Evolution of the Daleks

The Daleks are a triumph of design, a futurist alien vehicle that quickly became a pop culture emblem of swinging Britain, and from that point on a little piece of everyone's childhood. As an alien race, however, they're pretty bog-standard. Survivors of a dying planet stripped of their humanity and emotion and encased inside a powerful metal body: conceptually, you could barely get a cigarette paper between Daleks and Cybermen. Personality wise, all they ever really do is plot, kill, gripe about the Doctor and want to dominate the universe, just like 70% of Doctor Who aliens.

For this reason, I wasn't up in arms when Daleks In Manhattan tinkered a little with the mythology of the Daleks last week ? they're a decidedly limited concept anyway, so anything to make them a tad more interesting is always welcome. On the flip side, this week's attempt to spend 45 minutes delving into the psychology of what are essentially little tanks with laser guns for me resulted in crushing boredom.

Daleks In Manhattan was an entertaining Old Who style romp, maybe the closest in spirit and feel to the classic series as we've seen so far. By contrast, Evolution Of The Daleks was perhaps the flattest and most dispiriting slice of Doctor Who since Battlefield. It seems to be tradition now that Dalek/Cybermen two-parters consist of a fascinating first episode followed by an ineffectual run-around in place of a satisfying pay-off. I enjoyed both Rise Of The Cybermen and especially Army Of Ghosts, but was unimpressed by Age Of Steel and especially Doomsday.

Like the 'Cartmel Masterplan' episodes of the late 1980s, there was too much crammed clumsily into the limited running time, and what started in episode 1 as an interesting and satirical period piece degenerated into a hokey mishmash of Frankenstein, King Kong, Back To The Future, Ghostbusters and the 1930s Saturday matinee serials. This in itself wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, but the pacing was so off that it all came across as a joyless series of misfiring set pieces with no one coming out of it particularly well.

The Doctor fared particularly badly, despite David Tennant's typically sterling work. Twice he offered himself for up extermination? once is careless, twice is just tiresome and dramatically flat. Quite what he hoped to achieve is beyond me, blind self-sacrifice being something of an unDoctorly trait. Since he constantly champions himself as the Daleks' worst nightmare, quite what good he would be to anyone dead is a mystery. Admittedly, the second time he was prompting the Dalek hybrids to rebel, but it was something of a leap of faith that they would, and an even bigger leap of faith that the real Daleks wouldn't just go right ahead and exterminate him anyway. And why was he so enraged and indignant when the Daleks killed all the pigmen and human hybrids? Was he expecting them not to? All things considered, it was pretty much par for the Dalek course. To make it a hat-trick of bad Doctoring, he stood back and allowed poor misguided Solomon to be exterminated. If anyone knows you can't appeal to the good in a Dalek it should be our Doc, so I have no idea what he was playing at.

The Daleks themselves sadly have regressed back to Remembrance Of The Daleks standards (albeit not so wobbly on their feet): lots of shouting about exterminating, but rarely actually getting around to doing any of it. The only reason the Doctor survived this episode was that the old fellahs have become such chronic procrastinators.

Not a great episode for Martha either, I'm afraid. She had been growing on me as a companion, but in this episode Freema Agyeman seemed to be struggling to convince with the dialogue she'd been lumbered with (both she and Miranda Raison as Tallulah wresting with diction problems during their scenes together). Her girlie chat about Rose was toe-curling.

Special mention must also go to the baffling moment in which the Doctor retrieves his sonic screwdriver ? apparently, unless I misheard the dialogue, Martha somehow managed to catch it half way down the Empire State Building. Really?

Another big up for humans here, yay for us! Apparently, if you give a Dalek a dose of humanity, it'll start questioning orders and being all nice and conscientious. All well and good, but if history has taught us anything, it's that there's nothing humans like doing more than following orders and committing atrocities. (The Doctor puts the disobedience of the robomen down to a shot of Time Lord DNA, but as that would have been impossible to achieve through mere electrical conductivity, we have to assume he's talking baloney).

In a better episode, this would all be nit-picking. Unfortunately, as dramatic television, it was terribly flaccid and unoriginal, with the Doctor yet again scaling a mast in a thunderstorm (see The Idiot Box) and a major landmark lighting up (see pretty much everything). Packed with ideas and plot threads, none of them were given sufficient room to breathe, resulting in one long 45-minute soggy squib.

Mind you, I did like the perfumery line.