By Jessica Holmes

Welcome back, everyone! We last left the Doctor in pretty dire straits: Polly’s been kidnapped, he’s found himself embroiled in a murder mystery, and there are Daleks running about the place! Is there any hope for the Doctor, or indeed humanity itself? Let’s find out, as our second Doctor’s first story comes to an explosive conclusion.

EPISODE FOUR

What with all the chanting about their evilness, Lesterson starts to wonder if maybe, just maybe, the Daleks might be bad news. Better late than never, old chap. Unfortunately, stopping the Daleks is not quite as simple as turning off their generator. There are other factors to consider, such as Janley.

Janley still needs the Daleks for the rebellion, more than happy to keep aiding them while Lesterson slides into a nervous breakdown over their growing power.

The Doctor and Ben listen in on a rebel meeting, where Janley demonstrates the Daleks’ firepower. Understandably, the others are a bit hesitant to trust what are essentially guns with minds of their own.

Bragen’s happy with them, though, revealing himself to the Doctor’s surprise. Ben’s too unconscious to notice, having had the bright idea to try taking on a roomful of rebels single-handedly. It didn’t go well.

Bragen has the Doctor locked up with Quinn, able to blame the real Examiner’s death on him. It looks like things are pretty dire for the Doctor and company, but it’s about to get much, much worse.

Lesterson discovers that the Daleks are conspiring with each other, and upon investigating their capsule, he learns the true severity of the situation. They’re not just building a couple more Daleks… they’re churning them out on an assembly line!

This episode is a bit of a slow point in the serial. It’s not intolerably dull, but it’s markedly less exciting than the episodes preceding and following it. It’s a ‘setting up dominoes’ sort of episode; one that’s not as much fun on its own, but is vital if you want to bring everything crashing down in the future.

EPISODE FIVE

Horrified, Lesterson attempts to deactivate the Daleks, but learns that simply turning off their power won’t work any more; they’ve learned how to store it. This sends him into what I think is meant to be a fit of terror, but really he constantly seems on the verge of laughing. I doubt there will be any scenery left by the time he’s done chewing it. Unfortunately this is all he does for the rest of the story, and it does get rather grating.

He bursts into the prison, blissfully interrupting the Doctor, who was making a really annoying noise with a glass of water. You see, the Doctor’s prison cell is apparently unlocked by a specific audible tone, and he’s trying to reproduce it. At least, I think he is. He might just be messing around. It’s impossible to tell.

Bragen comes to the prison before Lesterson and the Doctor have much of a chance to talk, and Lesterson can’t convince him that the Dalek threat needs to be dealt with.

Too bad, because the Daleks are preparing the next stage of their takeover. In order to freely move about the base without needing to recharge, they begin laying down power cables.

The Doctor manages to unlock Quinn’s cell door with that confounded recorder of his, so I suppose it came in handy after all. I still want to shove it up his nose all the same. However, he doesn’t get out of prison fast enough to save the poor Governor…

The Governor arrives back in his office to find there’s been a change in management, and that his guards no longer answer to him. Bragen offers to allow the Governor to retain his title, in exchange for all the power that accompanies said title, but the Governor refuses. A principled move, but perhaps not a smart one, given the armed Dalek in the room. It doesn’t hesitate to dispatch him.

Fascinatingly, the Dalek is curious as to why humans kill other humans. Daleks are after all omnicidal maniacs, but I don’t believe we’ve seen one Dalek kill another Dalek. I’m still not sure they have the moral high ground on us, but I suppose they’re at least ethically consistent.

Quinn and the Doctor rescue Polly from the lab, immediately making a run for it as a Dalek comes out to accost them.

And then comes the single funniest thing I have ever seen in Doctor Who. It’s so audacious I can only admire its brilliance.

Pay close attention to the Daleks in the background of the group shot pictured above. Is it me, or do they look a little…flat?

Yep. They’re cardboard cutouts. And they’re not even trying to hide it! Well, you have to stretch the budget somehow, I suppose. It's been done before but never quite so blatantly.

Anyway.

Quinn and the Doctor find the Governor dead at his desk, and the killer isn’t far away. Bragen promptly throws the Daleks under the bus, blaming them solely for the death of the Governor. Until the threat is dealt with, he’s declaring martial law.

If he wants a fight with the Daleks, they’ll be only too happy to oblige…

You can see the cutouts in this shot, too– they look even dodgier from this angle!

EPISODE SIX

The revolution might be over and done with, but that won’t bring an end to the bloodshed. Aware that his rebel allies could turn against him just as easily, Bragen plans to have them killed– all except Janley, who is uneasy about the idea.

So too is one of said rebels, Valmar, who overhears the discussion.

The Doctor, Quinn and Polly find Ben, but don’t get much time to catch up as the Doctor rushes off again, not explaining himself as usual.

Fighting breaks out between the humans and the Daleks, but as you’d expect it’s rather one-sided. Valmar has the bright idea to try and turn the Daleks against Bragen with a control wire, and he’s joined by Janley, who has also changed her mind about Bragen.

Seeing the carnage, the Doctor hurries back to his friends, and they’re left with no choice but to flee out the window from the encroaching Daleks.

You’ll be shocked, SHOCKED, I say, to know that Valmar and Janley’s bright idea of using the Daleks against Bragen doesn’t go anywhere, with their Dalek ‘allies’ happily firing on anything human shaped.

It doesn’t take long for this foolishness to get Janley killed.

Bragen begins to panic as he loses contact with the other sections of the colony– it’s a massacre out there. Quinn confronts him in his office, ordering him to summon his guards from the interior. They’ll draw the Daleks away so that the Doctor can carry out his plan– assuming that he has one.

Pretending (I think) to join the Daleks, Lesterson distracts them long enough for the Doctor to do some of his technological wizardry. Unfortunately for him, Daleks have no sense of gratitude to the man who gave them life, so they kill him. His sacrifice (whether deliberate or not) enables the Doctor to do what he does best: pull levers and push buttons at random in the hopes of it doing something useful. Luckily for him, it does.

The colony’s electrical circuit overloads, flooding the Daleks with more voltage than their little tin bodies can handle. They blow up! Rather spectacularly, I might add. I think all the money saved by the cardboard Daleks went into the pyrotechnics. A fair trade, in my opinion.

Though I’m not convinced the Doctor did it entirely on purpose.

In the Governor’s office, things come to a head when Bragen attempts to murder Quinn, but Valmar arrives in the nick of time, slaying his former ally where he stands. Serves him jolly well right, too!

So, with that all done and dusted, it’s time for celebration, right? Ah, no. Besides the innumerable dead, the Doctor completely destroyed the colony’s power grid. Without getting so much as a ‘thanks for saving our lives’ the Doctor and friends beat a hasty retreat before anyone tries to hand them the bill for damages.

It’s not as if he didn’t try to warn them. Then again, as Ben says, the Doctor does not exactly have the same commanding aura he once did. He’s not a man who seems to have the slightest idea what he’s doing. Perhaps he never did– he’s just not as good at hiding it as he used to be.

Final Thoughts

There’s a lot going on in this serial, isn’t there? The Doctor’s renewal (and subsequent question of ‘Is this really the Doctor?’), the murder of the Examiner, the rebellion, the discovery of the Daleks, the Daleks’ subterfuge, and probably something else I’ve forgotten to note. It’s all at once a political thriller, a murder mystery, a cautionary tale about unchecked curiosity, and a science fiction romp. You’d think it’d be too much, and yet it works.

I had been a bit worried that the rebellion subplot might have been getting a bit too complicated for kids to really follow, but I think there’s more than enough Dalek action to keep them happy. I appreciated the slightly more mature storyline, with everyone having their own agenda. It made things more interesting, and gave the Daleks a chance to do something other than run around screaming and shooting people. They had the opportunity to show off their intelligence and cunning, which they never seemed to have much of in previous appearances.

There’s a lot of characters running around, and admittedly there were none I particularly liked, but their intricate dynamics made them more interesting to watch, Janley probably being the most interesting of the bunch as she balanced her scheming with the rebels with her alliance to Bragen.

I have most certainly warmed to our new Doctor (not that I was ever really cold to him in the first place), who I think still has the brilliance of the old one, if buried a little deeper. Or he’s a tremendously lucky clown. One of the two.

All in all, a jolly good first outing, I think. Exciting, suspenseful, and all around fully entertaining. I look forward to seeing where our new Doctor ends up next!

4 out of 5 stars

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