DOCTOR WHO - My review of "Victory of the Daleks"
Late last night, I posted my review of "Victory of the Daleks" on my site, and you can read that there, or you can read it here if you wish. How's that for service, eh? :)
World War II is a great setting for a story, and its surprising that Doctor Who hasn’t used it more often than it has. Written by Mark Gatiss, who wrote 2005’s “The Unquiet Dead“, and 2006’s “The Idiot Lantern“, the previews for this episode looked very promising, and its a safe bet to say that this episode was a highly-anticipated one.
Even moreso than my past reviews, I must interject with a stern SPOILER warning, because I’m summarizing the entire plot below before getting down to the nitty-gritty.
The Story…
Our story for this week starts out strongly enough. London, circa 1940-41, is suffering under the withering Nazi bombing-runs during the Blitz, and in this London War-Office sequence we hear of an impending bombing run from the Germans. The legendary PM Winston Churchill appears, gets a quick status report, and decides to roll out their secret weapons: the Daleks. We don’t see them immediately, mind you, but rather the movement of a Dalek model on the strategy map, which leads right into the opening credits.
Soon after, the Doctor arrives, and after a little semi-playful “tug-o-war” over the TARDIS, the Doctor introduces Amy and the PM to one-another. Churchill brings up the fact that the Doctor had changed his face again (which indicates that he’s met him in more than one incarnation), and that the Doctor was running a little late, as he had called him a month before, a fact which surprises the Doctor, who apologizes for his tardiness. Churchill takes the pair of them to the roof where they can see his new secret weapon in action. As the Doctor and Amy look on, a brief barrage of energy-beams utterly annihilates the approaching German bombers, leaving the Doctor shocked and a bit unnerved. He bounds up to the second roof-level, and finds that the familiar blasts of energy have come from a pair of Daleks. The Doctor is aghast, despite the apparent servile attitude of the Dalek he approaches, and chafes at the assertion that they were invented by one professor Edwin Bracewell, who has dubbed them his “ironsides”.
The Doctor tries to convince the PM that they are alien and his deadliest foes, but Churchill is desperate for any means to fight off the Nazi’s and win the war. He tries to enlist Amy’s aid in convincing the PM of the Dalek’s true nature, but he finds instead that she has no memory of the Dalek invasion of Earth (“The Stolen Earth” and “Journey’s End“), which is a development that the Doctor finds disturbing. Amy questions one of the Daleks, who maintains that he is their “soldier”, and a frustrated Doctor decides that he’s going to have to prove it.
The scene shifts to Bracewell’s lab, leading to a hilarious aside where a Dalek asks Bracewell if he’d care for some tea. Brilliant! The Doctor questions Bracewell about his inventions, and the professor maintains that he created the ironsides, along with many other advances which seem to come to his mind with startling regularity. Frustrated, the Doctor attacks one of the Daleks with a huge spanner in an attempt to get it to admit what it truly is, and during his assault, he boldly declares who he is and what they are. However, by doing so, he falls right into their trap. His words have been recorded as “testimony” and transmitted to a damaged Dalek saucer secreted behind the moon. They kill a pair of Marines, and when Bracewell tries to get them to stand down, they blast off his left hand, revealing him to be an android they had created. With that, they teleport away to their saucer.
The Doctor tells Amy to stay with the PM and dashes off in the TARDIS to the Dalek ship, and strides into the control chamber, wielding a Jammie-Dodger (HAH!) on the pretense that its the TARDIS’ self-destruct switch. He asks the Daleks about their plans, and they tell him of the Progenitor, a device which contains pure Dalek-DNA. He then deduces that they created Bracewell and their elaborate ruse in order to trick him into giving his “testimony” to activate the progenitor because the device wouldn’t recognize them as Daleks, considering them impure.
He tries to get them to deactivate it, but they quickly stalemate him by activating a signal that turns on every light in London, letting each location stand out like a beacon in the night sky to the approaching German bombers, and state their intent to return to their own time and rebuild. As the Doctor tries to get them to stand down, the progenitor finishes its work, and the new Dalek “paradigm” emerges: a quintet of colorful Daleks, a new, far superior and powerful breed.
As the Doctor faces off the new breed of Daleks, Amy and Churchill persuade the now-suicidal Bracewell to choose to help them by adapting some of the technology he had “created”. Heartened by their faith in him, he chooses to assist in striking back at his former, secret masters. As Bracewell sets to work, the new Daleks set about exterminating their predecessors, whom they consider inferior and impure, a move the older Daleks had anticipated and were rather chillingly prepared to accept. The nu-Daleks then blab a bit about how awesome they are, quickly discover the Doctor’s biscuit deception, and call his bluff. But before they can kill him, an alert signals an attack, and that’s when we get to what is definitely the coolest bit, as a trio of Spitfires outfitted with Gravity-Bubble generators and energy-weapons attack the Dalek ship, enabling the Doctor to dash into the TARDIS.
With the Doctor’s help, the surviving pilot, Danny-Boy, destroys Dalek signal-dish allowing the London lights to switch off and thus saving the city from what would have been a devastating Nazi bombing-run. But, the Daleks have one more card to play, that card being Bracewell, who isn’t just an android, but also a bomb capable of destroying the Earth. Faced with the choice of destroying the Daleks, or allowing the Earth to be ripped-apart (pretty much the same choice he faced in “A Parting of the Ways”), the Doctor is forced to call off Danny-Boy’s attack, and returns to Earth in an attempt to defuse Bracewell.
With Amy’s help, the Doctor convinces the professor that being a machine doesn’t make him any less a man, because he can think for himself and, moreso, he can feel (particularly love, a fact that Amy discovers), and because he can feel, that makes him a person (“actual and whole” to quote Malcolm Reynolds from “Serenity“.), and as a result the detonation is canceled. The Doctor has again saved the Earth, for now anyway, because the Daleks used the distraction to escape back into the future.
The Doctor removes the advanced tech from the remaining Spitfire, much to Churchill’s disappointment, but the Doctor assures him that Britain doesn’t need it because it has a superb, inspirational Prime Minister. He manages to pickpocket the TARDIS key, but Amy catches him in the act and he gives it back. Cute. They then go on to see Bracewell, who is prepared to be deactivated. The Doctor and Amy hem and haw a bit, hinting that they have something else to do that will take some time, and when he doesn’t quite get it, their hint becomes a bit more pointed, and Bracewell happily packs his belongings, planning to pursue a normal life with the hope of rekindling a lost love.
As the Doctor and Amy depart, the Doctor confesses that the Daleks always worry him, and Amy has now figured out that traveling with him is dangerous, but that she wishes to stay anyway. The Doctor again brings up the fact that she didn’t know the Daleks, and that she should have, something which clearly concerns him. As they leave, a glowing crack in the wall is revealed, which should prompt a definite “uh-oh” from anyone who has been following the season up to this point.
The Critique…
So, how well did this all unfold? As stated, the story starts out strong, but it goes into some directions I just didn’t like, which I’ll soon get into.
First off, big kudos for not mentioning the Great Time-War. As I said last week, it seems as if the Doctor (via the writers) has put that event behind him, and last week’s vague summation by the Doctor was probably the last we’d hear for a while. I’m glad to see I was right about that, since the presence of the Daleks could easily have allowed for more unneeded exposition on it. Good show!
The Daleks needing to use the Doctor in order to operate the Progenitor works from a plot standpoint, but it doesn’t make a heck of a lot of logical sense. That is, unless, you consider that the Daleks are so wary of the Doctor’s interference, the progenitor devices were also programmed to accept his own statements as activation code. Its just the sort of redundancy they would have programmed into such a device, and as such it works. The Doctor almost always comes along and hands them a big heaping-helping of defeat, so why not find a way to use that to their own advantage.
A few commenters were a bit confused about the execution of the old Daleks by the nu-Daleks, but that one’s easy. We’ve seen the Daleks behave in similar ways in the past, especially in “Power of the Daleks” when the human-factor Daleks and the normal Daleks annihilate one-another, or later on when a faction of Renegade Daleks battle it out with Imperial Daleks during the Davison, Colin Baker, and McCoy eras.
So, why were the older models considered impure? Now there’s no plausible way they could be the ones from “A Parting of the Ways“, the insane ones created from human cells, because Rose obliterated them all with the power of the Time-Vortex, and its not conceivable that she’d allow any of them to escape.
But the Doctor’s own statement about their last encounter indicates that these Daleks were the last survivors of the events of “The Stolen Earth”/”Journey’s End”, all of whom were created from Davros‘ DNA. The new, “pure” Daleks would probably consider them unclean, and thus plan to exterminate them. This is one of those occasions where a little more exposition would have cleared things right up and forestalled any confusion over the matter, but its not too hard to suss out if you ponder it for a minute or two, and because it was consistent Dalek behavior, I was fine with it.
However, there are a few bits which really blunted my enjoyment of this episode. The point at which the plot really failed for me was when the oblivion continuum that powered the Bracewell android was defused by the Doctor and Amy by making him feel emotional pain, by making him feel human, by making him feel REAL. All of which hearkens to Amy and Churchill convincing the formerly suicidal scientist to use his skills to help defeat his evil creators, and Churchill pointedly revealing that his definition of what makes a man is not dependent on him being a flesh-and-blood person, but rather the content of character, and the capacity to choose.
Now, this is a nice metaphor, and one we’ve seen many, many times in fiction, but using such a thing to defuse a bomb, triggered to detonate by the Daleks who created Bracewell? Dubious at best, especially without a bit of exposition to explain WHY it worked. Now, I don’t think everything needs an explanation, and I like some things to be left to the audience, but this was something that kind of needed it in my opinion. We didn’t get one, and it just didn’t work for me. Too much fairy-tale wishful-thinking, and I know Mofatt is all about the fairy-tale, but this edged a bit too closely for my liking.
Also, that exchange with Bracewell at the end where the Doctor and Amy keep hinting that he should leave, and it takes him a while to pick up on it? Yeah, that scene felt a bit clumsy and lasted a bit too long and smacked of padding. Less there would have been so much more.
There are few items of interest I do need to mention, and I think its all definitely connected to the season’s metaplot: As a few viewers have mentioned, yet again, the Doctor isn’t “on time” when he lands. Spatially, he seems to put the TARDIS exactly where he wishes, but he’s always late. First by twelve years, and then an additional 2 years in “The Eleventh Hour“, and then off by a month in “Victory of the Daleks”. Now, the Doctor missing his mark is nothing new, but this seems to be pretty consistent.
In the recent past, the Doctor has been a little surprised when he missed his mark, such as hitting Cardiff instead of London in “The Unquiet Dead“, bringing Rose home 12 months too late in “The Aliens of London“, or traveling to Pompeii instead of Rome in “The Fires of Pompeii“. But this time, he’s more than surprised, he’s rather confused and a touch indignant about it.
We also have the issue of Amy’s lack of recollection of the Dalek invasion from a couple years before, and I will point out that the ominous musical tones we hear when the Doctor discovers this seem to connect Amy’s “amnesia” (for lack of a better word) with that troublesome crack in the fabric of the universe.
I think these events are all connected: the surviving Daleks, Amy not recalling them, the Doctor’s TARDIS being off-the-mark, and perhaps a whole lot more, are all connected to that crack, and the looming silence that heralds the opening of the Pandorica. There are quite a few fan-theories about, and a lot of them are rather troubling. Is the Doctor still in the same primary universe, or an alternate one where history has been altered in ways he’s not yet discerned? What is Amy Pond’s true nature? Is she a real-girl, or is she some sort of construct, metaphorically like Bracewell? Is a duck-pond without ducks some sort of clue as well, or just a bit of fun?
I’m sure we’ll get the answers so long as we stay tuned: same Who time, same Who channel. I can’t wait to find out myself.
The Performances…
Matt Smith didn’t wow me this time around like he had in the last two episodes, but he wasn’t bad by any stretch. Granted, he was a bit more sombre and irritable because the Daleks were around, and that blunted his usual energy, as it probably should. Karen Gillan continues to impress as Amy Pond, and she’s quickly becoming familiar to us as a companion. Once again, she takes the Doctor’s plan and finds a way to apply it a little differently and make it work, essentially one-upping him again, although she doesn’t play it that way. It is, however, something that could become annoying if it keeps up, although by the time the season is over, we could get reasons as to why she’s so good at this already.
On the guest-star side of things, Ian McNeice was very, very good as Winston Churchill. He really pulled off the part very well. Historical roles of that sort can really trip an actor up, but not McNeice, who was fun to watch and also engaging and sincere. Bill Patterson was also very good as Bracewell, making him a very sympathetic character, and one who deserves the happy-ending it seems he will get.
Getting Technical…
The CGI effects were strong, although initially the sequence featuring the Spitfires vs the Dalek saucer seemed a bit short, but after a second viewing its not really the case, and seems just about right. I enjoyed this sequence, although I think a few more Spitfires would ave added some extra pizazz, but I understand that the budget may not have allowed for that, plus getting 3 Spitfires outfitted with Gravity Bubbles and energy weapons in such a short amount of time was pushing it as-is.
Speaking of that scene, any Lexx fans out there reminded of the Brunnen G’s last stand versus His Divine Shadow when the Spitfires swooped in, or was that just me? Yo-Way-YO indeed!
The new “Paradigm” Daleks. I like the color coding, and I like the height. A few people stated they liked the “deeper” voices, but only the Supreme had a deeper voice, just as the previous Supreme Dalek and the Emperor Dalek had. The other Daleks had the standard, higher-pitched voices, so nothing actually changed there. It is indeed about time we had tall, colorful Daleks. In that aspect they reminded me of the Daleks from the Peter Cushing movies. However, there were definitely aspects that I didn’t like. The hunched back really bugs me, a lot. I don’t like the new shoulders either, as it makes them look like they are carrying around a spare Tyre. The neck vents are too small in terms of diameter, and it makes the Daleks look pin-headed, and their bodies too fat. Perhaps the new Daleks could exclaim “EX-TER-MOO-NATE”?
As an aside, what the heck kind of Dalek is an “Eternal” anyway? The other types make perfect sense, but the Eternal? Not so much. What is his function? Is he like the official Dalek timekeeper or something, with a built-in atomic clock? My wife suggested that perhaps the Eternal is where “hope” springs from. Heh.
Anyway, I’m not keen on the overall design. It looks a bit cheap when compared to the tank-like new-series Daleks that preceded them (more than one reviewer has referred to them as “Ikea” Daleks, “Skittles” Daleks, “Gay Pride” Daleks, or even “iDaleks” as if they’d been made by Steve Jobs.), and seems very merchandise-driven (Which seem to be the case if the new issue of “Private Eye” is to be believed. One of the posters over on Gallifrey Base photoshopped an altered version of one of the new Daleks, eliminating the hunchback and increasing the size of the neck and head to bring it more in line with the girth of the lower body, and the tweaked version looked MUCH better. However, I don’t think the design team will alter them in any way, because I’m sure that too much time, money, and effort was put into the new design. More’s the pity, and I’ll just have to deal.
However, worse still than the new Dalek design, would be the interior of the Dalek saucer. It absolutely screamed “No more decor, we’ll go over-budget”, and looked nothing like the interior of the Dalek saucers seen back in 2005, nor the interior of the Dalek Crucible. From the previews, I figured it was a space somewhere on Earth that the Daleks had established in secret, and it would have worked just fine for that, but no such luck. It looked almost like a huge, industrial kitchen, minus the walk-ins, the sinks, the ovens and grills, and so-on. And now that I say that I’m having visions of the nu-Daleks hosting a cooking show called “Can’t Cook, Won’t Cook, Will Exterminate!”
I’m sure there’s more than one reason for this design decision. 1) Budget, which may be the chief reason, and this is the first time when I’ve felt that the slashed budget affected what was seen on-screen. 2) Too much detail may have detracted from the appearance of the new Daleks, and that’s also likely why the lighting was so unobtrusive and even: gotta showcase the 2010 Daleks for the kiddies. Whatever the reasons, it looked pretty bad from where I was sitting.
The other sets looked fine. We got a convincing WWII-era War-Office, which is something the BBC does well anyway, and is also a bit more important in terms of properly setting the story. So, kudos to them for that.
The Verdict…
FAIR.
After last week I was concerned that others may think I was being too easy on the show in my reviews, and that perhaps I was a bit biased in some fashion. However, I was disappointed by this episode overall, and such a bias no longer concerns me. Put simply, this episode just wasn’t as good as the last two. Its not a BAD episode at all, but nor is it particularly good. It has some good moments, fun moments, amusing moments, but overall they just aren’t enough to overcome the dodgy bits. Nowadays, Dalek stories really need to impress, and this one fell short. As such, I can only rank it as fair.
Now, bring on River Song and the Weeping Angels!
World War II is a great setting for a story, and its surprising that Doctor Who hasn’t used it more often than it has. Written by Mark Gatiss, who wrote 2005’s “The Unquiet Dead“, and 2006’s “The Idiot Lantern“, the previews for this episode looked very promising, and its a safe bet to say that this episode was a highly-anticipated one.
Even moreso than my past reviews, I must interject with a stern SPOILER warning, because I’m summarizing the entire plot below before getting down to the nitty-gritty.
The Story…
Our story for this week starts out strongly enough. London, circa 1940-41, is suffering under the withering Nazi bombing-runs during the Blitz, and in this London War-Office sequence we hear of an impending bombing run from the Germans. The legendary PM Winston Churchill appears, gets a quick status report, and decides to roll out their secret weapons: the Daleks. We don’t see them immediately, mind you, but rather the movement of a Dalek model on the strategy map, which leads right into the opening credits.
Soon after, the Doctor arrives, and after a little semi-playful “tug-o-war” over the TARDIS, the Doctor introduces Amy and the PM to one-another. Churchill brings up the fact that the Doctor had changed his face again (which indicates that he’s met him in more than one incarnation), and that the Doctor was running a little late, as he had called him a month before, a fact which surprises the Doctor, who apologizes for his tardiness. Churchill takes the pair of them to the roof where they can see his new secret weapon in action. As the Doctor and Amy look on, a brief barrage of energy-beams utterly annihilates the approaching German bombers, leaving the Doctor shocked and a bit unnerved. He bounds up to the second roof-level, and finds that the familiar blasts of energy have come from a pair of Daleks. The Doctor is aghast, despite the apparent servile attitude of the Dalek he approaches, and chafes at the assertion that they were invented by one professor Edwin Bracewell, who has dubbed them his “ironsides”.
The Doctor tries to convince the PM that they are alien and his deadliest foes, but Churchill is desperate for any means to fight off the Nazi’s and win the war. He tries to enlist Amy’s aid in convincing the PM of the Dalek’s true nature, but he finds instead that she has no memory of the Dalek invasion of Earth (“The Stolen Earth” and “Journey’s End“), which is a development that the Doctor finds disturbing. Amy questions one of the Daleks, who maintains that he is their “soldier”, and a frustrated Doctor decides that he’s going to have to prove it.
The scene shifts to Bracewell’s lab, leading to a hilarious aside where a Dalek asks Bracewell if he’d care for some tea. Brilliant! The Doctor questions Bracewell about his inventions, and the professor maintains that he created the ironsides, along with many other advances which seem to come to his mind with startling regularity. Frustrated, the Doctor attacks one of the Daleks with a huge spanner in an attempt to get it to admit what it truly is, and during his assault, he boldly declares who he is and what they are. However, by doing so, he falls right into their trap. His words have been recorded as “testimony” and transmitted to a damaged Dalek saucer secreted behind the moon. They kill a pair of Marines, and when Bracewell tries to get them to stand down, they blast off his left hand, revealing him to be an android they had created. With that, they teleport away to their saucer.
The Doctor tells Amy to stay with the PM and dashes off in the TARDIS to the Dalek ship, and strides into the control chamber, wielding a Jammie-Dodger (HAH!) on the pretense that its the TARDIS’ self-destruct switch. He asks the Daleks about their plans, and they tell him of the Progenitor, a device which contains pure Dalek-DNA. He then deduces that they created Bracewell and their elaborate ruse in order to trick him into giving his “testimony” to activate the progenitor because the device wouldn’t recognize them as Daleks, considering them impure.
He tries to get them to deactivate it, but they quickly stalemate him by activating a signal that turns on every light in London, letting each location stand out like a beacon in the night sky to the approaching German bombers, and state their intent to return to their own time and rebuild. As the Doctor tries to get them to stand down, the progenitor finishes its work, and the new Dalek “paradigm” emerges: a quintet of colorful Daleks, a new, far superior and powerful breed.
As the Doctor faces off the new breed of Daleks, Amy and Churchill persuade the now-suicidal Bracewell to choose to help them by adapting some of the technology he had “created”. Heartened by their faith in him, he chooses to assist in striking back at his former, secret masters. As Bracewell sets to work, the new Daleks set about exterminating their predecessors, whom they consider inferior and impure, a move the older Daleks had anticipated and were rather chillingly prepared to accept. The nu-Daleks then blab a bit about how awesome they are, quickly discover the Doctor’s biscuit deception, and call his bluff. But before they can kill him, an alert signals an attack, and that’s when we get to what is definitely the coolest bit, as a trio of Spitfires outfitted with Gravity-Bubble generators and energy-weapons attack the Dalek ship, enabling the Doctor to dash into the TARDIS.
With the Doctor’s help, the surviving pilot, Danny-Boy, destroys Dalek signal-dish allowing the London lights to switch off and thus saving the city from what would have been a devastating Nazi bombing-run. But, the Daleks have one more card to play, that card being Bracewell, who isn’t just an android, but also a bomb capable of destroying the Earth. Faced with the choice of destroying the Daleks, or allowing the Earth to be ripped-apart (pretty much the same choice he faced in “A Parting of the Ways”), the Doctor is forced to call off Danny-Boy’s attack, and returns to Earth in an attempt to defuse Bracewell.
With Amy’s help, the Doctor convinces the professor that being a machine doesn’t make him any less a man, because he can think for himself and, moreso, he can feel (particularly love, a fact that Amy discovers), and because he can feel, that makes him a person (“actual and whole” to quote Malcolm Reynolds from “Serenity“.), and as a result the detonation is canceled. The Doctor has again saved the Earth, for now anyway, because the Daleks used the distraction to escape back into the future.
The Doctor removes the advanced tech from the remaining Spitfire, much to Churchill’s disappointment, but the Doctor assures him that Britain doesn’t need it because it has a superb, inspirational Prime Minister. He manages to pickpocket the TARDIS key, but Amy catches him in the act and he gives it back. Cute. They then go on to see Bracewell, who is prepared to be deactivated. The Doctor and Amy hem and haw a bit, hinting that they have something else to do that will take some time, and when he doesn’t quite get it, their hint becomes a bit more pointed, and Bracewell happily packs his belongings, planning to pursue a normal life with the hope of rekindling a lost love.
As the Doctor and Amy depart, the Doctor confesses that the Daleks always worry him, and Amy has now figured out that traveling with him is dangerous, but that she wishes to stay anyway. The Doctor again brings up the fact that she didn’t know the Daleks, and that she should have, something which clearly concerns him. As they leave, a glowing crack in the wall is revealed, which should prompt a definite “uh-oh” from anyone who has been following the season up to this point.
The Critique…
So, how well did this all unfold? As stated, the story starts out strong, but it goes into some directions I just didn’t like, which I’ll soon get into.
First off, big kudos for not mentioning the Great Time-War. As I said last week, it seems as if the Doctor (via the writers) has put that event behind him, and last week’s vague summation by the Doctor was probably the last we’d hear for a while. I’m glad to see I was right about that, since the presence of the Daleks could easily have allowed for more unneeded exposition on it. Good show!
The Daleks needing to use the Doctor in order to operate the Progenitor works from a plot standpoint, but it doesn’t make a heck of a lot of logical sense. That is, unless, you consider that the Daleks are so wary of the Doctor’s interference, the progenitor devices were also programmed to accept his own statements as activation code. Its just the sort of redundancy they would have programmed into such a device, and as such it works. The Doctor almost always comes along and hands them a big heaping-helping of defeat, so why not find a way to use that to their own advantage.
A few commenters were a bit confused about the execution of the old Daleks by the nu-Daleks, but that one’s easy. We’ve seen the Daleks behave in similar ways in the past, especially in “Power of the Daleks” when the human-factor Daleks and the normal Daleks annihilate one-another, or later on when a faction of Renegade Daleks battle it out with Imperial Daleks during the Davison, Colin Baker, and McCoy eras.
So, why were the older models considered impure? Now there’s no plausible way they could be the ones from “A Parting of the Ways“, the insane ones created from human cells, because Rose obliterated them all with the power of the Time-Vortex, and its not conceivable that she’d allow any of them to escape.
But the Doctor’s own statement about their last encounter indicates that these Daleks were the last survivors of the events of “The Stolen Earth”/”Journey’s End”, all of whom were created from Davros‘ DNA. The new, “pure” Daleks would probably consider them unclean, and thus plan to exterminate them. This is one of those occasions where a little more exposition would have cleared things right up and forestalled any confusion over the matter, but its not too hard to suss out if you ponder it for a minute or two, and because it was consistent Dalek behavior, I was fine with it.
However, there are a few bits which really blunted my enjoyment of this episode. The point at which the plot really failed for me was when the oblivion continuum that powered the Bracewell android was defused by the Doctor and Amy by making him feel emotional pain, by making him feel human, by making him feel REAL. All of which hearkens to Amy and Churchill convincing the formerly suicidal scientist to use his skills to help defeat his evil creators, and Churchill pointedly revealing that his definition of what makes a man is not dependent on him being a flesh-and-blood person, but rather the content of character, and the capacity to choose.
Now, this is a nice metaphor, and one we’ve seen many, many times in fiction, but using such a thing to defuse a bomb, triggered to detonate by the Daleks who created Bracewell? Dubious at best, especially without a bit of exposition to explain WHY it worked. Now, I don’t think everything needs an explanation, and I like some things to be left to the audience, but this was something that kind of needed it in my opinion. We didn’t get one, and it just didn’t work for me. Too much fairy-tale wishful-thinking, and I know Mofatt is all about the fairy-tale, but this edged a bit too closely for my liking.
Also, that exchange with Bracewell at the end where the Doctor and Amy keep hinting that he should leave, and it takes him a while to pick up on it? Yeah, that scene felt a bit clumsy and lasted a bit too long and smacked of padding. Less there would have been so much more.
There are few items of interest I do need to mention, and I think its all definitely connected to the season’s metaplot: As a few viewers have mentioned, yet again, the Doctor isn’t “on time” when he lands. Spatially, he seems to put the TARDIS exactly where he wishes, but he’s always late. First by twelve years, and then an additional 2 years in “The Eleventh Hour“, and then off by a month in “Victory of the Daleks”. Now, the Doctor missing his mark is nothing new, but this seems to be pretty consistent.
In the recent past, the Doctor has been a little surprised when he missed his mark, such as hitting Cardiff instead of London in “The Unquiet Dead“, bringing Rose home 12 months too late in “The Aliens of London“, or traveling to Pompeii instead of Rome in “The Fires of Pompeii“. But this time, he’s more than surprised, he’s rather confused and a touch indignant about it.
We also have the issue of Amy’s lack of recollection of the Dalek invasion from a couple years before, and I will point out that the ominous musical tones we hear when the Doctor discovers this seem to connect Amy’s “amnesia” (for lack of a better word) with that troublesome crack in the fabric of the universe.
I think these events are all connected: the surviving Daleks, Amy not recalling them, the Doctor’s TARDIS being off-the-mark, and perhaps a whole lot more, are all connected to that crack, and the looming silence that heralds the opening of the Pandorica. There are quite a few fan-theories about, and a lot of them are rather troubling. Is the Doctor still in the same primary universe, or an alternate one where history has been altered in ways he’s not yet discerned? What is Amy Pond’s true nature? Is she a real-girl, or is she some sort of construct, metaphorically like Bracewell? Is a duck-pond without ducks some sort of clue as well, or just a bit of fun?
I’m sure we’ll get the answers so long as we stay tuned: same Who time, same Who channel. I can’t wait to find out myself.
The Performances…
Matt Smith didn’t wow me this time around like he had in the last two episodes, but he wasn’t bad by any stretch. Granted, he was a bit more sombre and irritable because the Daleks were around, and that blunted his usual energy, as it probably should. Karen Gillan continues to impress as Amy Pond, and she’s quickly becoming familiar to us as a companion. Once again, she takes the Doctor’s plan and finds a way to apply it a little differently and make it work, essentially one-upping him again, although she doesn’t play it that way. It is, however, something that could become annoying if it keeps up, although by the time the season is over, we could get reasons as to why she’s so good at this already.
On the guest-star side of things, Ian McNeice was very, very good as Winston Churchill. He really pulled off the part very well. Historical roles of that sort can really trip an actor up, but not McNeice, who was fun to watch and also engaging and sincere. Bill Patterson was also very good as Bracewell, making him a very sympathetic character, and one who deserves the happy-ending it seems he will get.
Getting Technical…
The CGI effects were strong, although initially the sequence featuring the Spitfires vs the Dalek saucer seemed a bit short, but after a second viewing its not really the case, and seems just about right. I enjoyed this sequence, although I think a few more Spitfires would ave added some extra pizazz, but I understand that the budget may not have allowed for that, plus getting 3 Spitfires outfitted with Gravity Bubbles and energy weapons in such a short amount of time was pushing it as-is.
Speaking of that scene, any Lexx fans out there reminded of the Brunnen G’s last stand versus His Divine Shadow when the Spitfires swooped in, or was that just me? Yo-Way-YO indeed!
The new “Paradigm” Daleks. I like the color coding, and I like the height. A few people stated they liked the “deeper” voices, but only the Supreme had a deeper voice, just as the previous Supreme Dalek and the Emperor Dalek had. The other Daleks had the standard, higher-pitched voices, so nothing actually changed there. It is indeed about time we had tall, colorful Daleks. In that aspect they reminded me of the Daleks from the Peter Cushing movies. However, there were definitely aspects that I didn’t like. The hunched back really bugs me, a lot. I don’t like the new shoulders either, as it makes them look like they are carrying around a spare Tyre. The neck vents are too small in terms of diameter, and it makes the Daleks look pin-headed, and their bodies too fat. Perhaps the new Daleks could exclaim “EX-TER-MOO-NATE”?
As an aside, what the heck kind of Dalek is an “Eternal” anyway? The other types make perfect sense, but the Eternal? Not so much. What is his function? Is he like the official Dalek timekeeper or something, with a built-in atomic clock? My wife suggested that perhaps the Eternal is where “hope” springs from. Heh.
Anyway, I’m not keen on the overall design. It looks a bit cheap when compared to the tank-like new-series Daleks that preceded them (more than one reviewer has referred to them as “Ikea” Daleks, “Skittles” Daleks, “Gay Pride” Daleks, or even “iDaleks” as if they’d been made by Steve Jobs.), and seems very merchandise-driven (Which seem to be the case if the new issue of “Private Eye” is to be believed. One of the posters over on Gallifrey Base photoshopped an altered version of one of the new Daleks, eliminating the hunchback and increasing the size of the neck and head to bring it more in line with the girth of the lower body, and the tweaked version looked MUCH better. However, I don’t think the design team will alter them in any way, because I’m sure that too much time, money, and effort was put into the new design. More’s the pity, and I’ll just have to deal.
However, worse still than the new Dalek design, would be the interior of the Dalek saucer. It absolutely screamed “No more decor, we’ll go over-budget”, and looked nothing like the interior of the Dalek saucers seen back in 2005, nor the interior of the Dalek Crucible. From the previews, I figured it was a space somewhere on Earth that the Daleks had established in secret, and it would have worked just fine for that, but no such luck. It looked almost like a huge, industrial kitchen, minus the walk-ins, the sinks, the ovens and grills, and so-on. And now that I say that I’m having visions of the nu-Daleks hosting a cooking show called “Can’t Cook, Won’t Cook, Will Exterminate!”
I’m sure there’s more than one reason for this design decision. 1) Budget, which may be the chief reason, and this is the first time when I’ve felt that the slashed budget affected what was seen on-screen. 2) Too much detail may have detracted from the appearance of the new Daleks, and that’s also likely why the lighting was so unobtrusive and even: gotta showcase the 2010 Daleks for the kiddies. Whatever the reasons, it looked pretty bad from where I was sitting.
The other sets looked fine. We got a convincing WWII-era War-Office, which is something the BBC does well anyway, and is also a bit more important in terms of properly setting the story. So, kudos to them for that.
The Verdict…
FAIR.
After last week I was concerned that others may think I was being too easy on the show in my reviews, and that perhaps I was a bit biased in some fashion. However, I was disappointed by this episode overall, and such a bias no longer concerns me. Put simply, this episode just wasn’t as good as the last two. Its not a BAD episode at all, but nor is it particularly good. It has some good moments, fun moments, amusing moments, but overall they just aren’t enough to overcome the dodgy bits. Nowadays, Dalek stories really need to impress, and this one fell short. As such, I can only rank it as fair.
Now, bring on River Song and the Weeping Angels!