Dalek

I come at this not as a hardened Who fan who follows every cough, spit and splutter of everyone who has ever written for, or of, the series and its predecessors, but as a non-nerdy lover of Doctor Who going back to when it began in the sixties. I rather hope it brings a different perspective to what I say about “Dalek”.

Yes, it was excellent, hence my being moved to write my first ever review of a Who episode. “Dalek” worked for me on a number of levels. It helped knowing something of the Daleks – and, I guess, having been one of the team who copy-edited many of the books for Virgin and the Beeb (I even helped to blow up Gallifrey). I realised, though, that, had I not known anything about them other than their cult status, my enjoyment would not have been diminished – it would merely have been made to work at a different level.

A friend thought the episode had sentimentality; I preferred the word “pathos”, not defined as arousing pity but going back to its Greek origin: “feeling”. I “felt” a lot for the Doctor and the Dalek while watching this episode, and could empathise with Rose, still very much an outsider to the Doctor’s world – universe – in spite of her show of being a little more “knowing” as the series has progressed.

We did not need legions of Daleks to summon the idea that this race was one of absolute monsters whose potential for destruction was Armageddon-like. Our minds could do that for us, thanks to the skilful writing of Robert Shearman and the direction of Joe Ahearne. The menace oozed from this understated creature because Messrs Shearman and Ahearne went only so far, and let us do the rest – surely the goal of any writer or director.

>From the single blue light when we were supposed not to know a Dalek was there (but did) to the lighting up of the room, revealing the carapaced creature bound like the Titan who tried to steal the fire (but bound for very different reasons), we were entranced. The wider emotional range Nicholas Briggs brings to the Dalek voice is apparent from the words, “The Doctor?”

Here was the centrepiece of the tableau, imbued somehow with an indefinable quality from the very fact that the episode was called “Dalek”, not “The Dalek”. Some subtlety there, on someone’s part. During this first confrontation between the creature and the Doctor, we found ourselves wanting to look for longer, wanting the dialogue to be more spare, wanting longer gaps between lines, so that we could witness this confrontation between – But wait a minute. It wasn’t between good and evil any more: it was between – well, between the Doctor and the last surviving member (as far as we know) of the Dalek race; between the complexity the Doctor was able to show in this episode and a balancing complexity brought to the Dalek by Briggs and the writer.

Yes, there were comic moments. One was when the Dalek realised its gun wasn’t working, and down went the eye stalk and up went the gun, simultaneously, in an anthropomorphic representation of someone who’s just been told that he’s holding a turd in his hand and can’t quite believe it. But the most telling thing to come from the Dalek was the line, addressed to the Doctor, “You would make a good Dalek.”

This was perhaps where knowing something of the Doctor’s past would have helped those viewers coming to Who for the first time, although perhaps having seen the first five episodes has given them enough of his character and backstory to work out that here we were seeing a “hero” who was not all that the heroes of drama are cracked up to be.

“Dalek” had claustrophobic menace, some classic creature features with much-needed enhancements thrown in, emotional complexity, the gorgeous Billie Piper and equally gorgeous Bruno Langley (Adam) and a Doctor who is forced to question himself. It worked on all these levels and, for this fan, was the best so far in the series.