Victory of the Daleks

Dear Gary—

Doctor Who isn’t Doctor Who anymore. It’s some generic action adventure series with a guy called the Doctor and some Daleks thrown in to make it seem authentic. That’s not precisely how I feel, but the thought does flit through my mind from time to time during Victory of the Daleks; most notably during the Star Wars fighter pilot segment.

This episode has the feel of a group of guys sitting around coming up with ideas. One says he knows an actor who does a great Churchill impression and the rest latch onto that notion and run with it. And oh wouldn’t it be cool, one says, if we had Daleks in it? Daleks in WWII, how cool is that? We could have Daleks in victory posters and camouflage and . . .

And oh, Gary I fear that Victory of the Daleks was born.

I can’t think why New Who has this all-consuming need to upgrade its classic villains; and this falling back through time routine is getting a bit old. Furthermore, the Earth apparently is the default setting whenever any alien race decides to hit their reset button.

Most annoying, though, is the shows increasing flippancy with the historical record. The Original got it right, with The Aztecs being the epitome of this history-as-sacrosanct philosophy. Understandably this hard and fast rule needed to be relaxed as the Doctor continued his travels through known history, and New Who’s fixed point theory, while highly improbable and preposterous, works on the superficial level that the show tends towards. However the show has started to go off the deep end in making a mockery out of the past.

Mind you, Classic Who would occasionally dip its toe in these waters but it was usually discordant. I think of the Fourth Doctor’s claim regarding his Shakespearean ghostwriting in City of Death; but this is nothing compared to the influence the Tenth Doctor and his companion have over the immortal words of the Bard.

Victory of the Daleks takes the London Blitz and turns it into the Doctor and Dalek show.

If I were a British subject I would be livid.

Yes, Victory Daleks are cool. Yes, the sight of Daleks serving tea is cool. Yes, hearing Daleks say, “I am your soldier,” is cool. And yes, even the Star Wars fighter pilots are cool. But Doctor Who has to be more than a sum total of a collection of its cool parts. Victory of the Daleks could use some grounding; Victory of the Daleks could use a Nancy to depict the true devastation of the London Blitz on ordinary life. The closest bone we are thrown is the peripheral character of Miss Breen. Hitler, the Nazis, and the Blitz are all trivial to the plot. Victory of the Daleks could be set in any time, in any place. But then we wouldn’t have a cigar chomping Churchill or the Victory Daleks. WWII is convenient and cool set dressing nothing more.

And that’s about the best this serial has to offer. The Doctor/Dalek confrontation and threat to Earth plot is rushed and blasé.

Why is it that everyone in the known Who universe just sits around waiting for the Doctor to show up? If it’s not Liz Ten amongst her water glasses it’s the Daleks in Blitzkrieg London. I guess they are just biding time anticipating the Doctor Who ‘Action’ call from Mr. Doctor Who Director; they know it’s inevitable that the Doctor will enter the picture once that happens. The Doctor never arrives anywhere by chance anymore; he is summoned or manipulated or fated to land at a particular time and place.

That’s a problem with New Who. It is so deliberately crafted; all its seams are showing.

So the Daleks are serving tea while they wait around for Churchill to phone a friend, his old chum the Doctor; because Churchill is incapable of running a war or making major decisions on his own. He needs an alien’s stamp of approval on the new war machines created by his scientific adviser Professor Edwin Bracewell. But never mind, a month has gone by since Winston made that urgent phone call and these machines make such good waiters, what’s the harm? Now that the Doctor has arrived and sounds off all kinds of alarms the Prime Minister ignores the very man he called in to consult.

The best the Doctor can think of in this situation is to pick up a giant spanner and start hitting a Dalek’s metal casing. He doesn’t go for the eye stalk or weapons systems. He isn’t trying to neutralize it; he is just trying to antagonize this “worst thing in all creation.” He is trying to prove the danger they are in by putting the entire room in danger, not to mention the Earth. By doing this he falls right into the Daleks’ (and author’s) master plan.

This is their master plan: to wait around serving tea until the Doctor inevitably shows up (nothing left to chance here) to identify them to the Progenitor, which will only take the word of the sworn enemy of the Daleks as proper evidence that this battered wait staff contains the right stuff to carry on the name of Dalek. Genius.

Now we get the Doctor holding off the Daleks with a Jammie Dodger (how cool is that?) and our cool Spitfires in space action sequences. Oh, and cool new Technicolor Daleks. After all these drab millennia the Daleks have become fashion conscious. Too cool for words. Cool; cool, cool, cool (borrowing a page from Abed Nadir).

Lighting up London during the Blitz is the initial threat posed by the Daleks. Not exactly a worldwide catastrophe; the action-packed attack on the Dalek spaceship isn’t quite as heroic when you consider it merely saves London from a massive electric bill; but I guess the Daleks are just warming up. Nothing is mentioned about any defense mounted by the British against the advancing German planes; nobody thinks to smash some light bulbs, draw their curtains, or cover their lamps with towels. So I guess it is all up to these miraculous fighter pilots in space to win this particular campaign in the Dalek version of WWII. But this is only a cool diversion before the real Dalek threat.

Turns out Professor Bracewell isn’t human. He is a bomb in robotic form. The Daleks do bombs on a grand scale. Maybe Bracewell isn’t exactly a Reality Bomb, but Oblivion Continuum sounds pretty impressive. A snap to defuse, though. All you have to do is convince Bracewell that he is human and not a robot bomb. This is where Amy and her wonder powers of observation and insight come in.

Victory of the Daleks is entertaining and funny and thrilling and even poignant at times. But I’m sorry, Gary; coming so close on the heels of The Beast Below I have no patience for it. Especially when they remind me with the Doctor’s ‘Sophie’s Choice’ moment; again with the alien vs. humanity dilemma. And of course that darn crack making its mandatory appearance in a random place.

“What does hate look like?”

Right now the show does not want to ask me that question Gary.