Victory of the Daleks
I try not to grow up. I plan to live in a sort of semi-child like state for as long as I can but sometimes there are such violent assaults on my view of the world that sometimes I’m left reeling by their attack. “Victory of the Daleks” was such an assault. For 45 minutes I sat watching a television series that once I’d known as Doctor Who but what I saw on screen was so far removed from the show that I’d once loved I’m not convinced that I didn’t watch something else and hallucinate the alleged title sequence at the start of it.
The title sequence is symptomatic of what’s wrong with the show. It was change for change’s sake but no-one stopped to ask “Is it any good?”. The music has retained something of the original dum-de-dum-ness but it’s buried under a layer of disco gloss that takes away any menace, any uniqueness and any sense of its glorious history. Then the episode starts and any sense of logical actions or careful thought go out of the window.
So there are daleks working for Winston Churchill, allegedly invented by their chief scientist (complete with oh so subtle reference about being a Paisley boy) only of course, we know they’re evil. It’s not as though the parallels between daleks and Nazis hasn’t been made a million times in the past (make that a million and a half times by the end of the Confidential). Only the Doctor knows the truth about the servants and we even get a line about being your soldier lifted straight from “Power of the Daleks”. It’s not till he goes off on one with a comedy large spanner that they finally confess, take a recording of his voice and teleport up to their ship after having revealed their human creator to actually be their robot spy (and in a moment of excruciating cheapness, look how much longer his forearm gets once his hand is blown off). Up to this point, it’s not too bad. Okay we’re retreading the same ground we’ve had for the last few years, daleks fallen back through time, they have a fantastic device that just so happens to be able to re-grow the entire race which is somehow activated by the Doctor’s voice. Just as well when he regenerates there’s something “Doctorness” about his voice that remains the same from regeneration to regeneration or the daleks would be completely messed up.
It’s when the daleks explain their plan that things start to go awry. They’ve got the magic DNA pod thing that can somehow re-grow (and re-design) the dalek race in a range of funky Character Options friendly new colours. These daleks then promptly destroy the old ones as they’re “impure” (so we’ve now borrowed from Remembrance as well) which raises the question of which story from the last few years they’ve supposedly fallen back in time from. It can’t be “Stolen Earth” as those daleks were VERY pure ones, grown from Davros’ own cells. Prior to that we’ve got “Evolution of the Daleks” but the only survivor of that time jumped into “Stolen Earth”. So are these ones that Super Rose somehow missed in Parting of the Ways? And if they’ve re-grown themselves to be pure, original daleks, why do they look unlike any dalek we’ve seen before? Anyway, back to the plot. The new, chunky daleks (sorry but your bum does look very big in that new outfit) have a magic ray that can somehow light up the whole of London, ready for the Nazi’s to attack. And the robot they left on earth just happens to have a mini time space visualiser so that those on the earth can watch what’s going on in the space ship (luckily he tunes it in perfectly first time). This means that Churchill and co. can, in the space of about 15 minutes maximum, convert some spitfires into space ships (using something that the episode implied was just a sketch on paper, not a fully functioning set of devices). So if the devices DID exist, then surely Churchill would have used them? What else did he have laying around that he didn’t use? Apart from diet pills…
The Doctor nips back to the TARDIS (thankfully the new daleks keep up the tradition of not being able to shoot straight when needed) and turns off the daleks’ forcefield just long enough for the final space travelling spitfire to shoot it off. Good job the extreme cold up there is also somehow countered by the gravity bubble that they’re presumably using to fly (at least, I hope that’s what the weird flashing lights were at the back of the plane and not the in flight entertainment system). What happens to them when they leave the gravity bubble and find themselves close to absolute zero is anyone’s guess but clearly rather than shattering on impact they still have enough oomph to take out dalek technology. Not to worry though, the daleks have a back up plan when the blackout’s restored. Just so happens their robot doubles up as a powerful bomb that will destroy the planet once the legally required countdown expires. Not to worry though, as is also seemingly required by science fiction, if it’s a robot that’s designed to look like a human you can instantly de-activate it or stop it from killing you by asking it who it fancies and about its childhood. Given how provocatively Amy is leaning over him when she asks him about fancying someone he shouldn’t… So the countdown is averted but the daleks happily fly off into the sunset (any bets on when they’re going to return other than in the upcoming computer games?) and the Doctor gets all miserable about being beaten by them again until he gets the chance to once more remind us that there’s the mystery of why Amy didn’t recognise them (shades of Charley not recognising Shakespeare in the audios). It was justified when they dealt with it early on in the episode, the reminder at the end was about as subtle as the glowy crack in the wall behind the TARDIS.
“Victory of the Daleks” is one of the worst examples of style over substance we’ve had in the history of the series. It’s as though they came up with a list of things they wanted (Churchill, spitfires in space, the same dalek story we’ve had multiple times before) and then sat down and gone “Right, we need a story to coherently link all of this together. Anyone got any ideas? No? Well I’m sure the set pieces will last 45 minutes, we won’t need a plot after all.” By the end of the David Tennant era the production team were pretty good at getting things right. The new boys have come in and decided to make their mark by changing as much as they can without realising that if it wasn’t actually broken it didn’t need fixing. The result is a mess of a production (I’d call it a story but that would be too generous to it) that shouldn’t have the name Doctor Who. Except of course it’s not Doctor Who. It’s Doctor DW Who, something else I don’t understand either.
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