Asylum of the Daleks

The Moffat era has one systemic flaw that just won't go away: it won't expand its episodes worthy of 90 minutes into that length, instead making its stories abrupt and cramped to make way for all those filler episodes.  Which, in the case of Asylum, is really too bad, because at 90 minutes, this would be up there with Genesis, Remembrance, Power, Master Plan, Parting of the Ways, and Doomsday as among the all-time great Dalek stories and one of the best Doctor Who stories ever, period.

Of course, even with that, it's still damn good.

It opens with the Doctor walking into a Dalek trap on Skaro, which... why... does Skaro exist?  The Doctor blew it up four regenerations ago.  It's not like this is some obscure point of arcana; this is one of the centerpiece stories of the series.  I guess if you go to the novels, there was some way Skaro came back, but then I think (I could be wrong; I've only read a couple of the novels) it was destroyed again, and I'm pretty sure it was destroyed a third time in the Time War.  I'm pretty sure it's more destroyed than the Earth at the end of Mostly Harmless.

Admittedly, it looks cool.

And it's not even necessary to be there.  It's just... a slap in the face to knock you off-guard for a much, much bigger one: apparently, Amy and Rory are getting divorced.

I've gotta be honest, even with Chris Chibnoll's Pond Life series, that doesn't fly.  There have been undercurrents of tension between them in the past, but for all the complexity in their relationship, they've been happy.  Emotionally, all the last few times we've seen them, they were really happy together.  It's an incredibly jarring way to open the story even without the Up Continuity line. (which I'm convinced Moffat put in for precisely that reason.)

It's a real problem because one of the two emotional cores of the episode is the Amy/Rory relationship.  Their actual scene where they discuss their breakup and get back together is nicely written, and the already brilliant Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill always bring their performances to a whole other level with director Nick Hurran, so it hangs together, but only by its fingernails.  It really needed time at the beginning of the story to properly set up the emotions.  As it is, it isn't unconvincing, but it's nowhere near as moving as it should be.  The six-minute pretitle sequence needed to be about 20 minutes.

The end of that sequence is a knockout, with the Daleks demanding the Doctor "Save us!"  But it would have been an even bigger punch with more build-up.

But enough complaining.  Outside of the Ponds, it's more a minor problem.  Moffat and Hurran could have done more with the concept, but it's an absolutely fantastic concept - the Daleks who are too insane for the regular Daleks.  It would have been nice to see more variations of insane in amidst all the ones who are just low on power, but it's still brilliant.  It's framed in a twisty plot, and there are lots of great set-pieces - Moffat wisely gives Hurran suspense and character pieces rather than action ones, and Hurran knocks those out of the ballpark.

And while Hurran may be a bit clumsy in the few bits of actiony stuff (check out the too-obvious camera and editing tricks for the "rising" platform), he gets sterling performances out of the cast and he might be the greatest visual stylist the series has ever had.  This has some of the most dazzling and iconic imagery in any Doctor Who story - the giant Dalek statue, the cramped Dalek corridors, and Oswin's spacecraft interior. (I'm not certain he's the best - Graeme Harper certainly gives him a run for his money, and if Camfield and Maloney had made anything with modern technology, they might have outshone him.  But that's good company to be in, even in only one category)

The real genius of the episode, though, is the aforementioned Oswin, played by the endlessly charming Jenna-Louise Coleman, who takes Moffat's already witty dialogue and makes it shine like a Blue Star.  The character is a work of art, and the character's climactic moment is a brilliant sequence that packs an  emotional wallop.  The finale is tremendous.

And, of course, there's all the things that are always wonderful about Who these days.  Matt Smith has that extraordinary ability to move from funny to threatening to philosophical, all while being accessible yet delightfully alien.  (Seriously, I think he's from whatever planet Tom Baker beamed down from.  Or at least the same solar system.  That chin is about as human as Baker's ears.)  Moffat's dialogue sparkles with wit and character, his stories are whimsical, scary, deeply dramatic, and dripping with imagination.  The visual effects are as good as TV effects get, and the cinematography is gorgeous.

And Moffat is the best writer the show has ever had at one thing in particular (even better than Robert Holmes): the shows relation between dialogue and action.  See, unlike many sci-fi shows - even really great ones - the dialogue isn't a way of stringing together the action scenes.  The action scenes are a way of stringing together the dialogue.  The great part of Dalek Invasion of Earth isn't where the Doctor destroys the Daleks by creating a volcano in Southern England, it's the part where he tells them they will never be masters of the Earth.  Asylum has all kinds of tense showdowns and a couple of beautiful explosions, but its climactic scene is a quiet, character-driven conversation.  Involving a Dalek.  That shouldn't work.  But it does.  It's one of the best Dalek scenes the show has ever had.

 As I say, at 90 minutes, it's a contender for best Dalek story ever.  And even at 45, it's an absolute blast.

"Rescue me, Chin-Boy, and show me the stars!"

RATING:

* * * ½

• Best Dalek line: "Eg-eg-eg-eg-eg... Eggs....  Eggggggsss..."
   
• Blue stars (O-Class) have the brightest luminosity of any star.  I was going to make a pun about her having "Sirius luminosity", but I realized that A) Sirius is actually an A-class star, and B) I don't make puns.  At any rate, I am so terribly, awfully sorry.
• The advertising made a big deal out of this having every Dalek ever, and I was overjoyed that the Special Weapons Dalek was finally, finally returning... and it shows up in the background of a couple shots.  What a waste, man.  On second thought, I'm actually convinced Moffat hasn't even seen Remembrance of the Daleks, because no one would intentionally waste the Special Weapons Dalek.  Right?

Left of center, between the Centurian and the Dalek actually doing something.

• Seriously, though, what in the Unholy Living Void was Skaro doing still existing?!

The Dalek Invasion of Earth

This is one of the big ones.  A sweeping, incredibly ambitious epic centering around the first return of a previous villain - and the villains who put the show on the map.  It takes everything the show learned across the first season and change and then shoots for the moon.  And it comes close enough to hitting it that it deserves to have the word "Classic" thrown at it.  There are a lot of little things wrong with The Dalek Invasion of Earth, but it gets all the big things right - and one above all that makes this the first episode of Doctor Who that truly feels fully like Who.

Planet of the Daleks



Seven thousand one, seven thousand two, seven thousand three...



Generally, when Whovians complain about Planet of the Daleks, it revolves around Terry Nation's liberal plundering of his first Dalek story, The Dead Planet.  It's certainly structured similarly, with one episode mostly of the heroes wandering alone through a strange planet, after which our heroes are trapped deep underground by the Daleks until about halfway through the story, when they escape and prepare their daring final assault, which takes place in the final episode.  Additionally, the Thals turn up again and explicitely reference the events of Dead Planet.  The Daleks plan to release a virus, just as they planned to release radiation in the original.  Our heroes hide inside a Dalek casing to infiltrate the base.  And so forth.

And while we're at it, the invisible creatures in the dangerous jungle are a direct lift from The Daleks' Master Plan.

There are a couple of notes to this problem.  The first is that, when this was first broadcast, there hadn't been a traditional Dalek story since 1967; their brief appearances tacked onto Day of the Daleks certainly weren't a satisfying return for them.  So for viewers of the time, it was the first real Dalek story in six years, and returning to the familiar elements would be refreshing.  It's only now, when you can chose to watch them side-by-side that it's really an issue.

The second is that even with his self-plundering, Nation still creates a highly entertaining, action-packed yarn.  It's not perfect, and doesn't hold up to his '60s Dalek scripts, but that doesn't mean it isn't a lot of fun.

Frontier In Space

SPACE!

Army of Ghosts / Doomsday

Army of Ghosts and Doomsday are essentially three different stories spliced together.  The first, Army of Ghosts, is a well-structured yarn of escalating suspense and intriguing mysteries.  It's not just the ghosts themselves, although that's certainly a fascinating idea, but also a sphere that, according to all technical instruments, doesn't actually exist.

Finally, we learn what became of the Torchwood institute Queen Victoria created in response to the Doctor and Rose being smug jerks amongst death and tragedy.  These scenes are carried by the brilliant character of Yvonne Hartman, head of Torchwood; she hits that perfect sweet spot of complex, intriguing, and larger-than-life, thanks to both multi-layered writing by Davies and a charismatic, impassioned, cheeky, and often very funny performance by Tracy-Ann Oberman.  She's the rarest of Doctor Who villains: a human antagonist worthy of the Doctor.

Also, the Doctor passing off Jackie as Rose is a wonderful spark of whimsy.

Then, inevitably, the Cybermen show up, increasing the steadily-built intensity.  Now the situation is really grim: not only is Torchwood helping a mysterious entity punch holes in the continuum between Universes, but the Cybermen are coming through and invading earth (again).

And this is where opinions usually split on Army of Ghosts and Doomsday.  While a lot of people are perfectly happy with what follows, what happens next essentially negates everything so carefully built about the Cyber-invasion and Torchwood-evilishness.

Because all of a sudden, the Daleks show up and hijack the story.  The semi-evil Cybermen and Torchwood are reduced to distant silver and copper to the Daleks' shimmering gold.  For some, this is a disappointment.

Those "some" are wrong.  It may be opinion, it may be how they honestly feel, but they're wrong.  The Daleks showing up and upstaging the main plot only increases the fun of the story.  After all, for all its flashes of darkness, Doomsday is fundamentally a fun romp, full of humor and action.  Just because it's dramatic doesn't mean it can't be fun.

The Daleks face off with the Cybermen, which results first in a series of insults, for which Davies deserves tremendous credit -- the insults are not just hilarious, but perfectly toned for both races.

DALEK:  This is not war - this is pest control!
CYBERMAN: We have five million Cybermen.  How many are you?
DALEK: Four.
CYBERMAN: You would defeat the Cybermen with four Daleks?
DALEK: We would destroy the Cybermen with one Dalek!  You are superior in only one respect.
CYBERMAN: What is that?

DALEK: You are better at dying!

And then the shooting starts and it plays out exactly as it should: the Daleks, despite being insanely outnumbered, mop the surface of the Earth with the Cybermen's faces.  The tone of the Dalek/Cybermen fight isn't one of horror or suspense: it's pure pop spectacle and breezy fun.

As this goes on, though, yet another thread slowly intrudes: Davies' conclusion to the various threads of the last two seasons.  As time goes on, it becomes clear that even the Daleks' superiority to every other villain ever invented by humans, or even the stunning sequences of millions of Daleks invading London, aren't the true centerpiece of Doomsday.  It's the emotional journey - for many, the last - of a gallery of wonderful characters.

Yvonne is taken by the Cybermen and gets a fantastic final scene as she's brought away to be cyberized.  Even brought to a fate she fully understands and fears, and even as she faces the consequences of her own actions, she's dignified and defiant.  Her cyberizing scene is genuinely moving.  And then, later, she gets an even better scene as a Cyber.  A great villain meets not one but two brilliant ends.

Pete, the alternate universe version of Rose's father, returns for a last hurrah.  I had very mixed feelings about his return in Rise of the Cybermen, but they ultimately went in an interesting direction with him, so his return is welcome.  Shaun Dingwall is as perfect as ever, and Pete's character arc is ultimately satisfying.  Camille Coduri also makes her final regular appearance as Jackie, and Davies gives her some of the funniest material she has had.  The scene where Pete and Jackie meet is just wonderful, equally hilarious and moving.

Mickey returns, but transformed by his time in Pete's World into Awesome Action Hero Mickey, and it's terrific.  It's really remarkable how far he's come - he was basically a failure of a character in Rose, but was carefully developed over time, becoming more and more likable, before being thrust into heroism in the early second season.  Here, when he shows up and starts going Bruce Willis all over the place, it somehow feels natural, as those it's actually the ideal ending to his character.  And really, it is; it's just totally unexpected, and a delight to watch.  Noel Clarke has been good as Mickey with a great variety of material, but he's just a blast to watch here.

Much more importantly, however, it's Rose's last (regular) appearance, and she's given a tremendous send-off.  Piper has all the appeal and humor she's always shown, she also shows a remarkable presence.  Doomsday opens with her stealing the Daleks' spotlight by facing them down with the sort of fearless power ordinarily only the Doctor shows.  Of course, Rose can't quite keep it up - she's not the Doctor, after all -- but it's a terrific character moment that, further, feels absolutely natural.  The Rose of End of the World could never have stood up like this, but the Rose of Doomsday has grown so believably that it isn't just cool; it's the culmination of the Doctor's influence on her.  She started as a normal, average person; now, she's become a mythical heroine, and deserved it.  Davies and the other writers may have occasionally stumbled with her in parts of the second season, but on the whole, her arc has been brilliant.

At the climax of the story, she saves the world, probably the entire universe with a genuinely selfless, sacrificial act.  As she falls into the Void, she is saved by the other universe's version of her long-dead Father, and rescued to safety in the other universe.  There, she can live her life with everything she ever wanted - her father alive, her parents together and in love, Mickey - except the one thing she wanted most.

Her Doctor is gone from her forever.

Davies can't help but give her a final farewell, but he takes tremendous care in the writing; it's melodramatic, but still underplayed just enough.  Tennant and Piper play their final scene perfectly.  But it's Murray Gold's music, particularly the entirely unexpected "Doomsday", that raises it to such a high level.  It's a devastating and extraordinary ending.

It's a complex, beautiful closing for a very strong companion.

But, really, Doomsday isn't even about saying goodbye to Rose.  It's about the Doctor - about the close to this part of his journey, and his moving on to a new one.

He's faced the Daleks just a season before.  Then, however, he was a different man.  Then, even having recovered much of his mojo thanks to Rose, he's still a traumatized war veteran, always on the edge of fury and destruction.  He faced them grimly and half-crazed.  But now, in Doomsday, he's not the Ninth Doctor, born of the tragedy of war and genocide, but the Tenth, who came from the Doctor's sacrifice of his own life to keep Rose from being utterly destroyed by the Time Vortex.  From the very first, he was cheerful and goofy.  Villainies could draw out his darkest side, yes, but it hasn't been constantly lingering under the surface, ready to explode.  This is the Doctor who, for the first time in more than a lifetime, is truly happy.

And so, when he faces his greatest adversaries, while he certainly respects their abilities, he's much more ready to fight them.  None of the full-on horror and desperation the Ninth Doctor felt, or the near-crazed edge to his threats and mocking.  No, he has his swagger back, the swagger than first put such fear into his enemies when he was a young man in an old man's body, telling off the psychotic creatures who have utterly conquered the entire Earth.  He can beat these guys, and he knows it, and he gleefully makes sure they know it.

And he does - literally sending the Daleks to Hell.  But it comes at a staggering cost.  Rose is alive, but locked away from him forever.  Just as before, he's alone.

But there's something more.  There's a magnificent moment where Rose and the Doctor lean their faces against the corresponding walls of their own universes, imagining and even, in some way, feeling each other's presence.  Rose sheds tears, of course, but the Doctor has no tears.  Every depth of the tragedy is buried in his eyes.  The look of utter devastation in Tennant's eyes is stunning.  Every day of his millenial life is etched across his face.  It's a man defeated and alone, more alone than any can imagine.  Again.  More so than anything else in the scene, even Gold's fantastic music, it's Tennant's face that hits the hardest.

And yet, there's something else in that face.  There's strength, and calm, and resolution.  Even after sending all the Daleks to Hell, the Doctor has lost Rose, and in a way, this was the ultimate loss for him.  But he hasn't just survived.  He's still the Doctor.  And in his farewell to Rose on Bad Wolf Bay, he's sad, but also warm and funny.  Now, he has the strength to go on to other adventures and feel the joy and fun and wonder, as he did before the War.  Even his own personal Doomsday can't take that from him.  Not any more.

RATING:

* * * *






SIDENOTES

• Okay, so, is there a reason we got Fear Her, but didn't get this episode?  I know RTD has said that he's more interested in stories about humans that about aliens on planet Zog.  But if that's what planet Zog looks like, why would anyone want a story about boring old humans?
• Come to think of it, the only other purely human adversary worthy of the Doctor I can think of is Salamander from Enemy of the World.

• Graeme Harper's direction is truly brilliant.  Harper's directing is always great, but this is among his finest work for Who.  He can't have had more than a few million bucks, but makes a spectacular, action-packed epic that weaves adventure, action, and a wondrous sense of breezy fun with quiet drama and melodramatic tragedy.  It's a stunning achievement to make all those work so smoothly and so powerfully.  There's a reason he's considered the greatest director Who ever had.

Remembrance of the Daleks

[1988, Season 25, Serial 1]

Remembrance of the Daleks came at a desperate time for Doctor Who.  Season 22 was, even by this show's standards, highly uneven and had hugely mixed reactions.  About this time, BBC brass apparently decided that Science Fiction was a blight on civilized society.  The show was given an 18-month hiatus and had its season length chopped in half.  The production team responded with the hugely ambitious Trial of a Timelord, which has many good points but builds to an astoundingly anticlimactic conclusion, and resulted in Eric Saward resigning from his post as script editor and angrily criticizing JNT in the media.  Then the Michael Grade unceremoniously fired Colin Baker and cruelly forced John Nathan-Turner to tell Baker he was fired, and then reneged on the deal he had made with JNT.  The next season was thrown together at the last minute, with a new Doctor who was totally lost, an undeveloped and unpopular companion inhereted from Trial, and no script editor.

In a surprise move, Season 24 sucked.  Horribly.  Fourteen episodes, four stories, none of them good, only two of them even watchable.  Still, by the end of the season, things were looking up.  Delta and the Bannermen and Dragonfire, while very, very flawed, showed hints of improvement.  Sylvester McCoy got a couple of good scenes between the two serials, and showed some potential in those scenes.  Bonnie Langford's ill-fated Mel got a little good material before be written out as abruptly as she came in, but her replacement was promising.  Ace was a bit long on then-current teen slang, and Sophie Aldred's performance a bit rough, but Aldred's personality was appealing, and Ace's background and basic sketch was intriguing.  Finally, the production had gone from the ugly-looking Time and the Rani and the appallingly cheap Paradise Towers to a pretty good-looking and well produced finale in Dragonfire.

This doesn't have anything to do with that.  I just wanted this pic somewhere.

But even with all that promise, Remembrance of the Daleks is a remarkable success.  Every hint of quality form the previous season is seized, but it goes far beyond that.  In the history of Doctor Who, Remembrance is one of the most perfectly-paced stories, and one of the most exciting.  It's a wild, rolicking ride full of action, humor, and character, and it ends with a terrific climax.  Most of all, its vision of the Doctor is one of the most intriguing variations on the enigmatic time traveler since his inception.

Also, Ace is awesome.

I mentioned in my review of Earthshock that the pacing felt much faster and tighter than usual, but this is something else entirely.  Earthshock mostly feels faster because it's surrounded by quiet, thoughtful stuff like Castrovalva and Kinda.  Where Earthshock felt action-packed, Remembrance actually is.  It's actually better paced than most modern episodes.  Not necessarily faster, but better; it's always moving forward, always doing stuff, but it knows when to slow down and rest for a moment.  It's paced better than most movies.  It may seem like a minor thing on the surface, but perfect pacing in film and television is exceedingly rare.

Part of it is Andrew Morgan's direction.  His previous Who story was Time and the Rani, which is a legitimate contender for worst Doctor Who story ever, but I will give him credit: he gave the serial visual flair and a wild energy.  There was nothing he could do to overcome the abominable script and production problems.  Here, with a good script and more confident leading actor, he knocks it out of the ballpark.  Tragically, because he went over budget by 13,000 pounds, he was not considered for directing future installments of the show.  It's too bad; this is one of the best-looking stories in the entire classic run.  It's not the flashiest-looking, but it belies its limited budget and captures the early '60s superbly without drawing attention to itself.

Writer Ben Aaronivitch and script editor Andrew Cartmel have a great take on Doctor Who.  There's a scene in the story where the Doctor has a quiet dialogue in a cafe with the server played by Joseph Marcell (Jeffrey the butler on Fresh Prince of Bel-Air).  It's a wonderful little conversation as the Doctor weighs the nature of decisions, but it's also a start to Cartmel's vision of the Doctor: the great wanderer finally taking control of his destiny.  He's no longer aimless traveling: he moves with a purpose, bending the universe to his will, attacking and destroying his enemies rather than waiting to stumble into an encounter, reshaping his companion.

On the surface, it makes him more actively heroic - he looks for villainy to thwart.  But the Doctor has a darkly manipulative side, and always has.  So it's not enough to stop evil: he wants to get evil to destroy itself.  [SPOILERS] The climax of Remembrance of the Daleks isn't just checkmate; the Doctor tricks the Daleks into destroying the entire solar system in which their home planet of Skaro resides. [END SPOILERS] It's an unusual and fascinating take on the character, making him new and mysterious again.

McCoy, finally given good material, takes the role and runs with it.  He's wonderful in the quieter moments, as he always was, and his blustering is great.  But his darker side is terrific.  The scene where he coldly talks a Dalek into blowing itself up is a great concept anyway, but McCoy makes it really gripping.

His teaming up with Ace only adds to the fun of the story.  Sophie Aldred has none of the roughness she showed in her first episode, and she's just a blast.  Ace is one of my favorite companions, and she shows why throughout this episode.  Despite her fanciful origins, she is a grounded, credible character; her emotions and struggles are spot-on for a teenager growing up, but they're also wisely underplayed, and her surface toughness and humor lead her.  Also, she makes her own explosives, just because she likes to.

She gets a lot to do in this story, like beat up on the evil Ratcliffe, blow up Daleks with anti-tank rockets, jump through windows, and is just generally be about twenty different kinds of awesome.  She also gets a nice character arc where she falls for a guy who doesn't turn out to be who she thinks.

Aldred and McCoy work together very well; it's the warmest and most enjoyable Doctor-companion relationship since Four and Romana.  There's also some darker stuff in their relationship, too, with the Doctor manipulating even his companion, but that mostly shows up in later stories.  Here, it's mostly just a good partnership, but the beginnings of it are here, as he refuses to let her in on his plan for no real reason, just because he prefers to keep it to himself.  It's an intriguing dynamic, and it only gets more interesting from here.


Aaronovitch fills the story with great supporting characters.  Dr. Jensen and Allison are a double act worthy of Robert Holmes.

Group Captain Gilmore is nicely drawn - antagonistic with the Doctor on occasion, and sometimes pig-headed, but a competent man nonetheless.  He's reminiscent of the Brigadier in his glory days, but also a distinct personality from the Brig.

As for the villains, there's several human villains, all interesting and full of personality, but Aaronivitch doesn't let them steal the stage from the titular bad guys, and the Daleks are awesome here.  Not scary, but they don't need to be: they're fun, threatening villains able to do genuine damage and, thankfully, never stupid or annoying.  It's a terrific story for the Doctor's best bad guys.  Aaronovitch manages to add some nice twists and little ideas - the Special Weapons Dalek is just awesome, and really needs to show up again.  Davros shows up briefly because Terry Nation insisted that he always show up, but Aaronovitch handles him well, keeping him hidden until the last ten minutes and pulling a nice trick about what exactly he's doing during the story.  Terry Malloy is as good as ever in his one scene, and Davros has good dialogue.  He's not at his Genesis brilliance, of course, but since the story doesn't revolve around him, and as his scene is itself pretty terrific, he works very nicely.

Also, we actually see them hover for the first time.

But the most memorable villain is probably the little school girl mentally possessed by the Daleks.  They need a human child to add some imagination to their strategies as their computers can't move forward, and the possessed girl is a genuinely creepy notion.

The dialogue is among the best non-Holmes dialogue in the show.  It's full of funny lines, but also manages to be dramatic, mystical, or poetic when needed.  The script is also filled with imaginative ideas and notions; the hand of Omega is the best of these, but they show up throughout.

Remembrance is one of my favorite stories, and unlike many of my others, it's so much fun and so fast-paced that it has remarkable replay value.  Despite an entire season preceding it, it's the true start of McCoy's era, and it's a knockout.

ACE: We did good, didn't we, Professor?
DOCTOR: Time will tell, Ace.  Time will tell.  It always does.



RATING:

* * * *

• For Whovians trying to introduce people to Old Who, this is one of the best places to start, thanks to its pacing.  It's especially useful for people like my sister who are allergic to anything filmed before their birth.
  
• They really should have let Aldred keep her hair down more often: she's a lovely girl anyway, but she's gorgeous when given the chance.

• Keff McCullough gets a lot of flack for his Doctor Who scores, and deserves a lot of it - his obtrusive, obnoxious mess of synthesized chaos pretty much single-handed brought Battlefield down half a star or more in quality.  But I can't complain about his Remembrance music; the action stuff is thrilling and dramatic, the music-box stuff for the girl adds a lot to her creepiness, and the other incidental music is very competent and effective.  Also, I'll go ahead and go on record now and say that, while it's not my favorite, I do like his version of the title theme.
• I just want to mention the Special Weapons Dalek one more time.  Man, that thing rocks.  

The Daleks / The Dead Planet

[1963-1964, Season 1, Serial 2]

This is where Doctor Who truly begins.  Partly, of course, because of the Daleks, the iconic villains who became the Doctor's greatest enemies, and who catapulted Doctor Who into pop culture; partly because it's this story that truly makes the show an adventure that never needs to end, that can go anywhere and be anything.

In its three hours of grim but enthralling and imaginative adventure, it's missing only one element of the show: the Doctor himself, or at least, the Doctor as we have come to know him.  But this is where he begins to become a hero - to become himself.

There are two things that make Doctor Who so special, so long-lasting, so difficult to kill: the first is the total flexibility of its format.  The second is its central character.  The Doctor is a unique creation in fiction, as fascinating and unforgettable as Sherlock Holmes, Hamlet, or Odysseus.  It takes a long time for him to reach this point; here, he's an intelligent, charismatic manipulator who does heroic things without ever quite being a hero.  He's still utterly self-centered, still has a dark edge (which never entirely leaves).  But he begins to become more than a cruel, eccentric old man who would bash a caveman's skull in simply because it's convenient.  Through the influence of two humans, a species he considers entirely inferior, he begins to see through their flawed but compelling example more than himself.  The compassion he learns from the creatures of earth that softens his darkness and ultimately comes to define him begins to take root.

Further, although his betrayal of his companions in the first episode is certainly selfish, it comes from curiosity and adventurous spirit, something that will always remain, though it will be tempered by goodness.  But already, there is clearly that passion for exploring the unknown.  This is a man who loves learning and exploring.  He also takes tremendous joy in mischievous decisions that he knows will get him in trouble.  Most of his Doctorly traits are here, without the heroism.  He does show some care for Susan, though he also unintentionally puts her in tremendous danger.

It isn't until he faces the Daleks a second time a year later, that his transformation into the fun-loving, blustering, swaggering hero, and later still, in The Power of the Daleks, that the Doctor's journey to literary eternity takes its last crucial step, when he becomes a new man and yet the same one.  But it's here that it starts.  Here, the mysterious elderly time traveler starts to become The Doctor.

And thankfully, this character development happens through the course of a damn good adventure that, for the most part, still holds up incredibly well, especially given that it's from an early '60s TV show with a budget of pocket lint.

It opens with an episode titled The Dead Planet, and like The Cave of Skulls, it's a better title than the one it's most known as.  It's a terrific, crackling 25 minutes often imitated in the show but seldom equaled.  It's almost an episode to itself; the actual plot of the serial is slowly introduced over the next two episodes.  In the meantime, the crew wander alone on what appears to be a lifeless, empty world.  Fortunately, Terry Nation fills it to the brim with fantastic concepts and ideas, and weaves in several carefully-built suspense threads that gradually but steadily escalate until the gripping final moment.  He (or, likely, script editor David Whitaker, who was always much more concerned about character than Nation) also fills it with generally strong character work for the regulars.  It's a brilliant bit of television that stands high quite apart from the exciting story it introduces.

The setting is awesome.

The Petrified Forest -- the trees are turned to stone; the "soil" is burned to sand and ashes in which no trees could have grown; there are beautiful alien flowers also turned to stone.  They come across a creature, the first monster in Doctor Who.  It's dead, but even in death, it's a fantastic creature.  In life, it was made of pliable metal, and held together with a self-made magnetic field - and, the Doctor speculates, may have pulled in its victims magnetically.

And there's also, of course, that mysterious city in the background.

Meanwhile, our heroes are slowly and unknowingly dying of radiation poisoning.  Someone unseen touches Susan on the arm; later, there are loud scraping noises, and the scraper leaves a box outside the TARDIS.  Nation, along with the production pouring its heart and soul into pulling off his concepts, creates a story that wants to engage our imaginations and really excite us.

Ian, Barbara, and Susan all want to leave before something bad happens, but the ever-curious Doctor wants nothing more than to explore that abandoned city, so he sabotages the TARDIS and insists that they have to go down to the city to get more mercury.

The empty city itself is incredibly eerie.  The distant model shot is obviously a model, but it's a beautifully-designed model.  Really good work for the time and budget.

And when they get in, the background sound is incredibly creepy. (I believe composer Tristram Cary is responsible, though I'm not certain) And then Barbara is herded away by unseen forces.  The claustrophic corridors and closing doors build the suspense until, of course, that final shot, which isn't scary because of what we see; it's scary because what on earth could be on the other side of that thing that would scare Barbara that much...

The next episode, wisely, keeps us from seeing them for several more minutes as the characters get weaker and weaker, and learn that they are dying of radiation, so the alien threat is that much more menacing.  The design of the Daleks is wonderfully alien: not a "bug-eyed monster" or any kind of monster you ever really get a good look at.  Instead, they're this one-of-a-kind metal casing with a plunger for one arm and a very high-powered gun in the other.  Terry Nation ended up with full credit for the Daleks, but it's designer Raymond Cusick who created the elements that made them so iconic and unforgettable.  Not to take away from Nation's achievement - he creates effectively frightening villains.  But Cusick deserves just as much credit. 

Their electronic voices simply add another element to that fact that there is nothing remotely human about them.

But they're also intriguing.  They're scared.  Even when they drag out the Doctor to interrogate him, and he's not the Doctor we know but just a weak old man barely clinging to life, they still act like he could somehow attack them at any moment.  Still, what really brings them to vivid life is the stunning design work, the creepy voices, and the performers inside the Daleks, who do a great job of convincing us that there really is something alive in there, and give a lot of energy to scenes that could have been deadly dull.

They tell their prisoners a story about the war that ravaged their planet, ending in an exchange the Doctor assumes to have been from a neutron bomb.  The Daleks, then known as the Kaleds, had fought a people called the Thals, who apparently are still alive.  In fact, the Daleks assume the travelers to be Thals because they can't conceive of any life outside their own planet.

The prisoners realize that the mysterious box left to them must have been anti-radiation drugs left by the Thals; the Daleks let Susan run to the TARDIS to get them.  This leads to the second cliffhanger, which is an incredibly effective low-key piece leaving us in genuine suspense.

Then the Thals show up, and they turn out to be the main element that doesn't work.  The Daleks are horribly mutated inside their shells; the Thals turn out to look like humans.

The first distant planet they go to, and the creatures look like humans.  Not only that, but in a story where the villains are essentially space Nazis, the regular people are blond haired blue-eyed hunks.  And then Susan goes and says, "You're perfect!" in regards to their appearance.  Compared to our complex protagonists and the fascinating Daleks, the Thals just aren't that interesting except for just how off it feels for the Space Nazi's nemeses to be Aryan Adonises.  The actors do what they can, but they're pretty dull.

But the actors are good enough and they're generally used well enough that even though none of them have a whole lot of individuality, they work well enough.  Susan returns, and while the Daleks send a message to the Thals that they want peace, the protagonists prepare their daring escape.  This extended segment, comprising second half of episode three and much of episode four, is excellent; the meticulous details of the escape make it much more thrilling when they do get out.  And further, although they do some fooling of the Daleks, the Daleks aren't made to be stupid; I love that when our heroes come up with an elaborate plan to make their destruction of the camera in their cell appear to be an accident, the Daleks immediately decide it was intentional.  It's an exciting, well-constructed scene that builds to the meeting between the Thals and the Daleks.

Of course, the Daleks turn out to have only one true motive: survival at the cost of every other species in existence.  The peace treaty is an an ambush; Ian tries desperately to warn them, to no avail.  After all the build-up, the Daleks' actual use of their weapons is really shocking.  They fire, the screen turns to a negative, and their targets fall over dead.

There's also this awesome shot of their guns boiling the walls when they miss.  Why didn't the series ever use that again?

After that, our heroes return to the TARDIS.  The Thals talk about trying to make peace anyway or just run because pacifism is all they know.  Ian tries to convince them that in this case, against these enemies bent on nothing less than extermination, fighting is the only way to survive, the only thing to do.  The Thals graciously thank him for trying to help, but decide to keep to their ways.  The travelers sadly turn to their ship, deciding to go on and leave this hopeless situation alone.

... and then they realize the Daleks took the fluid link the Doctor pretended was empty back in the city.  Meaning that now, it really is keeping them from leaving the planet.  What follows is really interesting: Barbara tells Ian that the only way for them to get home is to convince the Thals to fight.  Ian protests that he won't ask them to fight for them.  It's an interesting reversal of expectations - Barbara is generally the heart of the group, the kindest one, but here, she's pragmatic and selfish.  Of course, this early Doctor is much worse, telling Susan that this is no time for morals.  The following debate is really interesting:

Ian: I will not have anyone's death on my conscience!

Barabara: Except mine, and Susan's, and the Doctor's?

It's interesting that Ian, the most heroic and physical of the group (albeit reluctantly) is the advocate for peace.  Susan argues that they should convince the Thals to help themselves by fighting the Daleks, which Ian starts to agree to, which Barbara follows with a cold, "You're just playing with words."  At any rate, the travelers decide that they should get the Thals to attack the city.  This is an interesting moral quandary, and the protagonists arguably make the wrong choice, but both sides are really weighed.  It's very interesting and unusual for what is, plotwise, a fairly straightforward action piece, to really take the time with this sort of thing, and then send the heroes down what may be the wrong path.  And except for the Doctor, they sort of suspect that it's the wrong path, but convince themselves otherwise very credibly.  Ian finally makes his decision by seeing if the Thals truly are completely against fighting in principle, or if there is some level of fear and cowardice.  Very interesting, very unusual.

The rest of the story concerns the strategy of attack, the journey to the Dalek city, and finally, the climactic battle between Thal and Dalek.

The plot isn't the most original, nor does it seem on the surface that it could fill seven 25-minute episode, but it works because Nation fills it with details.  He spends five minutes on the characters finding they need to cross a gap, and figuring out how to get across.  Of course, it could have been done with a quick rope thrown across and a bit of swinging, but Nation instead delves into exactly how they get across, and because he does it so convincingly, the danger is much more real.  He also makes it into a good cliffhanger sequence, ending episode six on this bit, with one of the Thals dangling over the cliff - and then, in a genuine surprise, having him drop to his death at the beginning of the next episode.
 

The adventure to the city goes on a bit, but when they get there, it is a satisfying climax, with moments of action, suspense, horror, heroism, and sacrifice.

The character work of the four regulars is strong throughout the story.  They begin to settle into their roles -- Ian, the reluctant action hero; the Doctor, the clever manipulator; Barbara, the kind heart of the show; and Susan, the... well, by the end, she's pretty much just the person to get captured and need rescuing, which, unfortunately, is pretty much the sum total of her characterization for the rest of her time (with a couple notable exceptions).  But Carole Ann Ford does a terrific job with what she's given.  The other three are just as exemplary. 

But she really deserved better material.  That's great physical acting there.

All in all, The Daleks gets the series off to a strong start with a compelling adventure, well written and well detailed, and introduces a fantastic set of villains who, thankfully, will return...



RATING:

* * * ½ 

• I love the scene where the Daleks cold-heartedly test whether or not they can survive without radiation by subjecting one of their own to the treatment.  It really drives home their madness, of course, but it also has the Dalek yelling for help, making it just a little more three-dimensional and compelling.  I have to say, though, it's also incredibly satisfying to see the Daleks suffering.  And the concept of creatures who have evolved to depend on the very radiation that kills other species is a fascinating one.

• But more than that, I love the Dalek begging the Doctor to let them live, and not commit genocide against the genociders.  The Doctor stands by and lets them die, but Hartnell's delivery of the line, "Even if I wanted to, I don't know how," lends a lot of extra depth.  It's a powerful sequence.
• One character moment I really like: Susan finds a petrified flower she finds quite beautiful.  Ian kindly helps her to very carefully pull it out, being very gentle.  Then Barbara calls for help, and without realizing what he's doing, he crushes the flower in Susan's hand and runs off, leaving Susan alone with the debris.

 

• One thing that all Doctor Who productions should have learned from this is that the Daleks should never have lengthy dialogue scenes, and definitely should not monologue.  Those voices are creepy, yes, but too much talking and they just get really, really annoying.  Unfortunately, it not only continued through the 60s, but bled into the 70s.  And showing up in Victory of the Daleks last year, which was pretty much just one long Dalek monologue after a good first third, is just unforgivable.