Chapter The 165th, which sees a return to some unfinished business
One of Gilmore's soldiers, Mike, has been feeding information to this Association, and it just so happens he's the very same squaddie that Ace has taken a shine to: rule 1 of Doctor Who, anyone Ace fancies will probably betray everyone. He gets killed soon after, anyway, as is customary. The Imperial Daleks bring out their big guns, well, big gun singular, really - the Special Weapons Dalek. It helps them defeat the other faction and make off to their mothership with the Hand. Davros reveals himself to be the new emperor of the Daleks, and the Doctor - having lashed up the 1960s tech equivalent of a Zoom call - broadcasts to the mothership, advising Davros not to use the Hand. Davros takes no notice, of course, and the Hand destroys the Dalek fleet and their home planet Skaro.
Context:
Like the Doctor in Remembrance, I too am returning to unfinished business. After a summer holiday (staying at home), I took a short break from doing the blog for the rest of August and the start of September. But during that time I had watched two stories which needed to be written up. After watching The Lodger on my own, youngest child (girl of 8) requested a specific story, which she described as the one where the girl beats up the Dalek with a baseball bat. She's not seen it before, but the Better Half has talked about it to her previously. Over the many years I've been doing the blog, I don't think she has ever requested a story, so I was happy to override the randomiser to allow this. The whole family - Better Half and youngest being joined by myself and two boys (aged 14 and 11) - watched an episode a night from the revisited special edition DVD. It's taken a while to get back to the notes I took and write them up for the blog. That's not to say I haven't been watching Doctor Who in the meantime, of course; I have been working my way through a lot of animated Pat Troughton goodness, the new improved special edition of Power of the Daleks, and the recently released Fury from the Deep (I'll try to find an appropriate point in a future blog post to share some mini-reviews of those).
First time round:
I'll inevitably and rightly need to discuss below in my review of the story the kind of impact it had when it was first shown, as it is an intrinsic part of every viewing of the story even to this day. But there is an anecdote to tell about my own very first encounter with episode 2, or half of it at least. I don't think it's giving too much away to say I'd been blown away by the first episode on its debut UK broadcast. A week later, on the 12th October 1988, a few hours before it was shown, I was looking forward to seeing the second part; this was the point at which my sister decided to play a trick on me. She systematically went round our house changing the time on every clock, putting them all forward to the time of Doctor Who's BBC1 slot. Then, she played my tape of the Doctor Who theme, loudly, on the home hi-fi in the living room (where the TV also was). The idea was that I would come running thinking that Doctor Who had started, and I was missing it. I came running instead as I was intrigued why anyone in the house would be playing the Doctor Who theme who wasn't me. My sister hadn't counted on my extreme nerdiness in being able to tell the difference between the Peter Howell arrangement (on the tape) and the Keff McCulloch arrangement (on the current episodes) from fifty paces.
The joke was on me in the end though, as I failed to reset any of the clocks, nor work out exactly how fast they all now were. I was then distracted by my other lifelong obsession apart from Doctor Who, the music of the Pet Shop Boys. Their album Introspective had come out at the beginning of that week, and I was at the time listening to it over and over again on my personal stereo in my room (quite rightly, too, it's brilliant). Returning to this activity after my sister's trick, I lost track of time completely, and couldn't rely on any clocks around me either. Had I not had a new PSB album, I'd have been watching TV in the run up to the episode, poised to start the video recording. As it was, sometime during my third or fourth time marvelling at the piano break in Frankie Knuckles' remix of I Want a Dog, I was suddenly jerked into the realisation of how late it was getting. Rushing into the living room, I jabbed at the VCR's record button in time to catch the last 15 minutes or so of the episode. The first thing I saw was a split second of Joseph Marcell, playing an unknown character, disappearing out of shot.
I'd missed the resolution of the cliffhanger, some action scenes and what later became a famous and lauded scene of Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor and Joseph Marcell as John - the latter later to become famous as the butler in the Fresh Price of Bel-Air - talking about slavery in a late-night caff. Asking my friends at Sixth Form the next day wasn't much help in filling in the gaps, bagging me as it did threadbare explanations along the lines of "A soldier turned up at the school with big guns" and "The Doctor had a chat with a bloke about sugar". It was five more years before I saw that missing section, when the VHS of the story was first released in the Dalek tin, the first ever Doctor Who home video release to come in such a container (there would be many more). I still have the tin, but - unlike the others, which I've also kept - it's got a bit rusty since 1993.
Reaction:
Luckily my sister didn't play any tricks on me (see above) one week earlier. The beginning of episode 1 of Remembrance of the Daleks is not one you would want to miss. The BBC globe ident faded out and another image of the globe of the Earth hanging in space faded in (nice little formal gag, probably intentional?); every fan in the audience will be automatically aware that we are seeing a pre-credits sequence, a rarity during the 'classic Who' years - this would be only the fourth time it had ever been done, and the last time before the show was resurrected in 1996 and 2005 onwards. If those watching were clued in already that what was to follow would be a bit special, they wouldn't have been wrong. We hear snatches of speeches of 1963 vintage "I have a dream", "Ich bin ein Berliner", etc. coming in and out like a radio being tuned. A tense, but still energetic music cue comes in (part of what is probably Keff McCulloch's most successful incidental score for the series). It's an excellent model shot of the earth, and as the scene continues and builds, the shot zooms out and we see an alien spacecraft heading sleekly and ominously toward the planet. Bang - we're into the beginning credits. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I think that it is the best opening few seconds of any Doctor Who story up to that point. Simple; cheap, even, but damned effective. Could the rest of the story live up to this early promise?
Yes, is the short answer. The rest of this blog text is a slightly longer way of saying it, but it is but one of a chorus of such reactions, longer and more detailed from all across fandom and for years since it was first shown. In Doctor Who magazine polls of all the broadcast stories to date, Remembrance made the top ten in 1998 and 2014 (it was slightly relegated in the intervening poll in 2009, but only dropped to number 14 of 200). It stands on its own, but for those of us who were watching around the time it is probably inextricable from its context at that moment. The last story shown before this, the final episode of the previous year, Dragonfire, was a good enough script, and had some good performances and a few good effects. At the time, I'd latched upon it as the most traditional, and probably best executed story of the year. But it's so outclassed by Remembrance, that the difference is like night and day. But in one of those extreme North Scandi areas where the night lasts for months. It felt like a long time since we'd had a story so good and so self-assured. To me, it was the best story since The Caves of Androzani, four years previously, and - with no hyperbole, I assure you - the best Dalek story since the 1960s.
With Davros hidden for most of the action, the Daleks get to dominate the story in a way that they hadn't in their more recent previous outings, where they were playing second fiddle to their creator. And, by restating their xenophobia in a fresh new way, contrasting it with the racism (both casual and full-on neo-Nazi) of some of the human characters in the 1960s setting, Doctor Who's biggest baddies are revitalised. It doesn't hurt that the props are revitalised too. The Daleks themselves, and all their tech - including a full-size shuttle craft - gleam, and it's nice to see innovation too, with the Special Weapons Dalek being a memorable creation that lived on in viewers' imaginations, finally making a cameo appearance in the new series (in Asylum of the Daleks). The colour schemes of both factions are great (gold and white Daleks led by an Emperor based on the old 1960s comic strip look, and grey and black Daleks, led by a traditional black and silver Supreme Dalek). The idea of two factions is a complicating factor to allow the narrative to fill its running time interestingly, and allows some comments on the Daleks warring over racial purity, but it also extends the mythology of the series admirably. The last time we saw Davros, he'd created a new race of gold and white Daleks, and was taken off - by grey and black Daleks - to stand trial. Somehow, the wily Davros has turned the tables sufficiently that he has once again managed to take charge, and his old captors have become the renegade splinter group. It's not spelled out, it's just there as a nice bit of world-building for the fans, allowing imagination to flood into the gap (at least one tie-in medium has since written the story around that connecting narrative tissue).
It's not perfect, few things are, but any flaws are minor and seem to be borne out of ambition, so it's hard to criticise too much. For example, the concept of the battle computer (a child plugged into a Dalek-like casing) is an interesting and chilling one, and the child actor Jasmine Breaks performs it perfectly; it provides a nice shock reveal moment for anyone watching, but particularly for fans as every scene up to that point has been framed to suggest that it is Davros. It's let down, though, by the staging - the set or the prop in the room where George Sewell as Radcliffe is conversing with the computer should be constructed so that he can't see that there's a schoolgirl in there. And it isn't. He'd have to have zero peripheral vision and zero curiosity for it to be in any way credible. The writer Ben Aaronovitch, working on his first TV screenplay, is feeling his way. The feint about Davros, and the reveal of the girl were all in his screenplay as it developed, but he hadn't actually included Davros elsewhere until someone suggested people might wonder where he was.
Adding that particular character and another wonderful reveal in the final episode was welcome, but another minor flaw of Remembrance, shared with a lot of stories of this period, is that there were already too many characters chasing around for this week's cosmic MacGuffin. Pamela Salem and Karen Gledhill (as Professor Jensen and Alison respectively) are both great, but their characters contribute nothing to moving the narrative along. Simon Williams as Gilmore is the class act one would expect, but he doesn't do very much more. In fact, the whole cast is excellent, even down to the extended cameos from a couple of actors who kept coming back for guest spots in Doctor Who over the years, Michael Sheard and Peter Halliday. The dialogue they're all given is nice and colourful, and they're directed well. It's just that they aren't needed really. The story boils down to a very simple bait and switch con trick that the Doctor is playing on Davros. Everyone and everything else that happens just defers that; but, the script makes something of a virtue of this - it's the dark chess-playing Doctor's finely tuned clockwork scheme being interfered with by humans and Daleks that won't quite play ball.
The performance of Sylvester McCoy to achieve the dark chess-playing Doctor is something else that's wonderful to behold. Though there are occasional flashes of a more thoughtful or brooding nature in the previous year's stories, that side of the character hadn't been very much explored; from here on in, the writing and the leading man's performance bring this expertly to the fore. Another new aspect that has been thoroughly embraced since the series went off air in 1987 is Doctor Who's long history. There's an excuse for it here, given that this is the opening salvo of a season that acts as an anniversary 25-gun salute, but forever after this point the Sylvester McCoy stories will be informed by, and build upon, without slavishly copying, the show's established mythology. This is exemplified by the first ever sustained and successful depiction of a Dalek levitating up a flight of stairs. A triumph, and just one of many many magical moments in this superlative serial.
Connectivity:
Remembrance of the Daleks and The Lodger both take place in the South of England, and both see the Doctor stay for a night or more in the house of one of the guest characters.
Deeper Thoughts:
This Time Machine Kills Fascists. Remembrance of the Daleks, the TV story, started a trend of the series being more socially conscious in its subtext, in highlighting modern racism through both a 1960s and a Dalek lens. Remembrance of the Daleks, the tie-in novelisation, published a few years after the broadcast, arguably continued that trend into a new medium and kicked off a whole new line of original Doctor Who novels, the New Adventures, that would continue Doctor Who's ongoing narrative in the years when the TV show was not being made. Aaronovitch, in adapting his own scripts for 1990 publication, was the first of the set of new young Doctor Who writers who'd recently written for the TV show to flesh out the world and characters of his story on the page to a much greater extent that had generally been done before. A year later in 1991, with no sign of Doctor Who returning to TV any time soon, Virgin started publishing a range of original novels. They'd been producing novelisations of broadcast stories before then, but were rapidly running out of those that hadn't been done already. Aaronovitch was again one of a group of writers - with pedigrees either in professional or fan-fiction Who work - involved in producing these original stories, "too broad and too deep for the small screen" as the cover blurb styled it. The range was featured in a number of articles in this month's Doctor Who Magazine (I'm not sure why now, though - holding off until next year would have meant they could have tied in with the 30th anniversary of the first book).
I remember when that first book (Timewyrm: Genesys by John Peel, but not that John Peel) came out. It was the summer before I started at university, and I snapped it up from my usual supplier of all things Who, Volume One in Worthing. The excitement wore off a bit quickly for me: the book isn't that great. The title being two not-quite words connected by a hyphen was not a good sign, but things were just starting out. Anyway, I was still only a beginner fan when it came to viewing old episodes. I didn't need new worlds of Doctor Who's ongoing narrative to explore, as I was diving into its history by dint of the VHS releases. I've probably given the impression talking about collecting the videos in blog posts passim that I had unlimited funds in those days. I was certainly lucky, but alas I still had to count the pennies to an extent, and videos came first; so, I was never exhaustive in collecting the New Adventures novels. Later in the Summer, I bought the second one (Timewyrm: Exodus by Terrance Dicks) because Terrance Dicks. Thereafter, though, I was choosy. I managed to find a few second-hand in later uni years, in a Durham sci-fi emporium, amongst the many, many Red Dwarf T-shirts (it was the early 1990s, what are you going do?!). Then, I bought a few more new when I was working after graduation, but by then the range was almost at an end.
Like anything established in the world of Doctor Who fandom, the New Adventures soon became a battleground. The main fault line that cleaved fandom in two was the 'Trad versus Rad' divide. In summary, all that social conscience and innovative, dangerous subject matter (i.e. sex and swearing) was loved by a certain group of regular authors and fans, but the other group (writers and fans alike) just wanted to tell an engaging story of the kind that Doctor Who used to tell on telly. As usual for an awkward sort, I didn't feel at home in either camp; I liked some of the the Trad stuff and some of the Rad. Sometimes, the Trad stuff did get a bit stodgy, and the Rad stuff did disappear up its own space-time vortex. The range - never really settling down into one style or the other - lasted until 1997; the Paul McGann TV movie's launch the previous year had prompted a general reboot of BBC Worldwide's Doctor Who products, and they brought the ongoing original novels in-house to be published thereafter by BBC Books (there wasn't much sex and swearing after that).
Another battleground in fandom that's emerged since is in discussions of the legacy of the New Adventures, and particularly what impact they had on the series when it came back onto television screens in 2005. Russell T Davies is his usual perceptive self when interviewed about this in the magazine, and makes many good points, but he downplays any influence. He's right in his point that the relatively inexperienced writers had things made easier for them by being given free rein; writing books (or indeed TV stories) that would appeal to a wide audience without offending material takes more discipline. It is true though, that the writers of the first return Doctor Who season in 2005 bar one had all written for Virgin, including Russell himself who had a New Adventure published (Damaged Goods in 1996). And later, possibly the most successful of the New Adventures, Human Nature was adapted for TV on Russell's watch. Anyway, Russell T Davies can't throw stones about the lack of discipline in writing something with adolescent sex and swearing. We haven't forgotten series 1 of Torchwood, Russell; how could we?!
In Summary:
Like a Dalek hovering up the stairs, this one rises up above any competition to be one of the very best the series has to offer.
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