Destiny of the Daleks

Chapter The 183rd, where robots from the last days of Disco meet the Daleks and their creator; that actually sounds fun, but it isn't somehow.

Plot:

The Doctor and a newly - and sillily - regenerated Romana arrive on Skaro. They leave K9 in the TARDIS as the robot dog has - sillily - developed laryngitis. A spaceship lands nearby crewed by a bunch of silver disco robots called the Movellans. The Doctor and Romana don't realise they are robots at first even though it's blindingly obvious. They are silly. Anyway, the Daleks are back on their ancestral planet using enslaved humanoids from various parts of the galaxy to mine for something. They are using slaves even though they could do it much quicker themselves. This might be because they have, somehow, become coldly logical robot creatures exactly like they haven't been previously; but, they are manifestly rubbish at being logical. From his previous visit to the Kaled city, the Doctor remembers a short cut to what he thinks the Daleks are after: Davros. The Daleks' creator has been abandoned but kept alive by suspended animation technology in his chair for the centuries since the original Daleks thought they had killed him. This has clearly affected him a bit, as his voice is different and his face has changed so it looks like a mask that doesn't quite fit properly. Funny that.

The Daleks need Davros to help in their war with the Movellans, which is at an impasse because the fleets and battle computers of both sides are too logical to make any offensive move. The Doctor gets the slaves freed in exchange for letting the Daleks have Davros, then makes a break for it. With the help of the freed slaves, the Doctor and Romana defeat the Movellans (the robots have some serious design flaws). Davros's Daleks, each with multiple bombs attached for a suicide attack, approach the Movellan ship, but the Doctor goes back to the Kaled city and finds Davros, and uses Davros's remote control to blow the Daleks up before they do any harm. Davros is imprisoned to be taken off for trial. The freed slaves commandeer the Movellan ship, and the Doctor and Romana continue their wanderings through time and space in the TARDIS.

Context:

Watching the four episodes of Destiny of the Daleks from the DVD for the blog, I was not transported back to 1979 but to almost a decade later and the dark autumn weekday evenings of the late 1980s. The reason for this is that, despite its featuring what would seem to be the popular draw of Tom Baker with Daleks, I could not interest any of the family in watching with me. I had to find time when everyone else was out of the living room to catch up with each episode on my own. It was very reminiscent of how I watched every Sylvester McCoy episode in the 1980s when my family of that time were similarly not interested, somewhat furtively and definitely alone.

First Time Round:

I first saw this story from the VHS, which was released in early July 1994. This was around the time I graduated from university in Durham. I'd got my results and then stayed around, with all my stuff packed up, in a college room for a week or so between the end of term and the ceremony, which was held shortly after everyone else had gone home. It was an odd time as a graduand having nothing to do for a brief pause, except arrange the hire an expensive robe and hat and wait for another phase of one's life to begin. As such, I'm pretty sure I didn't buy and watch the story until I was back home in Worthing a little later. The one memory I have of watching it is not a memory at all but a lack thereof. Either I was tired or I'd had a little too much shandy while watching, or - just maybe - the story itself contributed in some way to this effect by numbing my brain - but I watched it, thought 'yeah, okay', then the next day could not remember how it ended, specifically regarding the fate of Davros. Had he appeared again for a resolution scene at the end? All I could remember was a blur of wonky Daleks with garlands of bombs round their domes squawking and blowing up. I had to fast forward to watch the last few minutes again, for which I had previously zoned out.

A clearer memory was my first reading of the novelisation. For some reason, a friend of mine, Andrew, invited me to meet him in Portsmouth for a day out. We went there a couple of times, as I remember, and this visit must have been sometime in the spring or 1988; I recall seeing a poster advertising Morrissey's first solo album Viva Hate when we went to the shops there. I travelled on the train to meet him, and read the Destiny of the Daleks novelisation on the way. The trip there and back was sufficient time to complete the slim volume. Both of us lived in Worthing at the time, so I've no idea why we went all that way and why we didn't travel over together. Perhaps he was staying with family for a visit and wanted an excuse to get out of their house for a while. That would fit. I don't want to get too Marcel Proust about it, but aside from Terrance Dicks's prose, I can only remember fleeting impressions: that Morrissey poster, Strawberry Switchblade playing at a funfair on a green by the seafront, and my buying and eating a roast almond Yorkie. They don't make the almond version of this UK chocolate bar anymore, and it was a favourite of mine at the time. Anyway, the book was much more exciting to read than the screen version was to watch years later. 

Reaction:

If I had to summarise Destiny of the Daleks in a word, I'd be torn between a choice of two: 'tatty' or 'threadbare'. I'm not talking about the production design though, I'm talking about the script. Some of the production design doesn't help, that's definitely true. Where they are saving money by reusing old elements, it shows: the original Davros mask from Genesis of the Daleks four years earlier is showing signs of wear and tear; it also doesn't fit actor David Gooderson, replacing the original Davros actor Michael Wisher who proved unavailable for the recording of Destiny. The Dalek props too are aged and could do with refurbishment. The Movellans are well turned out, though; whatever you think of the choices involved for hair and outfit, which look they might have been made for some high concept Hot Gossip routine, they are done to a high level of quality. The Movellan ship set too is gorgeous. The sets for the Kaled city on the other hand look like the money had run out; perhaps it had all been spent hiring the Steadicam, used here for the first time on a Doctor Who, giving us a few stand-out gliding shots. Even the more conventionally filmed location sequences are excellent, though, with Winspit quarry in Dorset being well used to give some interesting landscapes. The hit rate of the look and feel then is about on a par with any other story of the period. The script though...

Whoever was responsible for the story that ended up on screen (see Deeper Thoughts for more details), it contains much that doesn't work. The central conceit that the Daleks and the Movellans have reached a logical stalemate, each side anticipating the other's every move and therefore locked into immobility, is an interesting one, but is a bad fit for Daleks. They aren't emotionless robots, and have never before been characterised as such. It's heavily implied that they are no longer organic creatures in protective shells, but have dispensed with the organic component altogether. The Doctor and Romana both refer to them as being robots, which is just not the case before or since this story. Even if one accepts this is somehow true, or at least metaphorical (they have got so used to their way of operating that they act like robots, say), I'm still not sure that the stalemate idea hangs together. Couldn't one side or the other just use a random number generator subroutine to choose what to do? How would the other side anticipate that? The scene where the Doctor, Romana and the Movellans play Scissors Paper Stone to demonstrate the difference between machine and human intelligence is cute (goes on a bit, though), but doesn't really make sense. The game involves making a random choice between three options, with no factors to dictate any particular order to favour one of the three options over the others, so there's no reason for a machine to play them in the same order as another machine.

The script also has problems of logic, and lack of follow through typical of other Nation stories. In one episode, the Daleks find the concept of self-sacrifice so illogical as to be unbelievable, in the next episode, a platoon of them have been easily persuaded to strap bombs onto themselves and do a kamikaze run at the Movellan spaceship. In the first episode, it's established as vital that the Doctor and Romana take regular does of anti-radiation drugs, and the Doctor sets a timer for when they'll need the next dose. By the time the timer goes off, they have been separated. The Doctor takes his pills, but can't give any to Romana who by that time has been captured. Romana shows signs of being ill and swoons. But the faint is a feint: Romana's just pretending to be dead as part of an escape plan. She's successful, and meets up again with the Doctor. He doesn't give her any drugs, she's perfectly fine anyway, and it's never mentioned again. Sure, I can tell myself they must have taken the necessary medicine later off screen at some point, but that's a hell of a cop out. The fuss about the levels of radiation set up at the beginning also begs the question of who's giving tablets to all the Daleks' slaves, either before or after they're freed? Why do the Daleks need the captured humans at all, except to provide the Doctor with a rebel fighting force later? It can't be a logical decision; as Romana points out, they'd do the job a lot quicker with machinery. So they're doing it out of spite? If so, how does that stack up with them as robotic slaves to logic? 

Even scripts with lots of plot holes can have exciting action moments. Here, though, Destiny also fails to deliver. The Daleks are portrayed too often as weak. The Doctor jokes about them not being able to climb, he puts his hat over one Dalek's eye stalk and it has a hissy fit. The pepperpots talk a good game, endlessly chanting their repetitive slogans, but there's hardly any extermination. They only kill one character in battle, and a couple more prisoners are lined up and zapped. Davros is literally pushed around by various characters. As he is essentially a wheelchair user, the optics of this did not look so good to me on this latest watch. I know he's evil and all, but he should be allowed to be in charge of his own propulsion. The Movellans are a bit of a pushover too; you just remove their easily accessible power source and they do a bit of community theatre spaced-out hands in the air acting, and then kark it. Peasy. Again, one wonders where a non-robot race could place its most vulnerable point that would be more illogical than the super logical Movellans managed. None of these flaws on its own is that big a deal, but they mound up until they blot out the light of anything good. If there was a bit more pace then maybe one would not have time to think about it: take out an episode's worth of padding and tighten it up a bit, and switch your brain off, and a three-parter Destiny of the Daleks would be an engaging enough, though superficial, season opener.

Connectivity: 

Both stories that open a new season of Doctor Who and feature an alien race landing on a fairly barren celestial body in order to search for someone. 

Deeper Thoughts:

Adams Nation Damnations! In the Deeper Thoughts last time on Russell T Davies, Douglas Adams and Terry Nation were a couple of the contenders I considered but discarded as competition for Davies's crown as the biggest TV writer ever to work on Doctor Who. Destiny of the Daleks was the only time they worked together (in the loosest sense of the term as we shall discover), Douglas Adams as Script Editor, Terry Nation as writer. Well, maybe Nation wasn't the writer, even though he was credited as such. Adams later claimed that Nation did not deliver full scripts for any of the episodes, just what amounted to storyline notes, and Adams himself had to write the lion's share of the story. It's difficult to know how much this is true. Director Ken Grieve backed up Adams's version of events, putting the amount contributed by Adams at 98%; it is also not the first time in Doctor Who's history that the criticism had been raised of Nation's work needing heavy rewriting. Adams's reported woes are consistent with, if a bit more extreme than, those of a few script editors on Doctor Who working with Nation before. It seems unlikely though that the BBC would have had to pay Nation had he not produced actual screenplays for all four episodes, though they would likely still have paid him if they were slim and under-running. It's likely that some exaggeration has crept in to the telling of the anecdotes in the years since.

It's definitely on record that Nation's scripts came in late. The production team wanted to start the season that year with a Dalek story, the metal meanies' return with a bang after four whole seasons without them. Nation had agreed as long as he was able to write it, but he wasn't available to do this such that the story could be recorded first that year. It was dropped to third slot in the production order, making it a tight turnaround to get the episodes made in time for broadcast. When Nation's scripts came in later than expected even on that schedule, it must have necessitated that the in-house script editor had to do any rewrites rapidly rather than everyone wait for the back and forth of Adams' teasing the necessary changes from Nation's pen. It's definitely clear that Adams contributed some material. There is a sequence where the Doctor is reading a book on the origins of the universe by Oolon Colluphid, a reference to an established minor character from Hitch Hiker that can only have been put in by Douglas. Additionally, there's the sequence at the beginning where Romana regenerates. This is of course a standard thing for a script editor to do, writing the sections necessitated by cast changes in the wider production, unconnected to the story of the week provided by the commissioned author.

The sequence at the start of episode one annoyed lots of purist fans at the time, and probably has annoyed more such fans since and to this very day. Without being too po-faced about it, I do think these people might have something of a point. It takes what was one of the most dramatic and significant devices in the history of the show - regeneration, meaning the change of one lead actor for another, a significant and rare event in the show's history - and uses it for a throwaway comedy five minutes. Romana has been recast and this is played out as if the wearing of bodies for Time Lords is like the wearing of clothes for us mere mortals. If it was side-splittingly funny, it might be worth it, but it's smile humour at most, somewhat witty and whimsical but overlong. Crucially, it seems padded out. Other moments that one suspects could have been contributed by Adams are similarly drawn out and not that funny. He could have been having an off day, but - if Adams really did contribute 98% of this material -  I'd expect it to be a lot funnier and much more interesting.

Lots of the material, as mentioned when talking about the story above, is standard Terry Nation serial peril-to-peril plot, without any effort towards surrounding coherence or escalation. There's slaves, and radiation poisoning, and countdowns, and planet destroying bombs; all these crop up again and again in Nations's work, but seem too humdrum to be things that would preoccupy Adams's psyche. Then again, if Nation had written the basic storyline, one wouldn't have thought he'd base it on his creations being robots, nor continually refer to them as such, as he should know if anyone should that they aren't. Even the reason why K9 doesn't appear is contentious and up for interpretation; depending on who you ask, either it was because Nation didn't want the K9 to upstage his creations (which suggests that he was shaping the story as author), or that the production team believed use of the K9 prop would be a nightmare in the quarry location (suggesting that the script editor was dictating elements that could be used for practical reasons).

The final point that suggests Adams contributed a lot to the episodes is that Nation was reportedly aghast at what ended up on screen. I say 'reportedly', as I've seen it relayed as fact in many reputable sources, but I don't believe I've ever seen a direct quote from Nation to back it up. It's true that after his contribution to the 1979/1980 series, Nation didn't work on Doctor Who again, but the same is true of Douglas Adams. They both moved on to bigger and more lucrative things that would take both men eventually, separately, to the USA. If Nation's last Who script never reached the screen as he intended it, neither did Adams's (see the blog post on Shada for more details). And both men died in California after an insufficiently long innings (Nation was 66 years old at the time of his death, and Adams a heart-breakingly young 49). It's almost 20 years since Douglas's untimely death (the anniversary of that sad occasion will be the 11th May this year) and at the time of my writing this it's but a few days to the 24th anniversary of Nation's death (9th March). It doesn't therefore matter therefore exactly what part of the story was written by whom. Both writers contributed greatly to Doctor Who during its history, and I'd be tempted to watch a story by each to celebrate their contributions on those milestone dates. I just won't ever pick Destiny of the Daleks for either of them, that's all. 

In Summary:

Tatty script with some threadbare (and, to be fair, some good) visuals.