With ‘Snakedance,’ the done thing seems to be to say that it’s good, but not as good or smart as ‘Kinda.’ Now, whether one Doctor Who story is truly *better* than another is always going to be a matter of subjectivity, but I think it’s worth pointing out that ‘Snakedance’ stands up extremely well on its own, and is certainly smart. It’s true that writer Christopher Bailey does employ a more conventional storytelling style here than he did in the rich, strange stew that was ‘Kinda,’ but it no less intelligent, and in fact focuses on questions the earlier story ignores (or, at least, doesn’t get around to asking).

First off, one of the best things this story does is capture the Manussan culture itself. It’s always hard to suggest a realistic alien society in what amounts to a mere handful of scenes, and that’s why Doctor Who stories are historically populated by invaders from other worlds who have conveniently lost their home cultures. But the depiction of the Manussans is different – we get a clear picture of a society grown so remote from its own historical origins over half a millennium that its people have largely forgotten them. The account of a terrifying force that once dominated this world has been happily mythologized into ‘safe’ rituals like the ones at the anniversary festival (snake parade, ‘attendant demons,’ children’s Punch and Judy show, etc.). The Manussan people themselves are depicted as cheerfully cynical from the lowest social rank (the fraudulent showman and fortuneteller) up to the highest (Lon seems to question whether the Mara story even happened at all). But the viewer knows better – having seen ‘Kinda,’ *we* know that the Mara’s threat is frightening and real, and this even more than usual puts us on the side of the Doctor – who, in an amusing irony, is as squeaky and ineffective here as at probably any other time in his history (“I do not want more blankets, I want to get out of here!”). To see the Doctor scrambling to get the amiable Manussans to believe him is funny, but it also creates real suspense as we watch the Mara move towards its goal with complete ease.

But ‘Snakedance’ doesn’t simply tell a tense story set in a believable culture – it has real observations to make about reading the past, and somewhat odd ones at that, at least in the context of this series. For in ‘Snakedance’ we see that, for once, it’s the superstitious characters who are in the right, and the skeptical ones who are shown up as fools. This comes into focus in the fascinating character of Ambril, a tunnel-visioned academic with the authority of a government behind him (frightening thing). While the character’s earnestness and archaeological zeal is respectable, even admirable – he’s anything but a mad scientist – he is nevertheless so wrapped up in his own way of viewing the past that he can’t see new history being made around him. He scoffs at the Doctor (who, as I said, is quite a wonderful cracked young man in this story), but we can only suspect he’d act the same way even if the warnings about the Mara came from a more credible source. Ambril likes the past the way it is – frozen in time, preserved for posterity under museum glass. And Bailey’s script does a marvelous job of communicating the character’s smallness (the ‘sixth head’ joke is perhaps a little obvious, but it brings the point to the fore well enough).

The other caste of skeptical character here, of course, is the hereditary ruling elite, represented by bored Lon and his mother Tanha. Both characters are basic upper-class stereotypes, but they become quite full-blooded in the hands of the capable actors; more than that, they function well in the story, both in terms of their service to the plot and their symbolic resonance (as decadent skeptics so modern that they *laugh* at the Mara stories, despite being descended from the family who originally destroyed it!).

So who are the heroes of ‘Snakedance’? The obvious guess is Dojjen, Ambril’s counterpart and philosophical opposite, a scholar who takes such a hands-on approach to his subject that he becomes a true believer, and renounces his shallow culture for a mystic’s life in the wilderness. But the script’s real hero might actually be mild-mannered Chela, a kind of reverse skeptic – a student of science who is nevertheless able to imagine a reality outside his own experience, who begins to question the secular norm he has always known. He is a man with imagination, and Bailey seems to value that more highly than any devotion to science and reason; in fact, it’s implied that the search for knowledge is what created the Mara in the first place. (One senses that Barry Letts would have *loved* a script like this, and I like to think that the blue crystals were included in the plot as a conscious tribute to ‘Planet of the Spiders.’)

As for the aesthetics of the story, the absurd Manussan costumes are always good for a laugh (Lon does look like a refugee from a particularly wild Duran Duran video), and some of the snake effects are a bit sad, but by and large it has the look of classic eighties Doctor Who. Janet Fielding gives a good performance, and she is helped by the sound technicians (her ‘Exorcist’-like sudden voice change – “NO!” – is very effective); and Peter Davison is as wonderful as usual. As is so often the case, Sarah Sutton isn’t given anything to do, but as I can’t stand Nyssa anyway, I don’t mind. Director Fiona Cummings has some good ideas, and helps to make Lon and Tanha into more believable characters than they perhaps are on paper. (When Tanha stands with her back to her son - and the camera – it conveys her hurt better than words or acting ever could). The ending is a little sudden, but for once this abruptness works perfectly – I much prefer an ‘open’ ending like this to a hasty, well-let’s-sum-it-all-up-and-say-goodbye scene like the ones we so often get in this series.

A final thought: after sitting through a sometimes unpleasantly flirtatious first season of Russell T. Davies’s new Who, I found it refreshing to see the classic, sexless Doctor -one who doesn’t even recognize that his pert companion is wearing a new dress!

I'm falling to pieces! I don't even have any clothes sense...

Lots of 'bad' stories are often just mediocre, but seem worse due to being directly after brilliant stories. Revenge of the Cybermen isn't so bad, but when you've just seen Genesis of the Daleks? The Long Game after Dalek? Pretty much every Season 17 story after City of Death? Lets face it, no story could have started up after The Caves of Androzani and not suffered.

I, however, was fortunate to see this on video without having seen the masterpiece beforehand.

It ultimately dulled the pain, but it didn't help. I wish I was a funky rebel Who fan, able to hold up the most pathetic of stories and scream it's genius, but sometimes the majority are right. Not always, but when The Twin Dilemma ended up the least-liked official Doctor Who story, it was not by bad luck.The Twin Dilemma is bad. And worse, it's important. It's the first story of a new Doctor. It needs to be good, or at least, entertaining. And it fails. Anyone who has seen the new Children in Need special (which I insist on calling Afterlife), you can see the whole point of this story - the Doctor's regeneration is going wrong just when he needs to get his companion to accept him - done far better in seven minutes.

It gives me no pleasure to say it's a stinker.

In a way, the troubled background of the story (Anthony Stevens collapsed while writing it and his typewriter blew up, forcing Eric Saward to take over at the last minute) means it's got a better excuse for being crap than Resurrection of the Daleks which had plenty of time to have its wrinkled smoothed out only for the writer to simply make even bigger problems. However, the gloss to Resurrection means a first viewing leaves you bouncing with exploded Daleks and a massive death toll. It may not survive anything other than a cursory viewing, but Resurrection still beats Twin.

OK, the problems with Twin are if not obvious then at least very noticeable.

First off the scene where the Doctor strangles Peri. Now, on the one hand, it sets up one of the theme of the stories - the newly regenerated Doctor isn't so much mad, he has no self control. He sees a course of action and continually exaggerates it until it gets silly. Even his attack on Peri is justified in the plot. Here is a woman he risked total death to save and... she doesn't even thank him. She calls him old, ugly, rude and insults his fashion sense but expects him to applaud hers. Can you honestly blame the Doctor for being annoyed at Peri? But then it starts. The paranoia - Peri got the Doctor killed, Peri's not sorry, Peri's rude to him, was it all a plot? Is Peri some kind of saboteur trying to kill the Doctor? Is he going to let her get him killed again? Can he risk her killing anyone else? No, he's got to kill her now!

Of course, it's ridiculous and stupid. But that's the horror of the regeneration crisis, the Doctor can't help himself. When he realizes how dangerous he can be, he comes up with a simple and effective plan - put himself out of harm's way until he's settled down. Except he gets carried away: he's becoming a hermit, thriving on desolation, chanting in Latin and requiring eternal atonement! No wonder the production team wanted this idea for a regeneration story, it's brilliant - a Doctor going rogue, trying to stop himself screw up everything and somehow helpless...

And like so many brilliant ideas, Twin buries them under gastropod slime.

Like the gastropods themselves. This is the series that, twelve episodes previously showed the most horrific and stomach-churning insectoid grubs imaginable in the Gravis and his Tractators. I'm shocked that Doctor Who's cash-strapped ingenuity didn't step in and re-use them - not only were the monsters already made and shown to the public, there's not much difference between these slugs wanting to move planets and these grubs wanting to move planets. It would have been very interesting to see the blunt, coarse Sixth Doctor up against an enemy the Fifth Doctor defeated by never having an angry word with. Instead, we get the wittily-named Gastropods.

And they are rubbish.

We only see Mestor do anything, but apparently there are two other slugs waddling around, not even noticing that there's a huge blue box marked POLICE blocking their empty corridors. Mestor looks crap too - fat, cross-eyed and morbidly obese. Its embarassing to see him wobbling on his throne waving his paws on either side of his dumbfounded face. And why is there a frog outfit on a pole beside his throne? Why does he fancy Peri? Why is he supposed to be scarier because he is "half humanoid half slug" a phrase the Doctor trots out over and over again? Why does he have these mental powers? Why does Mestor go all the way to Azmael's room for a quick Q & A he could have done via telepathy, especially when he could have sent a vision of himself like he does to Titan 3? Why is he apparently determined to blow himself up? Just... why, full stop?

And the most painful thing is that Mestor could have been terrifying. Yes, even with that costume. His origins seem to be less oversized garden pest, more Skagra from Shada, who was determined to become a God by making his mind and personality spread like a disease, washing across civilization. We get a tantalizing glimpse of this, with Drak dropping dead and Azmael being possessed. There are a few moments when Noma implies that its not him talking, but Mestor when he euphemistically says that he does what Mestor 'would have wished' and he 'too, has duties' - but its all undone when it turns out Noma was genuinely working on his own bat. The suggestion that anyone might just turn out to be possessed by Mestor would be great thriller material, as well as explaining why the hell anyone puts up with this ranting, rude megalomaniac. It could also explain why no one realizes this last, desperate plan is so obviously doomed to failure and no one notices - because Mestor is blocking their thoughts.

A creature whose mental powers can control an entire planet would surely be calm, disarmingly polite... a bit like Noma... but Mestor shouts things like "Never argue with me again!" and goes to all the trouble of zapping workers to death instead of the cheaper bullet-in-the-back-of-the-head. It's not embarrassing when the Doctor denounces Mestor as crap, because he is. It's embarrassing because a story that is meant to establish that the Doctor is more cunning and cleverer than his opponent sets him up against an incredibly stupid slug. That looks stupid. And fancies Earth women.The Twin Dilemma also crystallizes the part of the Sixth Doctor's era I hate. Not the continuity, the companions, the costume or Colin Baker, but the no unity of action. It happens again and again. This story encompasses Earth, Titan 3 and Joconda and only the last one is in any way relevant to the plot - and we don't get there to episode three, where the plot finally starts. The first scene of the story should be (an unseen) Mestor ruthlessly executing the thief (in front of assembled masses to prevent further rebellion), not Rom and Re playing backgammon. We don't even see the regeneration sequence again, and it's far more important to the plot than it was in Robot and it was repeated then as well.

Why does the story stop at Titan 3 anyway? Why not have the Doctor simply mis-steer the TARDIS straight to Joconda and have him mistake its raped landscape mistaken for the quarry he was aiming for? Why do we abandon Earth after the worst episode - we never get to see Rom and Re meeting up with their parents, for Elanor and her boss be glad to see Hugo's alive and well. And if we're not going to see them undergo the whole 'growth over the adventure', why the hell include them in the first place?

In fact, the twins themselves baffle me. What on Earth inspired anyone to have a story where identical twin geniuses are kidnapped? It would make more sense for Azmael to be stealing some nifty computer designed for it - hell, I bet I wasn't the only one expecting the twins to be revealed in episode four to be badly-programmed androids (and would explain why we never see their mother). The twins are like Adric clones - something Saward flags up in his novelization - where you would expect something more like Chloe and Radcliffe from The League of Gentlemen. They should be creepy, speaking in unison, ideally freakier than their kidnappers. But they're not even as interesting and need to wear different colours in order to be told apart (colours also inexplicably mirrored in the pens they use, their backgammon set, their home computers and the ones the Jocondans helpfully provide).

Come to think of it, why have their memories removed? In prose, I might get that, having a novel hinge on these twins trying to remember where they are, where they came from and to be revealed at the conclusion. But we already know. And the amnesia does nothing to stop the twins asking awkward questions, causing trouble and whinging. Remove those circles and does the plot change? No! Hell, I don't even care they've been kidnapped, because their first scenes show them to be arrogant, emotionless, smug, gormless and rude. When they're kidnapped my sympathies are for Professor Sylvest when he gets home, not for dumb and dumber. Why is their "game of equations" so dangerous anyway? Looks like a dull computer game to me. And if its so dangerous, why on Earth allow the twins access to the computer to use it anyway?

Azmael doesn't grab me either. Why does he insist on calling himself Professor Edgeworth? If he had established this identity on Earth in order to infiltrate the twins' room, I could buy it, but he just teleports in and teleports out again. The character is written a bit like the Doctor in Caves of Androzani, a tired Time Lord desperate to save the day any cost. Part of me wishes it wasn't Azmael but Maxil involved, ironically regenerated into Peter Davison. You could believe him when he tells the twins either they help him or they die, and you can see him grimly setting the base on Titan 3 to explode because he honestly can't risk the Doctor interfering. Maurice Denham does a wonderfully tired old man, even though he does resemble that big-headed monster from an Original Star Trek episode (I do love his sad "I can if I have to" as he uses his mind power to freeze the twins in mid-stance).

Colin Baker's first full story. And he's far from perfect. I've met the man, he's a lovely human being and Big Finish have proved both he and the Sixth Doctor got a short rift. Here... he's intermitent. Sometime he's acutely embrassing (though not as embarassing as Peri's sobbing at the end of part two - the only time Doctor Who makes me want to hide behind the sofa), but I don't look at these moments and think 'Colin, you're crap!' I think Colin is deliberately acting badly, for the moments to show that the Doctor isn't thinking straight. Watch the bit where the Doctor makes a ludicrously overblown and passionate speech that just because there's a minor mystery to be solved the whole universe is about to fall about and only HE and PERI can POSSIBLY stop it, only for Peri to meekly ask "How?" and the Doctor blows out his cheeks, shrugs and changes the subject. That's brilliant, that is, fantastic.

However I can only really appreciate it because I know it's the latter that speaks of natural Colin Baker than the former. The Doctor is given countless stupid things to say, but knowing its awful doesn't stop it being awful. Just as good as the moments when you're not sure if he's having a fit or not: when the Doctor goes on about how old and useless he is, it's said with rising hysteria rather than self-pity; when the Doctor calmly and reasonably insists he and Peri leave the TARDIS to face, if not certain death, then a horrible, harsh life; and when he suddenly starts baiting Mestor. The moment where the Doctor's wandering mindset causes him to deride existence as boring and laughing hysterically is wince-inducing, but the moment were he goes Hannibal Lector on Peri/Piri is definitely scary.

But it happens in the first episode! That's what's wrong with it, not the act but it's timing!

Imagine it happening not just after the Doctor's finished changing, but instead happens towards episode three. The universe is in danger, the Doctor needs to get in action but we can see his thought processes have got muddled, he's moving off topic, getting enthusiastic, and now he thinks Peri is the danger to him and she can't reason with him and the Doctor attacks her - bang! Cliffhanger! And it's made all the more poignant because we know, like Maddox in Warriors of the Deep, the Doctor doesn't want this to happen...

The whole relationship between Peri and the Doctor is skewed. She starts off by treating him with open contempt and when she finally realizes the Doctor is not in the best of moods to be taunted with, she instantly becomes meek before finally snapping. Yet, this happens in the first episode! If you're going to have an emotional arc to the four episodes, it shouldn't be over in part one and then get repeated. I admit, Peri's tirades against the Doctor are brilliant (her taken-aback shout of "I'm not letting a manic-depressive paranoid personality like YOU tell me what to do!" is killingly funny), but they are not consistant. Peri has as many mood swings as the Doctor, being quiet and contemplative while tending Hugo to blubbing at the thought the Doctor's dead to giving the impression she'd want to do the deed herself. Peri was timid around the Fifth Doctor (did she have a crush on him?), and it would have been more effective if that had stayed until the end of the story where she finally snaps and earns the new Doctor's respect. The bit where he marvels she still cares about him is a case in point - he should be touched, not baffled!

The suit, also, is another thing I'd do differently. Actually, I don't hate it (my biggest issue is that it's a bugger to draw), but it is a massive problem. The Twin Dilemma might look like the cash-starved end-of-season four-parter it is, but it's doing better than The Caves of Androzani (where spy cameras are studio cameras, personal computers remote controls and laser guns replaced by machine guns with sparks added in post-production). The reason Twin looks worse is because its decked out in awful greens, purples, silvers, blues and browns. And why? Because of that coat! There's a whole chunk of The Sixth Doctor Handbook explaining that due to the way TV works, brighter colours cause others to fade out so everything in The Twin Dilemma had to look so gaudy otherwise they would litterally wash out by the coat. As Eric Saward notes in his novelzation, all the colours clash and don't add up to anything - a bit like the story itself. It would also, in my humble opinion, have been better had the Doctor not chosen the bloody outfit in the first place but rather grabbed the first thing to hand because the TARDIS was out of control and needed something to wear. Four episodes go by and the only person who thinks the Doctor looks stupid in the coat is Peri - hardly the evidence needed to show the Sixth Doctor is 'totally tasteless', is it?

The problems are shared by the plot. Anthony Stevens seems to have been making it up as he goes along and Eric Saward is constantly building up elements only to end up ignoring them. Mestor wants no link between Joconda and the twins' kidnapping... but he has the power to wipe out entire space fleets by just thinking it! Mestor tells Azmael to reveal what he knows in the belief learning the mission will be benevolent will convince the twins to cooperate - which begs the question why he didn't do this from the beginning, and maybe just write a letter to the twins asking for the answer on the back of a postcard? If Mestor is so powerful, why doesn't he slam the planets into the sun instead of going through the charade? And why is his plan's aim appear to be to increase his species but not himself when every other scene shows him to be an arrogant megalomaniac? What are the 'consequences' the twins foresee about the planet juggling, because it clearly isn't the one the Doctor twigs to? Why does Noma, clearly a smart cookie along the lines of Lytton, honestly believe Mestor is benevolent? If the Gastropods eat everything and food is running out... why don't they just eat the Jocondons? Why does Azmael have a couple of handy 'anti-Gastropod' juice hanging around and never used it? Just how and why did Mestor have the X3773 captured, and why doesn't he change the number plate if he doesn't want it traced? How come he can communicate with Azmael, but Azmael needs a pager to talk back to him? And why oh why does Hugo pull a gun on the Doctor and threaten to kill him if he becomes unstable when he's never seen the Doctor unstable? As far as Lang knows, the Doctor's just a prima donna!

The last scene doesn't work. I wish it did. The Doctor's line ("And whatever else happens, I am the Doctor - whether you like it... or not.") is delivered firmly but not angrilly, and the smile between him and Peri makes the story end on a happy note. But there's no resolution - otherwise we wouldn't have most of Season 22 where the Doctor and Peri are arguing all the bloody time. The line is given such heavy emphasis you wonder if the Doctor was originally supposed to say the same thing in episode one, only this time Peri actually believes him.

Oh, and the cliffhangers... Not good. Not good at all. I can forgive episode one as we see the Doctor's face (just in time for it to be blown off), but Peri's strange snorting sobs are off-putting. The extremely long lingering shots on Colin Baker's face for the other two are bad. Really bad. Especially the final one, where the Doctor is clearly staring straight at camera and looking gormless - and not at all like the genuine smile he was giving to Peri seconds earlier. You would have thought someone would have noticed and done something... And the music is terrible - bar the scene where Azmael detects the TARDIS following his ship and, not recognizing it, wonders what it might be as a militaristic version of the theme tune plays.The Twin Dilemma just doesn't work. And that's not just bad, it's a tragedy. Because new Doctor stories are the only stories in Doctor Who that HAVE to work. There are crap Dalek stories, Cybermen stories, companions can have bad arrivals and worse departures, and even regeneration stories have been known to below par. But a story introducing a new Doctor just can't afford to go wrong, and The Twin Dilemma hits the ground burning - there are good elements but the don't gel and we're left with a bad start to the Sixth Doctor, a terrible continuation of The Caves of Androzani and lacklustre end to Season 21. Eric Saward easily improved the whole story for his novelization, which proves that Twin was one rewrite short of greatness. JNT was not perfect, but fighting to keep the half-thought-out The Twin Dilemma in Season 21 rather than finish it in Season 22 was the only big mistake he'd made since taking the reigns.

If there's a story Big Finish are going to replace in the canon, don't let it be Shada, let it be this.

I would pinpoint season 21 as the major downturn of quality that eventually spelled the end of the original series of Doctor Who. Season 20, although it consisted entirely of sequels, emphasised the storytelling that largely forgave the occasional over-the-top moment of continuity such as was seen in, for example, Mawdryn Undead. Here though, Warriors Of The Deep was the largest step yet towards suicide, having the dreadful burden of including not one but two old monsters from the show’s past, the youngest of which was eleven years old. Not only that, it’s also one of the shoddiest and cheapest serials the programme ever made; not even the very early Hartnells had so many production faults.

My reviews tend to be mostly linear – I work my way through each element of the story as it comes up. That means I now have to do a complete about-turn and say how brilliant the modelwork is of the sea base, the Silurian ship and later the attack craft Sentinel 6. It’s very hard to reconcile this with what else is seen on screen, as it feels like it’s the only aspect of the production that any money was actually spent on. Unfortunately then the amount of screen time afforded to it is small, and we are instead subjected to the awful set of the bridge. Many of the sets in this story are bad, consisting of eyeball-aching white but without the stylised distinctiveness that made The Ark In Space work so well. The bridge has an even greater problem of being offensively floodlit, multiplying its tackiness a thousandfold.

Better is the Silurian ship; maybe it is so much more subdued to create a contrast between the alien and human environments. Whatever the reason, any scene set here comes as a relief to an extent, but is undermined by the presence of the Silurians: excellent in their 1970 debut story Doctor Who And The Silurians, here complete jokes. Their obviously plastic heads are fixed in grins, their voices are silly and squeaky, the lights on their heads flash in time with their words for no particular reason and they even have stupid names. They are only rescued by some decent lines; Johnny Byrne’s script is actually quite good in places with the Silurians displaying some nicely idiosyncratic mannerisms – but the aforementioned voices present a giant drag factor as far as their lines are concerned.

Also doing no favours for the lines are the horribly boring guest cast. In the first scene featuring them Nitza Saul as Karina comes off worst, saying her lines flatly and without any real feeling. Tom Adams as Vorshak is a little better but in later scenes has trouble with sounding desperate, and for my sins I find it hard to take seriously anyone whose eyebrows resemble their rank stripes. Martin Neil as Maddox fairs best, actually managing to sound like he cares about what he’s saying; the decent script allows him to cover for some obvious exposition with some reasonably interesting lines. Ian McCulloch is terrible as Nilson, and even the respected actress Ingrid Pitt is difficult to watch as Dr. Solow, such is the quality of her performance.

The opening TARDIS scene is shaky (a common complaint of this era) despite Janet Fielding’s improvements as an actress and Peter Davison’s dynamic new haircut. We see Davison fluff a line talking to Sentinel 6, and in technobabble terms “materialisation flip-flop” makes me wonder if Byrne was taking his job entirely seriously. Back on the sea base Byrne is very succinct when it comes to the technical talk from the crew at their posts, which while uninteresting to listen to at least presents the actors with lines within their range. Maddox’s synch-up scene has a new lighting effect – normally I wouldn’t mention something so minor, but as it distracts from the terrible set it’s more important than normal.

The scene where Captain Eyebrow gives the pantomime villains of Solow and Nilson Maddox’s disk has some more pleasing lines that nicely sketch in the complexities of the setting, even if they are delivered by partners in plankness McCulloch and Pitt.

The Doctor can tell that they have landed on a sea base instantly, which is unconvincing. So begins their exploration, and gradual revelation of certain plot points. I’d say that the sight of the Silurians spoils the mystery, except that there isn’t one; until they show themselves the humans are boring people doing boring things. Hexachromite gas is namedropped very deliberately, in a tokenist attempt to avoid a deus ex machine ending that falls on its face by making the ending very obvious while being subsequently ignored again until it is needed. Mark Strickson overacts when activating the lift, emphasising too much that Turlough has made an error, but it’s amusing to see him get caught in the closing doors.

The Sea Devils make their appearance now. They look good to begin with: dimly lit, shrouded in mist, and not moving, with an atmospheric score by Jonathan Gibbs helping.

The cliffhanger contains the first real incident of the episode, and while the reactor room set wobbles a bit during the Doctor’s fight it is actually very good, being very large and opulent (and maybe what the other 50% of the budget went on. It certainly didn’t go on the monsters.). The episode ends with an excellent stunt, closing a mediocre instalment helped in part by a script that so far just about manages to keep its head above water. This is followed by a well-shot underwater sequence – a rarity in Doctor Who. Pennant Roberts who also helmed the excellent The Face Of Evil) is not a bad director as long as he’s not doing action scenes. I could live without the close-ups of the horribly fake heads of the Silurians though. The Sea Devils start to move and although they have the same voices as in their debut, they look even worse than the Silurians, with their heads wobbling about and falling over.

Turlough’s scream of “save yourself” showcases Strickson’s penchant for intentional ham, and the ‘bad breath’ joke misfires – if only Russell T. Davies had learned from this that bodily functions jokes aren’t funny.

The Doctor raids the bridge, brandishing a gun and making cheesy “we have a problem” quips, going totally against his character (which at least sets a precedent for Resurrection Of The Daleks). Do I detect Eric Saward’s influence here? This scene makes me realise how little has happened so far; the regulars have only just met the other characters, while it has taken the monsters an episode and a half to start moving.

The back story of the Silurians and Sea Devils starts to cause a problem now. It would difficult for casual viewers to accept them and their attitudes without having seen this story’s prequels; as they were made over a decade previously a lot of fans probably would have had trouble as well. As such it is hard to relate them with the Doctor’s insistence that they are moral creatures: he says that “all they ever wanted to do was live in peace”, yet here they are on an obvious offensive. Solow portentously saying “Nilson, we must speak” loudly in the middle of the bridge is also an annoying moment.

The foam doors in the airlock look terrible, but they hide something infinitely worse: I’ll reinforce a clichй here and say that the Myrka is a strong contender for the title of worst monster ever. Large monsters were often a problem for the show, but other poor efforts like the Skarasen had the advantage of being models, meaning that the actors were not required to interact with them; watching people attempt to act in the presence of this ridiculous monster that can barely stay upright is cringe-inducing. The Doctor’s line of “it takes a lot to impress the Myrka” is unintentionally funny in this context: its head is totally inanimate and lifeless (like all the other monsters in this story, admittedly, but scaled up), and it moves so bizarrely that I sometimes think that the two operators were trying to move in different directions. Tegan actually manages to deliver her lines reasonably well; never a great actress, how she managers to perform here is beyond me, but I was sorely tempted to speed through her squirming under a weightless door while the Myrka wobbles about over her – which I unfortunately get subjected to again in the next episode’s reprise. When it gets blinded it doesn’t move any differently than it did before, which isn’t really surprising. Also, the extras it kills perform some of the most inept death scenes I’ve ever seen outside Destiny Of The Daleks, with all their ‘find your spot – shake about – lie down’ staginess.

This cuts away to another appalling scene with the Sea Devils. In their debut they were very good, running around athletically and shooting their excellently-realised weapons. Here they shuffle around like geriatrics, with their heads lolling uncontrollably, and firing weapons with cheap and nasty video effects. Sauvix says that “the ape primitives are no match for my warriors” – at least their mouths move when they talk, mate. Neither humans nor monsters move about much in the action scenes, but this is fine as neither side can shoot straight either.

The episode mercilessly cuts back to the Myrka, and we get to see Ingrid Pitt make a bad situation a lot, lot worse by attempting to karate kick it in one of the programme’s most toe-curlingly embarrassing scenes ever. Surely one for the blooper reel, how anyone thought it would work is beyond me; it’s as if Solow took the Doctor’s earlier line about impressing it a bit too literally. After this the monster’s death is pat and uninteresting, but oh so very welcome.

Icthar’s “it is they who insist on fighting” is a cool line, although when confronting the Doctor they drop in references to previous stories with no regard to anyone except the most insular fans. The “final solution” references are less subtle here than in the still-obvious The Dalek Invasion Of Earth, which had the advantage of a) slipping the line in relatively unobtrusively among several and b) being two decades closer to topicality. Hexachromite is mentioned again for the first time since the opening episode; there when you need it, ignored when you don’t. Preston and Vorshak are killed unnecessarily, making up Saward’s need to have a certain percentage of characters killed every episode regardless of narrative requirement (91.7% of characters die in this episode by the way, not counting the regulars and the nameless extras. All part of the service), and the Doctor’s line of “there should have been another way” is a cheap attempt at justifying a bog-standard, Saward-style ‘kill ‘em all’ resolution.

That this isn’t the worst story of the season reflects the downward slide it represents. It has a few nice moments from a genuinely talented writer that save it from a bottom-of-the-barrel rating, but fails because of the production which was now turning completely in on itself. It is a dull, uninspiring and poorly made story that unfortunately sets the tone for the next few seasons; it took the old master Robert Holmes to life the programme out of its rut after this, and that was only temporary. Arc Of Infinity showed signs of future problems, but Warriors Of The Deep was the first story to take them to extremes, and it is deeply sad to watch it in the knowledge that this story marked the beginning of the end for Doctor Who.

I've had Planet Of Fire on video now for about five years but this is only the third time I've ever watched it. While it's by no means below average, I've always found it quite hard to work up much enthusiasm for it and I can't quite put my finger on why. Maybe it's the slightly shaky way that Peter Grimwade imposes his usual complexities on what is really a very straight story: he is restricted from stretching out too far, like he did with Mawdryn Undead, by the need for his story to do certain things like write out Turlough and Kamelion and write in Peri. Having said that, his first script Time-Flight shows that there is such a thing as overstretching. Anyway, the story itself...

One of the most common criticisms of this story is that the planet Sarn looks suspiciously like Lanzarote. I don't have that much of a problem with this specifically; my problem is that both Sarn and Lanzarote look like quarries. Expensive quarries, I grant you, and exotic, but still quarries. Then again, I suppose if they'd stuck to Dorset they'd never have had the scope to show off their new Bond-girl companion's assets. Fair's fair though, I have to say that Nicola Bryant makes a promising debut here (although her accent veers about uncontrollably) as she's written to be a much more proactive character; the following season it would just be two whingers whinging*.

The first episode begins with yet another backwards-religion-with-token-anarchist-who'll-side-with-the-Doctor-and-eventually-end-up-in-charge set up, but in fairness the dissenters are a well-written attempt at showing how the religion has developed over time as opposed to coming from the stockpile of rationalists like all the others. Also, the character of Timanov is supremely well acted by Peter Wyngarde.

Typically Grimwade-esque touches appear, such as mysterious alien touches blended into a normal Earth setting, and having apparently disparate elements that won't come together until later. In the case of Planet Of Fire it is the Trion artefact that has managed to find itself in a shipwreck, which is never properly explained. The fact that it has no bearing on the plot except to get Peri into the TARDIS does make it appear a rather cheap and lazy tool to introduce the new companion, but it's better than the usual method of "wow, a police box, I think I'll go inside" and it does help to generate the effective sense of mystery that sustains the first episode as it's linked with Turlough's hitherto unseen marking (a slight writer's liberty I feel) that actually looks quite painful. I should just mention at this point that the scene where Turlough rescues Peri form drowning is very well directed, with lots of quick cuts making it seem genuinely action packed. Then again, although it's not my field, for the female / gay audience out there I'm not sure how the sight of Mark Strickson in his Y-fronts compares with Captain Jack getting defabricated in Bad Wolf.

The TARDIS scenes are better than average in this story as the departure of Janet Fielding has greatly relieved the overcrowding problem (two's company, she's a crowd) that the TARDIS suffered from during Peter Davison's tenure. Also, it's interesting to note that the Doctor has changed his clothes for the first time in three years ("no time to wash, I've got a universe to save"). It's not significant, and frankly I'd take his usual costume over that waistcoat that seems to have been made out of a lampshade, but I thought I'd mention it anyway. There are a few points of genuine interest, such as the fact that Turlough's suddenly come over all shifty again like he did in the Guardian trilogy, and also that Kamelion is treated as if he's been in every episode so far. A season on and he's still as crude as ever; at least with K9 they managed to update him a bit between seasons 15 and 16. He really is inept here, far too crude to function as a character as the prop has no means of expression other than a few basic movements. In order for it to have been a success they should have stuck to just using the voice (like with K9) instead of attempting genuine animatronics. The production team only had him in this story because they didn't get away with him just disappearing after The King's Demons and as a character he's a lot to impose on any writer; Grimwade does well in the circumstances by having him spend much of his time as the hybrid shape shifter struggling to maintain the shape of Peri's stepfather Howard. By the way, how rubbish is it giving a stepfather a name like Foster?

Anyway, with all the Earth-elements together Dr. Hero, Mr. Shifty and Miss American-Eye-Candy set off for Sarn (notice how Peri's hair is immaculate when she wakes up from unconsciousness) and it is only now that a few plot points come together, although a lot is still left unexplained across the episodes. They all arrive on Sarn - and how thick is the makeup on the location scenes? Blimey, there's controversy on the new series about all the innuendo with Captain Jack, but it's 1984 and the Doctor's a transvestite! The twist introduction of the Master is a genuine surprise (unless you happen to have the video with a big picture of Anthony Ainley on it), but then again it's always disappointing to see the Master mugging like a loon as it's clear from episodes like Survival that Ainley is not a bad actor. Further Master scenes in part two actually show the Master being quite intense. Reports say that this is how he wanted it to be, but John Nathan-Turner, with his infallible eye for taste and style, ordered him to camp it up. This conflict of interests plays out on screen, but in the circumstances I can put it down to Kamelion's instability.

The second episode is really a big runaround between Kamelion and Peri, with Turlough's edginess the only thing that maintains the tension in an episode where nothing much happens: it's episode three come twenty-five minutes early. Ainley is given very moody dialogue by a sympathetic writer and the episode in general is very well acted, but on the whole it feels padded out (notice the one paragraph it gets here as opposed to the six the first episode gets). I do like the scene where Timanov finds Kamelion wandering in a daze and believes him to be the Outsider: all together now, he's a Star--maaaaaaan...

Episode three continues the formulaic feel with yet another doom laden exchange between the Doctor and the Master. Turlough is given above average characterisation - even in their last stories it was rare for companions to be so motivated - but with each revelation about his past the episode gets a bit more contrived, although it's minute compared to that artefact taken by Peri in part one. Also, I should say that Edward Highmore looks nothing like Mark Strickson, even though they are supposed to be brothers.

The volcano begins to erupt and we see the TARDIS is again used indiscriminately, a problem the plagued the Davison era, with the Sarn natives being let in to see the sights and just because a polystyrene pillar came down. That, it has to be said, is the kind of effect that hasn't improved since Ixta struggled with a weightless slab in season 1's The Aztecs.

This episode is more interesting though as it presents the first new ideas since the first part, like the god Logar really being a space suited man and the idea of numismaton gas. It strikes me as odd that this gas, which is the whole point of the plot, is only mentioned now. The Doctor only takes note when it comes pouring out the top of a mountain (a nice effect), which I would imagine would be hard to ignore. The cliffhanger is a good twist and shows some quality CSO, bit is let down by some unusually naff dialogue (for this episode, anyway) given to the Master. These paragraphs are getting thinner and thinner aren't they? It just goes to show how little of substance actually happens in these middle episodes.

Episode four sees the typical Grimwade complications coming thick and fast, but they just about come together. There are still big plot holes though, like how the numismaton gas changes back to normal fire. I'm usually generous towards Doctor Who, so I'll say it just about hangs together even though it is hard to take the Master seriously in his Lilliput form. The scene where three people look down on him is well matted, but the combination of film and video always looks a bit dodgy. The use of stock footage of a volcano is generally good but no effort is made to tally it with the location shooting, so rivers of lava appear and disappear. Also, in another Grimwade trademark, Kamelion is defeated by pretentious technobabble. The Master is destroyed utterly, but neither for the first or last time...

After the introductions in part one it becomes increasingly difficult to find anything to say about Planet Of Fire. By no means a bad story - it could have been terrible given the massive requirements imposed on the writer - it serves simply to write out an old companion and introduce a new. It does that well enough, but it can itself only be called average.

*And a partridge in a pear tree.

Imagine if you can the most annoying, pedantic, anally-retentive fan you can: the kind who harasses strangers when they hear their kids humming the theme tune, whose heads explode every time WOTAN calls the Doctor “Doctor Who” and who have to shield their eyes from the Seal of Rassilon in the Vogan control room. Now imagine what happens when you give this fan a degree of creative control in how an episode is made. Alternatively, instead of imagining it, you could just watch Attack Of The Cybermen. I know that Ian Levine bashing is so commonplace now that it can be boring to read, but I’m not letting that deprive me of my share – it’s really the writing and Levine’s insular continuity references that bring this episode down. It’s generally well made (apart from the score), as with the case with any episode it’s the writing that’s make-or-break.

When not wallowing in its own filth, this episode borders on the average. The introduction is well shot (even though the Cybermen’s P.O.V. shots are so heavily distorted it makes them look nearly blind) and the sewer set is large and impressive, although very often characters are brightly illuminated even when their torches are switched off. Oh well, I’ll put it down to creative licence and dramatic necessity.

The location filming is also good, and it also introduces the terrific Maurice Colbourne as Lytton, the one continuity reference I’m actually happy with (he had only been in it the last season, after all). Terry Molloy is reasonable outside of his Davros mask and Brian Glover puts in a good performance that saves his comic-relief character. Payne’s comment that Griffiths is allergic to nylon is funny, an example of the flash of wit that occasionally permeates the episode. 

The regulars come off less well though, having to endure the same self-conscious banter that the Davison team had to endure as introductory material. The Doctor’s comment of “here we go again” is ironic, but Colin Baker’s overacting is rescued by his final, sweet coda to Peri of a promise not to hurt her. In general though they are very poor; I don’t know if it was Levine or Paula Moore responsible for their scenes, but they come off as being written by amateurish fans. While original characters get some decent lines the Doctor is portrayed as the self-conscious eccentric that we (OK then, I) used to be when playing Doctor Who when we were little. His pompous, facetious dialogue sounds like Adric’s from Earthshock, and the worn-out ‘distress call’ routine is the oldest clichй in the book.

The policemen serve no function other than to look mean; their purpose is never explained either here on in their previous story Resurrection Of The Daleks. The Totters Lane scene is extremely annoying, potentially a nice nod to the fans ruined by the fact that the Doctor actually has to make something of it – his excited “look!” when pointing to the sign must have come off to the casual audience like a child showing off their snappy new socks. Also, Malcolm Clarke’s awful score grates, here sounding like an electronic version of the Steptoe And Son theme. There is no point in changing the TARDIS either; Levine was simply indulging himself. The Doctor referring to Peri by a multitude of other companions’ names must have also seemed very odd: “why would he call her Jamie?” asks Mr. Jones from down the road. This is so annoying, as parts of this episode have real potential.

Payne’s death is quite creepy, scary without being too intensive (that comes later). It is shortly followed though by the Doctor gleefully duffing up a fake policeman; the Doctor goes against the series ethos so much I wonder if it was worth having that ethos in the first place.

There is little point in hiding the Cybermen from shot as their name appears in the opening credits (in capital letters, no less) and I would imagine that they were what the 8.9 million viewers were there to see (a significantly higher figure than the rest of the season). However, there is some seriously nifty direction keeping them out of sight and that’s always good to see, however worthless it may be. Their proper introduction is very good, as one is seen coming towards Lytton and his team Tenth Planet style – although the ‘March Of The Cybermen’ theme from Earthshock seems a bit cheesy and melodramatic when there’s only one of them on screen. There is a sense that this was written for the ordinary four-part format, as their reveal comes about halfway through the episode and would make for a good cliffhanger. Bullets kill Cybermen here, but this can be reconciled with the knowledge that they are being severely weakened by Cryon interference. In any case, it’s better than their usual aversion to gold which is one continuity reference mercifully absent. Their voice modulation here muffles their speech, and Brian Orrell is annoying as the Cyber Lieutenant. Their ship on the dark side of the moon is a smug nod to The Invasion (as is their presence in the sewers in the first place) but at least in this case not one that affects the understanding of the story.

There is a pleasing interlude with some good location shooting for Telos, and Stratton and Bates are a good duo that provides some actual quality for a moment. After that though we come to probably the worst derivative indulgence of them all: Michael Kilgarriff as the Cybercontroller. Nobody considered that even though the character had been great in The Tomb Of The Cybermen (and that was due more to Sandra Reid’s costuming and Peter Hawkins’s voice) that hiring a middle-aged actor with a beer gut (no disrespect) as opposed to an actor actually suitable for the role twenty years on. They hired a person no longer right to play the part of a Cyberman and all because he’d been in it before – and what makes it doubly pointless is that The Tomb Of The Cybermen was at the time completely missing, making Kilgarriff’s prior performance entirely irrelevant anyway. Back on Earth though, there is some reasonable back-history delivered and I have to say that the black Cyberman looks incredibly cool.

I’ve always said that the great thing about a good cliffhanger is that you get to see it twice, while the dreadful thing about a bad cliffhanger is that you have to watch it twice – and this is the worst cliffhanger I’ve ever seen. An amazingly inept scene shows Russell shooting at a dummy Cyberman, followed by him shouting a half-hearted “no!” and making no effort to dodge a Cyberman’s fist. This is followed by Peri’s appallingly-delivered final words, although in fairness to Nicola Bryant I don’t thing even Meryl Streep could have made the line “no! NO! NOOOOOOOO!!!!” work.

After the break, it goes on to talk about The Tomb Of The Cybermen as if all the people watching had seen it. Such a busy story necessitates here a large expositions scene and while it does help a little in explaining what is going on to the audience – and it’s the non-fans who are the show’s bread and butter – what is going on, although it does create a rather boring plot for them as the Cybermen’s plan revolves around rescuing a planet that is only ever mentioned in passing. I feel that they would care more about the idea of it attacking Earth in one year’s time; in fact they’d be better off just avoiding this story altogether and watching The Tenth Planet instead.

The rogue Cyberman is again from The Invasion, but it isn’t so bad as it doesn’t have to be to work – and the scene where its fist bursts through the doorway decapitating another Cyberman is a genuine jump moment; one thing you can’t call this story is badly directed (apart from that cliffhanger, obviously). The Cryons sound good and have some nice lines but are conceptually clichйd, and they would have been less cheesy if they were simply called Telosians. A good theme in this story though is the aliens’ difficulty with Griffiths’s Cockney dialect.

The hatchway taking Lytton and Griffiths to the surface is an old fork-lift truck pallet that I used to carry about when I worked at B&Q, which spoils the illusion slightly. I’d also say that the hatchway echoes the one in The Tenth Planet but it might be a coincidence and in any case I’m getting bored of all these continuity references. 

The Doctor has a decent scene with Flast, even if it does concern that stupid plot. The revelation that the Cybermen can’t time travel properly is interesting despite meaning very little. Also Rost and Varne have a good rapport, the line “you never were very bright” reminding me of the twins Cora and Clarice from Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast novels.

The Cyberman that flaps aimlessly at its burning arm damages their credibility still further and shows how far they fell outside the black and white years. The hand-crushing scene is undermined by the old cut away – cut back directorial trick and by the fact that the blood is very obviously painted onto some undamaged hands – but it’s the thought that counts and the thought is very unpleasant indeed. Thank you Mr. Saward, shining light of narrative justification. The other surplus characters are polished off in quick succession, showing Saward’s stupid philosophy that if there aren’t x number of deaths per episode then it won’t be any good. While I’m on the subject the mortality rate in this story (not counting Cyberman extras or the regulars) is 85.7%, which is very excessive considering the numbers involved; it’s not that they die (Horror Of Fang Rock had a mortality rate of 100% and was superb), but that they die pointlessly through a sense of requirement that it should happen regardless of circumstances.

The TARDIS changes back to a police box (why change it in the first place?), and Lytton’s death is actually quite poignant. The action scene with the Cybercontroller is reasonable but standard, and I’m getting tired of seeing empty Cyberman suits exploding. The end is very annoying also, as the sonic lance (why get rid of the sonic screwdriver if you’re just going to replace it with something else that does the same thing?) being used to detonate the vastial – to reiterate, a made-up gadget is put into some made-up powder and everything goes boom. And the lead Cyberman’s gesture of “run, lads!” doesn’t help either.

When I was young I used to like this; I’d seen the stories it references so that didn’t worry me, and I just rode the wave of pyrotechnics. Looking at it objectively though this is a silly, inward-looking and very anal episode that probably put more nails into Doctor Who’s coffin than any other. The Cybermen can be such good monsters when written well, but when put in the hands of people who forget that the programme’s audience might not be as knowledgeable as them they become what any other monster would be in such circumstances: mediocre at best.

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.