New Who 5.3: Victory of the Daleks
There were some good ideas in this week's Who. The basic idea of questioning the mythologisation of Churchill by asking whether there were any means he wouldn't happily have justified for the sake of his desired end was good - but it got rather overshadowed and forgotten once we learnt how the Daleks had fooled him. I think I would have liked to see him still considering a collaboration with them even after their true nature had become clear. It seemed for a while, too, as though this new Doctor might actually make the Daleks evil by assuming that they must be - but that vanished likewise as we discovered that they had a hidden agenda all along. And the basic premise of questioning what makes a 'real' human being through the character of Edwin Bracewell was good - but as rhube has pointed out, defusing the 'Oblivion Continuum' inside him by appealing to his emotions didn't really make any sense as it was presented, and needed to be glossed with a little more techno-babble. Something about his feelings of guilt and regret prompting the release of artificial hormones which interfered with the trigger mechanism would have done the job - but we didn't get it.
There were certainly plenty of fun ideas and cross-references. I loved the use of the jammy dodger as a weapon - definite echoes of Four threatening a guard with a 'deadly jelly baby' in The Face of Evil. I liked how the spitfire attack on the Dalek ship and Edwin Bracewell's lost hand and later black glove strongly recalled Star Wars. And it was fun to wonder whether Nine, Rose and Jack were out there somewhere amongst the barrage balloons. Except that thinking too much about that was probably a bad idea, because The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances was a much more profound and powerful story than this one. Even making the Doctor choose between destroying the Daleks forever and saving the Earth seemed to lack real impact - perhaps because we knew it was no real choice at all, and we'd seen it before in The Parting of the Ways anyway.
As for the use of a historical setting - it was OK, but I felt it ran into danger of using the Blitz as merely a setting that wasn't the present, and within which the threat of the Daleks could be raised and then overcome while the present day remained safe until a grander climax later in the season. There were a few attempts to explore the issues of the period, like portraying Churchill's desperation and the grief of the female staff officer who'd lost her sweetheart - but they felt pretty token to me. I think more time was needed to explore Churchill's aims and agendas, and to show the real everyday experiences of some of the more ordinary people around him, in order for it to achieve a deeper engagement with the period. It's a shame that Edwin Bracewell wasn't a real historical character - it would have been fun to play around with that, but maybe it would have appeared too irreverent? And I suppose it's reasonable enough to imagine that the events of the story were suppressed by Churchill under the official secrets act - hence the lack of any surviving records of it. But I think I'd have liked some in-script comment to that effect.
Meanwhile, Churchill himself could have used a lot more gravitas - he felt like a bumbling bank-manager, not Britain's greatest war-time prime minister. And the new Daleks? I like them from the front, but from the side they look like hunch-backs. I hope the new fixtures they have on their backs will turn out to have some plot significance later along the line - otherwise, it just seems pointless and ugly. Fundamentally, an episode which takes us into the war-time cabinet rooms and reintroduces the Daleks should feel rather more impactful than this one managed to. But maybe it was trying to do those two things at once in a single episode that was the problem? A two-parter might have done it better.
Anyway, there's that crack in the wall again. And it's obviously significant that Amy doesn't remember the events of The Stolen Earth / Journey's End. She clearly wasn't just scuba-diving this time. Has something been messing with her memory? Or the time-line? I'm still looking forward to finding out.
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There were certainly plenty of fun ideas and cross-references. I loved the use of the jammy dodger as a weapon - definite echoes of Four threatening a guard with a 'deadly jelly baby' in The Face of Evil. I liked how the spitfire attack on the Dalek ship and Edwin Bracewell's lost hand and later black glove strongly recalled Star Wars. And it was fun to wonder whether Nine, Rose and Jack were out there somewhere amongst the barrage balloons. Except that thinking too much about that was probably a bad idea, because The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances was a much more profound and powerful story than this one. Even making the Doctor choose between destroying the Daleks forever and saving the Earth seemed to lack real impact - perhaps because we knew it was no real choice at all, and we'd seen it before in The Parting of the Ways anyway.
As for the use of a historical setting - it was OK, but I felt it ran into danger of using the Blitz as merely a setting that wasn't the present, and within which the threat of the Daleks could be raised and then overcome while the present day remained safe until a grander climax later in the season. There were a few attempts to explore the issues of the period, like portraying Churchill's desperation and the grief of the female staff officer who'd lost her sweetheart - but they felt pretty token to me. I think more time was needed to explore Churchill's aims and agendas, and to show the real everyday experiences of some of the more ordinary people around him, in order for it to achieve a deeper engagement with the period. It's a shame that Edwin Bracewell wasn't a real historical character - it would have been fun to play around with that, but maybe it would have appeared too irreverent? And I suppose it's reasonable enough to imagine that the events of the story were suppressed by Churchill under the official secrets act - hence the lack of any surviving records of it. But I think I'd have liked some in-script comment to that effect.
Meanwhile, Churchill himself could have used a lot more gravitas - he felt like a bumbling bank-manager, not Britain's greatest war-time prime minister. And the new Daleks? I like them from the front, but from the side they look like hunch-backs. I hope the new fixtures they have on their backs will turn out to have some plot significance later along the line - otherwise, it just seems pointless and ugly. Fundamentally, an episode which takes us into the war-time cabinet rooms and reintroduces the Daleks should feel rather more impactful than this one managed to. But maybe it was trying to do those two things at once in a single episode that was the problem? A two-parter might have done it better.
Anyway, there's that crack in the wall again. And it's obviously significant that Amy doesn't remember the events of The Stolen Earth / Journey's End. She clearly wasn't just scuba-diving this time. Has something been messing with her memory? Or the time-line? I'm still looking forward to finding out.
Click here to view this entry with minimal formatting.