Written by Tom
The human rebels attack on the Daleks doesn’t go well, though at least the Doctor gets removed from the Dalek ship and Ian survives by hiding in the floorboards. Barbara and a few of the remaining rebels travel across London to another rebel base. The Doctor is reunited with Susan and her new friend David; they make plans to go to the rebel base too. Because we need a cliffhanger, some Robomen randomly put a ticking timebomb next to where the Doctor, Susan and David coincidentally happen to be sitting.
Let’s begin with the critiques: there are parts of this episode that are straightforwardly non-functional. The big one is the giant fight between the Human Resistance and the Daleks which starts the episode, formed of a pretty much continuity-less collection of shots in which as many humans as Daleks get visibly killed. We are then informed for three scenes straight that, despite appearances, the fight was actually a curb-stomp battle in which the Daleks massacred pretty much all the humans. Only the rest of the episode is made entirely of an endless supply of rebels popping up out of nowhere to interact with our main cast, all of whom are survivors the battle. It’s all very confused – the script doesn’t really know what it wants to be and the visuals are fighting against the few things it can decide on.
The Daleks themselves aren’t handled particularly well either. One scene requires a Dalek to walk up a ramp, look around, then go back down the ramp. It does this, only it wobbles around an awful lot, manages to back itself into a wall while doing so, and frankly looks unable to slow down as it little more than falls down the ramp. Our readings of the Daleks as being fundamentally absurd creatures can cover a lot, but when the main power of something is coming from its supposedly imposing image, things like this become harder to excuse.
Indeed, you do get the sense that the production team have bitten off more than they can chew here. This feels odd because the production of Doctor Who has often been its strongest element, covering to no shortage of script defects through pure spectacle. There have been several previous serials which are little more than the production team showing off what they can do, ranging from the Marco Polo serial’s lavish recreation of China to the miniturisation serial’s requirement for an awful lot of giant props. And yet the one thing they can’t seem to do is action sequences. This is usually not too much of an issue as Doctor Who tends to be pretty high-concept and talky for an action-adventure series, its occasional fight scenes being used as seasoning in scripts whose focuses are usually elsewhere. But when you have episodes like this which are almost entirely built out of tense action sequences connected by whatever genre bullshit you need to justify the next tense action sequence… for all that this is meant to be a marque Doctor Who serial designed to get the punters in, this is not a story that actually plays to the show’s strengths.
Elsewhere in the script, we have Susan and David getting close to each other. Who the hell David is and exactly when he and Susan got so close is complete mystery to me – I imagine he did appear last week but in no form that would justify the instant dependency Susan suddenly has on him. Indeed, Susan gets treated particularly awfully by this week’s episode, which is bloody saying something. At one point, she’s forced to admit that “I’ve never had any real identity”, which, like, Jesus Christ if that isn’t true, but the reason she doesn’t have an identity is because the writers have never been bothered to give her one, nor any material other than “being pathologically subservient to the Doctor” and “being useless in ways that makes things worse for everyone around her”. Writing this into the dialogue such that it becomes her canonical fault isn’t so much correcting the error as just giving up on the idea that things could ever get better for her. From this point onwards, Susan is officially over as a character.
There is a potential salvaging of this plotline. The Sensorite serial had a lot of material about how Susan’s subserive relationship with the Doctor was unhealthy for both parties, Susan functioning better as a character and a person the further from the Doctor she got. The issue is a common one that occurs between parents and children: eventually the child has to fly the coop and build a life for themselves, and a parent’s desire to protect the child from having to do that is likely to hinder this development rather than help it. Here we get the confirmation of this – the relationship that Susan and the Doctor has is one which has stopped her being able to define herself and have her own identity. It is time to move on, in other words, and the idea of having her fall in love with another character like David and decide to move is sensible given this. It’s an overly traditional story but it’s also a classical one: Susan wants to grow up as a person so she finds a suitor and goes to make a life and family of her own.
The issue with actually doing this plotline would be two-fold though. Firstly, David’s come out of nowhere and doesn’t have a personality himself. There’s nothing to hang a relationship plot on. More than this, Susan and David’s relationship appears to be exactly the same as the one between Susan and the Doctor – that of the authorative male and the subservient nervous wreck. Given that Susan’s canonical flaw is the way that her character leaves the room once a man of sufficient presence enters the scene, then we need to see her form a relationship with someone who’s her equal, and to take control of the relationship herself rather than just fall in line the first person she’s paired with. If she instead just allows herself to passively stick by David, then this wouldn’t be her successfully tackling her character flaws but instead succumbing to them. The former would be the culmination of a season long character arc; the later would come off as Terry Nation being told to write out Susan and hastily cobbling a Doctor surrogate together out of nothing because he doesn’t really care.
(Of course, we do get the scene where Susan is shown to be able to run rings around the Doctor and David in order to get both to agree to her course of action, which would seem to imply that she does have a certain amount of control over both of them, but that just solidifies the idea that David is an alternate Doctor in all but age and species, more compounding the issue than negating it.)
T[his is probably the point where we could do with standing back and remembering that this is an absolutely massively successful piece of television that we’re talking about – a ratings hit that led directly to the Dalekmania craze and is still fondly remembered 59 years later. It’s arguably the single most iconic serial we’ve covered so far {with its own contestant for the title being the other Dalek serial}, and will probably remain so until we start reviewing Genesis of the Daleks. So doing a post where we decide that everything’s a bit shit because it’s all been shoddily written and directed {which is what we’re doing here} is a position we’re going to stake particularly carefully.
One is tempted to argue that the production flaws which are obvious in the more sophisticated {and upscaled HD} days of 2024 probably weren’t that obvious in the less sophisticated {and much smaller/fuzzier} days of 1964. I am resistant to this idea though – fuzzy screens help explain why it might not be so obvious to a viewer from the 60s that half the Daleks in the background of shots are cardboard cutouts, but what they’re not going to account for is the fact that the editing of the fight scene at the start is nigh-on incoherent in ways that contradict what’s stated by the scenes immediately after it. People from earlier times aren’t stupider because their times are older. So instead let’s assume that the 1960s audience would be fully aware of the production flaws of this episode and wouldn’t consider it a dealbreaker because of something else. What could that thing be?
Well, t]here is one element of the episode that’s absolutely superb: the location footage. The big center piece positioned at the middle of the episode (forming the episode’s equivalent of last week’s light refraction puzzle) is Barbara and the rebels running through an abandoned Westminster that’s infested with Daleks. The image of Barbara and the Daleks running over Westminster bridge, sharing the screen with the Houses of Parliament, and navigating Trafalgar Square are all genuinely impressive and iconic feeling. Weirdly, the thing that makes the footage so impressive is just the fact that they were able to film it at all – you wouldn’t expect the streets around the Houses of Parliament to ever be quiet enough for this footage to be shot. They definitely were there though – we can tell the difference in film grain between location footage and studio footage. And so the palpable sense that the Daleks are intruding on our reality and making it weird continues, having somehow managed to empty actual London landmarks long enough to film these scenes.
[The fact that they got this footage by just getting up early enough of a summer’s day, the streets always being empty around that time, is academic given the effect it produces. It works so well that 28 Days Later would be able to pull the exact same trick 30 years later and make another iconic pop culture moment out of it.]
The location footage is also being used to elevate the few actually properly dramatic moments in the episode. A secondary character in the last three episode is a English rebel in a wheelchair who’s been trying to create a bomb capable of destroying the Daleks. It’s his bombs that the rebels were armed with when they stormed the Dalek ship, and thus tacitly his fault when the bombs didn’t work and things apparently became a massacre. This leads to a scene late in this episode where he commits suicide by Dalek, using it as one last chance to test his latest bombs. The scene is genuinely harrowing and helped greatly by the higher contrast and grit that the location film provides, giving it a grounding that no other death has had so far. While the studio deaths have had a certain pantomime nature to them, the location death is happening in the real world and is relatively subdued, giving it a reality and a gravity not felt anywhere else.
In short, the serial’s novel use of location footage is giving its visuals an unique effectiveness that greatly elevates everything it shows. With the marketing of the Daleks moving them into being treated as more fetishtic objects than originally intended, sequences like the location footage of Daleks in Westminster do an awful lot to make these guys as mythic as the show wants them to be. The fact that the studio footage does not compare to this in the slightest ends up not mattering as much – the images that linger in the memory will be the location footage. [Hence why the serial is still fondly remembered as a classic.]
If only the scripts and studio footage actually matched the memory of the location footage.
FNORD 