Remembrance of the Daleks

I am at loss to explain what the Doctor is doing here.

This is held up as one of the best stories of Doctor Who. It’s quite good, especially if you can ignore McCulloch’s dreadful music and the appalling title which means absolutely nothing, but it also left me feeling a bit unhappy about a few things. McCoy, in my mind, still seems to be going through the motions and the way he deliberately rolls his ‘r’s and over-pronounces some words to be honest is a bit much and I really feel he’s not in character, but at least he’s a far cry from ‘Time and the Rani’ where he seemed desperate to be funny.

Dursely McLinden as Mike Smith

The Daleks are back, and following on from ‘Revelation of the Daleks’, we have two factions, one headed by Davros now going by the guise of the Emperor Dalek, and the other headed by the Black Dalek controlling a young girl. Why? Because why not I guess. There’s great pace and energy through the four episodes, penned by first-time Who writer Ben Aaronovitch. Pamela Salem (Toos in ‘Robots of Death’) is just one of many quality actors recruited for this tale with deliberate nods to the past and very much a UNIT feel. We also have Michael Sheard returning to who as the Headmaster.

The Doctor with Gilmore and Rachel Jensen (Pamela Salem)

We see Daleks rising up stairs for the first time, a space shuttle actually land on Earth without any CSO, and the biggest explosion in Who-history. I think if you don’t delve too deep below the surface this is an almost perfect Doctor Who. However, it’s not.

The character of the Doctor, for starters, is too dark. To intentionally programme the Hand of Omega, which he calls a ‘stellar manipulator’ (oh Pu-lease!) to destroy Skaro’s sun, taking Skaro and other planets along with it, that is not something the Doctor would do in my book.

Maybe the Thals have died out, I don’t know, but still it’s very harsh to destroy a world. The Omega device appears to go forwards in time, but it’s all a bit confusing really. Cartmel and McCoy made a decision to make the Doctor darker, suggesting he had something to do with the days of Rassilon and Omega too. It flies in the face of who the Doctor has been up until now. Not to mention McCoy is not very convincing as a ‘dark character’, in my opinion. Mind you, I prefer it to his clowning around.

Inside a Dalek. Ewwww!

I really liked the use of nods to the past. In ‘Attack of the Cybermen’ the nods to the past were convoluted and confusing, yet important to the plot. Here, Totter’s Lane, the Coal Hill School, mentions of Zygons and Yeti, and even what appears to be Doctor Who about to be aired on BBC One, are incidental to the plot so the casual viewer might not know they were even there, and if they did and didn’t get them, it didn’t matter. For the fan though, they were nice touches.

The Black Dalek, Radcliffe and 'the girl'.

Ace makes a good impression, very different companion even if she is a bit much at times. The series is the better for her introduction. This story feels a lot more like Doctor Who than any of the previous season which is an interesting choice. We seemed to be going in a different direction in Season24, but season 25 sees more of a traditional feel in its opening instalment.

Where there's Daleks, there's always Davros it seems.

This feels like just about the most expensive Doctor Who story to date. A Dalek shuttle which is actual sizes that was lowered by a crane, some pretty awesome explosions, a high proportion of the story shot on OB. It’s only let down by one or two things, such as the music (especially) and the use of a lightning ball as the ‘time manipulator’. And the idea that the Doctor set a trap for the Daleks prior to November 1963 even though in ‘The Daleks’ he had never met them before.

But Doctor Who tales aren’t supposed to make perfect sense right? And we get some awesome scenes of Daleks exploding and the organic matter that is inside. Oh another returning face – Peter Halliday as the blind priest, I wonder if the casting was deliberately nodding to the past. Moving the coffin with the Hand of Omega though, that seems unnecessary and perhaps was just an idea for a scene that Aaronovitch wanted included.

Andrew Morgan makes a much better fist of this tale too which is good for him. I do wonder about its status as an absolute classic though, maybe fans are just agog at the explosions and so many Daleks in London. Great story though.

7.5/10

Robots of Death

It's the robots in control!

Not since Ian Stuart Black’s ‘The Savages’ was followed by Ian Stuart Black’s ‘The War Machines’, I THINK I am right on saying, has a writer delivered back-to-back stories in a season. Chris Boucher though does here, with ‘Robots of Death’ closely following on from ‘Face of Evil’. It’s a character-based whodunit in space, and a great murder-mystery it turns out to be. This might also be the first all-out murder-mystery style story that Doctor Who has done.

The Doctor and Leela look out the sandminder

And it’s pretty creepy, clever and for the most part well designed. The Sandminer is not a space ship perse, but it is a futuristic machine for mining planets, and it is where the entirety of the story, bar a TARDIS scene at the start, is set. Inside it is decked out in Art Dec o designs, and looks like a luxury liner of some description. It’s a great idea, considering a sleek space ship is hard to do on a budget and they really stretched this budget well.

On top of the murder-mystery elements, the other influence is Asimov’s ‘I, Robot’, with some of the directives being used, in  particular that robots can’t harm humans. Of course that also appeared in Tom Baker’s first story, ‘Robot’. Holmes and Hinchliffe spent the previous season using tried-and true horror stories to underpin the stories. Season 14 has seen them use other famous stories, some science fiction and others, like ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ for ‘The Deadly Assassin’, falling under a wider net of genres.

D84 sneaks up on Leela

At least they know they have a solid basis for the story, and here the story is about characters mostly. The robots themselves have a great ‘art-deco’  head, although the rest of the body is basically a costume and I’m not sure how believable that was. The idea was to make the robots look as human as possible. The humans on the sandminer are really living in the lap of luxury, hoping for the ‘big one’ – to find enough minerals to make them rich.

Superbly cast by Michael E. Briant, now one of my favourite ‘Who’ directors, the guest cast is led by Russel Hunter as Commander Uvanov. There are many sub-plots going on and he is at the centre

Uvanov and Toos in action.

of most of them, including the one involving Zilda’s (played by Gangster’s Tania Roberts) brother. It’s a classic case of someone looking guilty as hell, and then it turns out he had nothing to do with. The part works perfectly for that.

Dask goes a little crazy.

On top of Uvanov, David Collings returns to the Who-fold and Poul, a great performance as he has robophobia, and also some sort of agent. Interesting he is one of three human characters to survive the story. Yes it was another one with lots of death. Well, they were the robots of death! Pamela Salem plays Toos, the only other character to make it through, and the villain of the piece is Dask, played by David Bailie. It’s all a bit strange, his motivations, and the part isn’t very big – needed more exposition in my humble opinion. The rest of the cast are smaller characters, but strong characters and well played characters, the real strength of this story.

Leela (Louise Jameson) is showing a real aptitude for the space/time travelling, enthusiastic and willing to learn. Her character worked well again, and Tom Baker was solid as always. A good, solid, interesting story well told.

8/10