Doctor Who Review – Victory of the Daleks

Steven Moffat’s acquired a reputation for being a sort of magical Scottish gremlin with a Midas touch. I’m a fan of his ideas, and a big fan of his writing – he clearly has talent – but obviously the man’s going to be handed a crap script once in a while. This was the low point of Series 5, and the reason should be obvious: the writing. It’s atrocious. The logical gaps in the story are down there with any of Davies’s work.

First and foremost, the Daleks’ plan is patently ridiculous. Why does the Progenitor need an excuse to produce Daleks? And even if there were a good reason for this, why on Earth would the Progenitor rely on voice-recognition when the Doctor’s voice is unrecognizable from previous incarnations? Don’t tell me it’s that the Daleks can always recognize the Doctor – that in and of itself is never given a full explanation in the series, and it’s equivalent to trading one plot hole for another. How did the Daleks know the Doctor would visit them specifically? If a simple voice recording would have worked, couldn’t they have used a recording from some earlier encounter – and they must have had them, if they could recognize the Doctor – or simply faked his voice? I mean, the Progenitor’s going off an mp3, isn’t it? It’s not hearing the Doctor for itself?

Moreover, why would these Daleks even want to use original Dalek DNA? Shouldn’t they consider themselves superior, the way each side in the Dalek Civil War did – it’s not like Davros was going to program them with self-loathing, is he? Couldn’t they just build a new Progenitor and use their own DNA to create new Daleks? And how is it that the Dalek ship doesn’t have the energy to do this – or even defend itself against fighter planes from the forties – and yet it does have the energy to travel vast distances across space and time, maintain a force-field, power all of London, teleport a couple of Daleks back and forth, build a fully-functional android, and instantly synthesize five new Daleks? And if it can do all of this, why can’t it stop the TARDIS from materializing on the ship? Surely a ship that fought in the Time War should be able to do at least that! And how, for the love of God, can a single ray light up London? Believe it or not, lightbulbs don’t work because of rays! A spotlight of some kind would have worked better; frankly, the image of lighting up London to destroy it is nice, but is more consistent with some kind of high fantasy than it is with what is ostensibly science fiction.

Then there’s Churchill. Churchill trusts the Doctor’s experience and technology enough that he asks the Doctor to help them win the war – but when the Doctor tells him that these murderous mechanical beings are his lifelong, mortal enemy who are essentially Nazis in space, he shrugs this off. I mean, what on Earth is going on in Winston’s head? Does he think the Doctor is so delusional that he made up  centuries’ worth of Dalek memories? That the Doctor is just lying for some unexplained reason? Why does Churchill feel no guilt when he realizes he was party to the resurgence of a genocidal cosmic superpower?

Bracewell isn’t stupid in and of himself – but the idea behind him certainly is. Why did the Daleks program him with real scientific knowledge that could be used against them if Bracewell turned rogue or were reprogrammed? Why didn’t they just deactivate Bracewell after they left or, more to the point, detonate him if they had no more business on Earth? In fact, when the Daleks were in the room, why didn’t they exterminate the Doctor before teleporting away, when they had no reason not to do so and the Doctor was defenseless? And how can Bracewell make three fighter planes fit for spaceflight – and capable of destroying a Dalek vessel – and send them up into space in less than ten minutes? And how is it that convincing him he’s human defuses the bomb inside him? The closest I could get to an explanation for this was that this would give him autonomy and therefore the ability to stop his own self-destruct. Couldn’t the story have spared two sentences to explain that?

Finally, and most unforgivably, the Doctor. Instead of taking the subtle course of action and waiting the Daleks out, watching them for clues, he instantly goes into “shout-away-the-problem” mode. He somehow fails to impress upon Churchill the fact that he has been fighting these creatures across space and time, and that they pose a much greater threat to Britain that Hitler ever would. He honestly believes Daleks are stupid enough to be held at bay with a biscuit – it’s not something the Doctor wouldn’t try, but he’d do it out of desperation, not as a first option. Think about the Fourth Doctor threatening Davros with real dynamite, then think about this joker waving baked goods around it. You can’t take it seriously. It defuses any tension instantly. But that’s not even the half of it. The Doctor doesn’t realize that if he leaves the Dalek ship, they’ll just detonate Bracewell anyway; he doesn’t realize that destroyed Daleks wouldn’t be able to detonate Bracewell, and that destroying the Dalek ship basically makes no difference to his chances of being able to defuse Bracewell. He punches Bracewell for no reason. And in spite of being able to lower the Dalek ship’s shields without remotely putting himself in danger, he can’t disable its communications so they won’t detonate Bracewell, and he can’t track it when it escapes through a time corridor.

Every single one of these problems boils down to Gatiss having logic operate at the convenience of what he wants to see. Tension has to be maintained, so Churchill has to make idiotic judgments; he wants fighter planes in space, so Bracewell has to have ridiculous amounts of technical knowledge; he wants the Doctor to have a moral dilemma, so Bracewell has to detonate as fast or as slow as the script requires.

But even writing this boneheaded usually has a at least consistent tone to back it up. This story, though, is the creative equivalent of building a Porsche by ramming two Vauxhalls into one another: all you have is an automobile accident on your hands. The initial idea of the Daleks’ deception (which, as The Power of the Daleks proved, is a workable idea) aborts halfway through, without having time to build, develop, or relate in any way to the setting, to make way for the exposition and ending. This is a story that is just not about anything, which is especially insulting when you consider that a) the episode turns a real conflict and real human concerns into a caricature to support freaking pepperpots from space and b) the setting doesn’t even relate to the story! For God’s sake, putting the Daleks and the Nazis together should give you storytelling gold – and Gatiss still manages to run the concept into the ground!

The point of having a Dalek story this early on was obviously to help cement the idea that Smith really was the Doctor, and also to give him his first “big villain” encounter. This just reeks of a kind of insecurity I  can neither stand nor understand. Matt Smith is a great actor with a great take on the Doctor, and if you want him to impress people what you need to give people is good writing, not shoddy attempts at big villains. Daleks or not, Smith is going to make this part his own. If people stop watching Doctor Who because they didn’t see Daleks all season, screw ‘em; they probably weren’t real fans anyway.

About the Dalek redesigns…they were apparently inspired by the Technicolor movies, and I’m still confused as to why they would draw inspiration from them. I mean, we’re talking about space Nazis here; they shouldn’t be big on colors and variety. Totally aside from their appearance, even the idea of Dalek castes feels off when you remember that especially in their early appearances the Daleks were interchangeable and uniform. They do have a height and weight to them that is suitably menacing, but if it were up to me I’d have gone for the classic Baker-era look: imagine combining their dark coloring and monochromatic eyes with the size of the current model. I’m certain the result would have been a deeply intimidating design – especially with the Supreme Dalek’s deep, grating boom of a voice. But honestly I could care less what they look like as long as they don’t appear in schlock like this story. Every time I see the Daleks given rehashed, simplistic storylines it only further tempts me to think that the Daleks should be written out of the show once and for all.

A look at the positive. The acting is pretty solid all-round. Matt Smith continues to impress; he’s got a Bakeresque talent for expanding his personality to fit any vessel. Gillan delivers a passable Pond, but this story isn’t really about her and she takes a back seat. Bill Paterson renders Bracewell as absent-minded (appropriate for his artificial identity) but also sympathetic. Ian McNeice also does a good job, though admittedly he is working with flat and nuance-free writing; the decision to have Churchill and the Doctor be old friends was a nice touch. The female assistant and the warden are utterly pointless in terms of writing, but Susannah Fielding does imbue the paper-thin character of Blanche with genuine emotion, and Colin Prockter imbues the warden with…well, annoyance. The music is good, especially when the Supreme Dalek reveals its ace in the hole; the scene where the Doctor and Pond are trying to strengthen Bracewell’s humanity is wonderfully acted and sweetly written, if fundamentally stupid. And a lot of the images – fighter planes vs. aliens, Daleks in WWII, and the Daleks enacting a plan of deception rather than all-out war – are pretty good, if poorly realized here.

It’s abundantly clear to me that this is the worst story of the season, but a few points bear consideration. First is that Smith can work even with writing like this to convince as the Doctor, a testament to his acting abilities. Second is that this was an early episode; I get the feeling that Moffat knew this was going to be a dud, and figured he’d get it out of the way early on. I like that decision: it teaches rabid Moffat fans that Doctor Who’s not going to be perfect every time under his watch, but lets us raise our expectations as the season continues. Finally, I hope this will contribute to the track record that gets Gatiss kicked off the writers’ team. I do have a hunch that this was originally intended to be a two-parter but was condensed for scheduling reasons; if so, I’ll forgive Gatiss as cutting a two-parter in half is a Herculean task for the best of writers. Otherwise, Mark, I love you like a brother, and your work on Sherlock is terrific, but take a back seat or get a co-writer to lend you some balance.

So there you have it. It’s not a total loss, and there are some great creative seeds involved, but it’s certainly not need-to-watch material and you could skip it without much incident.