Remembrance of the Daleks

It's November 1963 and the army are on patrol in Shoreditch around Coal Hill School and a junkyard at 76 Totters Lane. The Doctor and Ace arrive and find two different Dalek factions lurking in central London, both after the same thing: the Hand of Omega. During his stay on Earth with Susan, the Doctor had intended to bury the Hand on Earth and use it as bait but when Ian and Barbara pushed into the TARDIS he was forced to leave before completing the job. The Hand of Omega is what it implies: a tool used by Omega to craete the black hole that became the centre of the Eye of Harmony, and it will give the Daleks the power that the Time Lords have. But the Imperial Daleks, under the command of their Emperor, have to overcome the Renegade Dalek army which has enlisted the aid of local facists. And that means all out war.

Welcome back to Doctor Who.

Now I know a lot of people will get mad at me for saying it, but THIS is what the show is about. It's about the Doctor, the alien man with an agenda, who has had enough of the evil he finds in the universe and is going to do something about it. And the trusting companion, who believes in him totally, and even though this is their first full adventure together now that Mel has left (she never would have survived this one) one gets the feeling that a lot of time has already passed just from watching them together. There are of course moments where Ace's questions to the Doctor sound more like she's interviewing him from cue cards, but on the whole they've got it stitched up between them.

Word is Terry Nation did not like what writer Ben Aaronovitch did with the Daleks. I can't imagine what his beef was; they're at their most innovative here, with the Black Dalek's renegade army laying clever plans to use a small child's mind as a battle computer, and the Imperial Daleks evolving beyond their usual means and creating a super weapon in the form of the Special Weapons Dalek which is just an engine of destruction. I got annoyed at Ace's little soliloqy about the cause of the Dalek conflict though; she saw the fight as a parable of racial intolerance until it is revealed that Davros has become the Emperor Dalek and the Renegades are the last remnants of the Dalek race who would not follow him.

The commentary on racism continues with the xenophobia displayed by the character Mike, an army sergeant, who takes a shine to Ace, and she does to him until she realizes not only is he inadvertanly selling everyone out to the Renegade Daleks but he's the same racist scum she has always hated. The reasons for that aspect of Ace's character would come out later on in the television series but the novelization of the story illustates it beautifully; Ace had a best friend named Manisha who was from a Pakistani family, and racist white kids firebombed her home. And to further reference the novelization, there is some internal strife amongst the Imperial Daleks who view the special weapons unit as an abomination to their own purity.

So now with a companion who is more real than several of her predecessors who never really evolved beyond their character summaries, we also have a Doctor who is dramatically different from any of his previous selves. Sylvester McCoy has said he wanted to draw on characteristics of the previous Doctors but none of them ever had the same air of danger and menace about them as his Doctor would. The Doctor has deliberately drawn the Daleks to Earth and put it in danger, he engages in deceit to keep the humans involved out of harm's way, he gives Ace a superweapon by having the Hand of Omega imbibe her aluminum baseball bat with destructive energies (which she uses with great skill against a Dalek in episode two), and when it comes down to crunch time, he allows the Daleks homeworld to be obliterated without a qualm, precipitating what would eventually be known as the Time War and putting his own people in jeopardy.

Visually too this story is top notch. The Daleks are all rebuilt to look sturdier although Jay didn't like them; they're obviously pulled from a plastic mould as opposed to built in smaller bits. The Black Dalek, though, is made in the old way and is slightly bigger than the others. The Renegades are coloured in the traditional grey and black scheme and the Imperials have adopted the white and gold first seen in Revelation of the Daleks. A lot of the story is shot on location in the streets of London, including an incredible firefight between Dalek factions that apparantly set off alarms. The Daleks have new ray gun effects, and the mothership seen hovering over Earth maintains basic elements of the Dalek battle cruiser from Resurrection, and the shuttle... wow! As an outer space effect it looks pretty bad, but when they land the full scale version in the playground at Coal Hill School it is almost flawlessly done. The Emperor is more mobile than it was in Evil of the Daleks; now it is more like the Emperor Dalek of the 1960's comic strip versions with a bulbous head and no "arms", rolling along on a standard Dalek base.

I could go on at great great length about Remembrance of the Daleks. When I saw it back when I was 17 years old I was so fascinated by it I started seeing elements of it in my dreams, and eventually wrote a massive 150 plus page story for one of my classes where the fallout of Skaro's destruction forced the Imperial Daleks to adopt a plan devised by the Renegades (before they were deemed as such) involving their duplicates from Resurrection of the Daleks. I told Jay about it while we were watching this one and he seemed interested; maybe I'll dig it up and include it in my ideas here as I did with Offworld Vegas.

As a matter of fact, I think I will.

NEXT EPISODE : THE HAPPINESS PATROL