Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) (54 page)

There are some other good bits here. Maxtible insists that the Daleks are his colleagues, and thereby sets himself up for a mighty fall, the marvellously bewhiskered old loon. Gary Watson (as Terrall) and Brigit Forsyth (as Ruth) impress again in what are hardly the most rewarding roles. John Bailey (as Waterfield) has a timbre to his vocals that gives the impression he could break at any moment. And yet, he also manages to ooze conscience and goodness; Waterfield could so easily have been a dull, snivelling wretch, but Bailey gives him massive dignity. And I love the episode ending, in which the humanised Daleks are so playful and childlike, they take the Doctor for a ride; it’s much more interesting than your run-of-the-mill piece of random jeopardy.

But I wish they would stop mentioning “the power of the Daleks” (they’ve done it three times now, I think!), as it only serves as a reminder of how good that adventure was. So far, I’d even rate it a bit better than this story – which is strange, because before we started this marathon of ours, I’d have ranked Evil higher. Nonetheless, I’m splitting hairs a bit – whichever of them is better, it’s a crying shame that both aren’t available for us to watch and appreciate.

The Evil of the Daleks episode six

R:
The three Daleks endowed with the Human Factor are wonderful, their ordinary monotones replaced with excitable inflection. The joy they take from their new names is infectious – chanting them with utter delight. Then there’s a moment, just a beat of silence – and they tell the Doctor in their childish sing-song voices that they’ve been recalled to Skaro. And a chill blows through the scene as the Doctor loses control of his new pepperpot friends, and you realise that for all their humour and curiosity these still
are
Daleks, and they’re still receiving orders. The reminder of that is really chilling.

By taking the Daleks and tweaking what they stand for, both here and in his earlier story this season, David Whitaker is making them what Terry Nation couldn’t – genuinely iconic. In The Chase, you’d get the odd thick Dalek who stuttered a bit, and that was simply because the production team hadn’t cemented what truly represented a Dalek yet. But by writing stories which play directly upon what sounds entirely
wrong
coming from a Dalek voice – “I am your servant,” “Alpha, Beta, Omega!” – David Whitaker is ironically able to define what a proper Dalek should be: callous, sly, pitiless and entirely inhuman. And it’s therefore only right, after having the Daleks look so incongruous against the trappings of a Victorian house, that they’re now transported right back to where they fit in entirely. We’ve barely seen Skaro since that very first season, and by now even its name is part of that iconography. (And it’s great that Maxtible, still insistent that he’s on an equal level to the Daleks, pompously refers to it as “Skarros” – brag about his importance all he wants, but the joke’s on him, because even we as an audience know more about what’s going on than he does. It’s like Mavic Chen all over again; the more he claims superior knowledge of the Daleks, the more the viewer knows he’s going to get a terrible comeuppance.)

As soon as you’ve made the Daleks icons, though, there’s really nothing else you can do with them except play off that. It’s why this is entirely
right
that this was intended to be the final Dalek story – once you’ve played with the characters as freely as Whitaker does here, it’s time to bring things to a close. (And it means that when the Daleks
do
return, in five years’ time, it’ll have to be done on first principles again, going back to telling very archetypal stories, reminding the audience of what the Daleks represented at grass-roots level. When the series starts to feel confident enough to play with their iconography again, it veers into another direction altogether, and introduces Davros.) It’s why, with things coming to a head, that it’s great we get the introduction of the Dalek Emperor; with the Doctor saying he’d always wondered whether they’d ever meet, this creature – who has before now only been mentioned within the spin-off merchandise, and
never
on screen – elevates this adventure to one of a new importance. Not only does The Evil of the Daleks riff off our expectations of what Daleks should be and subvert them, it also tells us at the same time that everything we’ve ever seen before was just a disposable preamble for this: the confrontation at last between the Doctor and his
true
nemesis. To take either stance is daring; to do both in the same episode is not a little breathtaking.

T:
At times you’re a master at seeing the sub-text in a piece of work, Rob – and yet, I can’t believe you’re actually trying to pass off Marius Goring’s fluff as a deliberate insight into the psyche of his character. If you’re going to play that game, why did he call Waterfield “Whitefield” in episode two? Does he have a subconscious Aryan supremacist streak, which makes his eventual transformation into a Dalek an obvious thematic payoff?

Nonetheless, Maxtible is a terrific character – he’s a real prat, mind you, but a very interesting one. What’s most curious about him is his overriding obsession with turning metal into gold – has he not realised that he’s invented time travel? With mirrors? In the nineteenth century? Has he not thought of the financial implications of
that
? He could earn a fortune... except that, hang on, he’s rich already; he said he was in episode two. It’s a ridiculous scenario, and it looks like those making this episode have begun to realise it – Goring goes a bit bonkers (repeatedly shouting “murder” when Waterfield attacks him, and bumbling about looking for the Doctor like he’s a geriatric in a farce), whilst Simpson augments the man’s escape with comic plinky-plonky music that is quite at odds with the deep, portentous score used so effectively elsewhere. There’s an utterly superb moment, though, where he demands to know what right the Daleks had to destroy his house, and one sarcastically repeats the question “right?” over and over again as he blusters, then pushes him to the ground whilst they all start yelling at him. Like Mavic Chen before him, Maxtible just doesn’t realise that he’s not in control of the situation, but his presence allows us to see the Daleks as cruel and threatening.

But then events work towards a belting climax, as the Dalek Emperor orders the Doctor to take the TARDIS and spread the Dalek Factor throughout history. The design work on the Dalek Emperor is obviously stunning, and this scene is such a profound and terrifying moment, especially as it marks such a whacking great change in tone from where the episode started, with playground Daleks using childish speech patterns. The opening bits with the humanised Daleks could have been utterly ridiculous, but they serve as such a stark contrasts to the non-augmented ones, who even prior to the revelation of the Emperor’s masterplan have underlined their callousness by sterilising the area surrounding Maxtible’s house with a bomb.

This is a superb episode, one that’s full of dramatic impact. It’s powerful, and, yes, as iconic as its reputation suggests. And surely, this is the only Dalek story in which the title of its prequel and sequel are both mentioned, as Troughton talks here of “the day of the Daleks”. It’ll have to be very good to be better than this.

March 27th

The Evil of the Daleks episode seven

R:
In The Power of the Daleks, David Whitaker posed the question, why do human beings kill human beings? And in The Evil of the Daleks he asks, how would you get Daleks to kill Daleks? The answer’s simple – turn them into human beings. It’s interesting that the first thing that the human-factored Daleks do is to rebel, to turn against authority. The great triumph of humanity is its ability to question – but as Whitaker shows, it leads immediately to dissent, and then to war, and then to annihilation. I’m not sure that this story is quite the celebration of mankind that people think; as in Power, there’s something very impressive about the unanimity of the Daleks – the chaos that we see destroy Skaro is entirely alien to them. And I can’t help but feel there’s something unavoidably cruel about the Doctor’s plan – no sooner does he give the Daleks consciousness, and make them vulnerable and likeable, than he allows them to be destroyed. It leaves a nasty taste in the mouth – deliberately or otherwise.

But what the episode does very cleverly is make it clear that the Doctor is fighting not only the Daleks as a race, but the Daleks as a concept. When Maxtible becomes imbued with the Dalek factor, and when a whole army of Daleks become humanised, the whole struggle becomes blurred; no longer is it simply that looking unhuman and having grating voices can be the focus of our revulsion. Now we can be horrified instead by the instinct to conform. It is that which makes these Daleks the strongest metaphor for Nazism in the programme – certainly more suggestive than in any Terry Nation story. And it’s perhaps Whitaker’s fascination with it, that it
is
efficient, that it
does
look attractive, which gives the drama such power. Humanity is confused and eccentric, but there’s something rather wonderful in that. If we look over the colourful cast of characters we’ve had over this story, it’s their Dickensian individuality that has made them so memorable. On any logical level, someone who’s had the ability to invent time travel obsessing over the secrets of alchemy seems preposterous – but that silliness is what makes Maxtible so appealing. And it’s typically cruel of the Daleks that it gives him the formula he craves... just before turning him into a Dalek drone who wouldn’t find it worth having. Maxtible may be capricious and selfish and corrupt, he’s the very worst presentation of humanity on offer in this story – but he’s also
bizarre,
and that wide-eyed larger-than-life performance he gives is so much more appealing than the efficient automaton he’s turned into. There’s no more disturbing moment in the entire story than hearing Maxtible chant “kill” over and over again, not as a Dalek but as a human who has no longer the imagination to think of anything else.

The subplot about the Doctor’s own morality is nicely concluded too. When the Doctor apparently becomes Dalekised, it forces Jamie to decide finally whether he trusts him or not. And it is Jamie’s decision to have faith in this Doctor – the Doctor who tells him to step through the Dalek factor archway – that redeems them both. It feels as if they make a pact together at the end, that they need to take Victoria with them and look after her – and it forges for them a new friendship.

So, that’s the end of Season Four... Let’s face it. It’s not the same programme, is it?

I think I can’t help but feel a bit guilty how quickly I’ve adjusted to a new Doctor. I thought it’d take longer to accept Patrick Troughton, but I’ll be honest – I’ve been carried away by the sheer excitement he’s brought to carving a new character altogether. Doctor Who is finding a formula for itself, and I miss the versatility it had in its earlier years; you’d never have had a situation before, say, when The Tenth Planet and The Moonbase repeated much of the same plot only a few weeks apart, and the last four stories of this season have so traded in the same themes of possession, it’s becoming a cliché. But in a funny way, the repeated motifs do give the series an
identity
, something it seemed to be sorely missing last year. And yes, it’s true, we’ll never get a Marco Polo again – but we never got a Marco Polo back in 1965 or 1966 either. The science fiction stories of the Hartnell years always looked rather awkward and naïve besides their historical cousins. Whereas there’s a far greater confidence and depth to them now than was ever even attempted before – and if we can have a series that can produce the thoughtful drama of The Macra Terror or The Power of the Daleks, then bring it on.

I miss the Doctor Who that was, the series that could offer
anything
in time and space. But I’m still enjoying this new sci-fi show about monsters nonetheless.

T:
On a grand scale, what’s changed since 1963 is that this bunged together, odd little show has become aware of itself. Just compare the ending here to the slapdash denouement of The Daleks – that was a so-so battle that wrapped up a jolly kid’s SF adventure, but here the final showdown between the humanised Daleks and the, er, Dalek Daleks on Skaro has the deliberate air of an epic. We’ve been building up to this point, in a story that’s been designed, specifically, to give the Daleks an appropriate send-off, their “final end” (at least, for now).

And it works – especially for me, as I so adore watching Victorian characters in a futuristic backdrop. It floats my boat much more than the B-movie shtick of The Moonbase; the Doctor Who of the Gerry Davis mould was more gutsy, but its emphasis on hard-nosed base personnel, clumping soldiers and high-tech establishments gave a sense, sometimes, that the magic of the series had been misplaced. In The Evil of the Daleks, it’s the blend of the historical with the futuristic that provides a sense of the bizarre. And it’s even
more
strange to witness the gruesome dehumanising of Maxtible – a nineteenth century man – as he stumbles about on an alien planet in the future, and mentally becomes a Dalek. And while it’s unclear from the telesnaps and the soundtrack, it appears that Maxtible doesn’t actually die on screen, and instead just wanders off shouting, completely demented – if anything, that’s more horrifying than if he’d just been shot.