Dalek: Ranking - 6

 

Dalek

(Series 1, Dr 9 with Rose, 30/4/2005, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Robert Shearman, director: Joe Ahearne)

Rank: 6

   'Invite: Let's storm area Van Statten, they can't stop all of us! We all know they're keeping things from us in there, alien things from outer space. Well let's band together and liberate any alien life they're holding. We can run like Naruto with our arms outstretched past the security guards and...wait what does exterminate mean again? Is that alien for 'thankyou'? No wait, stop, Aaaaagh!'

The 2005 comeback was already going great. We’d seen things the old series used to do but with a bigger budget and more emotion (‘Rose’), bonkers things with CGI and a budget the old series could only have dreamed of, with oodles of new monsters to love (‘End Of The World’), re-created the past in loving detail (‘The Unquiet Dead’) and taken pot-shots at contemporary politics (‘Aliens Of London/WW3’). I already knew that the future (not to mention the past and present) was in safe hands. But then came ‘Dalek’, a story that did things with Dr Who’s biggest and baddest enemy (and by association things with Dr Who’s oldest and most central character) I hadn’t even thought were possible. This was an episode I was both anticipating and dreading, the watershed moment that might make or break the comeback, the much anticipated showdown between the Doctor and the alien that made the series, the first re-match in seventeen years on-screen, in a series where if the audience went seventeen weeks without seeing one they got restless. Ever since they were brought back for the debut 2nd Doctor story ‘Power Of the Daleks’ there’s been a saying that no new Doctor feels like a proper Doctor until they’ve fought off a horde of Daleks, so for the revival to seem legitimate and ‘proper’ Dr Who this battle needed to happen somewhere in the first season and showing them midway through the season rather than keeping them for a finale was a strong move. There was so much riding on this story it had to be special, bigger even than the other episodes around it and it had to make the Daleks seem a plausible threat for a whole new generation who’d seen an extra couple of decades’ worth of scarier, angrier CGI monsters. The Daleks are after all such an integral part of this show - if the Daleks didn’t seem a threat how could any other monster possibly match up? Yet equally if they were modernised to look like everything else a generic Dalek would put off the fans who were still on the fence about the comeback. Putting them in an Earth base, a sort of area 51 (actually Cardiff’s National Museum and a sign of how much faith the local council had in Russell’s grand vision given the series hasn’t been on air and become a hit just yet) overseen by eccentric millionaire Van Statten and setting the story as close to present day as they could get away with (just seven years!) made this story seem ‘real’ in a way that a lot of other Dalek stories just weren’t, a ‘warning’ the audience ought to heed about where the world might end up rather than pure imagination. 

 The Daleks never seem more real too, or more dangerous, even though we only ever see one. Thankfully they take all the parts that made the Daleks so successful (with the frame actually going back in time to the original 1960s designs, re-designed by Mike Tucker who’d worked on ‘Remembrance Of The Daleks’) and throw in a few things that feel highly in keeping that production teams past would surely have used had they had the means and budget. The most interesting addition is a set of numbers just below the dome something the Daleks had only ever had before in the 1964 Christmas cash-in ‘The Dalek Book’ (and then because of a mistake: the artist, visiting the set of ‘Dalek Invasion Of Earth’, hadn’t realised they were only there for rehearsals so the director could remember which Dalek was which). It’s an odd idea that’s not generally there for future appearances but it works: this is a soldier whose come off a conveyor belt and hasn’t had the time to think for itself till now. Most of all, though, ‘Dalek’ writer Robert Shearman writes the Skaro scaries as the same cunning creations we always saw, as intelligent and driven as any human and a hundred times scarier. By 2005 The Daleks’ reputation was in a sorry state. Their creator (not Davros, the other one) Terry Nation had famously been protective of his inventions, worried that they might end up losing their power if every Granny at home was knitting cuddly Daleks and they were making endless appearances in ‘light entertainment’ shows (they do turn up in a racist Spike Milligan gag about Pakistani Daleks in the 1970s, but we try not to think about that if we can – if only because it should be the Dalek being racist and exterminating the Humans). After Terry’s death in 1997, though, we began to se why: suddenly they were everywhere, advertising batteries and chocolate bars and going all sweet and cuddly. For a generation of children they were the silly looking robots, not the most evil creatures in the universe who were so terrifying precisely because there were still living things inside their casings. Billie Piper herself was part of this generation (well, technically she’s two months younger than me but there weren’t exactly many people my age in love with this show as I remember well from having similar discussions about the Daleks looking silly on school playgrounds) and mostly laughed when people showed her pictures of Daleks after taking the role and wondered out loud how they could ever have terrified anyone. Even Dr Who itself had fallen into this trap a little, making the Doctor seem as if he was enjoying a holiday with some Dalek bashing rather than running scared for his life ( ‘Destiny Of The Daleks’ I’m looking at you! Though it’s hardly the only example). 

Russell T Davies knew this well so his demands for this script were to ‘reinvent everything that made the Daleks great and banish everything that made them daft’ and most of all to make people scared of the Daleks again, so Shearman sat his wife Jane Goddard down (who, despite being part of the ‘Big Finish’ family who’d played Alpha Centauri from the ‘Peladon’ stories on audio, thought the Daleks were stupid and couldn’t understand why her husband was so excited at the commission, ) and asked her for a list of all the reasons they looked silly. ‘They couldn’t go upstairs, they have no legs’ she said. So Shearman has Rose point the same thing out – only for the Dalek to chant ‘elevate’ and glide up after her (if Shearman was like me he no doubt ranted about how The Daleks had also climbed stairs in ‘Remembrance Of The Daleks’ but nobody watched that story because people thought Daleks were rubbish because they couldn’t climb upstairs and how wrong that was). Next Jane commented on how daft their plungers were – so one of the Dalek guards in the story does the same, before it suckers his face to death. ‘They can’t see behind them’ his wife continued, so Rob wrote in a scene where the Dalek dome swivels round. ‘Guns can damage them’ she added, so in went a scene where the Dalek disintegrates bullets easily. Basically every joke everyone could throw at the Daleks somebody does in this story – and then it gets turned upside down (Adam calls them ‘pepperpots’ early on – he isn’t doing that at the end when he’s running for his life. Hopefully neither are the audience). At last, for the first time in a long time, it feels as if someone is treating the Daleks with respect. Precisely by having the Dalek treat nobody with respect (Jane then received a thankyou by having Van Statten’s underling named ‘Goddard’ in this story!) 

In the single best move of the episode, we don’t see the damage and destruction a whole army can do but the threat caused by just one lone Dalek who was still powerful enough to destroy whole human platoons (Russell already had plans to bring back a whole Dalek army in ‘Bad Wolf/Parting Of The Ways’ so wanted this story to show what a threat one could be, thus upping the ante for the destruction a whole army of the blighters could cause). There’s one moment in particular that makes the Dalek such a threat in this story – the first time we see it exterminate anything. Rather than simply point and shoot a hovering Dalek absorbs a whole arsenal of weaponry without even blinking it’s eye stalk, then shoots a base’s sprinklers to their bemusement, then fires into the wet ground, electrocuting a whole battalion of soldiers in one go, ruthlessly, in order to kill as many people from one precious thunderbolt as possible, a terrific special effect (and ones we haven’t seen enough of in recent stories). If you’d never ever seen a Dalek story before this one (as a lot of the audience at home hadn’t) then you can absolutely see why this particular monster scared the Dr so much, with an unstoppable ruthless efficiency that made them stand out against everyone and everything else but an intelligence behind it too. This isn’t some army drone fooled by a bit of imagination but a smart kid turned bad. There’s none of the sense of flippancy that had underpinned so many of their stories down the years, no sense that the Dr must surely defeat them because he’s done that on screen so many times before, because everything about this story seems new and the 9th Doctor, whose always seemed so fully in control to the point of impenetrability, now looks terrified. 

Many fans wondered why Russell didn’t write this all-important story himself, but that was because he knew Shearman could pull this story off – not least because he’d already done it once with ‘Jubilee’, a Big Finish story from the 40th anniversary of 2003 that took Colin Baker’s 6th Dr into new territory, putting him at the heart of a war he could only half-remember. Big Finish were the audio company that had been started by fans in the ‘wilderness’ years when the show was off the air and I remember well buying up all the unofficial ‘audiovisual’ stories they used to sell at conventions before they got the official license from the BBC (Nicholas Briggs, for twenty years now the voice of the Daleks, was to me the voice of the 8th Doctor first, long before Paul McGann came along). Big Finish largely did what the New Adventures promised, ‘adult’ stories that wouldn’t have made it on TV in the classic series (the new one maybe not so much), but without resorting to the sex and drugs sniggering of some of the worst novels (and, indeed, ‘Torchwood’). They are, like the novels and comic strips, every bit the rollercoaster ride of the mains series, lurching from masterpiece to unlistenable horror with every roll of the dice, but at their best they pushed the returning Drs 5-8 with the original actors (and later the original Dr 4 plus 9 and 10 and impressionists for Drs 1-3, though these audios tend to work best when an actual companion ‘remembers’ their Dr speaking to them rather than an impression) further than they’d gone on TV. ‘Jubilee’ is one of the best of these early stories, released for the show’s 40th anniversary (one ignored by the BBC) and which Russell loved so much he used it in most of his pitches to the BBC about how a newer, darker Dr Who might look for modern audiences (the BBC assumed that they would just take the license off them when the show came back but Russell stuck his neck out and said how important they were for keeping the flame of Who alive and how useful they’d be to the series: it’s one of the few times he outright said ‘no’ to his paymasters). A lot of the 9th Dr’s darker edges had a home here first and perhaps the biggest change is the emotion in the stories and the fact that there’s no re-set button the way that there is on TV, with lessons learned from one story spilling over into the next. The 6th Dr, especially, goes on quite the journey, forced to face up to the fact that he’s not quite the ‘hero’ he thinks he is in his own head and mellowing slowly into maybe the warmest and cuddliest Dr of them all, but one with guilt for his past (oh for the original series to have put this 6th Dr on screen instead of the spiky acerbic one we got!) It was a smart move: the Big Finish fanbase already loved this story and Russell knew an audience of non-fans would too. Even before Big Finish Shearman was quite a big name in the CommWhonity too: he was co-editor of beloved fanzine ‘The Cloister Bell’ and even sneaks in a reference to the other editor, ‘Baywater’, which becomes the name of one of the guards. 

So Shearman became the first – to date the only – Big Finish writer hired for the new series and asked to write the new doctor and do for him what ‘Jubilee’ did for the 6th Dr. As a writer he ‘gets’ Christopher Eccleston’s timelord better than all the non-Russell writers for my money (in many ways the 6th Dr is the closest to the 9th, an angry not-so-young man scowling his way round the universe, even if they have different dress senses): this is a Doctor that isn’t just goofy ears but primal fears, someone who isn’t just harsh but someone trying so very desperately hard to be fun, but who has learnt the hard way to be too tough as a defence mechanism (as opposed to someone fun pretending to be tough or someone though pretending to be fun the way some of the other scripts had it). The 9th Dr is a trauma victim who would love nothing more than to go back to running madly round the universe writing wrongs with a wave of his sonic screwdriver and floppy scarf, but every time he does he forgets all the terrible things he once had to do in the name of war and survival and that haunts him more than the battle itself. In ‘Dalek’ Rose, like us, sees new sides of this mad stranger she’d never seen before and suddenly gets scared by what he’s capable of. Like many a soldier in WW1 and WW2 this isn’t the same man (well, timelord) who set off to war – he can’t just undo everything he’s seen, even though he so desperately wants to and the shock of seeing a Dalek unexpectedly triggers something inside him that reminds him of everything he’d been trying so hard to forget. 

 It was Russell who pulled that element to the front though. The initial draft was much more about the Van Stattens, with Adam as Henry’s son rather than an employee and a wife we don’t see on screen, living in an area 51 base surrounded by stolen alien tech. Shearman based him on the sort of millionaires who had more momey than sense and who had used their money to please themselves and endager lives rather than help people – for a time he was even called ‘William Fences’ in a nod to ‘Bill Gates’ before the idea got dropped! He’s not really like Bill Gates though: Van Statten is passionate and anger and full of very Human mood swings, a little like a Dalek himself – Davros even (Gates, of course, is an emotionless Cyberman viewing mankind as expendable beings to buy his gadgets). Van Statten is itself a name Russell had used before, in his penultimate series pre-Who ‘Mine All Mine’, in which a penniless taxi driver ends up discovering he’s the true heir of Swansea (it’s very much a love song to Wales and starred Gareth Lloyd David a couple of years before his recruitment to Torchwood as regular Ianto Jones). In this draft the Dalek is tortured purely to make it serve van Staten and sing ‘happy birthday’ to him (which would have been quote something in a Dalek voice). It’s a story seen much more from Adam’s point of view, as he realises how dysfunctional his family are and how hanging around hoping to inherit their millions is far more costly than getting out now penniless. One thing that didn’t change from draft to draft was the setting: an ‘area 51’ style bunker (named ‘The Cage’) full of alien weapons that have been stolen or recovered from crashed spaceships, alongside all the more interesting cultural artefacts man should be studying (my favourite scene of the episode has bunker owner Van Statten assuming he’s got hold of an alien weapon only for the Dr to show its really a musical instrument and one that sounds more convincing than anything in ‘Rings Of Akhaten’ to boot; another ‘gun’ turns out to be a hairdryer in one of my favourite DW gags – my candidates for the aliens using it are the Abominable Snowmen or The Monoids. Very Dr Who: if this was an American show they would all be weapons, but even though we’re in an American base the Whoniverse doesn’t work like that). Even so, the script was missing something to make it spark. 

And then Russell mentions the time war and the script all falls into place. Having the Doctor just running round when we didn’t see him having everyday adventures was boring – giving him something he was still recovering from when we met him, something impossibly big that couldn’t possibly be done even on the new bigger budget, raised the stakes that much more and was vastly more in keeping with the darker toned edge of other 21st century stories than the traditional ‘optimistically wandering through space’ idea. Russell wasn’t a big fan of the timelords either, overseeing mini-Gods who could swoop in and solve everything at a stroke, so instead had the most powerful race in the universe locked in a stalemate with the Daleks, the Dr’s people effectively wiped out by a genocide that’s perfectly in keeping with the way Terry Nation used to equate his creations with the Nazis (though for now its shadowy and some of the details aren’t filled in till later). In a sense too the time war is the fan’s trauma of losing their favourite show, of having the universe of the future trapped and unmoving, static. So far the comeback series has been all about looking forwards (yes, even in a story set in Victorian London), but this is the first time the Doctor stops to properly tell Rose (and us) about his past and what he got up to during the years off screen and its one of Russell T Davies’ best ideas, having the Dr be in mourning for all those ‘lost years’ alongside us. The time war element gives this story a whole layer that none of the earlier or later Dalek stories have: the last time these two met in battle unseen, it wasn’t just fighting over a planet of strangers but the Doctor’s homeworld Gallifrey and very nearly every living soul with it; this battle isn’t just to save a planet of stragglers, this time it’s personal. The 9th Dr has clearly been suffering from ptsd and survivor’s guilt (ironic, really, given that the last story of the old run was called ‘Survival’) ever since we first met him, surly and aloof and detached but with sudden howling emotional rages that come out of nowhere, usually after putting a brave face on things and trying to make a joke, but so far fans haven’t been quite sure if he was always going to turn out like that or whether this regeneration was the direct result of trauma we never saw. And now, at last, we know. Because for the first time in the new series the Doctor does something that would have been unthinkable in any of his past eight regenerations but which is entirely in keeping with this story: he comes across the final Dalek (or so we think) and gloats, triumphant in his enemy’s downfall before telling it to die. And the Dalek doesn’t react the way we’ve come to expect from any of the fourteen Dalek stories of the past: he breaks our heart, a creature of pity and suffering who in any less emotional setting would be the first person the Dr would have helped, a last soldier who knows the war is over but for whom fighting has become so much of his identity he doesn’t know what else to do anymore. Had this moment come out of the blue, had it been in the first episode, we’d all have piled on this story for contradicting the entire moral backbone of the series (the way most of us did with ‘The Timeless Child’) but no: we’ve seen flashes of this mystery across the first five stories of ‘new Who’ so the answer, when we get it, feels earned and makes total sense. The time war wasn’t just another war, it changed both Doctor and Dalek forever, it made the Dalek more vulnerable and the Dr more ruthless so that they ended up more like each other than they care to admit. 

There’s another layer upon that with this one in a long line of Dr Who stories debating the need for war and the possibilities of peace. This is only the fifth story since 9/11 and the first to approach it, with Russell T a furious critic of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that were fought directly afterwards and all the ‘excuses’ America (with British support) used to do despicable things back. Bush Jnr only left office the year this story was being written and 2005 was very much an era of distrust, when people had been whipped up by speeches and media both to distrust their Muslim friends, neighbours and strangers and see terrorists round every corner. Note that Van Statten is American, not British: we had remarkably few American characters in the original series (I won’t mention Morton Dill if you don’t!) and the base is in the USA not London (or Cardiff) for a change. All the better, then, for a parable of which war the writers are taking pot-shots at here. The Dalek is, in a sense an innocent victim: even though his kind are responsible for a good half of the time war he did no harm to Van Statten but he’s been kept in his museum along with the other relics. As much as the base is like area 51 it’s also Guantanamo Bay, the place where prisoners of war were being locked up and tortured by Americans, generally without trial. Virtually none of the prisoners there had any links to 9/11 and a lot of them weren’t even from the countries where terrorist group Al Qaida had launched their attack (and most of the remainder were innocent bystanders). And yet Bush had to be seen to do something, given how angry his nation had become. Russell was horrified at the idea of politicians claiming to keep people safe by keeping people who weren’t like them in conditions that very much weren’t safe. There was an outcry at the time: people at home began to wonder if it was right to chain and torture soldiers who were only taking orders from terrorists and were real people with real homes rather than cold-blooded killers (we desperately need a sequel about the fact that place is still open, even now). When Rose makes the quip, on hearing that they are filling the base in with concrete, that it’s ‘about time’, you sense she isn’t just talking about Van Statten’s base. And yet ‘Dalek’ the story isn’t as interested in the war was it is in what comes afterwards and it ends up being more like one of those documentaries you see every so often about how two OAP from different sides of wars, their lives shaped forever by the conflict of their youth, finally meet decades after shooting at each other and end up being scared not by how different they are but how similar, the way the war they fought has never quite stopped despite the dates down in the history books, in mourning for all that was lost because of it and haunted by all the ways in which the people they’d grown up to believe were ‘the enemy’ are really people just like them. It’s a whole new way of showing this series-old conflict on screen utterly unlike any of the previous Dalek showdowns, a battle reduced in scale to being one last soldier on either side of the trench who have to decide whether they finish the war off for good or find a truce. 

 So far the 9th Doctor has been very much the teacher to Rose’s pupil but in this story, just for a second, Rose’s natural empathy and kindness and open heart (the very thing that killed the 5th Dr after all) is a reminder to the Doctor of everything he used to be. In a sense this story is a sequel to ‘Evil Of The Daleks’, as the one we see here gets a little bit of Rose’s ‘human factor’ inside him and feels ‘contaminated’ by human concepts of kindness and sacrifice. Yes Rose accidentally frees the Dalek with her kind heart but the Doctor never tells her off for it – instead he’s ashamed that he isn’t like that anymore. War does difficult things to complex people and no character is more complex than the Doctor and this story pushes him to the extreme, to the point where we see this happy, goofy Doctor, whose trying so hard to turn over a new leaf and be likeable, suddenly does something he vowed he would never do and loses control (and right in front of his ‘girlfriend’ Rose just as he’s trying to impress her too), turning momentarily into a Dalek. One of the best lines of the entire comeback is Rose, big hearted Rose who would do anything for this man, breaking down and asking ‘what are you turning into Doctor?’ And for once even this smart alecky incarnation, with an answer for everything, can’t tell her because he doesn’t know who he is himself any more. No wonder the Dalek gets in perhaps the best dig of the whole series minutes later: ‘You would make a good Dalek’ he crows, hitting the Dr right in the hearts where it hurts the most, just at his moment of greatest triumph against his mortal enemy. 

 As for the Dalek, well, it goes on a similar journey which would have seemed unthinkable years before. When I first read the Radio Times preview of series one, complete with Russell T Davies ‘spoilers’, I have to say I was concerned by the line ‘Will you weep for a poor little Dalek?’ Seriously? The xenophobic wheeling nazi metaphor in a tank? Empathy? That’s wrong isn’t it? Not the Daleks at all. Clearly this series was going to be a disaster…And yet you do, because even the worst soldiers are affected by the wars they fight and suddenly all those past seventeen Dalek stories don’t matter. This Dalek isn’t like any others we’ve ever met. He’s alone and scared, just like the Doctor. He’s a prisoner of war in a war he wasn’t even fighting this time. He’s awaiting orders that never come and, like all the best/worst soldiers, he’s trained to not think on his own, so he just doesn’t know what to do anymore, blindly following orders to fight even though they make no sense. Only with utter humiliation he’s been chained up by a lesser species and had his exterminator taken away from him so he can’t even follow his basic training (he’s like the new recruit in prisoner of war films whose fingers are still reaching for their gun automatically even though it got taken away a long time ago). This is a Dalek whose also haunted by what came before every bit as much as the Dr and wants to be free of the war, but like many a soldier he’s been taught to survive above all else so goes on a killing spree because what else is there for it to do? This is all it knows and these people are hurting it, so why should he show mercy? Suddenly this Dalek doesn’t seem such a monster – the Doctor does, giving it orders to exterminate itself when its hurt and defenceless (and in the end its Rose who acts as go-between for them both, with peaceful solutions both are too prejudiced to see). 

Many writers on Dr Who in any era forget what the Daleks really are, they see the metal casing and think that’s the whole monster (Douglas Adams, for one, seems to have spent the entire time script-editing ‘Destiny Of The Daleks’ thinking Daleks were pure robots, with no one telling him otherwise), but there’s a tiny vulnerable lump of green goo inside that uses the tank to hide behind because it’s so scared and vulnerable and that deserves our pity (even if it would shoot us for giving it). In the same way that a lot of bullies are cowards underneath if you scratch the surface, afraid of anyone having power over them so they take control over other people and in the same way that most ring-wingers are secretly scared that people better and more able than them will take what they have away from them, so the Daleks are just trying to get the first shot in before someone does the same to the, with trauma of their own after the atomic war with the Thals that’s been a part of their story since their first story ‘The Daleks’. No other Dalek story remembers that detail quite as well as this one and of all the many sequels to the first story (including the ones written by creator Terry Nation) this one gets closest to the heart of what made that story work: you weren’t just scared of the Daleks, you pitied them too, trapped inside the machines they needed for survival but unable to experience ‘normal’ life ever again. There are lots of subtle bits of writing in this story that make you see this Dalek as more than just a ‘monster’. Given that the original Terry Nation Dalek stories started as a metaphor for prejudice and a Nazi style quest for racial purity that blinds the Daleks to everything else, it’s so poetically fitting this story, turning the tables on the Dr 9 and us older fans, makes us question all the cultural baggage we’ve heaped on this one Dalek and see history in a more modern way than we used to, seeing it as an individual, not an army, not a general, not a leader, just a footsoldier (well, wheel soldier I guess but you catch my drift). There’s even a brilliant bit of writing where the Dalek opens its casing, open and vulnerable in a way Daleks never are, enjoying the sunlight it’s been hiding from for so long before it dies (usually we only see a ‘proper’ Dalek when its casing has been destroyed), suddenly turning human at the point where it destroys itself forever because to go on living with such turmoil is just too much for it, one of the saddest scenes in all of Who, notwithstanding the fact that he was exterminating humans left, right and centre (and up and down) just a few scenes ago. Of course I was weeping. You’d have to be a, well, Dalek not to cry at scenes like that one. Cleverest of all for a story about war this tale creates a mini-one in the family household watching this on first transmission too and is a story that plays different depending which side of the sofa you’re on, just like the 1960s Dr Whos of old. If you’re little and this is all new to you then you’re instantly on the side of Rose: why is the Dr being so mean? This poor thing, its in pain, of course Rose should be helping him! And if you’re an older fan whose seen the other stories and what the Dr had to do in those to save people then you’re instantly on his side: of course he has to destroy this Dalek before it can do any harm, it’s pure evil! And like all the best Dr Who stories somehow those conflicting viewpoints have to come together to find a compromise in the end. 

Truly, though, this is one of those exceptional stories that works all the way through. Yes Van Statten is a bit of a clichéd bully, an American millionaire whose a bit shouty whose Dalek-like not because he’s pushed as far as the Doctor or the Dalek in this story but simply because he can afford not to have to worry about anyone else’ feelings (the story works better if you view him as a nerdy Bill Gates type with ideas of becoming a macho killer he was never cut out to be – good as Corey Johnson is as a swaggering Schwarzenegger the point would come over better still if they’d stuck to that idea). Even so you need a wannabe Human-Dalek contrast like Van Statten in a story like this, someone living off manipulation and instinct and greed who in his own way is less understandable a baddy than the more direct Dalek (and I love the way he’s just cast out by his underling Goddard by story’s end to become homeless and forgotten, the way he was sounding off to his scared staff earlier). Yes new boy Adam is a right pain, chatting up Rose and showing off gadgetry, something that gave me more nightmares than the Dalek at the time when I feared he was about to become a full-blown companion, but as things turn out he’s meant to be that wet behind the ears (next story ‘The Long Game’ shows up why Rose is exactly the sort of warm hearted open minded person that deserves to be travelling in the Tardis and money-grabbing Adam isn’t, but of course we at home don’t know that yet so it just looks as if Rose is acting up after a tiff with the Dr and has gone a bit loopy dragging an unsuitable boyfriend along as a backup). There’s maybe not as big a sense of what this underground base (a kind of area 51) is, how far it extends and just what else it contains beyond a single storeroom or the handful of staff we see. 

 The ‘torture’ scenes maybe go a little too far for a family audience too, the reason the first series carries a ‘12’ certificate when most of the others don’t. I know a few little ‘uns who were quite happy to see Slitheeens and Gelth blow up and were less upset than I was at the death of a talking tree, but who were deeply upset by the Doctor’s behaviour here and stopped watching, for a few weeks at least. Actually the Doctor was written to be mocking in these scenes and everyone was surprised at rehearsals when Eccleston started throwing his weight around and screaming (legend has it he was channelling his anger at his dad being poorly in the hospital and the strict Who schedule not being able to give him more than a few snatched days off to go see him he also said privately that he channelled the idea of a holocaust victim coming across a Nazi in chains; which given that Terry Nation created the Daleks partly out of his sheer hatred for all things Nazi is closer to the truth than Chris probably realised at the time). It works though: if the Doctor had just gone ‘hey ho’ so would the audience – we need to see that the Doctor is scared of a Dalek in a way that he isn’t by all the other creatures he meets. More than that we need to see the Doctor out of control not just swapping insults and it makes more sense that this particular jumpy, passionate Doctor would turn into the angry man in a leather jacket you wouldn’t want to go near after dark would end up that way. Honestly its no worse than similar scenes in ‘Vengeance On Varos’ and making a similar anti-violence point and well nobody seemed to care much about its effect on us 1980s kids (we turned out fine. Erm, mostly). Oddly enough it was Van Statten’s lines about the British ‘spooning’ that caused the most controversy and complaints about sexual connotations in a family show by Mary Whitehouse’s 21st century successors ‘mediawatch’ (to which I say…did you actually know any children in 2005?! They heard far worse than that on the playground. And you just wait till Captain Jack comes along!) Almost everything else in this story is a triumph though and ‘Dalek’ the story earns the accolade of being my favourite Dalek story from Who old series or new. 

 All the more remarkable, then, that at one stage it very nearly didn’t feature the Daleks at all until close before filming: despite okaying hippie Daleks eating kit-kats Terry Nations’ estate were still umming and ahhing about whether to sanction the use of the Daleks in the new-look series, worried that their beloved father/grandfather/uncle’s greatest creations might be tarred with the same brush of silliness if the show wasn’t any good when it came back (and if that seems harsh then, well, bear in mind the Daleks’ last official appearance before this had been in 30th anniversary special ‘Dimensions In Time’ where they’re up against that deadliest of foes: half the cast of Eastenders). So the Daleks were taken out (Shearman jokingly calling his next draft ‘Absence Of the Daleks’!) For a while the Daleks were re-written as the Toclofane, the small metal balls of hate-filled children Russell brought back for ‘Utopia’. That would have made for a perfectly good story too, but thank goodness Nation’s estate came round in the end: this is very much a Dalek story, from the tip of its chrome dome to its metal alloy wheels and to have another monster involved wouldn’t have given this story the huge big dimensions it has and it makes one of the most overused, overwritten monsters in scifi seem fresh and young again, breathing new life and ‘regenerating’ them the same way new life was breathed into the Dr a few episodes earlier. Even when Terry’s estate backed down, thanks to a copy of early rushes and scripts for other stories, the BBC still tried to dilute this script with the ending one of the few things they tried to over-rule: surely, they said, the Dalek should end up friends with Rose rather than commit suicide? But that would have been even more unthinkable Shearman stuck to his guns and demanded the script be kept as it was and the BBC, figuring that probably no one would watch anyway, rolled their eyes and let them get on with it. Indeed, it’s that brave ending that makes this story: if anything it’s ‘Bad Wolf’ that rather takes away from it, with hints that this lone Dalek really escaped and brought its pals back with it for revenge against humanity (I’d much rather think it was a rare honest Dalek, imbued with the benevolent spirit of Rose and the internet, telling the truth here). 

 If ever a story in the run of the new series made me feel that proper Dr Who was back – not just the nuts and bolts or the production values or the continuity references to past adventures but the ethos, the storytelling and understanding of what made the old series special - then ‘Dalek’ was it. A story that let me sleep safely at night knowing the ‘right’ people were in charge of my favourite show – even if, perhaps because, of it being a story that meant the Doctor and his greatest foe hating one another meant I felt like never sleeping ever again. This is a story that makes full use of the biggest change in the series since the comeback: the emotion. Rose feels the Dalek’s pain. The doctor feels guilt and regret. The Dalek finds that emotions are brutal. And somehow, even though we’d never had an emotional Dalek story before, it works because of the strong characters of all life-forms. Shearman’s script is a triumph: the old traditional view of Dalek stories was that they were good for action but bad for dialogue, given that they speak in such a spare bare monotone, but Shearman turns that on his head. This Dalek is wittier, smarter and more poetic than any of the humans. He’s much like the Doctor in fact, full of pithy one-liners that cut through to the heart of the action (we’ve had so many ‘talky’ Doctors in the years since it’s almost a shock to come back to series one and see just how much space there is in these scripts, with space for the Doctor thinking to himself rather than out loud the way the 10th 11th and 13th Doctors in particular do) and pretty much two out of three lines in this story are quotable classics that either are or deserve to be on merchandise (my favourite is Rose discussing bringing Adam along: ‘Let him come with us, he says he wants to see the stars’ ‘Well, tell him to go outside then!’) This is a really tight script, where barely a word is wasted, and without the padding common to practically every other story. It’s a huge loss to the show that Shearman hasn’t written for the series again (and not for lack of asking either, but the show as it became just grew too ‘big’ for him to be comfortable with all the extra scrutiny that goes with the job nowadays). The acting, too, sells the drama in the script: you feel every last word, every last thereat, every last twist of the drama. Even now, so many Dalek stories on, this one has never been beaten. Just when we feared we were going to get a shallow cartoon we got as adult and serious a drama as any in the show’s long history, all my doubts about the new series exterminated inside fifty minutes. Bringing back The Daleks for a series that had so much resting on it was a gamble. Bringing them back like this, in a way we’d never seen before, was an even bigger gamble. But both Davies and Shearman knew how brilliant the Daleks were when they were done ‘right’ and knew they were onto something when everyone kept coming up and touching the props during camera rehearsals, coating it with fingerprints to the point where a sign had to be added saying ‘please do not touch the Dalek – or you will be exterminated!’ Soon that idea would be playing out everywhere and I can’t tell you how proud |I was, as one of the last ‘new’ fans to join in with the old series, to pass a school playground and hear children playing at being Daleks just like I used to. That’s the moment when I knew this series was safe. The comeback series worked partly because of how consistent and adventurous it was but if it owes its success to any two episodes it’s the opener ‘Rose and this one, the story that went to places no episode had been to before, while honouring old friends (and enemies). 

 Oh and incidentally, one of my favourite details of this story is the way the Dalek effectively brings itself up to date with what’s been happening on Earth via the internet (at the same time we’re brought up to date with what’s happened with the Doctor), something that just wasn’t around for the old series. If any Dalek or indeed any other monster in the future uploads the entire internet as part of its rejuvenation process it will find I’ve written quite a lot of it via my three blogs. So if you see a Dalek walking round tutting, complaining about the Spice Girls, making bad puns and getting into flower power and taking up peace and love instead just know that you’ll have me to thank, okay?!

 POSITIVES + I love museums, the closest humans can get to time travel (old timers might have noticed we haven’t got to a certain Hartnell story set in a museum yet and I’m quickly running out of reviews) and even more so ones in the Whoniverse that collect together all sorts of artefacts on screen. Admittedly this one is more of a private collection of stolen artefacts and we don’t get to see much of this one bar a Slitheen claw and a ‘Revenge Of The Cybermen’ head, but even that was a thrill at a time they hadn’t come back on screen yet (for all we knew we weren’t going to get any more Dr Who post 2005 ever – its only right and proper the show’s second most important baddy should be in there somewhere). Just having things from multiple cultures, all clearly different, rubbing shoulders on a shelf says more about how big the Whoniverse is than any amount of CGI shots of planets in space. It’s an attention to detail that just didn’t need to be there for the sake of the plot and yet is there to please fans like me, because this is a show being made by fans for other fans who know what will excite the audience. I only wish we’d got this story maybe later in the run so we could have had a whole collection of props like this (the ‘old’ series props, of course, having been lost, sold, recycled, raffled or disintegrated long ago by 2005). This aspect also allows a bit of a ‘Toy Story II’ theme in there too: amazingly there were more Dr Who things to buy than ever, mostly because there were now more independent family companies making stuff beyond the old days with just a handful of big name manufacturers. Slowly, though, the merchandise range had moved on from ‘toys for you to re-create your own Dr Who adventures’ and more towards ‘collectibles that sit in a box and gather dust and money’. As a fan who’d played with so many Who toys himself Russell knew how intrinsically ‘wrong’ this was for a series that was pro-imagination and anti-greed, so the Doctor gets a rant in here about people ‘collecting’ the universe’ and bringing it down to their level without really understanding it, rather than exploring the possibilities it offers. 

 NEGATIVES - With so much subtle emotion going on in the dialogue its rather a shame that Murray Gold chooses now to become louder and more hammy than ever, drowning out some of the words with his all-singing all-dancing orchestras and choirs, plus a synthesiser he’s got out the loft to make it sound ‘Daleky’ (thankfully he never tries this again, as it never quite worked in the 1980s and certainly not in 2005). It’s all a bit loud isn’t it? I SAID IT’S ALL A BIT LOUD ISN’T IT?! Gold’s at his best across the rest of this first season, filling in the gaps of the emotions these characters aren’t telling each other (especially the 9th Dr, who leaves more gaps and silences to fill than Murray’s other talkier Drs 10-12) but here, in a story where the Dr’s already been pushed to such extremes that he’s an emotional ball of fury spitting venom, we can already see what he’s thinking more than clearly and musicians tugging at our heart-strings just get in the way of a job the script is doing far more subtly. 

BEST QUOTE: ‘You just want to drag the stars down and stick them underground, underneath tones of sand and dirt and label them. You’re about as far from the stars as you can get. And you took [Rose] down with you!’ 

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ’Jubilee’ means this is, of course, all déjà vu for the Doctor. Back in the days before the comeback this 2003 Big Finish story (#40 in the main range) already seemed ‘special’. You can see why it so appealed to Russell T that he used it in all his pitch meetings as its effectively Dr Who pared down to its essences: a Doctor versus a Dalek, re-introduced in a story that makes them chilling. All the plot beats from the final story are there: the eccentric millionaire is part of the British aristocracy and there’s no time war, but there is a big showdown in a museum where a Dalek is being tortured and it is the Doctor’s companion Evelyn (a mature history student and the single best Who companion not seen on telly) whose kindness for the tortured alien sets off events and has her questioning the Doctor’s motives when she sees how terrified and angry he is. The stakes are just as high, the tension just as palpable. However the ‘feel’ of this story is very different. The 6th Doctor might be shouty on TV but in the audio adventures he’s older and calmer, more of an eccentric grandfather than an angry young man (and it’s a part that suits Colin Baker far more), his conversations with Evelyn more banter than the bickering he had with Peri. This Doctor isn’t as scarred or as scared as the 9th Doctor – his actions are more because he knows the damage one lone Dalek can do and nobody else seems to be taking the threat seriously. With less action sequences and more supporting characters this version of the story is more of a philosophical debate. Honestly I’m not sure which approach is better – I like the depth of the audio version and loved it long before the TV one, but it’s not as if that was a disappointment: the fact that you cans see the threat of the Dalek on screen makes the TV version all the more ‘real’. Fans who like one version, however, are sure to like both. Look out for the pizza company ‘Jubilee’ that delivers to the Van Statten base by the way, a quick in-joke for fans who already had this story (though sadly nobody orders any ‘Dalek bread’ to go with it!) 

‘Sven and the Scarf’ was one of many short extras created at home by Dr Who writers and actors during the 2020 covid lockdown (I won’t say the ‘2020 pandemic’ because we’re very much still in it) as an ‘extra’ to go with whichever regular ‘Dr Who watchathon’ was taking place that week with various people on twitter talking live like some big DVD commentary and uploaded to the Dr Who Youtube channel for free (I’m amazed that to date there has yet to be a DVD or Blu-Ray collecting them). This is one of the sillier, more pointless ones, mostly because Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper were busy doing other things and while Shearman gave his blessing to the project he didn’t fancy writing it. Instead it’s Who podcast presenter (‘Type 40’) Andrew Ireland who wrote and directed this piece with Leo Flanagan (Charlie in ‘Kerblam!’) playing the part of autopsy medic Sven. Set in Van Statten’s museum shortly before the events of ‘Dalek’ and a parody of the infamous Roswell autopsy tapes (that may or may not or may be half a hoax with human-made bits attached) the millionaire with more money than sense thinks he’s got a hugely valuable artefact, one that’s passed down through the space-time continuum after seven years in orbit and which has been parcelled up with heaps of bubble wrap for extra safety precautions. Not really a spoiler, given that it’s both an obvious punchline and its in the title, but it’s the 4th Doctor’s scarf. Goodness when he lost it – down the ‘Pit’ with Erato, on the space station of ‘The Invisible Enemy’ or in e-space maybe? At least Ireland knows his Who continuity and gives us lots of extra gags: samples include ‘remnant of alien grub like organism’ which happens to look just like bubble-wrap (the Wirrn in ‘The Ark In Space’ really was made of this packaging delight!), two wires that reminds him of a conflict (the big famous speech in ‘Genesis Of The Daleks’), a piece of sponge that might be a computer – or could just be a sponge (see ‘Terror Of The Zygons’), a ‘silicone based life-form’ that makes Sven go all funny and start talking about Eldrad (see ‘The Hand Of Fear’), an alien cactus that’s nearly a mega-loss’ (see ‘Meglos’) and a scary shrunken head (actually a jelly baby!) Good fun, but it doesn’t exactly add to your enjoyment of the episode. Oh and if we’re close to the Doctor’s arrival then presumably Sven is Adam’s predecessor, the unfortunate technician who ‘burst into flames’. Which makes you wonder if the next package was from Karn or Sarn, the two ‘hottest’ planets in Dr Who (except the ones in the process of blowing up or disappearing into a sun anyway). 

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