#3 (5.3): Victory of the Daleks.

"I am your sol-DIER!"

1 episode.  Approx. 42 minutes. Written by: Mark Gatiss. Directed by: Andrew Gunn. Produced by: Peter Bennett.


THE PLOT

A summons from Winston Churchill (Ian McNeice) brings the Doctor to the London blitz. It's not the blitz as he remembers it, though. The British are fighting off the Nazis using an alien weapon of awesome power, one the Doctor instantly recognizes. His deadliest enemy: The Daleks!

With a Scottish scientist insisting that the Daleks are his creation and Churchill consumed with the hope of a quick victory, the Doctor cannot convince anyone that these creatures are the evil aliens he claims. He resolves to prove his case against them - and in so doing, walks straight into the trap that's been laid for him!


CHARACTERS

The Doctor: Is, apparently, really quite stupid. That's the only explanation I can come up with for his strategy to "prove" the nature of the Daleks, which amounts to: Throw three temper tantrums, the last of which involves beating on a Dalek with a heavy wrench. He does have a good point about Churchill calling him in, then refusing to listen to him. But given the way in which he behaves, I don't think I'd listen to him either! Matt Smith remains a likable presence, but this is by far the worst characterization the Eleventh Doctor has received to date. It might well be the worst characterization the Doctor has received. Yes, including Time and the Rani.

Amy: Doesn't remember the Daleks.  This confuses the Doctor, given that she would have been alive when they invaded Earth by transporting it across the galaxy. Her lack of memory has something to do with the crack that we keep seeing, the crack from her bedroom.  I'm starting to wonder if this entire season is possibly set in a parallel universe that the Doctor either crash-landed his TARDIS into when he regenerated, or that he accidentally slipped sideways into during his "five-minute hop." Right now, I'm leaning in that direction, though I suppose we'll see where this all goes soon enough. The episode itself gives Amy relatively little character material, though Karen Gillan invests such energy that she still comes across strongly.

The Daleks: "I am your sol-DIER!" Writer Mark Gatiss is clearly trying to channel The Power of the Daleks, right down to having the Daleks pretending to be servants. Unfortunately, that set-up is quickly abandoned in favor of bringing out a new toy Dalek production line. I will say that I think the new Daleks look better than the battered Time War Daleks, and I hope to see them as a formidable presence in a genuinely good story someday. But in this story, any sense of threat is obliterated by how persistently awful they are at exterminating the Doctor. First the Time War Daleks stand around chanting Dalek phrases instead of exterminating the Doctor. Then the new Daleks emerge, announce that the Doctor must be exterminated, announce that they know that his "self-destruct bomb" doesn't exist, and then... stand around chanting Dalek phrases instead of exterminating him, until he has a chance to run away. Amy's quite right - Dalek technology is a bit slow on the uptake.


THOUGHTS

Ugh.

OK, as I said in my review of The Unquiet Dead, I have never been a fan of Mark Gatiss' Who scripts. I've liked his work elsewhere, but when he writes for Doctor Who, all spark of originality seems to leave him. So I'm admittedly biased against any episode that carries the credit, "Written by Mark Gatiss." I've also been consistently unimpressed with the new series' Dalek stories, which seemed to run out of ideas (or at least good ones) after the Eccleston season. So combine one of my least favorite new series writers with the iconic villain that the new series has, to my tastes, consistently failed to use well, and this was probably never going to be a good episode for me.

But Victory of the Daleks is not simply uninspired and unoriginal. My problem with the episode is not that it's derivative (though it is). My problem is that it's bad. One of the few genuinely bad Who episodes I have yet reviewed, and my new pick for World Champion Worst Dalek Story Ever!

In addition to the Daleks' big victory being a victory of putting out a new toy line, there's the stirring Star Wars ripoff in which Spitfires are turned into X-wings and sent in to blow up the Death Star. Why is this done? So that they can get the lights back off before the Germans bomb London again. YOU'VE CONSTRUCTED FRIKKIN' STARFIGHTERS! Let the lights stay on, and then send your new, genuinely cool superweapon over to Berlin to blow up the city. Then collect Germany's surrender at your leisure.

Which raises another point. The Doctor insisting on removing all the alien technology makes sense. He wants to preserve history and its proper course, and the last thing the mid-twentieth century needed was a British empire with technology roughly 1,000 years ahead of the rest of the world to enforce a brand new, worldwide reign. But Churchill gives into that with only a bit of mild grumbling and whining.

Grumbling and whining, before giving in to the removal of weaponry that would end the war very, very quickly? Let's take a look at what the real Winston Churchill was facing at this point. France had fallen, Australia was pinned down by the threat of invasion, while the United States was maintaining an official neutrality. Britain very much stood alone, with the Axis Powers at their absolute height. Never mind the bombs falling all over the country, and then on London itself. The real Winston Churchill was facing a grim picture, in which there was no certainty that there would even continue to be a future for Great Britain.

Give that guy (the real Churchill, not this episode's cartoon of him) Spitfires capable of shooting lasers and flying into space at incredible speeds. Then have the Doctor say, "Actually, it's a bad idea for you to have these." I somehow think he would have told the Doctor exactly where to stuff the shape of history before putting a small army around the upgraded weapons with orders to shoot instruders on sight. That's assuming he didn't just have the Doctor and Amy confined on the spot as enemies of the Allies... which the Doctor actually would be in this situation!

Fortunately for the Doctor, this is a cartoon Churchill. He puffs on cigars, makes a few "KBO" cracks, and has character depth that makes Yosemite Sam look like one of the more vivid figures in a Faulkner novel. Ian McNeice is a good actor. It's a shame he was given a one-dimensional cutout to play, instead of a character.

Good bits? Hmmm... Well, there's the scene in which Amy uses her knowledge of human nature, gleaned from a career as a Kiss-o-Gram, to talk a Dalek bomb into not exploding because it's human. Yes, it's every bit as stupid as it sounds. But thanks in large part to Gillan's performance, the scene manages to sort of work. Maybe it's because it's a scene involving emotion, one that hints at something resembling a character for both Amy and the bomb, which helps it to stand out from the rest of this noisy, frenetic runaround.

But this one scene was literally the only one in the episode that I enjoyed at all. And even it was, essentially, daft. By the labored "ten minutes... fifteen... well, twenty" bit, I was actually kneeling in front of my screen, praying to any deity who might listen to please God, please just let the episode be over.


Rating: 1/10.

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