven for two
strangers who’d never met till the year of transmission, very much on the same
page) to actors (the entire cast are excellent for once, even the bit parts) to
the director to the producer (who wasn’t sure about so much of this story but
trusted everyone enough to let them make it). ‘Remembrance’ manages to juggle
the two most defining images of Who’s early days (that school and those Daleks)
into a whole new story, recognisably like both starting points but making full
use of all the things the series had learned since. I wish we’d been able to
force-watch Michael Grade and Jonathon Powell into seeing it and maybe they’d
have changed their mind on the show they were trying so hard to kill. There are
other superb scripts too in these last couple of years, maybe even better ones,
but they tend to be more about taking Dr Who into new areas. This one is there
to remind people of what Dr Who always stood for – then does it better than it
had been done for a long time. After all, Dr Who is unique: yes there were
other series that had run for twenty-five years too but they had stayed the
same and never played with the formula, mostly soap operas that had become
outdated relics still doing the same thing week in and week out. But Dr Who was
about change and no story shows that change better than ‘Remembrance’. Even
though it wasn’t the official anniversary story everyone still thinks of it as
one: it’s everything we remember and love about this series, very much
including the new things it does that surprises us. Even compared to ‘Rose’ it’s the perfect reboot for the
series, a reminder of all the reasons we love this show so much and how it’s
managed to move with the times, unafraid to comment on things other series can’t
say, atone with the ‘graphic novel reboots’ of famous franchises in vogue in
the 1980s. The fact that we’ve come here after such a troubled season is
nothing short of amazing: the gulf between ‘Dragonfire’ and this story is one
of the biggest in the sixty year run, big enough to fly a Tardis through.
Inside out. In other words my six-year-old self couldn’t have chosen a better
story to start with. Even the nightmares it gave me were worth it. ‘Remembrance’
might not be perfect, but boy is it special.
POSITIVES + 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 this rogue Dalek is run up a flight of stairs. Easy
peasy! 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..Heard. Master?!) has been possessed and locks Ace
in. We still think she’s safe as long as she can duck long enough for The
Doctor to rescue her. Then behind her the Dalek, almost nonchalantly, as if it
has all the time in the universe, does something we’ve never seen them before
and which even the 4th 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, the kid at school you’d
always hide behind when something scary happens, 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 (although admittedly that’s only from memory: my copy of the story
is still the original DVD from 2003, taken from a ‘superior print’ copy of the
episode that was discovered in the vaults. Only which no one noticed was made
for post-production before the Dalek effects were added so is missing most of
them! This has been corrected for the ‘special edition’ the blu-ray and the i-player
incarnations, by the way).
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: It’s
the return of our old friend, the 30th anniversary comic strip ‘Time
and Time Again’ which ran in Dr Who Magazine issue #207. Benny and Ace are
trying to piece the 7th Doctor back together one artefact at a time,
‘Name Of The Doctor’ style, as they travel
through his timelines looking for help across old adventures in an attempt to
defeat The Black Guardian. We’re at the big finale now with the 7th
Doctor himself coming across his 1st incarnation on his way home to
the Tardis outside Coal Hill School in 1963, saving him from being exterminated
by a Dalek. Presumably it’s one of the ‘Remembrance’ Daleks gone rogue as it
talks about being on a ‘mission from Davros’ while the strip makes it clear
that it was indeed the 1st Doctor that planted the ‘hand of omega’,
worrying to himself that he needs to ‘solve’ both that question and how to keep
Susan safe at the same time. In typical 1st Doctor form he
doesn’t even notice how close to death
he comes, as the 7th Doctor pushes him over and thinks he’s just
slipped on the icy path! The 7th Doctor picks up his Tardis
instruction manual when he falls, the 1st Doctor apparently still trying to
understand it (though quite why he’s taken it out the Tardis where it might
have been stolen in an age where he’s so secretive about it he kidnaps two
schoolteachers to keep his secret is anyone’s guess!)
Big Finish have released a whole spin-off series
‘Counter Measures’ featuring the further adventures of Captain ‘Chunky’ Gilmore
and Rachel which ran for four series of four adventures each between 2012 and
2015, followed immediately by ‘The New Counter-Measures’ which ran for a
further three series containing eleven stories between them across 2016 and
2020 (they’re basically the same series in all but name!) There’s also a
sort-of second re-launch pilot between series one and two in the form of ‘1963:
The Assassination Games’ from 2013 (where they again work with the 7th
Doctor and Ace). They’re a sort of
pre-UNIT UNIT crossed with Man From UNCLE and Jason King, based in The Post
Office Tower (see ‘The War Machines’),
with lots of period gags about life in the 1960s in between the usual shooting
and action sequences and a lot of international spying. The two main leads are
strong but the rest of the characters fall flat and the series never really
quite comes together with its own identity with a Doctor-shaped hole in the middle
even bigger than in other Big Finish spin-offs; without him there it’s just
noisy and all too often far-fetched fun with toy soldiers and nothing more.
There are some good stories in there though, especially towards the end: ‘State
Of Emergency’ (a Dr Whoy take on The Cuban Missile Crisis that involves a
matter transfer device that goes off by accident and a desperate cover-up), ‘The
Ship Of The Sleepwalkers’ (which features the team waking up on board a cruise
ship with no memory of how they got there. Clue: it involves an above-average
intelligence!) ‘The Movellan Manoeuvre’ (in which the Dalek rivals infiltrate
Earth with robot assistants to help in the home in a sort of sequel to ‘Power Of The Daleks’ via ‘Victory Of the Daleks’) and big finale ‘The
Dalek Gambit’ (where the metal meanies try to blow both Humans and Movellans up
with one big bomb that’s treated like a WW2 story).
We haven’t mentioned ‘Class’, the most obscure Dr
Who spin-off, in this book yet have we? A rather desperate attempt to regain a
teenage following by carrying on the adventures of Coal Hill School in the 12th
Doctor era once Clara had left the series, it was broadcast on BBC3 in the
original ‘Torchwood’ slot but did very badly on first transmission and
continues to make me wonder whether anyone in the production team had ever met
anyone under thirty as the characters never felt like real teenagers at all.
The series’ main problem was that, apart from an appearance by Peter Capaldi
halfway through the opening episode saving the day in Doctory style (in which
he introduces himself as the ex-caretaker and ticks everyone off for making a
mess!), it seemed to have very little to do with Dr Who and the little that did
link in seemed to contradict the series, like having a rift in the school akin
to the Torchwood one where aliens got in and an alien teacher that nobody
seemed to think was weird, the peculiar Miss Andrea Quill (a cross between Mrs
Robinson, Miss Trunchball and The Demon Headmaster) sentenced to be a bodyguard
to an alien pupil in Charlie Smith (a sort of cross between Susan and a Russian
prince, in exile from his home planet after a coup an attacked by the Quills).
Really, though, the aliens play second fiddle to the usual ‘class comedies’ of
teens falling in and out of love (but more usually lust) with lots of ‘Will
they? Won’t they?’ ‘Who cares?’ The series was axed after just one series of
eight episodes, all of which showed promise but were excessively slow and talky
and low budget, with characters who never react the way normal people would and
with Torchwood levels of gratuitous violence grafted on top of Sarah Jane
Adventures’ style plots about getting alien invasions done with in time for
homework and tea.
Why mention it here? Well, when the series was axed
as soon as it began in 2016 Big Finish took the franchise over with four more
series between 2018 and 2020 and a further special (arguably the best o the
bunch so far) in 2022. One of the series two adventures is ‘In Remembrance’ and
it ties up quite nicely with the ‘Remembrance’ story, involving a time rift
that causes the school to link up to 1963/1988, with Class and teacher hiding
from Daleks and meeting Ace, with Sophie Aldred returning to the role as an
older version of her character. No Doctor though, weirdly. Charlie assumes the
Dalek is a toy robot, Ace gets to say out loud what they could only hint at in
the original (explicitly calling the Daleks ‘racist’) and Mrs Quill gets to
look inside a Dalek and wonder if it’s a ‘squid’. It’s all very in keeping with
the original story (there’s a sweet moment where Charlie beats up a Dalek with
the line ‘who are you calling small?’ first spoken by Ace all those years ago)
and confirms for the first time what’s only been hinted at in the modern
series: that the Doctor’s actions in ‘Remembrance’, using the hand of Omega to
kill Davros, is where the time wars all kick off. Alas the characters in Class
are still a bit too cartoony and don’t quite make the grade and when Axe is
still the most believable character as a ‘real’ sixteen year old you know
you’re having problems.
Arguably Russell T Davies’ most beloved work in
between his two stints as showrunner was Channel 4 series ‘It’s A Sin’ (2021),
about the 1980s HIV/Aids epidemic that ran riot throughout the gay community. It’s
a shameful part of our culture that was swept under the carpet for far too
long, full of injustice and stigma and gut-wrenching emotion and bright bold
characters which are all the things Russell does so well, so I’m not surprised
it was a hit even if I am surprised that it found enough of an audience (so
were the BBC, apparently, who for the first time turned Russell down). Even
though the later episodes of the series didn’t carry on the impact of the early
ones (it’s one of those that should have finished an episode early, at the
‘real’ climax instead of adding an epilogue) it remains one of his most
meticulously crafted and well written works. Despite being praised for his
accurate re-creations of 1980s London actually most of it was research rather
than observation; Russell was too young and too awkwardly single to be in the
scene during the early days when the illness was still new and confusing and
peak scary, stigmatised and ignored, but he became friends with lots of people
who lived through it who told him their stories. Though Russell witnessed many
of the after-effects and grew to know many of the survivors, for most of the
characters he had to rely on filling in characters from people who’d died
before he met them. One exception is the lead character played by Olly
Alexander (future Eurovision star discovered by Belle and Sebastian for their
indie film ‘God Help The Girl’) who’s character Ritchie was loosely based on
Dursley McLinden, the up and coming actor who plays Sgt Mike Smith in
‘Remembrance’ and who’s career was tragically cut short by Aids and who died in
1995 aged just thirty. Russell became a good friend during his final years
(their mutual friend was the real life ‘Jill’ who had once been Dursley’s
flatmate) and would surely have cast him in ‘modern’ Who for sure had he lived,
but we get the next best tribute instead. A Who obsessive born and bred,
Russell has his actor character Ritchie over the moon (well, Skaro anyway) to
get a part in Dr Who (the campest show on TV!) as the aptly named ‘Trooper
Linden’, helping to bravely face off a battle crew of Daleks in a grey corridor
(just like old times!) The story is given the fictional name ‘Regression Of The
Daleks’ but is clearly based on ‘Remembrance’: the ‘chunky’ guns, the gayest
soldiers ever holding butch guns in khaki uniforms, the smoke, the very 1980
video effects, the maguffin that leads
to ‘the end of the world’; it’s an affectionate word-perfect tribute and very
sweet when you know the context that it’s one friend saluting another. Despite
being a minute long some fans still consider it the best Dalek story of the
2020s so far!
Previous ‘Dragonfire’ next ‘The
Happiness Patrol’
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