Evil Of The Daleks: Ranking - 69

 

 Evil Of The Daleks

(Season 4, Dr 2 with Jamie and Victoria, 20/5/1967-1/7/1967, producer: Innes Lloyd, script editors: Gerry Davis and Peter Bryant, writer: David Whittaker, director: Derek Martinus)

Rank: 69

   'What-do-we-play-now-we've-fin-ish-ed-play-ing-trains-Doc-tor? Do-you-fancy-a-game-of-hide-and-seek-locate-destroy? Or-blind-man's-buff? (Wait-my-vision-is-im-paired-I-can-not-see!-Ah-that's-bet-ter). I-know-let's-play-Bin-go! All-the-lit-tle-Dal-eks-eight-y-exter-min-eight-ext-erm-in-eight-ex-ter-min-eight!!!'

 

This is, in so many ways, the big one: the ‘Sgt Peppers’ of the Dr Who canon (released the day before episode two went out Beatle fans), the big sprawling colourful(if that’s not a daft thing to say about a show still in black-and-white!) epic that dressed our usual heroes up in Victorian clobber and re-shaped their characters before our eyes that was silly and scary all at the same time, had a ‘final end’ that comes down with a crashing flurry of exterminates and which was immediately accepted as an instant classic that summed its era up perfectly – although whether it still seems as good to fans who didn’t live through it on first transmission compared to lesser-regarded-at-the-time stories around it is a matter for debate. The first Dr Who story to be repeated since the Kennedy assassination overshadowed the very first episode back in 1963 and caused them to put it back on before part two, it’s safe to say that everyone who made this story back in 1967 and everyone who saw it on first and second transmission (in 1968) thought of it as one of the most important stories of the show’s entire run. Many fans still do, even though the only thing we have of it nowadays are the soundtrack, a collection of telesnaps and episode two (the only one that survives out of seven). At the time it was meant to be the definitive ‘final end’ of the Daleks now that Terry Nation was busy trying to sell his inventions to America (as it happens the USA won’t bite and he needs to pay bills so they’ll be back, but not for five years and will never again be seen in black and white – it’s worth remembering that the idea of a series lasting ten years and being shown in the UK in colour as a matter of course would have seemed more alien to viewers on first transmission than killer pepperpots and time travel) and the big pay-off ending to a season that’s covered more changes, in Doctors, companions and production crew, than any other. 

 You get the feeling that, after an up and down year involving daft comedies in the Scottish highlands, comic book kicks with mad professors in Atlantis and giant crabs from space in holiday camps they’ve now finally worked out how to get this new phase of the show work: make the threats feel as realistic and nasty as possible but in a more whimsical setting that makes it all unsettling rather than silly and make the Doctor darker to better match him to the danger, rather than have him ‘laughing’ at the monsters. ‘Evil’ re-writes a lot of the rules of the past few years (the only real precedent being ‘The Moonbase’, Dr Who’s darker-edged ‘Revolver’, though admittedly shown a few months late): it’s our first trip to the past that doesn’t make exploration part of the plot and where the Tardis crew never go outside (except the trip to Skaro at the end – the first time Dr Who had ever returned to a planet that wasn’t Earth); it’s the first time the Tardis visits Victorian London, where it seems to spend practically every other story nowadays; the Daleks bring this story on themselves by trying to trap the Doctor and make him work for them rather than simply have him interfere and stop them; and as a result it’s the first time in a long time that you’re not automatically on his side (as much as the big battle at the end with clockwork Dalek toys destroyed en masse, the real battle here takes place in part 5 when Jamie finds out he’s been used and rounds on the Dr for being ‘callous’ ; even after you’ve learnt what’s really going on and the concept of the bigger picture justifying the means you’re totally on Jamie’s side and never quite look at this 2nd Dr the same way again). Terry Nation was still busy trying to be diplomatic to American networks (something he found a lot easier than writing about extermination) and requested the BBC wrote his creations out of the series so he could re-launch them in his new home, a move he’d been planning for a good two years by this point – having cannily kept hold of the copyright he was within his rights to take away his ball and play with someone else, even if BBC designer Ray Cusick was at least half as responsible for their success. So the BBC decided that if they couldn’t have the Daleks as regular monsters at least they could destroy them in a big epic battle that was sure to be ratings winner. As far as Terry Nation was concerned it was the absolute definitive final end and the story was 99% made that way (until a panicked head of drama told producer Innes Lloyd not to make it too final just in case they ever came back one day, getting a ‘blue light’ to pulse at the end as a final display of life, something that’s hard to see now the story doesn’t exist. Though why anyone thought a ‘final end’ meant we could never see the Daleks again in a series all about time-travel is beyond me: it’s fan tradition that, given we never get a definitive date for the setting of episode seven, this is the furthest in the future we ever see the Daleks and every successive meeting took place before this one). 

 David Whittaker was the only person Terry trusted to write for his creations after the script editor handled the first two stories so well and for good reason: Whittaker had helped turn them from generic monsters into something more distinctive, something more ‘human’ (not that the Daleks would have appreciated that word). Freed of the need to adapt Nation’s more action-orientated scripts Whittaker goes the extra mile here, writing a philosophical story about what it means to be both and how humans can behave just like Daleks when acting out of fear or greed. Picking up on Nation’s equation of the Nazis with Daleks Whittaker writes a story that’s basically the final year of the Second World War: the Daleks try to trick their opponent by laying a trap for him and luring him into a fight (by stealing his Tardis/Paris) before the final episode becomes Hitler’s last days in his German bunker, still desperately trying to hang on to power even while his soldiers squabble bicker and fight while a civil war breaks out as to whether they should surrender or everyone dies in a blaze of glory (the ‘human’ Daleks are Rudolf Hess finally getting up the courage to ask his boss ‘why?’ and trying to make secret pacts with the enemy). The Nazis wouldn’t have stood a chance of power if everyone had carried on asking ‘why?’ all the time and it makes for a good Dr Whoy moral, about the importance of always making your mind up for yourself instead of letting other people do it for you as humans are want to do. After all, is Maxtible really that different to a Dalek even before his conversion? He’s manipulated everyone including his best friend in his greed and goes along with the Dalek efficiency because it appeals to his scientific side (the Whoniverse equivalent of going along with the Nazis because the trains are running on time, without asking the bigger question of what the trains are running for). This is a story that asks, over and over, from everybody, as to whether the end can ever justify the means, whether a people who make one part of your life better at the cost of someone else’s freedom or life is ever truly worth it. And finds it isn’t: not for Maxtible, not for Jamie, not for the Doctor. Because while humans are morally ambiguous at the best of times the Daleks are truly evil and after a much bigger, more final end (a phrase not unlike the holocaust’s final solution, only its all of humanity in their plan, not one particular race or religion). 

 However the setting isn’t anything quite as on the nose as being a WW2 story, which 22 years on from VE Day was still considered a no-go area for now: we’d already had multiple Dalek stories set in the near-enough present and future by now. Whittaker’s big love is history though and he comes up with something Terry would never have thought up on his own, the brilliant idea of putting the Daleks back in the Victorian day, a time of prim and proper reserved rich people trying to hide their feelings and ladies walking in big skirts so you can’t see their feet move, just like the Daleks. The fan re-creations from telesnaps suggest that the juxtaposition of the two, of the Daleks trundling through a manor house, are truly eerie, while the Victoriana themes of alchemy and mesmerism are perfect for a Dr Who story. They both belong in this era and don’t belong at all, the story making good use of the contradictions of a series about time travel, combining elements of the historicals and futuristic stories together (it’s the first time we’ve been back to the past in five stories in a series that had, till the start of the year, gone back every other adventure or so and only the second time the series had blurred the line between the two following ‘The Time Meddler’). Though lots of humans do bad things in this story only the Daleks are truly evil – usually the Daleks’ invasion of Earths involve collaborators who want some of their glory and power but in this story a scientist with the gloriously Victorian name of Theodore Maxtible conjured up the Daleks by accident while trying to turn metals into gold using mirrors, in true Dr Who mad English inventor fashion, while his friend Edward Waterfield is roped into it, going along with the plan against his better judgement after the Daleks kidnap his daughter (and future companion Victoria) and hold them to ransom. 

 What’s the Dalek Masterplan this week? Well, they’re tired of being defeated all the time and figure that humans must have some kind of special qualities that the Daleks don’t have which they can absorb for themselves and the Doctor is the only scientific brain they can think of worthy enough for the cause, so they kidnap the Tardis and lure him into their trap. Given the Nazi leanings of the Daleks and the fact we’re in the most English setting of all you do have to wonder if Whittaker was writing about the war-time spirit, the pluckiness of the Brits who fought off Hitler’s might with some planes, vegetables and bits of string and the bulk of their plan is having the Doctor locate all the things that makes Britain great by watching Jamie risk his neck saving Victoria. Only of course he’s not alone just as British forces weren’t: there’s a Turkish man servant Kemel whose been told that Jamie is the enemy until Jamie saves his life too and befriends him (sadly he’s one of Who’s most forgotten characters, given that no moving footage of him exists and him being mute doesn’t exactly work on the soundtrack we have – as he’s played by Sonny Caldinez though, who was such an excellent Ice Warrior, fair to say he was probably rather good though the part is rather a waste of his talents).It’s more than just courage though, because the Daleks are brave too: the British sense of humour and eccentricity, the things ‘about’ us that the ruthlessly efficient Nazis could never understand, comes into play too (although I have to say I’ve always wondered just how the Doctor extracted this from Jamie’s behaviour: the Highlander has one of the best senses of humour in the series but we see very little of that when he thinks he’s fighting for his life. Then again putting him at such risk with so many deadly boobytraps that he could easily have lost his life and ended the experiment early isn’t one of The Daleks’ smarter ideas either). The scene at the start of episode 6, when the Dr gives the human factor to the Daleks who become ‘human’ and regress to being children who play trains and roundabouts, giggling at their ‘dizzy Doctor’ friend as they swing him round and round, is such a gloriously funny moment in what’s quite a grim story and Roy Skelton has great fun talking to himself as a childish Dalek (one of my favourite behind-the-scenes stories has him filling in time between shots singing ‘what’s it all about, Alpha?’ in an impression of Cilla Black while the Dalek ‘ring modulator’ voice was still on, while the Dalek operators danced just like the showgirls on Cilla’s TV variety show of the day. Although even more apt for this story might have been ‘Anyone Who Had A Heart’ or ‘Skaro’ sorry ‘Liverpool Lullaby’ about how her kid is ‘shaped like a dustbin lid’). Of course (spoilers) the twist is that the secret Dalek plan is to remove the human factor from their DNA and thus eradicate what they see as a weakness, but that doesn’t stop the rogue trio of Daleks the Doctor has named Alpha, Beta and Omega from challenging authority and asking their leaders the very human question ‘why?’ That, too, is very British: the rise of the Nazis happened partly because so many ordinary peace-loving kind Germans were scared into not questioning orders, something Hitler absolutely tried to exploit by war propaganda and assuming we wouldn’t obey orders the same way his people would. But it’s that questioning, that potential loss of individuality, that made soldiers fight so hard in the war (if we’d just been switching one oppressive regime for another we might not have fought back quite so hard). This all leads to perhaps the biggest, certainly the longest, fight sequence in the entire series, a mass extermination with toy model Daleks that seems to go on for hours but still isn’t nearly long enough – that idea sounds awful on paper, given the best Who stories are all about using the brain, but it is shot extraordinarily well (from the bits we can see) and is the sort of huge epic climax the story needs after seven episodes of build-up and a ‘fitting end’ to Who’s biggest monster. 

 Terry Nation was, so the story goes, appalled: he hated the idea of anyone laughing at his creations and thought the ‘human factor’ Daleks who disobeyed their orders steered perilously close to that, although really Whittaker was just choosing to write about the bit of the Dalek natures that appealed to him most, the paranoia and prejudice that made them almost human. He’d approved the original plan, which was more how ‘Ghost Light’ turned up, about the Victorians who consider themselves the height of sophistication being used as part of a test for evolution, with Jamie’s part played by a kidnapped caveman called Og (and if you think the audio of Jamie effectively talking to himself for half an hour is heavy going, what would it have been like with a character who could only grunt?)As much as this is a story about the Daleks’ capacity to be evil it’s really a story about humanity’s capacity to be good. Lots of people risk their lives in this story and sacrifice themselves for the greater good. Even Victoria feeding the pigeons outside her window rather than scoffing crumbs herself is a part of this tale of what ordinary people do in extraordinary circumstances. It’s very much the war spirit of all being in it together, of making the world a better place through mercy and tolerance. Nobody sums that up better than Jamie and even though he was a last minute decision to keep on in the series (who Whittaker had never written before – his earliest scripts don’t seem to have survived, but presumably it was written for Ben and Polly like so many others, their contract running out midway into this story) he’s perfect for this story, loyal and brave and doing the right thing automatically without question, as the Doctor knows he will. Other stories will make Jamie out to be thick, especially when computer whizzkid Zoe comes along, but Whittaker is a smart enough writer to make him intelligent just inexperienced and much of this story comes from him thinking for himself too. Of course you can’t have it both ways: Jamie is also smart and brave enough to stand up to the Doctor when he finds out what’s really been going on, the key scene of this story the one at the end of episode five when he turns on the Doctor in a way that only Ian and Steven had in the past, questioning his mentor in the exact same way the Daleks do. The Doctor’s response is to be horrified that the plan is in danger, while just a little proud (he seems genuinely rattled, as if he never saw it coming). The Daleks are never more evil, but then neither is the Doctor, manipulating Jamie in much the same way the Daleks manipulate the people in this stately home and asking bigger questions that are asked in many a war about whether sacrificing individuals is worth it to win a war. For the first time since ‘The Massacre’ this isn’t a straightforward fight between the light and the dark but in a grey area somewhere in between, with villains acting like heroes and heroes like villains. It is, in short, exactly the sort of thing Dr Who is for. 

 One of the best things this story has going for it is the location shooting, which unusually was mostly done indoors. Grim’s Dyke House was, back in 1967, a ‘rehabilitation’ centre for young offenders who were no doubt thrilled to see other people ‘trapped’ by Gestapo-like jailors threatening to exterminate them. The house, in Harrow Weald, Middlesex, was one of the furthest away places from TV Centre the series had ever travelled to but it’s worth it: the house, built in 1872 five years after the setting for this story (where it was intended to be a hundred years to the day before the story went out on air), is full of Victorian grandeur that had already been used in ‘The Saint’ and ‘The Champions’ and was chosen partly because it had a fine ‘minstrel’s gallery’ the owners where happy to let Frazer Hines climb up for a cliffhanger. It had been, for a time, the home of W S Gilbert of the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas (not Sullivan’s house, as some guidebooks have it, which was a lot more grand him being naturally rich rather than a self-made man like Gilbert); I suspect he would have approved, Whittaker being the most ‘Gilbertesque’ of the series writers, with a ready wit and plots that prick pomposity of the day when the British got too full of themselves as a matter of course (everyone thinks Gilbert and Sullivan are ‘high art’ but for their time they were the equivalent of ‘Have I Got News For You’, holding a mirror up to something in the news and laughing at us. If Gilbert had been born a century later he’d have written for TV for sure and come up with something like ‘The Greatest Show In The Galaxy’ or ‘The Happiness Patrol’). Having The Daleks walk through our past, our heritage, in a place that looks just like the sort of a stately home/mansion/museum surely every one of the audience watching in 1967 would have been round on a day trip/school-trip/relative visit is one of the all-time great clashes between the ordinary and extraordinary. 

 There’s another major influence on this story too. Since leaving the post of script editor (1964’s ‘The Dalek Invasion Of Earth’ was his last story in that capacity) Whittaker has been working on the Dalek comic strips for ‘TV Action’ which take their cue from ‘Mission To The Unknown’ and don’t feature the Dr at all and you can tell how eager he is to go back to writing for humans again and give his goodies as much characterisation as his baddies. The Emperor Dalek, not seen on screen again till 1988, is taken wholesale from the comics and invented basically so that, in the years before Davros, the Daleks had a ‘boss’ that thought and pondered things at length and could deliver more detailed sentences than your average Dalek could. The prop is mightily impressive on screen – it’s one of the biggest the series ever used and filled most of the studio where the last two episodes were made and looks like the Dalek equivalent of an octopus; it’s so frustrating that all we have of it are some behind-the-scenes footage and still photographs. A lot of fans read about the Louis Marx ‘tricky action’ (which basically means you pull the back and they move on their own) Dalek toys being used in the battle too, just like the ones you could buy in the ships and wonder how that could possibly work, but if you squint using the behind-the-scenes footage it really works, especially in context and with Roy Skelton’s superb voiceover: there’s no other way they could get hundreds of Daleks on screen without breaking the budget for the year and shot from a distance they look plenty good enough to me. 

 In many ways ‘Evil’ is the best of the olden days’ blend of historical and futuristic stories, with the setting in an old Victorian house and the rich dialogue of Whittaker stories from the past but with the Daleks and their technology front and centre. It’s a landmark of Dr Who in so many ways the quintessential story combining more elements that people associate with the series in one place (the fun, the drama, the scares, the scheming, the Daleks and with settings in the past. Present and future) than maybe any other one single story. No wonder they repeated it: this story is everything people thought Dr Who should be every week and after a pretty uneven season full of cul-de-sacs and fish people it finally feels as if everyone has worked out how to do things. In truth, though, this is one of those classic stories that (like Sgt Peppers) doesn’t work quite so well after other people (and often The Beatles themselves) cherry picked the best bits for other stories and often did them better. Even at the time it wasn’t the sort of thing you listened to all the way through with long sections where nothing much happens (I mean, I don’t know about you but I skip lots of part two, roughly the equivalent of episode four here). The only truly great parts are episode 2 (which sets up a lot of the mystery very atmospherically – thankfully this is the one part we can see; it was found by a collector at a car boot sale in 1987) and the final two episodes (where everything goes wrong very quickly in the biggest of ways). The parts between can really lag: episode one is playing hide and seek looking for The Tardis for most of a whole episode. Following on directly from the end of ‘The Faceless One’ it’s all one big trap that seems ridiculously hard even for a timelord to follow: the ‘clues’ amount to a man in overalls that are too small for him and the top sheet of a clipboard looking different to the rest. It’s out of character for the Doctor to behave like this anyway: not till Steven Moffat starts writing for the 11th Doctor does he become such a Sherlock substitute. Forget Sherlock’s four-pipe problems, this one seems impossible even for the Doctor, when all they really needed to do was drop a flyer saying ‘brand new antiques’ near Gatwick airport to pique the Doctor’s curiosity (a very clever scheme to finance the plan, thanks to time travel; I have to say I’ve long wondered if this is Whittaker writing a cheeky in-joke to his old friend he knows will be watching: Terry Nation couldn’t work on ‘Power Of The Daleks’ and nominated Whittaker because he was hard at work on ‘The Baron’, an ITV series about an antiques dealer who was really a spy. Here the antique’s dealer turns out to be a Dalek spy). Plus how do the Daleks even know which Doctor is going to turn up? They’ve already met him in two different bodies and – if this really is their last encounter from their point of view – have met him in thirteen and counting by now. Though, talking of The Beatles, at least viewers on original transmission got to hear ‘Paperback Writer’ on the soundtrack, one of only two times the Beatles sanctioned one of their songs in another series in their lifetime as a soundtrack (the other is ‘Good Morning Good Morning’ in the final Monkees episode from ‘Peppers’) - sadly it cost too much to get the rights from Apple for the official soundtrack on CD or the animation. This is, it seems safe to say, the only time in history where the fab four were replaced by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Titch, who sing ‘Hold Tight’ instead, which is actually a pretty fair replacement (and easily their best song). At the time the coffee bar setting - the most 1960s place possible short of having Daleks exterminating shoppers in Carnaby Street – was every bit as exciting as Skaro, showing us a bit more of ‘our’ world again after 1960s Britain being the last possible place the Tardis could land without the series ending in the days of Ian and Barbara as our eyes and ears. 

 Elsewhere there are two whole episodes which feature Jamie lumbering around a house where the scariest thing he does is climb a Minstrel’s Gallery on a rope and have a swordfight (hard to tell how these worked without being able to see them but on audio they really drag and Patrick Troughton going away on holiday for an episode so the emphasis is fully on Jamie doesn’t help much). Episode 4, in particular, is the worst of Dr Who in many ways, at least in this era: twenty minutes of stalling for time while the story is all action without apparent purpose, full of clumsy fight scenes and Jamie having one-way conversations with himself (because Kemel can’t talk) while the audience haven’t yet got a clue what’s going on and are relying on blind hope it will all make sense to get them through (It’s not for nothing that ‘Within You Without You’ came in the middle of Peppers too). A lot of the plot, too, is just bonkers – as well as the clues left for the Doctor this story relies a lot on Jamie spotting a painting not of Victoria but of her mother, commenting on it and having somebody drop the hints that the daughter has gone missing and needs rescuing. This is Jamie we’re talking about, not generally that observant as a rule. If this was season six he’d have been written to go to sleep in that chair, not take a breather out of his predicament to ask question about Victorian beauties. Plus the dialogue goes to great lengths to point out how humans are a race more varied than The Daleks, where we’re free to question orders and discuss things. Stick twenty human beings in a room and they wouldn’t fully agree on anything (even more so if they’re Dr Who fans!) never mind agree to rescue a Victorian lady from a mere painting from the most evil scourge in the universe. This isn’t the Human factor, surely, just the Jamie factor. Though it was a very Victorian concept to use mirrors to do impossible things with science it’s never explained why the Daleks happened to break through this one time (and sadly with all happens on screen without even a flashback – we really need a scene of the Doctor getting the truth of what happened firsthand). Plus mesmerism, though a very Victorian concept, seems the last thing The Daleks should be messing around with: this isn’t hypnotism as such but the manipulation of auras around the body and the corresponding fluids within it that requires a lot of patience. 

 Till now if a Dalek can’t exterminate it or turn it into a slave it isn’t interested. The story also seems to assume that the humans the Daleks have ‘infiltrated’ are powered by the same static electricity they’ve been suing since their first appearance in ‘The Daleks’, which works as a clue to the Doctor about what’s really going on but would surely have fried any human body in reality. For all his many strengths as a writer (one of the series’ very best) science really wasn’t Whittaker’s strong point: he was much more interested in ideas that feel aesthetically ‘right’, something he could get away with when he was the script editor setting the tone of the series but which just feels ‘wrong’ in an era when Gerry Davis and Peter Bryant are going to great lengths to make the Cybermen seem plausible and getting their facts about the moon straight, not to mention following on from a story filmed in an airport, as ‘real’ a place as the series has yet been. There must, too, be one hell of a lot of conversations off screen for characters to know things they shouldn’t (not least Victoria greeting the Doctor as if she knows him), while the Daleks setting a trap for the Dr by having their henchman steal his Tardis from an airport where he’s never been before, in more or less the exact place and timezone he couldn’t get the Tardis to land in when trying to take Ian and Barbara back home, is the sort of plothole that laughs in the face of coincidences. You would have thought if the Daleks were so far ahead of the Dr that they ‘trick’ him into creating the human factor in Dalek form then they’d at least keep an eye on their rogue humanish Daleks when they go back to skaro too – they’re not exactly shy at exterminating their defective own after all. Oh and while we’re at it, why did the Dr ‘repeat’ this story showing it to Victoria’s replacement Zoe as evidence of all the things she might come across now she’s stowed away – it’s the one story where the Dr’s motives seem a bit dodgy and Jamie isn’t over the heartbreak of losing Victoria yet, which seems a bit rude to Jamie and Zoe both (while it would be totally in character for Zoe to tease him about his rescue of her. Incessantly). Though it’s not quite the case of the Emperor Dalek’s new clothes it has to be said that the story, though by no means leaving him naked, does have him threadbare and down to his last baubles in some places. 

Even so, none of these problems really get in the way and for episodes 2, 6 and 7 – and bits and pieces of the others – this story really is every bit as good as people say it is, a brilliant morality tale that does so much with the Dr Who concept we’ve never seen before: the scheming Daleks are truly, well, evil as all good Daleks should be, Jamie is truly good, the supporting characters are strongly written (all but Victoria weirdly who gets to do very little except blub and feed some pigeons: the maid Molly has far more promise as a companion) and there’s a neat air of mystery and intrigue that more than keeps you going through the lesser moments. It’s all beautifully atmospheric too, from the contemporary opening with its coffee bars and warehouses of the present day, to the Victorian estate marking where we started, to the derelict Skaro that might mark where we end up. This story features one o Dudley Simpson’s best scores for the series too, with sounds that like the settings shouldn’t go together but do: the futuristic sounds of the xylophone and marimba, the very 1960s sound of the timpani and percussion and the olde worlde flavour of the flute and oboe.The first visit to the period of time that in many ways suits it best (time travel and scifi are Victorian inventions) particularly is still one of the best even after the series has returned here lots of times, the theme of alchemy, of turning things into something they shouldn’t be and ending up a morality tale about being careful what you wish for, is very Dr Who. This is a story where the acting is strong, the writing delicious and the stakes higher than almost ever before. Had this really been the Dalek swansong it would have been a very fitting final end indeed and for once even the big final fight scene feels earned and a part of the plot rather than a distraction from it. While it will never quite be my favourite story I can totally see why people who saw it at the time raved about it then and now – there’s no other story out there quite like it, with an ambition that’s only rarely been matched in all the years since. 

 POSITIVES + Even in the midst of a fine cast the regulars really shine. Till now we’ve only seen flashes of the 2nd Doctor’s darker side behind the bumbling and mostly he’s used his mercurial shifting ways to make strangers ignore him till he can win over their trust and help, but Patrick Troughton makes the Doctor truly alien in this story, using the people around him because he has to, shifting sides in a way that seems every bit as ruthless as anything The Daleks are up to (after all, at least they’re open and honest in their motives). Not until the 7th Doctor has an Ace-induced personality change do we see our hero become this dark and un-heroic again. Frazer Hines, too, really comes into his own as Jamie, a character who till a couple of stories ago was a comedy extra and sharing lines written for Ben and Polly but here, as in ‘The Faceless Ones’ is the driving force of the story and more than up to the challenge. By the end (when writers were told to write him out – then in again at the last minute) Jamie is even more of a jokey character, too often asleep, doing something endearingly stupid or blundering in behind the Dr and Zoe, the Watson to their Holmes (at least the version of him in most of the films), but here Jamie is the perfect moral contrast to the Doctor’s complexity. In this story he’s bright (for an uneducated Highlander), brave beyond question and loyal to the extreme – which is why his heartbreak at apparently being ‘betrayed’ by the Doctor is such a blow. These two actors shared many great scenes together but none more so than when a bewildered and hurt Jamie, who would do anything for his friend, finds that his best pal is responsible for the traps that have nearly killed him. Not since Steven at the end of ‘The Massacre’ have we had such an emotionally charged scene and arguably we haven’t really since either (it seems an obvious thing for new Who to try but the closest we’ve come is Amy turning on the Dr for accidentally-sort-of killing Rory and even she knows that wasn’t really his intention or fault). This moral ambiguity is one of the great things about Dr Who after all: can you imagine accusing Captain Kirk of being callous or yelling at Superman for helping the enemy? 

 NEGATIVES - Victoria, though, is a right pain in the neck from the first time we see her and the most interesting thing she does all story is shout at a Dalek for trying to weigh her (long story). The whole plot relies on Jamie falling for her simply from seeing her portrait hanging on the wall and going through everything to save her, but a) the Daleks don’t know the Dr happens to be travelling with one of his most romantic companions when they set this trap for him b) Jamie’s only suddenly developed this new aspect to his character starting with ‘The Faceless Ones’ which takes place mere hours before this one starts and C) Victoria hardly seems worth saving, given that all she does in this story (and indeed most of her future ones) is mope. Many fans try to excuse her by pointing out that she’s a Victorian Lady and is therefore bred to mope and whine, but it’s worth pointing out that Queen Victoria herself (one od the two influences on the character, along with Gerry Davis’ daughter Victoria) would have been the first in the queue to say why that idea’s wrong. Other than Susan, Victoria is the biggest ‘peril monkey’ sitting round to get rescued in all of Who – and Susan had the excuse of being a teenager (or the timelord equivalent). Victoria’s not even that fussed when her father snuffs it in the last episode. You have to question the thinking in this period too - no sooner do the production team dump poor Ancient Greek Katarina and the most promising 16th century French maid Anne Chaplet for being historical characters who would forever need to be brought up to speed by the technology the 1960s viewers took for granted than they bring in an 18th century Highlander and a 19th century Victorian maid. Also why, with so many names in the English language, do we get a second companion named Victoria/Vicki when this is only the sixth female companion we’ve ever had? Oh well, could be worse - at least it’s not ‘The Faceless Ones’ Samantha Briggs, as was seriously considered (at least Debbie Watling can act, even if her character doesn’t give her much of a chance to), although that said the plot would have made a lot more sense had Jamie been risking his neck for someone he actually knew. 

BEST QUOTE: Terrall: ‘No doubt you are a keen student of human nature, but some things are better left alone’. Doctor: ‘No, Mr. Terrall. I am not a student of human nature. I am a professor of a far wider academy, of which human nature is merely a part. All forms of life interest me’. 

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: The start of this story is, unusually for Who, set up at the end of previous story ‘The Faceless Ones’ when the Tardis goes missing from the runway at Heathrow.

A lot of the background for the Emperor Dalek comes from the 1966 ‘Dalek Outer Space Book’ and while it doesn’t look or act quite the same (it’s mobile for a start, not plugged into the walls) its close enough to suggest David Whittaker took his cue from what his friend Terry Nation wrote for it here (with Brad Ashton an uncredited second writer and other ideas taken from ‘The Dalek World’ book of 1964 which Whittaker did write). Amazingly this Dalek was elected as part of a democratic vote (there’s less cheating than there is on Earth!) and he was a normal everyday Dalek before elected to high office and being connected to all those wires. It soon wages a war against Earth and sets off in Galactic battleships but are defeated by supersonic waves that cause their shuttle to go a bit weird, cracking the Emperor’s casing (apparently repaired in time for ‘Evil’) before vowing its revenge on humanity. Oo-err. Like the rest of the book it’s not the most detailed or in-depth work in the Whoniverse but it’s fondly remembered for lots of very good reasons and brings out nostalgia even in collectors who never read these comics strips and stories as children, long overdue a re-issue. 

 ‘The Death Of The Daleks’ (2022), part of the Big Finish ‘Companion Chronicles’ series, picks up the story straight after ‘Evil’, with the Tardis landing on the planet Tersimmon. The 2nd Doctor and Jamie go out exploring, where they gete to talk about what ust happened and how much the events of ‘Evil’ scared them – Jamie stil not quite trusting the Doctor but at least understanding his motivations and the Doctor haunted by the genocide he’s just committed and hoping he will never have to face such a choice again (erm, see ‘Genesis Of The Daleks’ for how that turns out!) Much like Sarah Jane Jamie is surprisingly gung ho – after all weren’t his highland clan all prepared to wipe out the English Sassenachs? – but the Doctor is still deeply troubled and wishes he had a second chance. He gets it, as the Skaro scaries are at large on this planet too with a ‘Grim Reaper Dalek’ whose basically their pr guy, removing all trace of Dalek failures from the timelines (he must gets sick of visiting Earth). What starts out as a rather moving tale quickly becomes silly but Frazer Hines is on great form performing double duty as both Jamie and the Doctor. 

 ‘Children Of The Revolution’ (2001-02) is an 8th Doctor comic strip from Dr Who Magazine that’s one of the most popular and always high in polls – if only because for twenty-odd years it was the only full-colour Dalek strip the magazine did (until the 14th Doctor’s only comic strip ‘Liberation Of The Daleks’ in 2023). This story suggests that one of the Daleks from this adventure, at least, survived: Alpha, still infected with the ‘human factor’ who fled to start a new life on the planet Kyrol Creating a hippie colony in an underwater cave and developing psychic powers wasn’t on my bingo card list for Dalek behaviour, even humanised ones, but it works. Alpha greets the Doctor as his ‘creator’ when he turns up, despite having a different face, only there’s a problem: he won’t let the Doctor and friends leave in case they spread word of where the Daleks are and everyone else comes to wipe them out, instead holding them prisoner. The Humans, for their part, think they must be up to something because a true Dalek never changes it’s baubles. Its a good story well told, give or take the mutant ‘Kroll’ like squid they keep as a ‘pet’ (though ‘ska-throom’ is as great a sound effect as I’ve come across in a comic!), but a little dark – in all meanings of the word (the Daleks don’t seem to be able to afford any lightbulbs in their cave). There are two alternate versions kicking around: a re-print in the 8th Doctor graphic novel collection ‘Oblivion’ features an extended ending (not the original feels particularly rushed) while the fan website ‘Altered Vistas’ turned this into an hour long animation in 2005 and, though low budget and a bit ‘blocky’, looks better than some of the official ones (such as ‘Dreamland’ or ‘The Celestial Toymaker’).

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