Dalek

‘Dalek’ reintroduced ‘Doctor Who’s’ most enduring and iconic villains to a new audience, and at times during this story we can’t help feeling a kind of magic. When the Doctor approaches the hurt, shadow-shrouded alien in friendship, only to hear that horrible, familiar voice (“DOC-TOR? THE DOC-TOR?”), it’s a moment filled with horror and delight – an instant classic scene.

The idea of an emotionally tortured and stranded Doctor facing off against a *literally* tortured and stranded Dalek counterpart is a fascinating one, rich with dramatic possibilities, but unfortunately this story is not the mini-masterpiece it might have been. This is not really to do with the ‘time-traveler DNA’ element that seems to have angered so many fans (it’s really amazing to me how many of us seem to have convinced ourselves that classic ‘Who’ was above absurd – often *extremely* absurd – pseudoscience).

No, instead it’s more to do simply with the storytelling methods. If classic ‘Doctor Who’ can be criticized for giving its audience too much detail (and boy, can it ever), then ‘Dalek’ can be criticized for giving us too little. Oh, we have everything we need to follow what’s going on – but we have nothing more, and it is that ‘more’ that so often made the old series feel like it existed in its own true fictional universe. ‘Dalek,’ on the other hand, feels like a plot outline. Gone is the fun of the Doctor having to figure out where he and his companion have landed and why; this time he simply tells us in the story’s first minutes. (In fact, he tells us we’re in an alien museum before we can even *see* that we’re in one!) Then we are asked to swallow that the paranoid van Statten would immediately take an intruder found in his maximum-security compound and dump him in (unchaperoned!) with his most prized possession . . . . These problems aren’t really the fault of Rob Shearman’s script; the writer simply does what he has to in order to bring the viewer up to speed within the constraints of a single 45-min. episode. But to anyone approaching the new ‘Doctor Who’ in the context of the old, ‘Dalek’ can’t help feeling somewhat shallow and rushed – blink and you’ll miss it.

The supporting cast of characters doesn’t add much. Van Statten is an extremely annoying stereotype – he bellows his own *name*, for crying out loud – and his self-conscious banter with Goddard is shrill and witless. He’s as bad as Chinn in ‘The Claws of Axos,’ and the fact that the character is such an obvious joke makes it seem ridiculous that the Doctor would take him seriously enough to give him a Pertwee-esque indignant lecture. And the irritating Adam contributes little to this story, except for his obvious plot function as provider of the secret Dalek-killing weapons.

That’s not to say that all is bad about ‘Dalek.’ The fundamental premise is still compelling, and Christopher Eccleston effectively plays the Doctor’s jumble of emotions at the resurfacing of his oldest foe – bafflement, fear, fury and mockery all combine convincingly in this performance. Rose is plonked into a ‘Beauty and the Beast’ clichй, but Billie Piper makes as much of it as she can. The finale is rather melodramatic (especially Rose’s ‘What the hell are *you* changing into?,’ accompanied by ‘Tara’s Theme’ style sweeping music, which made me cringe a bit), but even so, it’s hard not to be touched by our first good look at the sad, lonely mutant inside the travel machine.

As for the Dalek itself, it is also somewhat better in the concept than in the execution (this is nothing new for the series, I suppose!). Nicholas Briggs seems to be channeling the ghosts of Dalek voices past – he sounds like Roy Skelton when angry, like Michael Wisher when hysterical, and like Brian Miller much of the rest of the time. It’s a messy, mixed bag of a performance: Briggs jumps up and down vocally where Dalek inflections traditionally go up and up and up, and I found it rather distracting. The Dalek machine itself does look very good, and it’s certainly nice to see its lights flashing in synch for once. But it also seems to move slower than any Dalek in ‘Doctor Who’ history (who would have thought that was possible?), and the production team has inserted a C-3PO-esque mechanical squeak when it moves its eyestalk, which makes it more robot-like than ever. As for the Dalek’s character, it does show cunning and manipulation in its dealings with Rose, true, but it doesn’t really resemble the resourceful, scientific Daleks of old at their best (the weaponless Daleks in ‘Death to the Daleks,’ for instance, take control of their situation much faster than this mopey old philosopher).

All in all, it’s of course worth watching, and nostalgia alone should raise it a couple points in any fan’s estimation. But there should have been another way . . . .