By Jessica Holmes

EX-TER-MIN-ATE! I hope you aren’t tired of Daleks, because we’ve got angry pepperpots aplenty in the latest Doctor Who serial– and this one’s a long-haul. Will the Daleks quickly wear out their welcome or leave us begging for more? Let’s find out as we watch David Whittaker’s Victorian spin on the ever-popular villains, The Evil Of The Daleks.

EPISODE ONE

The Doctor and Jamie can’t catch a break, can they? Fresh off the whole palaver with the Chameleons, they try and return to the TARDIS only to find that it’s been stolen! Trailing their suspect to a warehouse, the Doctor and Jamie soon realise that they’re being led into a trap, and the TARDIS is bait–but they have no choice if they ever want to get it back.

But who has taken the TARDIS? Another man out of time. Enter Waterfield (John Bailey), a dealer of Victorian antiques who seems to belong to the period himself. He’s very anxious to bring the Doctor to his shop, obeying the orders of an unseen master… Give you three guesses who that’ll turn out to be.

However, it doesn’t seem that he pays his lackeys well enough, because the rogue who nicked the TARDIS for him comes snooping around his parlour looking for extra compensation, and gets rather more than he bargained for. A hidden room– and a deadly foe.

Enter the real villains–the Daleks!

EPISODE TWO

The Dalek in the secret room kills the intruder before vanishing, leaving the Doctor and Jamie unaware as they arrive for their meeting with Waterfield. Noticing that all these Victorian ‘antiques’ appear to be brand-new, yet somehow genuine, the pair begin to suspect they’re dealing with another time-traveller.

Meanwhile, Waterfield finds his dead lackey (much to his horror). He realises he’s definitely in too deep–but there’s no backing out for him, for reasons that will later become clear.

The Doctor and Jamie discover the body a few minutes later, and believe that Waterfield has murdered the man. Soon finding the hidden room themselves, they inadvertently set off a booby trap that knocks them out—and then Waterfield makes the three of them disappear.

When the Doctor wakes up, he finds himself nursing a cracking headache in Waterfield’s house–and he’s been transported to Victorian times. 1866, to be precise. Waterfield introduces him to his colleague, Maxtible (Marius Goring), and the pair explain that they’re in big trouble. While conducting experiments into time travel, they accidentally opened the door to horrors beyond imagining. I dearly love the look of dawning horror on Troughton’s face as the Doctor, hearing the familiar scream of the Daleks, realises what the pair have unleashed. It’s a great little moment of acting.

The Daleks, unusually for them, don’t want to kill the Doctor. Not yet, anyway. They require him to assist them with an experiment. After however-many attempts to conquer humanity, the Daleks have realised they need a change of tactic. They want to understand what makes humanity tick–that unknown human factor that they can transplant into themselves, and thus become unstoppable.

The Doctor has little choice but to assist. If not, the Daleks will kill Waterfield’s daughter, Victoria (Deborah Watling).

However, he’s not so keen when it turns out that Jamie is to be the Daleks’ test subject.

While all this has been going on, Jamie has woken up in the other room, met Maxtible’s daughter Ruth (Brigit Forsyth), and worked out what year it is. Before he can snoop any further, however, a man breaks in and abducts him!

The Doctor arrives to find him missing, the unconscious maid in his place. He needs to find Jamie, fast. Any delay in starting the experiment will result in Victoria’s death.

EPISODE THREE

So, what’s happened to Jamie? He wakes up in a stable and finds that his kidnapper acted on the instructions of another: a posh bloke called Terrall (Gary Watson). Terrall doesn’t seem to have any better idea of what’s going on than Jamie. Though he had apparently promised to pay the kidnapper, he refuses, claiming to know nothing of this. It doesn’t get much clearer from there. One moment he’s asking about the whereabouts of Victoria, then the next he’s claiming to be sure she’s gone to Paris. He’s quite all over the place.

The Doctor catches up to them before long, so we don’t get any better idea of what this bloke’s problem is. Perhaps it will become clear in due course. Until then, I’m just going to call it a bit of a plot cul-de-sac.

The pair return to the house. The Doctor leaves Jamie with the maid, Mollie, while he goes off to discuss the experiment. He doesn’t give Jamie so much as a hint of what’s going on (at the Daleks’ insistence), and boy is Jamie mad about being left out of the loop. He gives the Doctor a good telling-off once he gets back from the meeting, both upset about the secrecy and that the Doctor is so chummy with Waterfield, who for all Jamie knows is a murderer. It delights me to see a companion with a bit of backbone.

While the Doctor is off playing mad scientist, Jamie gets to know Ruth a little better. She is either mind-controlled or an extraordinarily bad actress, because everything about how she talks and carries herself is just plain weird. She turns out to be with the posh bloke who had Jamie kidnapped earlier–he’s her fiance! Perhaps whatever made him so odd is also influencing her?

Jamie gets along much better with Mollie (Jo Rowbottom), the maid. She tells him that Ruth’s fiance, Terrall, is normally quite a nice bloke, but does have anger issues since coming back from Crimea.

When the Doctor and Jamie meet back up, the Doctor warns Jamie that under no circumstances is he to attempt to rescue Victoria.

As expected, he immediately goes off to do just that. Truly the Doctor is a master of reverse psychology.

Mollie sneaks Jamie a copy of the house plans so that he can find his way around, and he commences his quest.

However, little does he know that the house is full of booby traps! What's more, a silent Turkish strongman by the name of Kemel (Sonny Caldinez) guards the way.

And so the experiment begins. Jamie charges off to mount a rescue, and the Doctor returns to Maxtible’s lab to monitor his progress and analyse his actions. In case you’re thinking the Doctor is being a bit too cooperative with the Daleks, he did offer himself as a test subject in Jamie’s place, but he’s not exactly human, is he? If I wanted a new face I’d need a boatload of money and a very good surgeon. Though the Doctor looks human, I think we can assume by now that he’s at least a little different from your average Joe.

Unhappy with being stiffed on the payment by Terrall, the ruffian who kidnapped Jamie earlier attempts to blackmail him. When that fails, he settles for a mugging. Unsatisfied with the contents of Terrall’s pockets, the ruffian pushes his luck by breaking into the house.

The Daleks find him before long, and his end is swift–and painful.

Final Thoughts

Though I’m beginning to worry that the Daleks are becoming a tad overused, I cannot deny that The Evil Of The Daleks is off to a good start. There’s something quite H.G. Wells about our time-travelling Victorians encountering horrors from another world. It’s some really old-school science fiction, and I’m on board.

There’s only so much I can say about the new characters thus far, being only a handful of episodes in. Poor Waterfield doesn’t strike me as a bad chap.  I think he’s in over his head. I have my doubts about Maxtible. He seems a lot less uneasy about the unethical things the Daleks are making them do.

The Daleks’ new scheme could mark an interesting evolution in their villainy. What would a more human-like Dalek be like? If they end up taking on more humanity, might they end up becoming more like their Kaled ancestors? Can the Daleks be reformed?

We’ll have to wait and see.