The Cutprice Guignol

The Doctor: What’s the nearest town?

Henry Van Statten: Salt Lake City.

The Doctor: Population?

Henry Van Statten: One million.

The Doctor: All dead. If the Dalek gets out it’ll murder every living creature. That’s all it needs.

Henry Van Statten: But why would it do that?

The Doctor: Because it honestly believes they should die. Human beings are different, and anything different is wrong. It’s the ultimate in racial cleansing, and you, Van Statten, you’ve let it loose!

IT’S DALEK O’CLOCK!

First and foremost, I’d like to introduce you to this blog. Yep, that’s right, someone else has joined Red Whine and I on our adventure through space and time and has started reviewing episodes, so if you’d like yet another take on the series, check their blog out. And, of course, head over to Red Whine for his take on this episode.

But, more to the point, let’s take a look at this week’s seminal episode, Dalek. Now, the Daleks have sort of been the bane of my existence since New Who started, and not in the way the show intends them to be. It seems that every time a writer can’t come up with something better or more interesting or maybe even fucking original, they chuck the Daleks at the story, dust off their hands, and walk away. I understand that the Daleks are the most iconic villains in the Whoniverse, and they’re a kind of hazing process that all new Doctors have to go through. But you can’t deny that they’ve been painfully, painfully overused, to the point that I hear those famous tinny voices of doom and roll my eyes, wondering what laboured new “twist” Moffat is going to put on them this time. How many times can the last of the Daleks be destroyed, only for them to return? HOW MANY TIMES, MOFFAT?!

Sure, this gif is from this episode, but I need a hug whenever I think about how painfully the Daleks have been overused. Bleh.

Ahem. But then- then there was this episode. Honestly, it was almost tragic for the show that they seemed to understand instantly that they would never top this episode. It’s probably the best standalone episode of this season, and I can still remember vividly the hype that surrounded it’s broadcast. I remember them on the cover of the Radio Times, I remember my parents insisting that they had to watch it with me “just to see”. This was proper event television, so it was a brave choice to subvert pretty much everything we knew about them over the course of these exquisite forty minutes.

Obviously, the first and most important change is the fact that they can fly, rendering my Dad’s jaw uncharacteristically stiff as it dawned on him that he couldn’t just go up a flight of stairs and render them harmless.

Now with 50% more nightmares!

But, past that, this episode was the first to really delve into what happened in the Time War, as the Doctor ends up face-to-face with a lone Dalek housed in the collection of an American millionaire. It’s here that we find out the Doctor was the only one of his race to survive, and that the Daleks and the Time Lords were wiped out together. As the Dalek points out (with it’s terrifying whisk of death) in their first encounter, the two cowards survived. But for once, the Doctor doesn’t have empathy for this lone survivor, but instead demands that it be killed, and now, no matter what the consequences.

It’s a brave twist to make your leading man the murderous villain (no matter how reasonable his thought process), but Christopher Eccleston- in what is his best performance of the season to date- works in perfect contrast to the Dalek who’s been driven mad by years of torture at the hands of it’s captors. The episode, as well as making the Doctor a bad guy, makes the Dalek a sympathetic character, which is a pretty amazing feat for a tin cylinder with a plunger and whisk sticky-taped to it. There’s a scene towards the start of the episode where the staff who experiment on the collection are trying to get it to talk, but are only able to make it scream. That’s audacious fucking stuff for a teatime TV show, but this episode goes all-out on exploring the cost of war and the impact of survivor’s guilt. As well as, phew, the urge to domesticate the out-of-the-ordinary, the definition of “evil” and how motivation affects that, and how you should NEVER ask a Dalek “what are you going to do, sucker me to death?”, because that’s just asking for trouble.

This guy knows.

So, after Rose (in another fabulous supporting performance where she basically wanders round the collector’s underground bunker flirting with an exceptionally dull supporting Ken doll) accidentally sets the Dalek free, the Doctor is forced to chase it down and stop it killing every last one of the crew. There’s lots of fun action sequences to be had as the Dalek rampages through the bunker, killing everyone in it’s path as Henry Van Statten (the mad collector behind it’s acquisition) insists that it be left intact. The claustrophobic setting is great as the Doctor is forced to watch Rose attempt to flee as the Dalek bears down on her. Eventually, the Doctor and the Dalek have their face-off, and it’s the Doctor- storming into the scene in a maelstrom of fury and frightening presence- who’s the really scary one as the Dalek tries to comprehend something, anything, beyond it’s urge to kill. The ending is genuinely moving, and so good I won’t ruin it here, as it’s proof that Doctor Who can tug at the heartstrings without dipping over into the realm of cheese.

I know there are a lot of quotes in this episode, but it’s supremely well-written and worth quoting, so there.

It’s hard to say much about this episode when I can’t reach through the screen, grab your shoulders, and shake you repeatedly while bellowing “WWWWWAAAATTTTCCCCHHH IIIITTTT” into your face over and over again. I doubt there are many people reading these review who haven’t already seen Doctor Who, but on the off-chance there are: this is your way in. This is where you start. If you want to find an episode that’s packed to brimming with ideas, brilliant performances, and a sharp vein of humour, this is it. There’s no better place to begin than with the most iconic Who villain of all time, and those villains have never been served better than in this episode.

Join us next week as we head off to a space station with Simon Pegg and something questionable in the ceiling.

Welcome back to another merry week of Doctor Who-less than a month till the new series! Are you excited? I’m profoundly not, partly because Moffat (I’ll have him yet) has announced that there will be a good number of two-parters in season nine, which would have been great news, oh, about four years ago. Ever since the terrible Living Flesh or whatever episodes from a couple of seasons ago, two-parters in New Who have increasingly seemed more like space-fillers than space adventures (it’s okay, I’ve already killed myself over that attempt at wordplay). Which is a tenuos enough link to get us into our next recap, which covers the first ever two-parter of the rebooted show- Aliens of London, and World War Three (we’re doing double-handers in one review, because these recaps are already stretching out in front of us like that neverending corridor in Time Bandits). And you know what that means, don’t you? We’ll be spending a couple of episodes with the inhabitants of Raxacoricofallapatorius (and yes, I knew that one off the top of my head, or at least you can’t prove otherwise)- better known as the Slitheen. As ever, check out another take on these episodes over at Red Whine.

Look, I know that these episodes are…divisive, at best. Even I can concede that they’re probably the weakest episodes of season one. But Christ almighty, at least when this season was bad, it was still fun (see: the arduously pretentious season 8 shocker Kill the Moon). The Doctor brings Rose back to her own time again, only to find that she’s actually been gone for a year- and as Rose reconciles with her distraught, badass mother, Jackie (who, in this episode, becomes thw first mther to slap the Doctor in the face), and her boyfriend, Mickey, something somewhat surprising happens.

Aliens! Or, at least, alien. In one of the best red herrings I’ve seen before or since, an alien spacecraft carrying a pig-like creature-

Ugh, this thing really freaked the fuck out of me on re-watching. Is that a real pig’s head? Ugh ugh ugh.

-smashes through London. As the authorities hustle to figure out what’s going on, the Doctor deduces that the spaceship was actually launched from earth, and that the creature is just a pig-albeit it one modified with alien technology. UNIT (appearing in the new series for the first time, hurrah!) recruits the Doctor to help them figure out what’s going on, as the mysteriously missing Prime Minister is replaced by an MP who isn’t quite what he seems.

Let’s be clear here: this episode is mainly just a collection of moments that I find amusing. Matt Baker, from my generation of Blue Peter (if you’re not British and you don’t know what that is, this clip should pretty much sum it up for you) appearing briefly baking his “very own edible spaceship” as the Doctor flips through channels, Jackie laying the smackdown on the Doctor for stealing away her daughter, and, of course, the introduction of Harriet Jones (MP Flydale North), one of the most gloriously well-realized supporting characters of Davies’ run.

The actual substance of the episode- farting aliens crammed into human body suits trying to take over parliament- is pretty awful when you actually think about it, but hinges on whether or not you find this-

-on any level intimidating, amusing, or even watchable. I think they’re pretty far from actually scary (I mean, look at those fuckers- they look like some nightmare version of a Baby Born doll), but fuck it, I’m a big fan of using real effects over CGI and I like the fact that for the most part, these things actually exist for the characters to interact with. Some effort went into the design, and even if having them fart away while wearing the skin of their human conquests diminishes their fear-factor somewhat, the show was still finding it’s feet as family viewing and I’m not going to begrudge it some toilet humour. And anyway, Doctor Who has a long and glorious tradition of cramming hapless actors into pretty shit rubber suits in the name of a story, so why should we start getting snobby about it now? Case in point:

If we can consider a show with the green bubblewrap monster a classic, then I’m sorry, but we have no right to be deriding the Slitheen, who are Michael Myers, Golden Freddy, and the notion of death itself rolled into one compared to this.

And I also dig this episode because it’s set on Earth, and we get to spend some more time with Rose’s friends and family. Whenever these episodes roll about with any of the assistants, all it serves to underline is that otherness the Doctor has from the rest of their lives, and how impossible it is to integrate those two things entirely. It’s also nice to see Rose interacting with other humans, for a change, and particularly with Harriet Jones, with their conversations existing apparently only as proof that Moffat cannot write women anywhere near as well as Davies can (seriously, give me five words to describe Clara off the top of your head. No disrespect to Jenna Coleman, who’s great, but Rose actually has, you know, a fully-formed character as opposed to a thousand lines about her short skirts) and to annoy me with the knowledge that we have to deal with Stephen Moffat’s bullcrappery for another two years at least.

But, my non-sequitor ranting aside, I like this episode, despite it’s faults. It’s a good, silly romp that underlines all the things I enjoy about Doctor Who at it’s most silly- an inherent recognition of it’s daftest, the enthusiasm real-life serious people-

(for those not acquainted with him, this is Andrew Marr, a well-respected political journalist and broadcaster, starring in a brief cameo in this episode)

-in getting involved with a story this dumb, and a cast of warm, well-rounded supporting characters joining the Doctor and his assistant in saving the world. And, since there was no room for it anywhere else, I’ll round of the episode by pointing out that this is the second episode is as many weeks to introduce a main cast member of Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood, in the form of Tosh, the doctor who examines the alien pig-man at the start of the first episode (in fact, canonically, she’s a computer expert and is covering for her hungover doctor colleague Owen, but basically what I’m saying is go watch Torchwood because it’s more fun that you think, okay?).

A prize for the best caption for this picture.

Join us next week so I can masturbate furiously over the utter, unparalleled glory of Dalek, the very first episode of New Who to introduce one of the Doctor’s most notorious villains.