Remembrance of the Daleks

One of the best things about Remembrance of the Daleks is the pacing. Aside from a few breaks for character development and exposition on the background, this story does not stop moving. Now a story that doesn’t stop moving can be a bad thing, because it can result in a story that’s all flash but no substance – all plot but no reason to pay attention to the plot. But there are enough big ideas in Remembrance that it not only occupies the higher brain functions, but also ushers in a whole new conception of Doctor Who at the same time.

This story is most important for introducing a morally ambivalent side of The Doctor, as well as marking the beginning of the Cartmel Masterplan to bring a more ominous depth to The Doctor. This is perhaps a Doctor who has realized his error in not destroying the Daleks in Genesis of the Daleks. Or perhaps he realized what a time paradox that would create, since his own life was so intertwined with the Daleks anyway. And this isn’t just taken as a snap decision. The coffeeshop scene between The Doctor and Geoffrey from Fresh Prince of Bel-Air shows that The Doctor is very conflicted over his decision. He has determined that this is the right way to destroy the Daleks, when they are about to reach the height of their physical power in the universe. But he says, “Every decision creates ripples in time. The larger the decision, the greater the ripples.” He isn’t sure what results the destruction of Skaro is going to have. But no matter how much he doubts, his plan has already been set in motion, and so he has already forced himself merely to guide the action to its proper conclusion.

Ace also fares well in Remembrance of the Daleks. I’ve seen a lot of reviews on Outpost Gallifrey bemoaning her acting abilities, or lack thereof. But while she’s no Meryl Streep, she handles herself well when the material is good. She gets her fair share of action scenes, as does everyone else in this story. But it’s her quieter scenes where she fares best, in particular the scene where she discovers the ‘No Coloureds’ sign on Mrs. Smith’s bed & breakfast. Watch her face, and you can see how she goes from disbelief to disgust as she crosses the room to ask Mrs. Smith about the sign, then leaves before saying a word about it. 

I believe the best Doctor Who, as well as the best fiction in any medium, works best when its stories develop on multiple levels of meaning. Remembrance of the Daleks is one of the best examples of this in 1980s Who. The ‘No Coloureds’ scene is the centrepiece of the story’s treatment of the issue of racism. The emotional effect of that scene carries over into all the other mentions of racist and ethnocentric ideas in the story. Without this scene in mind, Ratcliffe would be little more than a stock neo-Nazi, and the same would go for Mike Smith. The very idea of racism disgusts Ace. What this scene does is show how ordinary people, like Mike’s little-old-lady mom, can develop notions that drive them, like Ratcliffe, to betray humanity. 

Ratcliffe is an idealist who has found, through his alliance with the renegade Daleks, what he thinks is a path to realizing his ideals. Ratcliffe’s and Mike’s shadowy Association is a precursor to the modern European National Front movements. Ratcliffe, really, is just a bitter war veteran who went against the grain of his people at the time. Mike Smith and his mother are just ordinary people who want to protect what they think is important about England. It’s this moral shortcoming that leads them to ally with the renegade Daleks, which of course, leads to their deaths. This other theme of Remembrance of the Daleks is extremely important to the success of the story, because it humanizes characters that could all too easily be stereotyped by a lesser writer.

As a sidenote, listening to the DVD commentary by Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred, you learn that these two pivotal scenes were almost cut entirely by the production team, as they felt the scenes detracted from the action. Sylvester and Sophie demanded that they be kept in, and justified it to their bosses as merely giving the audience a breather. Though I haven’t heard John Nathan-Turner’s and director Andrew Morgan’s side of this story, this would indicate a near-total ignorance of the importance of in-depth character and thematic development for a good story. Doctor Who may have been a low budget science-fiction television serial, but that’s no reason to think of it as merely a kid’s adventure show. I see it as just another example of the same attitude that resulted in thousands of hours of classic BBC programming being consigned to the trash bins because they were just some old black and white prints of silly television shows like Quatermass, The Avengers, and Doctor Who.

Getting back to the story proper, I consider this Davros’ best outing since Genesis of the Daleks, since he appears so little. Davros here acts as the perfect counterpart to The Doctor, staying behind the scenes, using his Daleks to manipulate events to his own benefit. In the same way, The Doctor manipulates the Daleks for his own benefit. Some may call their confrontation at the end of the story over the top. But Terry Molloy’s Davros was the ultimate shouting nemesis in Doctor Who. I consider it quite fitting that The Doctor used Davros’ own short temper to destroy his home. I even named my blog ‘Unlimited Rice Pudding,’ I thought that scene was so cool.

Also cool is all the explosions in Remembrance, which just get wonderfully bigger and more spectacular as the story goes on. The Daleks get a pretty good showing here, though they still never matched the sheer menace they embodied in the Hartnell and Troughton days, or that they would embody in the Eccleston days (I mean day). The confrontation between the army and the Dalek at Totter’s Lane in episode one is one of the most gripping Dalek scenes of the decade. The little girl at the heart of the renegade Daleks’ battle computer is suitably weird, though her incidental music can grate on the ears sometimes. Keff McCulloch’s incidental music was far from the best of Doctor Who. Even the Davies series, while generally pretty awesome, has never equalled some of the creepy scores that Dudley Simpson used to write.

I have only two gripes with the way the Daleks are handled in Remembrance. One, of course, is the way The Doctor talks the renegade leader to death at the end. The Doctor and the Dalek come off as simply not saying enough. Having your home planet destroyed would probably make the average Dalek angrier, and few Daleks I’ve seen would self-destruct simply because something didn’t compute. If there was any good way to talk a Dalek to death, Rose Tyler did it in Dalek.

My second gripe is that the series never really explained the Dalek’s transformation from psychopathic killing machines to psychopathic killing machines dependent on logic. I’ve come up with sort of an explanation, but it probably won’t satisfy most of the truly angry among fandom for the logicising of the Daleks. In Evil of the Daleks back in 1967, the Dalek Factor was established as a propensity to obey without question the orders of a superior. I can imagine a state existing among Dalek society when even their leaders asked themselves, “Who should I obey?” And the best answer they could come up with was logic. I think the real world problem might originally have been the the writer of Destiny of the Daleks, where all this logic stuff was first dreged up, thought the Daleks were just robots, so made them logic-dependent for their larger plans. Thankfully, the Daleks have regained some independence of thought under Russell T. Davies’ stweardship. But other than these minor quibbles, this is the best Dalek story of the decade.

To round off, the supporting characters work quite well in the story. Group Captain Gilmore’s group is clearly a UNIT predecessor, and the relationship between Gilmore and his scientific advisers Rachel Jensen and Allison mimics closely the early Brigadier/Doctor relationship from season 7. There’s a grudging respect, but still a considerable difference in methods. Watching the banter between these three, and their growing trust in and reliance upon The Doctor provides some of the funniest moments in the story. It makes them quite well-rounded and interesting characters. I always laugh at Rachel and Allison griping that The Doctor’s idea of needing their help involved lifting a television set down to the school’s cellar so he could hook it up to the Dalek transmat. And as Group Captain Gilmore says, “Only a fool doesn’t listen to his Doctor.” I’d certainly trust these three to defend Britian from alien attack. Granted, this is partially because I live in Canada, which aliens tend to ignore in Doctor Who.

Last note – Mike Smith > Mickey Smith? Could Russell T. Davies be drawing some kind of parallel between the two? Perhaps he’s trying to make some kind of point about the impossibility of The Doctor’s companions forming stationary relationships. Or perhaps it’s just a coincidence. I think it more likely that he’s trying to provoke hardcore fans into making near-groundless connections like these for no real reason. Joke’s on us, then.