Jubilee

It's the year 2003 and the glorious English Empire is celebrating the 100th anniversary of the day they defeated the Daleks. Aided by the Doctor and Evelyn, the English people wiped out the Dalek invasion fleet and used the technology they captured to take the world. And today, in 2003, they are going to celebrate their victory in style and execute the last Dalek survivor from the war.

Brutal. Who would ever feel sorry for a Dalek? As fans we have a love - hate relationship with them; delighted when they return and loving to hate them, but here it's different. The last Dalek is brutally punished and tortured but its human captors, its outer casing smashed and dented, its weapon removed. Defenceless and in agony, the last Dalek is ready to die, but the arrival of the Doctor sends it towards the edge of a complete mental breakdown. In desperation it forges a bond with Evelyn Smythe, refusing to kill her when it has a chance because after all the years of conditioning it can't handle having a choice again.

The people of the English Empire have become a brutal, obsessed race. They have trivialized the Dalek threat with all manner of Dalek themed merchandise in their stores, movies about the Daleks where the Doctor reduces them to quivering wrecks. And they are obsessed with killing the last one to such an extent that without the hatred, they would no longer have an identity.

The Doctor knows that the timeline is wrong, and somehow the TARDIS managed to materialize in both 1903 and 2003 and place both him and Evelyn in a time paradox. At times the differential threatens to overcome him, and he can just hold it back. Almost. But he sees the choice the people of Earth have made and how their evil has replaced that of the Daleks; the Daleks, after all, were engineered to hate, to conquer, to enslave... they had no choice. Humanity did, and it became the biger monster, with crowds gathered and screaming "Exterminate!" on the Jubilee day.

This is actually powerful stuff. Who knew that a story with only one Dalek in it could be one of the best Dalek tales out there. And to have Colin Baker's sixth Doctor (who is fast becoming one of my favourites) as the star.... close to perfection.

What is not perfect is how in 2005 the new production crew decided to get writer Rob Shearman to pretty much self-plagirize his story and re-tell it as Dalek. Skip ahead to the entry and see for yourself how similar the tales are. Here's where the new series starts raping the old, or at least having their way with the non-canon tales brought out by Big Finish, which to me smacks of disrespect. And it happens more than once.

But enough. Time for sme adventure on the high seas...

NEXT EPISODE : DOCTOR WHO AND THE PIRATES!