The Power Of The Daleks
(Season 4, Dr 2 with Ben and Polly, 5/11/1966-10/12/1966, producer: Innes Lloyd, script editor: Gerry Davis, writer: David Whittaker, director: Christopher Barry)
Rank: 65
'I am your servant, Vulcan!'
'That seems illogical. You have no hands or feet'
'Well...you have big pointy ears! I mean...I am your servant!'
'Did you just shoot one of my men in a red shirt?'
'No...I exterminated them!!! I mean...I am your servant'
<
What’s more they
deliberately stress that ambiguity in the opening episode to ‘Power Of The
Daleks’. Is this the same man? Is this a trick? Is the show going to be
remotely like the one we’ve been watching all these years? Even the companions
Ben and Polly, who were there watching when the regeneration happens, don’t
believe it so why should we? It’s amazing in retrospect how far everyone takes
it too: it’s only by the very end of the story, six weeks later, that the 2nd
Doctor is even vaguely acting Doctory. Even if you’ve come to this story
backwards and know how Patrick Troughton will turn out he’s so shifty and
unreliable in these opening episodes you find yourself agreeing with companion
Ben: this can’t be the Doctor, he’s an imposter, he’s just the opposite of the
tough confident safe presence the Doctor used to be: far from being an
authority figure he’s a rebel, far from explaining all the answers out loud he
keeps them to himself, far from being at the heart of the action he’s off to
the side looking on. So small and fragile and unserious is he that you feel he
can’t possibly save the day the way the old Doctor could – especially up
against The Daleks. For the first time since 1963 you no longer trust in this
man to get everyone home safe and in an instant Dr Who has switched from being
a gradually cosier series about exploration to a terrifyingly scary programme
where everything could go wrong at any moment. It’s such a brilliantly bonkers original idea. What other show could you simply change the
lead actor? In short, you couldn’t, but this is a series that’s always been
about change above all things and how times change but people stay roughly the
same – it still makes perfect sense. It’s also, arguably what’s enabled the
show to last as long as it has, allowing the series to grow and change rather
than becoming stagnant or stuck in one time like lesser shows. After all, a
show about time travel has no excuse to be dated the way more Earth bound
linear shows do.
Who could the production
team trust to pull off such a coup? They turn to two sources in the end, both
of them sensible. Firstly original script editor David Whittaker returns after
an eighteen month break to write this story. He’s surely the best person to
steer the ship into new waters, given that he has as good a claim as anyone to
have invented what Dr Who is, while additionally he’s one of only two people
Terry Nation (busy with his ‘other’ 1960s series, ‘The Baron’ for ITC) would
trust to handle The Daleks (though Whittaker had never writtern a Dalek script
before he’d worked closely with Terry on the first two as script editor and
co-written the Dalek comic strips, the stage play and writing the screenplays
for the two Peter Cushing films on his own). It’s also an idea that’s right up
Whittaker’s street: his stories tend to be more about people than events by and
large and – like The Who – every story he seems to be writing about something
or someone else is really about trying to understand who your identity is after
some big change comes to shatter your idea of who you are (‘Talking ‘bout my
regenerations!’) Just look at the stories he wrote: ‘The
Edge Of Destruction’ in which The Doctor and companions learn to trust each
other after their paranoia comes to the service, only to discover it’s a
‘fault’ in the Tardis settings; ‘The Rescue’
in which the show changes again after its first alteration to the cast and how
that changes the dynamics amongst the others, ‘The
Crusade’ where we see new sides to all four travellers as they fight to
survive their different sub-plots, then in the future ‘The
Evil Of The Daleks’ (in which The Doctor has a new manipulative side and
poor Jamie doesn’t like it), ‘The Enemy Of the
World’ (where The Doctor spends half the story pretending to be his evil
doppelganger Salamander), ‘The Wheel In Space’
(where The Cybermen are most like Humans and least like relentless robots) and ‘The Ambassadors Of Death’ (about -
apparently – astronauts who have returned to Earth and started acting
alien). Whittaker is, therefore, the
perfect person to change the entire identity of the show and he does so very
cleverly, writing a script that starts off odd, then gradually becomes more
normal in stages until by the end the Doctor has proved himself against his
greatest foes, all whilst showing how things have changed now (because he does it
through manipulation and suggestion, in a very different way to the 1st Doctor:
for a start he pretends to be an ‘examiner’/inspector in episode one after
finding a dead body, simply because it’s the easiest way to investigate what’s
going on – a sort of lie the Hartnell Doctor would never even have contemplated
and would simply have brazened out; its also hard to imagine the 1st Doctor
getting a seat suck to his posterior as the 2nd childishly does here too!) Only
there was a slight problem: Whittaker was, by 1966, a very busy man. He had
just deservedly been elected by his peers to become the president of the
Writer’s Guild, back in the days when it was a really big deal (it still exists
now but in drastically reduced fashion) and he would hold the post for the next
two years. Though free to write the first draft he didn’t have the time to
commit to all the rewrites necessary. Not usually a problem (having been a
script editor himself Whittaker’s first drafts tended to be more like other
people’s lasts, with considerations of budget, character and plotholes already
covered and dialogue that read like poetry) but in this instance there was a
huge problem: though the new Doctor had been cast nobody could decide who he
was or what he should be. So Whittaker decided to leave a big hole, leaving the
Doctor as vague as possible, to be filled in by someone else at a later date.
That person ended up being – due to a quirk of fate and the fact that he was
the only other person Terry Nation trusted with his Skaro miscreants –
Whittaker’s replacement as Who script editor Donald Spooner. Only he wasn’t
writing for The Daleks (and by all accounts left those parts of the script 99%
untouched) – he was writing for the new Doctor.
It took a long time to
work out who the second Doctor was and it’s perhaps a sign of how he would
treat the role that Patrick Troughton’s first reaction to being offered the
role back in June 1966 was to laugh: he couldn’t possibly see a way that he
could fill the shoes of an actor he genuinely admired and thought the show
wouldn’t last with him in the role. He was, nevertheless the first – in many
ways the only real – choice, nominated by both producer Innes Lloyd, head of
drama Shaun Sutton (who’d been at drama school with Troughton) and accepted
enthusiastically by series creator Sydney Newman and – so some reports have it –
with relief by William Hartnell himself, who both liked and respected Troughton
and knew he would have the same commitment to the show he did. Only Troughton
seemed less than convinced. Nevertheless two months of being out of work made
him rethink his mind: Troughton had only ever had one regular role in a series
before (Sir Andre Ffoulkes in ‘The Adventures Of the Scarlet Pimpernel’) and
that had been eleven full years earlier. He’d mostly stuck to bit parts to
avoid typecasting but by now his home life was complicated enough to need a
reliable wage (one of the reasons there are so few interviews with Troughton
was that he was terrified of the papers finding out his big secret: that he had
two wives and children with both of them, yet hadn’t divorced the first: a big
scandal in 1960s Britain). So by August 2nd, with the production team (and Who
creator Sydney Newman) still convinced he was the right choice, he finally
agreed. In a quick turn around that seems like science fiction today this was
announced to the paper just three days later: before the costume, the
character, camera tests, rehearsals, anything.
At first Pat, still
terrified of casting, suggested wearing black facepaint and a turban: if the
casting went as badly as expected nobody need know it was him and even if a fan
liked it they wouldn’t recognise him and leave him in peace. This idea lasted a
while before he was agreed to drop it (too much time in the makeup chair). Then
at the costumiers Troughton picked out a Victorian windjammer’s uniform, hoping
to play a hardened stricter Doctor closer in feel to Hartnell and his own
villainous bit-parts. Sydney Newman was the one who vetoed this idea, asking
why he wasn’t playing the part more as his ‘real self’ as a sort of ‘cosmic
hobo in space’. Troughton still wasn’t sure how to take that comment and nor
were the Dr Who team. There was a false start where he tried out the Doctor
with a Chaplinesque walk and a Harpo Mark style wig (finally dropped super late
in the day when he dressed up in camera rehearsals for the first episode and
his co-stars couldn’t get through their lines without giggling). For a time,
too, it was thought that the Doctor could be a dashing action hero (much closer
to who the 3rd ended up being) owing to the fact the new actor was
‘so much younger’ (actually he was only twelve years younger than Hartnell but
the script makes much of this being a ‘rejuvenation’ rather than a
‘regeneration’). Troughton, overwhelmed
by all the voices in his face giving him suggestions and super close to filming
without having found ‘his’ Doctor by October (his first time in front of the
cameras was on the 22nd, no time at all from casting), decamped to
the BBC bar where Who producer Innes Lloyd and script editor Gerry Davis spent
a rowdy lunch throwing out ideas. By the end of it Troughton still hadn’t got a
clue who his Doctor was, but his colleagues did: they’d seen the way he sat
back, taking things in, his mind apparently elsewhere and the quickness with
which he went from seriousness to laughs. So that became the new Doctor: where
the old was ‘doer’ and a ‘talker’ this
one would be a ‘listener’ and a ‘thinker’ and far from imposing his own
authority onto situations he would be off to the side tearing existing ones
down, with sudden moments of flippancy that took people off-guard but the same
intensity deep down and the same committed morals (something all the Doctors
have shared, more or less) because he was still recognisably the same man. As a
cut line from the first episode puts it: ‘Plasticine is still plasticine, Ben,
whatever shape it’s in’.
Spooner duly created much
of what we think the second Doctor is, working from notes from his colleagues
who all had slightly different takes on the process. Whittaker – for whom the
Tardis was sacred and the single most important ‘character’ in the show – wrote
in a line that made it to air that regeneration was a ‘part of it without which
I couldn’t survive’, a line that’s ignored by practically everyone who wrote a
regeneration scene later (it won’t happen in the Tardis again until Peter
Davison becomes Colin Baker at the end of ‘The Caves Of
Androzani’ in 1983). Whittaker also wrote in a cut line that it happened to
every timelord (not that such a word existed back then) every 500 years like
clockwork, regardless of whether they were clean living or not, a fact which
would have changed the show forever if it had got through. Davis, meanwhile,
didn’t see regeneration as becoming a whole new person: for him it was like ‘Dr
Jeykyll and Mr Hyde’, a character that was always lurking inside the Hartnell
Doctor that only now came to the surface (the way it does occasionally with
patients who’ve banged their head badly and been concussed). Other people
around talked about a more spiritual process, describing the change as a ‘bad
LSD trip’ and akin to the Buddhist idea of reincarnation (something future
producer Barry Letts will pick up on in two regenerations’ time). As for Sydney
Newman, who’d suggested the idea when he saw how much Hartnell was beginning to
struggle, he didn’t care as long as it added to the mystery of the show rather
than took away from it. Notably even by the end of the story the 2nd
Doctor is still quite shapeless, more defined by all the ways he isn’t like the
st Doctor than who he actually is, with Troughton forming many of his
characteristics himself. The recorder, for instance, was his own touch: he
wanted the Doctor to be more child-friendly and figured a lot of children are
taught to play recorders – he himself had been learning alongside his children
the past six years and had taught him to play basic tunes (the first one he
ever plays, briefly in episode one, is a tune one of his songs had written –
sadly we don’t know which one, but it could well be future Who star David; dad
tried to get a production credit for them but sadly this was vetoed). Troughton
improvises wildly from the first too, with the ‘Lesterson listen’ tongue-twister
thought to be the first Troughton ad lib (pity the poor production team: there
they are, after three years of Hartnell fluffing and making stuff up to cover
his fading memory when his replacement does the same, for fun! By contrast
Pertwee was the sort of actor who learned everyone’s lines not just his own and
hated anyone going off script. The two stories where Doctors 2 and 3 worked together
were, apparently, quite the experience for everyone in their shared scenes). If
there’s one thing this new Doctor is at first, though, it’s unpredictable –
he’s a long way from the safe pair of hands that Hartnell was. Somehow its
fitting his first planet should be one filled with mercury swamps – the 1st Doctor
was a solid presence in every situation he was in, across time or space, but
this Dr is mercurial and unpredictable, changing with the wind.
The usual story in
guidebooks and forums goes that the series takes the safe route by putting the new
Doctor up against the Daleks so the series can return to more normal form with
a big ratings grabber, but even this isn’t quite right: there was less
publicity for this story than any previous Dalek serial and the Daleks we meet
here aren’t anything like the straightforwardly scheming Skaro natives of their
previous four appearances. This lot are shifty, devious, cunning, over-running
a Vulcan human colony not by direct invasion but by stealth, acting every bit
as oddly as The Doctor (and no we don’t meet any Vulcans only Humans and no we
didn’t pinch it from Star Trek – Dr Who got there first, if only by a few
weeks. Vulcan was really popular in 1966 for some reason, despite being an 18th
century invention of a hypothetical planet some scientists assumed to exist
between the sun and Mercury, mostly it seems as a result of them getting their
sums wrong). They’re subtly different to anything we’ve ever seen them do
before: they talk a lot more and are far more individual than Terry Nation ever
designed them to be (an aspect of the final story he hated but which I confess
I rather like; they’re less monotone and stupid in this story than they had
been of late). Also we can no longer see it, but this is the first story to
show the mutants inside the Dalek casings for the first time (though we have
seen some move across the floor), answering for once and for all the question
of whether they were ‘robots’. The threat level is clever too: this is a small
scale story, to better concentrate on the new Doctor and the threat seems small
at first compared to past Dalek stories (we ‘invade’ them, they ‘invade’ us,
they travel across time and space and they hold the potential destruction of
the universe in their hands), but this small gaggle of Daleks are still more
than enough to destroy. Within mere episodes they’re building their own armies on
an alien planet with alien technology and seem unstoppable, outnumbering the
few straggling Humans here. The Daleks are also the perfect choice for a story
that’s all about people pretending to be something they’re not; they’ve set
themselves up as the harmless servants of the humans, there to help humanity
and do all the jobs they don’t want to do and the Humans have never seen them
before so simply take them at their word – only the Doctor (and us) know better.
And nobody’s listening to him because nobody trust him, including Ben (even
companions Ben and Polly have never met The Daleks before). It’s such a clever
idea: the audience at home automatically sides with The Doctor (in an era
where, even if this was your first ever Dalek story, they were so much a part
of 1960s society you knew exactly what they were). Most of the drama comes not
from ‘how is the Doctor going to stop them this time?’ but ‘is the Doctor going
to stop them at all?’ After all, for people who’ve never heard of The daleks,
The Doctor looks like the madman, rushing around talking about doom and
destruction when they’re happy playing the perfect butler and he’s clearly the
unstable one why should they believe him? This is the one story where he can’t
bring his usual Doctor authority to bear on the situation – because he hasn’t
earned it yet, including with the audience at home. We’ve seen the Daleks do
similar things to this since of course and we’ve seen more than enough
regenerations for the scenes of the Doctor acting a bit odd to lose its effect
nowadays, but coming to this story fresh, for the first time, must have been
the single most confusing bit of television 1960s viewers could watch. The
Doctor acting like a villain? The Daleks acting nice? What is going on? Slowly
though Whittaker (along with Davis and Spooner) slowly move their pieces across
the board bit by bit until, by the end of the story, you know that The Daleks
are only pretending and The Doctor isn’t – that this really is him and he is
the same being we’ve loved the past three years. After half a story of agreeing
with Ben that this new man can’t possibly be the Doctor, you end it agreeing
with Polly that he’s still the same underneath it all, with the same characteristics
of bravery, kindness and cleverness, just shown in a very different way (same
flagpole; different flags). It really is a very clever way of handling the
impossible. Slowly, this story goes from being nothing like Dr Who to being the
most Dr Who story ever, a full on fight between good and evil.
Credit, too, for the way
Whittaker handles the rest of the story that is all about trust and power
struggles: what seems to fight to control static electricity is really a fight
for power. And it’s not just The Daleks fighting Humans for control either.
This is a story where even the minor characters are ‘playing’, pretending to be
someone else (much the way The Doctor is by taking on the role of the
‘examiner’). Bragen appears to be the trustworthy boss, but he’s hedging his
bets who’s side he’s on. Janley seems like the quiet token girl in the group,
staying in the background and doing as she’s told – but really she’s the head
of a rebellion group who wants to tear the colony down. Everyone treats Quinn
with suspicion after it seems as if he’s sided with the rebels, but he’s been
framed and trying to hold things together. Even Lesterson, the most reliable
and trustworthy member of the base, is living on denial a few episodes in,
unable to believe the horror that The Doctor is right and that the Daleks he’s
trusted have betrayed them all, pretending everything is fine when it clearly
isn’t. As early as the first episode when The Doctor turns up they’re all
looking shifty too: after all, if he really is the examiner, what are they so
afraid of that they won’t let him examine? As the story goes on all of them
appear happy to kill, whether directly or indirectly by not stopping things
when they have the chance, because of all their contrasting, conflicting,
overlapping principles. This contrasts heavily with The Daleks who are all as
one, with the same voice and the same single goal of extermination: fragmented,
The Humans don’t seem to have a hope trying to save the universe from Daleks
when they can’t even save themselves.
There’s a telling moment in this story when The Daleks ask why Humans
destroy that nobody ever answers. It’s not meant to be ‘in character’ or be
cheeky, as some reviewers think: it seems like a genuine question. Daleks
destroy life because anyone that isn’t a Dalek is inferior and deserves to die.
But Humans? They all kill to save humanity – it’s just that they have such
different ideas of what would be better that they all kill each other. No
wonder to a Dalek that looks blooming daft.
Against all this only Ben
and Polly are in any way reliable and they get a nice lot to do this story,
Ben’s cynicism and Polly’s sarcasm far more explored and pertinent to the plot
than in some of their other stories (as the only story to feature the 2nd Dr
without at least one of Jamie/Victoria/Zoe along for the ride its notable how
independent they are, not taking the Doctor’s word for anything and doing
investigations of their own – Jamie especially would be following loyally and
thus remove a lot of the drive of this story about trust and accepting people
at their word. Whittaker will build on this a lot for the sequel ‘Evil Of The Daleks’ when even he
loses it for a while). Notably much of the plot happens because of their
unstinting belief in the other – that Ben will always rescue Polly come what
may, no matter how difficult or scary and they will always find each other. In
a story of such shifting sands it’s the one reliable constant. They’re both
superb, both actors really taking to being the ‘old experienced hands’. Anneke
Wills and Michael Craze are great throughout; the story rather falls apart in
episodes 4 and 5 when they have a week off each. They get a lot of tricky stuff
to do too, such as changing their characters because o the change on board the
Tardis, both of them subtly re-thinking their life wandering across and time.
Notably Ben doesn’t like this Doctor as much: he gets on better with authority
figures giving orders, but for Polly it’s an improvement: this Doctor gives her
the freedom and fun they’ve been missing.
And out of the ashes Dr Who
is reborn and safe (for the next three years, before we go through it all again
anyway – only in colour this time). We owe a lot to this story which might not
necessarily have done anything best but did it first and is the giant many
later towering stories get to stand on that wouldn’t be a quadzillionth as good
without this trailblazer to make them possible. The regeneration rightly
overshadows this story and so it should; the opening episode of the new Dr
checking up in his 500-year-diary (such a great joke!) and looking back at his
old self in a mirror have rightly gone down in DW folklore, even though they’ve
long since been wiped and restricted to being a sort of folk memory of
something nobody under sixty can possibly remember firsthand (A quick word on
the mirror actually which most people are so used to they just accept at face value.
But how would that work, that the 2nd Doctor – and us – see Hartnell’s
face looking back at him? Has the time-travelling Tardis not caught up with
reality? Is the Doctor still pulling his new face together through force of
will? Or is this just Whittaker writing about his obsession with mirrors and
how they could relate to time travel again? There’s far much more of this sort of
thing in ‘Evil’).
The rest of the story is
often a strong one too though, even if it’s one of those ‘classic’ stories
that’s great in parts rather than great all the way through. There tends to be
one great powerful moment per episode that overshadows the rest of it: the Doctor’s
regeneration, the discovery of a Dalek lurking in the shadows, best of all
their ‘creator’ Lesterson’s discovery of a Dalek production assembly line at
the end of episode five where he discovers that rather than four Daleks as he
thinks there are millions of the things, all creating themselves as far as the
eye can see. Even though this story has sadly been reduced to a few seconds of
surviving material (cut by censors in countries apparently more squeamish than
Britain and still miraculously held in foreign archives still decades after the
episodes themselves were wiped), the audio soundtrack and a rather rickety
animation, this short surviving scene is still one of my favourites in all of Dr
Who, yes even with Louis Marks Dalek toys on a 12 foot conveyor belt (technically
renamed ‘Herts Plastic Moulders’ push along Daleks’, released for Christmas
1965 and still in the shops when this story was on) and cardboard cutout
blowups at the back to save money. It’s a huge payoff: the moment the Daleks
are proven to be lying and the Doctor is proven to be right and even Vulcan’s
biggest denier can’t ignore the Doctor’s pleas anymore.
However, so big is the
shadow of the regeneration and the Daleks’ plan that it’s sometime forgotten by
fandom how boring the moments in between are and how in many ways, word for
word, this might be Whittaker’s least interesting overall script for the series.
The ‘in-between’ scenes are mostly the old Dr Who standbys of getting captured,
then escaping and there are a lot of them this being a six parter, while by
1960s Dr Who standards the acting is...variable (so much of this story depends
on Lesterson’s slow crumble from confident belligerent scientists to broken man
that actor Robert James is the weakest link on audio, though for all I know
he’s brilliant and did it all with his eyes, not his voice – it’s so hard to
tell when so little survives. Equally Jenley’s ‘betrayal’ and her change from
flirty strumpet to hard-nosed criminal should be huge news, but Pamela Ann Davey
plays the part with the same hard-edged confidence throughout). Compared to the
best of Who stories none of these supporting characters really stand out and
lapse into caricature at times, while even the understandable denial of not
wanting to admit a mistake and having to believe what’s in front of your eyes is
wearing thin by the end. Even Troughton isn’t as great as he’ll become, though
that’s understandable given how hard he hit to the ground running (he has a lot
of lines to learn too with such a small cast, more than Hartnell had for years)
– impressively all the aspects of his Doctor are there already, including the
recorder and the baggy trousers, though I for one am sorry he dropped his
fascination with hats after another couple of stories. He clearly works well
with director Christopher Barry too – no surprise, really, given that he was
hired specially as a close friend of Pat’s and had co-directed the first Dalek
serial). The sets aren’t great either, though again it helps a lot seeing
actors actually move around them rather than as static photos where you can
study them and see how they were put together so that view might be wrong too.
So is this a great story
or just an important one? As ever it’s hard to judge this story against most
others – they actually ‘exist’ still whereas this one doesn’t, bar a few scraps
and photos, and this one is harder to judge than most: rather fittingly for a
script that’s all about things not quite being what they seem this one seems to
have been filmed to ‘con’ the viewer more than normal with its models and
cardboard backgrounds. It certainly seems to be lower budget than normal, but
sometimes that can work in a story’s favour (see ‘Edge Of Destruction’
especially). Is the script good enough to work despite these problems or not?
We know from the likes of ‘Tomb Of The Cybermen’
and ‘Galaxy 4’ how flimsy a great story
can seem when we can actually see it, as opposed to imagine it in our heads.
Even as a soundtrack it’s hard to get a full measure on what’s going on as this
is such a ‘visual’ work and even the much delayed novelisation (one of the
last, as Terry Nation was reluctant to have anyone else write for the Daleks,
but was too busy to write the novels himself) feels quite ethereal and hard to
pin down, to imagine happening for real. There’s no denying that ‘Power’
clearly had a big impact on the people who saw it at the time and it continues
to be well loved even by those who can only imagine it (at a ranking of #19 in
the 50th anniversary poll, this is the highest of the Who stories with any bits
‘missing’ - bar ‘Web Of Fear’ which is 5/6ths complete and thus the missing
part is easier to imagine anyway, with ‘Evil Of The Daleks’ next on the list at
a lowly #34). Part of that ranking, too, must be because the scraps we have
look so good: the shots of the Daleks chanting in unison that stretch on for
minutes or the Daleks going round and round in circles as if there’s a whole
army (instead of a clever set that enables the four props to chase each other’s
castings across the scenery): if the rest of this story genuinely looked like
this then it would be in my top ten easily, but of course those are two of the
best scenes that have survived. I suspect if we had it the whole story wouldn’t
hold our interest enough for ‘Power’ to get away with so many conjuring tricks
we fail to notice when things go wrong, but that the set pieces would, if
anything, have even more impact when seen in the context of the whole story.
One thing I do know is that ‘Power’ is a powerful script that takes one hell of
a lot of chances and if this story had got them wrong then this would have been
the end of the series right here (well, the end of the season would have been maybe)
and instead of writing 335-odd reviews for a 60th anniversary I’d be mentioning
Dr Who in a list of worthy but forgotten scifi serials that ended before their
time. ‘Power’ really is that crucial to the DW story and for that alone
deserves a high placing in this list, full of many magical perfect moments,
even if it’s not quite a perfect magical story per se.
POSITIVES + This is a
story with notably strong cliffhangers but the best of all comes at the end of
episode two when we see our first ‘awake’ Dalek, working for the humans and
apparently working as a good little slave. Just to rub the point home he keeps
intoning ‘I am your servant’ in the usual monotone Dalek voice. Only the Doctor
knows the truth and, still a little manic after his regeneration, goes into a
long mad emotional speech about how these Daleks are killers and no one in the
colony is safe because they’re going to be wiped out, all while the Dalek stays
rational and placid and just won’t shut up. We know the Doctor’s right of
course because we know our Dr Who and like the Doctor are desperate for
everyone to listen to him, but to the colonists it’s this untrustworthy
interloper whose clearly emotional and mad and you can understand their
scepticism against these seemingly calm and placid creatures. Even Ben and
Polly are reacting as if The Doctor needs a lie down, not as if everyone should
be rushing around obeying his every word. It’s a great chilling moment of
drama, as two world views come up against each other and clash and we at home are,
despite the title, powerless to do anything about it (Whittaker’s scripts are
always good at this sort of thing).
NEGATIVES - Not to bring
it up again but how exactly did they think they were going to get away with a
still photograph of a bunch of Daleks at the back of the set? Till now we’ve
had static Dalek bases and they’ve been obvious enough, but this just seems
ridiculously hopeful that viewers won’t notice anything is amiss when The Daleks
don’t move and their casings don’t even reach the floor. Even on a grainy TV
set in 1966 I’m willing to bet it stands out a mile. I’d love to see the surviving
scenes we have properly back in context though as I have a sneaking suspicion
we’d all be too wrapped up in the whole thing to notice – but working with what
we’ve got this seems a budget cut too far.
BEST QUOTE: ‘I'd like to see a butterfly fit into a
chrysalis case after it's spreads its wings’
Previous ‘The
Tenth Planet’ next ‘The Highlanders’
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