Written by Tom
The Doctor and Ian are kidnapped by the Daleks and put in a cell with an intelligence puzzle in it. The Doctor beats the intelligence puzzle easily and thus becomes the Daleks’ next candidate for conversion into a CyberRoboman. Meanwhile, the English Resistance has come up with a new anti-Dalek grenade that they use to storm the Dalek’s ship.
It is endlessly amusing to me that the big set piece of the episode – the thing which is unique to it instead of leading to/from the episodes next to it – is a logic puzzle about refracting light through glass. After successfully reintroducing the Daleks through the second most iconic shot of Doctor Who‘s first year, the script uses them to deliver a half-formed science lecture on refraction, because it’s GCSE science that we’re interested in here and not the apparent end of the world via alien invasion.
Indeed, the Daleks are odd creatures here. Apparently they build their prisons as escape rooms in order to find the cleverest humans. Why? So they can figure out the best candidates for… being turned into mindless android servants. It’s a baroque audition process to say the least, and are we sure that intelligence is the metric they want here?
This gets at an odd paradox that underlies a lot of this episode. Last week, we talked about how the Daleks’ return was heavily promoted in the press, allowing the episode to be completely defined by the Daleks despite their absence. Part of the function of this was to make the Daleks more fundamentally mythic creatures – they are now Big Iconic Characters whose appearance is worthy of newspaper columns and front page photoshoots. In short, what we’re seeing here is the start of the Daleks becoming fetishised pop culture objects – the beginning of Dalekmania.
But this doesn’t quite cohere with the Daleks as they actually existed in the original Dalek serial. As creepy as the Daleks could be throughout that serial, we also kept observing that they remained faintly absurd characters prone to doing such things as accidentally murdering themselves with anti-radiation drugs and overcorrecting through nuclear Armageddon. Rather than being totemic icons of pure evil, the Daleks were these strange schemers easily led into histrionics. And these are the Daleks who return for this episode, apparently being the types of people who pick their slaves through obscure puzzle-based entrance exams.
Luckily, this plotline finds itself pinned down by a Doctor himself who’s having one of the best times we’ve ever seen him have. Terry Nation is pretty much the only person who writes the Doctor as a straightforward hero, being the main writer so focused to adventure serial tropes that he hasn’t yet realised that Doctor Who‘s not quite a classic example of the genres. As such, he makes sure that the Doctor gets an awful lot to do: showboating in front of the Daleks; figuring out the refraction puzzle; delivering one liners; etc. The thing is, Nation has accidentally hit gold here because Hartnell is absolutely amazing at playing this type of hero. The very clever thing that Hartnell does is to make look like the Doctor’s actively playing the role of a hero, wearing the archetype like a cloak and, most importantly, having an absolute blast doing so. This brings him back to the more mercurial characterisation that we saw him having during the earliest episodes, playing it as if the Doctor has immediately clocked that he’s cleverer than everyone around him this serial and is going to have fun running rings around them for a bit. The fun is contagious, the audience being invited to gain as much pleasure out of the performance as the Doctor is.
In doing so, the silliness of the refraction puzzle gets recontextualised as something that’s purposely a bit of silly fun. Having noticed that the Daleks are more ridiculous than the show’s been letting on, the Doctor is thus able to run rings around them by the simple act of not taking them particularly seriously, making him as narratively transgressive against the Daleks as they are against Doctor Who. This in turn sets up the cliffhanger where the Daleks subvert his victory of solving the puzzle, turning it into him having egotistically walked straight into a trap. The Doctor and the Daleks are fighting for control over the narrative here, and the important thing at the moment is that the characters who are dominant is constantly switching. Who will come out on top?
Alas, while this all works, it does have the effect of making the British Resistance comparatively a bit boring. Indeed, the entire British Resistance does have a sense of “Will this do?” to it from a scriptwriting point-of-view. Obviously you want there to be lots of Dalek fighting in your big Dalek Blockbuster serial which requires groups of people beyond Team TARDIS for the Daleks to fight. Luckily, you’re doing an It Happened Here style story, drawing on previous tales of plucky British resistance fighters fighting an invading enemy. From these two impulses, a British rebels vs. the Daleks plot arrives fully formed. Maybe that’s the issue though. The British Resistance look exactly like what you’d expect a British resistance to look like. The Daleks are never quite what you think they are. Put the two together, cutting back and forth from one to the other, and you are left to conclude that the British Resistance are comparatively quite dull. This helps with turning the Daleks into a fun festishised icon that people will want to watch, but is going to give you some issues when we need to follow the heroes of the story for a bit and find the plot suddenly start to drag. We should probably want to follow the story’s heroes too.
The result is remarkably uneven. The Daleks make no sense, the Doctor’s plotline is being held together purely by William Hartnell, and everything else is a bit dull. Given that this is meant to be the second episode of the show’s first blockbuster serial, the sum of the parts is really struggling to become a whole.
Erm… the only way is up?
FNORD 