Victory of the Daleks

Chapter the 254th, which teaches us that nothing good was ever described as a "new paradigm".

Plot:

The last remaining Dalek ship falls back through time after a previous altercation with the Doctor, to Earth in the early 1940s. The Daleks have a Progenitor DNA device that will help rebuild their species, but because of their impurity, having been created from the cells of the Emperor Dalek / Davros / humans (whichever of the many various groups of final remaining Daleks these are), the device will not recognise them as true members of the species. There are probably many plans they could hatch to address this problem, but they decide the best thing to do is to help the allies win WW2. They create a robot professor with fake human memories called Bracewell who pretends to have invented the Daleks as helper machines dubbed "Ironsides". This is so that Winston Churchill will tell his old friend the Doctor about it, the Doctor will arrive (with Amy Pond in tow) to warn everyone that the Daleks are evil and must be planning something, and will inadvertently identify them by name. This indeed comes to pass, and a recording of his identification is used to fire up the Progenitor. The Doctor materialises the TARDIS on the Dalek spaceship and witnesses the creation of the new Daleks. To destroy the humans, the Daleks force all the lights on during an air raid. But, using the future technical knowledge of Bracewell, the British air force - very rapidly - installs space-proof bubbles around Spitfire planes and they fly up and attack the Dalek ship, turning the lights back off again. The new - fat, hunchbacked, colourful - Daleks destroy the old impure ones, and activate a planet-destroying bomb within Bracewell so they can escape (funny they didn't do that earlier, rather than muck about with the lights). The Doctor returns to Earth and cannot diffuse the bomb, but Amy has the idea to appeal to Bracewell's pretend humanity, and that makes the countdown to destruction cease (somehow).

Context:

Watched one dull weekend afternoon with all the children (boys of 16 and 13, girl of 10) from the new series 5 box-set Blu-ray disc (the sound seemed a little off, and I'm worried that I missed a recall many years ago). The middle child throughout expressed his enthusiasm, as he really likes this one (unlike his Dad who was harrumphing all the way through at one thing or another, but we'll get to that anon). 

First Time Round:

Most people have probably forgotten this, but the first experience I had of this story was of a single line of dialogue. An audio file of Matt Smith's line reading of what turned out to be some key dialogue "I am the Doctor, and you are the Daleks" leaked to the online forums many months before the story aired, and before any of Matt Smith's work in his stories had been seen. Nobody knew exactly how he'd perform the role, and this was the earliest clue. As anyone with experience of such things would have anticipated, fans' extrapolations from this smidge of evidence went big, broad and deep. It was the best of lines, it was the worst of lines; he was going to be a disaster, he was going to be marvellous, etc, etc. Much later, on the evening of Saturday 14th April 2010, I was visiting the flat of old friend Phil, mentioned many times before on this blog, to meet his new partner (and later Better Half) for the first time. All of us being fans, our idea had been that we would watch Doctor Who together before dinner, but my bus over to his place was delayed, so I ended up watching Victory of the Daleks the following day at home. I'm glad at that, as I was so disappointed with the episode on first watch it might have put a downer on the evening.

Reaction:

Is it better to be bored or disappointed? It's one of those age-old questions with no right answer. A story - or indeed any piece of art or craft - can fail by playing it safe and ending up dull, or being over-ambitious and ending up embarrassing. Which is the lesser experience for the viewer may be just a matter of taste, but I've always thought it was better to shoot for the moon and miss than keep one's sights low. Until now, maybe. The last story covered on the blog The Web Planet - which in its own special way manages to be both dull and embarrassing - is clearly on paper a very challenging spectacle to realise for the time in which it was made. The story structure supporting the spectacle is coherent, though, and aligned to those visual aims: imagine a planet of insects, and the insects are at war. Simple. There's a difference though, at least I think, between failing to realise an ambitious script, and squandering the potential of a good scenario with an incoherent script. Victory of the Daleks asks its dramatic question "What would happen if the Daleks took part in World War Two?" in a 'celebrity historical' featuring Winston Churchill (expertly brought to life by Ian McNeice). That is a set-up with a great deal of potential. It's not over-ambitious either; WW2 and Daleks are both things that Doctor Who has a lot of experience at doing well previously. The script becomes ruinously ambitious by trying to do so many disparate things within that set-up in 45 minutes, none of them getting the time to be properly explored or even - in some cases - covered sufficiently to be baseline plausible.

The story starts intriguingly by side-stepping what might be the viewer's expectation: the Daleks are fighting on the allied side. As they have been Nazi analogues throughout their history, it might have been more obvious to have the Daleks fighting against Churchill and Co. The Doctor and Winston Churchill versus Adolf Hitler and the Daleks - how would good prevail? It's a sitting target and it's sitting right there - why not go for it?! Okay, maybe it's a bit too obvious. So, the intriguing and less obvious - but probably less exciting - option is chosen instead, and the Daleks are pretending to be good. It's not exactly an original idea, as it is openly and playfully plagiarised from a 1960s Doctor Who story The Power of the Daleks. There's even an in-joke highlighting it with the Daleks saying "I am your soldier" instead of "I am your servant". Cribbing from a story as good and as well remembered as Power is a bit risky, but the earlier story showed that focusing on the Daleks using their wiles and gradually taking over a situation can be winning. The problem is that Victory of the Daleks doesn't explore it for any length of time. At roughly the 12 minute point, it leaves the plot behind, a means to an end just to get the Doctor to identify the Daleks. For that purpose, though, it doesn't make any sense as the Dalek's gambit. In Power, they had no, erm, power, so they couldn't exterminate everyone. The Daleks in Victory have no such limitation, so why don't they just threaten to kill Churchill to make the Doctor do what they want? In Power, the unarmed Daleks look relatively benign; in Victory, Churchill knows full well they are capable of vaporising German aircraft, so why doesn't he listen to his old friend the Doctor when he's pointing out the dangers?

Almost a third of the way into the story, and everything so far has been a gimmick, a little callback fun for long-term fans and the chance to see Daleks painted camouflage green (which is admittedly pretty cool). The next third is mostly set on the Dalek spaceship. There's a nice Matt Smith moment where he bluffs the Daleks that a Jammie Dodger biscuit is really a detonator, but it can't take away from the deathly surrounding exposition that forms the rest of this sequence. The convoluted backstory of Daleks (that aren't quite Daleks any more) creating new Daleks (that are) is not interesting to even long-term fans. Why can't the Daleks just turn up wanting to explode or enslave things anymore, and spare us all this tedium? A new type of Daleks is created, which I'll get to criticising in a moment (everybody else has over the years, so I don't see why I should hold back). Before that, there's a moment that's stupid with two o's - the Daleks have turned all the lights on to allow for the devastation of humans (why bother, though, when they have a bomb that can explode the planet?), but luckily - based on some blueprints that the robot Bracewell created (why would the Daleks program him with knowledge that could be used against them?) - Churchill's team are able to make Spitfires and their pilots capable of operating in space in special protective bubbles. From an idea on paper to working space-Spitfires in the time it takes the Doctor to have a brief conversation with the Daleks. It's ludicrous. Our boys bravely battle against the Dalek ship, and knock out the transmitter keeping the lights on, so the Daleks use their bomb anyway. It's pointless, but people get to see a WW2 dogfight in space (which I didn't think was cool, as it seemed to be playing on war years patriotism just for some cheap thrills).

We're now approximately 30 minutes in to a 45 minute episode. The final section is Amy stopping Bracewell from exploding using the power of love (yuck!) and then some drawn out resolution scenes. Bill Patterson as Bracewell is good, but the material he's given is poor. Writer Mark Gatiss maybe had to rush the screenplay, as it is not up to his normal standard. Perhaps, though, all the material described thus far was merely window dressing, as the point of the story is really just to introduce a new look (plus, if one is cynical, some new merchandising opportunities) for the Daleks. If the new designs weren't an unmitigated disaster, this might be a justification. Alas, they are awful, hardly anybody liked them, and they rarely appeared again after this series. They're too big - one of the joys of Daleks is their not looking quite big enough for an operator, and these look big enough for two. They have a weird hunchback - the older designs have the upper section and base section aligned in a fluid way. They all have job titles (the Strategist, the Drone, and, erm, a few others I already can't remember) - Daleks shouldn't have anything as dull as job titles, so these were wisely never mentioned again. They lose all the detailing of their immediate predecessors like rivets and panels, and go instead for smooth blocks of colour - this would be good if it didn't look like they were made of such cheap plastic. And they don't do anything. They kill only their own kind, and then they run away. All told, the so-called 'new paradigm' Daleks and the story as a whole are two of the biggest disappointments of Doctor Who's long history. They could have done Churchill and the Doctor versus Nazi Daleks, and everyone would probably have been happy. Maybe sometimes it is better to keep things simple.  

Connectivity:

Both Victory of the Daleks and The Web Planet start from a lead-in set up in the previous episode. There's also maybe the faintest echoes of World War 2, specifically D-Day, in some of the action of The Web Planet related to the Menoptera invasion plans.

Deeper Thoughts:

They keep killing, and it's snoozy. The one positive thing I found with Victory of the Daleks at the time was that the Daleks got away at the end, rather than all being destroyed as had happened every time they appeared in the new series previously. The Doctor's a bit sad about it in the story, but I was relieved. It meant that they could return the next time without as much convoluted explanation. The question I posed above, "Why can't the Daleks just turn up wanting to explode or enslave things anymore, and spare us all this tedium?" could do with a little deeper thought to answer it. Apart from in their first appearance, when they weren't expected to appear in any further stories, and in The Evil of the Daleks, which was intended to write them out of the show forever, the classic era Daleks didn't get wiped off the face of the universe at the end of their every story. The small group of them that been threatening whichever planet, colony or home counties mansion would be destroyed, yes, but there were always more out there; sometimes this was explicitly stated, sometimes implicitly hinted. When the series came back, this all changed because showrunner Russell T Davies believed he had an issue to overcome. He felt that the Daleks - after years of no appearances on telly except in chocolate biscuit commercials - had become objects of fun, or even ridicule. They were the butt of jokes about sink plungers and not being able to go up stairs, and such.

To rectify this, Davies commissioned a story for their reintroduction (2005's Dalek), where just one is shown to be a plausible threat to the world. It was very effective, too. By the end of the first season of the relaunched show, when they come back en masse, things hit a dramatic peak; as Billie Piper's Rose says "We could hardly stop one" and now there are thousands. As part of the overarching mythology Davies weaves into his first year as showrunner, the Daleks are also the old opponents of the Time Lords in the Great Time War, both races having wiped each other out; because, of course, who else was it going to be? So, they're all powerful to the extent that even one survivor could wreak havoc, and they were all supposedly destroyed long ago. But they are also the most popular and recognisable foe the Doctor has, so they have to return periodically, and when they return - because of the nature of a good versus evil narrative - the Doctor has to defeat them. One side effect of this was pointed out by the showrunner that followed Davies, Steven Moffat: the Daleks become paradoxically the most defeated of all Doctor Who villains. The other side effect, though, is that there has to be precious story time given over to how they returned from annihilation this time. In those early years after the Daleks' reintroduction, this generally followed the same pattern (as seen in Victory of the Daleks), one or a small group (the Emperor Dalek, members of the Cult of Skaro, etc.) inexplicably escaped the previous purge by "falling back through time", and they rebuild the race using cloning or a previously unmentioned device (the Genesis Ark, the Progenitor).

It's easy to see why all the Davies Dalek stories after that first one are two-parters; by the time you've explained how they returned, and then explained how they're being got rid of again, you haven't got much time for any story in between. Moffat seems less enamoured of the Skaro pepperpots than his predecessor: they stop returning every year regularly, they stop being the de facto villains for every series finale, they usually get one episode for their tales rather than two. And, because enough time has passed since the show introduced the Time War mythology, nobody feels any longer that they have to ensure the threat of the Daleks is removed at the end. There's no reason ever given why the colourful new paradigm Daleks created at the end of Victory don't regroup, come back and destroy the planet Earth a little while later. This is probably more in keeping with what had come before in the series, though, than the more detailed explanations felt required by Davies. The other two contenders for the 'Most defeated villain' award in Doctor Who, the Cybermen and the Master, also fell at different times into similar patterns of implausible destruction and rebirth, story after story. The various different groups of Cybermen encountered in the 1960s were all the last vestiges of a once mighty race, every single one of them; the explanation given in the show was... none, they just didn't mention why or how this came to be. In the 1980s, the Master got killed off at the end of every story, only to turn up again fine the next time; the explanation given in the show was... none, they just made a running joke out of it. Maybe plausibility isn't that important a quality for Doctor Who. Which is lucky for Victory of the Daleks in particular.

In Summary:

If I wanted a shoddily written adventure story designed to launch a range of toys, then I'd pick He-Man and the Masters of the Universe over this.