Tony’s caught in the crossfire.
The Movellan
Manoeuvre was Act 1 of what probably shouldn’t feel like a two-part
finale, but absolutely does. Creepy factories, double crosses, business
geniuses taken by surprise, and the nerves of the Counter Measures team strung
tight as the Movellans didn’t appear for the longest time despite being in the
title of the episode, and then brilliantly did, revealed an audacious,
emotionless plan and took on the forces of the Earth for a kind of supremacy
they saw as utterly logical.
One line from that first
act sets the tone and pace for The Dalek Gambit – ‘We are better than
the alternative.’
It’s time to meet the
alternative.
Doctor Who fans of course
know of the war between the Daleks and the Movellans, but it’s rather gorgeous
that in what might yet be the final episode of The New Counter Measures (spoilers!),
our team of heroes are back on turf that’s familiar to them. Certainly, far more
familiar than was the mystery of the Movellan Manoeuvre.
Daleks are what got them
into the lives they’ve now led for over a decade. Might it be Daleks who bring
those lives to an end?
Certainly, it sounds like
it might be a very close thing, and it’s a flash of brilliance that makes
Roland Moore, writing this story, validate and prove the line about the
Movellans being the better option. This is not a story of deep Dalek cunning
and round-the-houses prevarication. This takes its pace and tone from those
second parts of Russell T Davies Dalek stories – everything’s built up and up
and up like the charge in a laser gun. This episode fires the gun, and things
never really stop from that moment on.
In terms of the pacing,
there’s a flip here, from the creeping, building mystery of The Movellan
Manoeuvre to all-out high-pitched dramafest of this episode, with the war,
and the battles, and the yelling, and the running, and the planet-killing bomb
as the Daleks refuse to mess about, and the giant ticking clock that’s counting
down.
That’s all really rather
the point of The Dalek Gambit – non-stop action and pace and
breathlessness when the Daleks, rather than being engaged in an internecine war
with their own kind, as when the Counter Measures team first encountered them,
are engaged in a full-on war with the Movellans, and are prepared to blast the
planet to dust just so it will take the remaining Movellans with it.
Along the way, Moore
manages to delineate the difference between the Movellans and the Daleks, and its
no small irony that the Daleks, with their organic component, are less rational
and more overwhelmed by fury and devastating destructive power. In a way, the
no-questions-asked, no-compromise Daleks here make The Dalek Gambit one
of the best Dalek stories you’ll ever have encountered, because they’re not
hampered by the need to explain their plans, or engage in some extermination-stopping
buzzkill game with the Doctor. These are Daleks as primal and straightforwardly
lethal as you’ve ever seen or heard them, and they fairly blow your hair back
in this story. That brings us round in a rather joyful, if nail-chewing, full
circle to Remembrance of the Daleks – while Gilmore, Jensen and Williams
had their hands full with a few scattered Daleks more intent on killing each
other than noticing the human flotsam, here we get a sense of that ship that
lurked in orbit with its colossal firepower, able in a heartbeat to wipe
humanity off the face of the earth.
Here, it might very well
happen for real, and the New Counter Measures team are mostly caught up in
mini-quests, dealing with landing parties, chasing a surviving Movellan, trying
to work out a way to broker a survival for humanity that neither the Daleks nor
the Movellans ever really see as an option, and all the while, the clock
ticks down, malevolently, your chest getting tighter as the stakes get higher,
the team fighting Daleks, the team trying to imagine a way round the inevitable
destruction of the earth…
It seems as yet uncertain
whether any more New Counter Measures stories will be made.
We’d rather like them, if
they were. But if not, then let it be said that the New Counter Measures team
went out on a screaming high, fighting the alien monster than first got them
into the business. It’s punchy and powerful and you’ll pretty much forget to
breathe as the run-time runs on, and the ending will affect you. Maybe not in
the way you think it will, but it will.
If this is the end, it’s
the best of endings. If it’s not the end, there are ways to write around the
end of this story, and let the adventures continue. But if it is the
end, it’s an end that’s true to the evolution of the characters, in a
full-circle full-on fight for survival, and for the earth itself. It’s a tale
of noise and fury, with aggressive Daleks, desperate flailing hopes against
hope, and at least a little Something Very Clever from one of the team. It’s an
ending that says thank you to everything that’s come before, everyone who’s had
the privilege of writing for the team, everyone who’s made their world come
alive, going all the way back to Coal Hill School and the mind of Ben
Aaronovitch. It’s a thank you to the actors who play the roles that they get to
save the world again in such spectacular style, while also being a truly
exceptional, if uncomplicated, Dalek story.
Thank you, New Counter
Measures team. We’d love to hear you again some day, but if this is the end,
you went out playing an absolute blinder.
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