Wednesday, 4 April 2018

Who Reviews Revelation of the Daleks by Tony J Fyler



Tony reveals all.

Revelation of the Daleks is so distinctive a mix of the vivid and garish and the dark and morbid, it earns its place as one of the most grand guignol stories in Doctor Who history – an entertainment so macabre as to be tasteless, but yet entirely compelling, with a mind-blowing miserablism deep down in its soul and its assessment of the morality of human beings.

The notes of its storytelling strands seem to offer a palette of depressives right from the start – Necros is a world of funeral directors, and therefore a world involved in the unsentimental business of tending to dead people, to maintain an illusion of life for their relatives until the bodies can be safely disposed of. It’s run by professional cynics and grotesques, from the emotionally desperate Tasambeker, to the have-a-go thugs, Lilt and Takis, to the ultimate sleazebag from every professional outfit everywhere, the pompous, self-revolving but never-quite-unintelligent Jobel (played with a particular knack for nastiness by Clive Swift).
It’s also a world of snow and ice, lowering the emotional temperature even further – and that’s before we even meet a disfigured, deeply confused mutant, the product of experiments by the so-called Great Healer (a title which in and of itself embodies grotesquerie). Meanwhile, there’s Alexei Sayle as the most annoying DJ in the universe, playing music to what are probably already-empty caskets; there’s the spinning head of Davros in a catacomb, like the spider at the heart of this web of bad taste; there’s the grandly-turbaned Eleanor Bron as Kara with her waspish secretary, Vogel, planning to assassinate the Great Healer; there’s  fatalistic but discredited Knight of the Grand Order of Oberon, Orcini, played with spectacular restraint by William Gaunt, and his disgusting squire, Bostock, who might be thought of as the War Baldrick. There’s not a character in the whole thing that isn’t existing on at least two levels, their public face sometimes barely hiding the darker reality underneath. Everything has that note of formal fakery that makes the world of Necros a polite and brittle lie, from the make-up on the attendants to the DJ’s ‘entertainment’, to people supposedly in suspended animation, to the idea of some of them being there only until the disease that killed them can be cured, only to have it revealed that the cure was found decades earlier, to the polystyrene monument that falls on the Doctor and the fake blood that comes with it.

And then of course there’s Natasha Stengos and her drunken doctor-friend, prowling about the catacombs looking for her father’s dead body.

It’s worth remembering that Revelation of the Daleks is a two-part, 45-minute-per-episode story, and the Doctor and Peri spend the entirety of the first part trudging through the snow, killing rather forgiving mutants, shinnying over walls rather than finding the front door, breaking pocket watches, glimpsing Daleks and then in the Doctor’s case having a fake monument fall on him – all before they even GET to Tranquil Repose. As such, Eric Saward on writing duties ‘pulls a Robert Holmes’ in making the other players and their stories so fascinating that they absolutely exist outside of the Doctor’s intervention and hold our interest. Every character has a story, a personality, an arc here, albeit most of them end in gruesome, mostly Dalek-powered death. But whereas Holmes’ fascinating secondary characters had a tendency to fall on the redeemable side of the spectrum, Saward brings undiluted, positively visceral miserablism to the screen, making all his characters phonies of some variety (with the possible exceptions of Bostock and Natasha), giving them masks to hide their real, dark natures behind, and using the notion of Davros as a corrupting agent to expose those natures.

Even when they arrive, the role of the Doctor and Peri in events as they unfold is marginal at best – Peri goes to see the DJ and helps him destroy a Dalek with ultra-directional rock and roll, while the Doctor potters about, gets locked up, discovers the actual Dalek-and-Davros plot in an info-dump from his fellow prisoners, confronts Davros and then…is responsible for none of the resolution of the story, except a brief lesson in botany, which could revolutionise the future of Necros. When you think about it, Kara employs Orcini and Bostock to kill Davros, while aiming to destroy them too by a bomb in their communicator. Almost everybody ends up dead, and the Doctor can save none of them, it’s Lilt and Takis who eventually call in the ‘Supreme’s Daleks’ to come and destroy Davros’ new recruits and take him back to Skaro – notably, the Daleks don’t level the planet on their way out, they just take their creator and swan off back to the stars – and Orcini eventually blows himself and Davros’ new Daleks to death. It’s a little grim that Lilt and Takis, the thugs-turned-funeral-directors, get to survive, and the Doctor’s lesson about the weed plant producing protein reveals to the Necrosians what we learned in Episode 1 – that the Great Healer’s eradication of famine in this corner of the cosmos needn’t end with him being rooted out and carted off – protein is abundant on Necros in a vegetable form, so they needn’t have been eating their processed relatives all this time.

In a Doctor Who story in which neither the Doctor nor his companion get to actually do much of any relevance, it’s mind-blowing how much Saward packs into the story, how many threads intertwine and how dark and cynical the key Davros plot is, underneath it all – harvesting human brains (or indeed heads) and turning them into Daleks, while feeding the rest of their bodies (and those of the less intellectually endowed) to the populace as concentrated protein. The darkness of that plot, swirled around as it is by violent, lecherous and desperate funeral directors, corporate leaders determined to bite the hand that feeds them, assassins looking for the redemption of their lost honour, ubiquitous Daleks, and bickering bodysnatchers, is rendered hypnotically on screen by Graeme Harper, and ultimately it delivers what is many people’s favourite Colin Baker story, its unique visual style and the spot-on musical sizzles lifting a plot where no-one is remotely pleasant or telling the truth into a hallmark of the Baker era. Certainly in the way it’s presented, it’s a defining moment of that era – the Stengos glass Dalek that feels its mind succumbing to Dalek conditioning and then begs and screams for death is iconic of the harder, more gruesome tone the Colin Baker era espoused (after bleeding Cyber-converts, tortured Varosians, the Doctor quipping at people in acid baths, and the personal poisoning of an Androgum by this morally crusading Doctor comes this story in which Saward, as he did in Resurrection of the Daleks and Attack of the Cybermen, raises the game of the villains of the Doctor Who world, making them seem more real and dangerous by turning up the body-count). It shows the body-horror of Dalek-conversion, just as Attack of the Cybermen shows Cyber-conversion, in a visceral way that had never been seen before, and the sense it leaves with the reader is that the universe is not only more real and dangerous than we’d ever previously imagined, but that ordinary people – business people, grieving people, even people there to provide us a service at our most vulnerable, like funeral directors, can be dark, deceitful, bullying and complex, so if our Doctor is harder and more voluble than we’ve been used to, he still stands for one of those unusual absolutes of goodness in a universe that’s out to get us.

Revelation of the Daleks, even today, can be a shocking watch. The pure venality that runs through its characters’ veins can make it a hard, exhausting, depressing watch. But it’s also a gripping watch that you can rarely turn away from once you’ve started, because the maelstrom of evil, from the petty, like Jobel, to the greedy, like Kara, to the utterly corrupting, like Davros in his lair, just grows and grows and swallows you up, leaving you at the end feeling like you’ve just spent an hour and half on an epic adventure with real people, but also, strangely, enormously glad it’s over and you made it out alive.

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