Doctor Who - Dalek
Last night I decided to pick up my Doctor Who viewing of the new series again. Previously I saw the first five episodes of Season 1, so it was time for Dalek.
After the huge spectacles of the Daleks in the season finales and the whole Daleks in Manhattan fiasco, I had forgotten how good this episode was and how well the Dalek worked in the story. It's a smaller episode with a tight focus where the meat of the story is the parallels between the Doctor and the Dalek. Not only that, but this one Dalek is scary where entire fleets of them were eh.
I've been thinking a bit lately about all the mirrors that we've seen for the Doctor recently (with the most recent being Jackson Lake) and here is the first of those mirrors in new Who. They are both alone; both the last of their kind (as far they know at this point); and both perfectly willing to kill each other. The Dalek makes the mirroring explicit when it tells the Doctor that he would make a good Dalek. It's quite intense to see just how angry the Doctor gets as soon as he sees the Dalek. It's a measure of his own self-loathing that he is blinded by rage even before the Dalek has any ability to be a threat to him or anyone else.
Another theme in this episode is that it has us on the other side of a turning point for the Doctor and Rose. In the previous episode he finally admitted his attachment to her after denying it and claiming not to need her (see The Unquiet Dead for the Doctor threatening to send her home simply for disagreeing with him). But in World War Three he gives up the pretense, 'I could save the world and lose you.' In Dalek he no longer spends any energy pretending that she is not important or that he won't be deeply hurt if anything happens to her. He's absolutely crushed when he thinks the Dalek has killed her and it willing to let it loose on the world just to not go through the thought again that she is dead. This can be thought of as very romantic or incredibly co-dependent. Perhaps both. I can certainly understand why he latches onto her so strongly. He can barely see through the self-loathing and the loneliness. And then he meets Rose.
After the huge spectacles of the Daleks in the season finales and the whole Daleks in Manhattan fiasco, I had forgotten how good this episode was and how well the Dalek worked in the story. It's a smaller episode with a tight focus where the meat of the story is the parallels between the Doctor and the Dalek. Not only that, but this one Dalek is scary where entire fleets of them were eh.
I've been thinking a bit lately about all the mirrors that we've seen for the Doctor recently (with the most recent being Jackson Lake) and here is the first of those mirrors in new Who. They are both alone; both the last of their kind (as far they know at this point); and both perfectly willing to kill each other. The Dalek makes the mirroring explicit when it tells the Doctor that he would make a good Dalek. It's quite intense to see just how angry the Doctor gets as soon as he sees the Dalek. It's a measure of his own self-loathing that he is blinded by rage even before the Dalek has any ability to be a threat to him or anyone else.
Another theme in this episode is that it has us on the other side of a turning point for the Doctor and Rose. In the previous episode he finally admitted his attachment to her after denying it and claiming not to need her (see The Unquiet Dead for the Doctor threatening to send her home simply for disagreeing with him). But in World War Three he gives up the pretense, 'I could save the world and lose you.' In Dalek he no longer spends any energy pretending that she is not important or that he won't be deeply hurt if anything happens to her. He's absolutely crushed when he thinks the Dalek has killed her and it willing to let it loose on the world just to not go through the thought again that she is dead. This can be thought of as very romantic or incredibly co-dependent. Perhaps both. I can certainly understand why he latches onto her so strongly. He can barely see through the self-loathing and the loneliness. And then he meets Rose.