Who Reviews Victory of the Daleks by Tony J Fyler

 

Tony claims victory with a Jammie Dodger. 

There’s an old saw in Doctor Who fandom that says that a Doctor isn’t really a Doctor, or that they don’t really reveal what kind of Doctor they are, until they come up against the Daleks. It’s by no means consistently true, of course – the Fifth Doctor didn’t face them properly until his final season, and both the Sixth and Seventh Doctors were firmly into their on-screen time before they encountered the pepperpots of doom. 

The Eleventh Doctor had no such wait for his first encounter with the Daleks. Three stories into his first series, the Tweed-suited Time Lord came across the sons of Skaro in one of their most insidious stories since Power of the Daleks, with which the parallels are both obvious and intentional. 

Winston Churchill (Ian McNiece, giving us a believable performance that has seen him anchor box sets of Churchill adventures in audio) is in his bunker during the early years of World War II when he calls for the Doctor’s opinion and assistance with an ethical dilemma over a magical new techno-weapon that could win him the war. 

The Doctor, naturally – new body, new Tardis interior, both taking a while to wear in – is a little late, so in the meantime, Churchill acts as he sees fit. A new robotic sentinel called an Ironside, built by a Scottish professor named Bracewell, is able to shoot Nazi planes out of the sky, and also serve tea to the victors once their offensive duty is done. 

The Eleventh Doctor’s reaction to the Ironsides is especially extreme when he finds out they’re actually Daleks. Yelling, demanding they admit who and what they are, and even attacking them with giant spanners, seeing the Daleks in this scenario, hiding in plain sight, shooting down Nazis and pretending to be willing ‘soldiers’ of the Allies offends everything in his hearts. Even Amy Pond seems worried about the extreme reaction he has to them, which in itself is odd – in the history of which the Doctor is aware, Amy comes from an Earth that has seen the Daleks attack, experienced the Earth hijacked across space by them, seen people exterminated by the tank-dwelling Nazi-blobs. But she has no memory of any of that – a factor in the ongoing story of the cracks in time that are the arc of Series 5. 

But when the Doctor goes spanner-nuts, demanding that the Daleks acknowledge him, and stop pretending to be subservient to the humans around them, one of the weirdest things in almost 50 years of Dalek history happens. 

His words are recorded, transmitted through space, and apparently ‘accepted as testimony.’

Almost immediately, the Daleks drop their pretence, go on a brief killing spree they’ve evidently been itching for, and, when Bracewell pleads with them, demanding that they are his creation, they shoot off his hand, and reveal that in fact, they created him as a way of getting close to Churchill – and the Doctor. And then, in the most unDalek-like move of all, they naff comprehensively off. 

The next phase of the story stretches credulity out niiiiice and thin. The last of the Daleks, it seems, have found an ancient Dalek MacGuffin – a Genesis Ark (full points to writer Mark Gatiss there for coming up with a suitably impressive Doohicky name). In the Ark there’s some primal, perfect Dalek DNA, enough to reboot the species from a fundamental template. There’s just one problem: the modern, bronze Daleks are so far from the fundamental Dalek that the Ark refuses to acknowledge them as Daleks. 

O…K. 

Instead of acknowledging their Dalekness though, the Ark will recognise the testimony of the Daleks’ arch-enemy – the Doctor. So, all the sophisticated analytical equipment you imagine would be in a Dalek Doohickey says they’re not Daleks. But the word of the species’ most eternal enemy is good enough for the Ark to open up. 

It’s really best to stop thinking too hard at this point. When you also understand that in an effort to get the Doctor to acknowledge them, the best plan they could come up was to a) create an android professor, and b) to go and hang around with Winston Churchill for a bit, serving tea in the hopes that the Doctor might just… pop along though, you ssssort of get the Genesis Ark’s point. Conquerors of time and space, they may be. Great thinkers? Nnnno. 

Where Victory of the Daleks also seems to go astray is that having established that the Ark contains primal Dalek, pure Dalek, fundamental Dalek, what emerges from it looks significantly less like a Dalek than any Dalek we’ve ever seen on screen. Big, bulky, with skirts the size of Skaro and in colour schemes not even the Peter Cushing movie dreamed of, the New Paradigm Daleks look OK in their initial emergence scene, backed by some superbly strong Murray Gold music. And there’s no doubting the fact that they sound the part, Nick Briggs making the voice of most of them deeper and more gravelly than the bronze Daleks. 

But ultimately, they look like a marketing strategy first and a universal despot second, which is one of the reasons they never especially caught on with fans. If the plan had been to replace the bronze Daleks – themselves an extremely elegant upgrading of what it meant to be a Dalek – with a new paradigm to be used in future stories, audience reaction appeared to take the wind out of the production team’s sails, and they were only included among other varieties of Dalek in future stories, before being more or less dropped altogether in the Chibnall era. 

The point about all of which is that their look makes no sense within the context of the story.

But then, in fairness, nothing much after the Doctor hits the Dalek with the spanner makes sense within the context of the story. Once the New Paradigm Daleks have emerged, the rest of the story is simply a matter of competing stakes. 

The Doctor threatens to blow up the Daleks with a Jammie Dodger… as you do if you’re the Eleventh Doctor and all you happen to have about your person is a Jammie Dodger. The Daleks, crippled though their ship might be, threaten to destroy London simply by shining a giant spotlight on it, so the Luftwaffe can do its thing. 

Bracewell, inspired by fellow Scot Amy Pond, takes some ideas he’s had for gravity bubbles and turns them from designs to fully working versions fitted to a bunch of Spitfires in what is practically no time at all – and with one working hand, no less. Spitfire pilots, used to flying sorties from England to Germany and back, have abbbbsolutely no problem flying into space to attack the Dalek ship. And in a move to get the Doctor to call off the attack, the new Supreme Dalek – presumably plugging itself rapidly into the data banks of the former Daleks it has systematically exterminated – reveals that as well as a passport into Churchill’s inner circle, the android Bracewell is an oblivion cascade (again, full marks on doohickey-naming for Gatiss). A walking, talking, thinking bomb that will take most of the earth with it into a screaming void pretty shortly as a way to give the new Daleks cover to get the hell out of Dodge and begin being simply awful to other people in other times and places. 

The Doctor, faced with his second impossible conundrum in two weeks – the week before, he’d been on the brink of killing the last of the star whales till Amy Pond talked him round – lets them go, and returns to Earth to persuade the android Bracewell that he’s a real boy after all, on the wiiiildly spurious grounds that provoking the implanted memories of a human life within him will stop him acting like a bomb and taking the Earth with him. Because… reasons. 

But of course, it’s not the Doctor who can provoke the right memories in Edwin Bracewell to cool him down and stop him exploding. The Doctor, like Bracewell, is fundamentally not human, and his efforts to get Bracewell to believe in his own humanity are doomed to fail. 

As with the star whale conundrum in The Beast Below, it’s actually Amy Pond who brings the goods, provoking memories of Bracewell’s “lost love,” Dorabella, and the ‘good hurt’ of loving someone. When Edwin stands down from his explosive countdown, all’s well that ends well, the light over London is extinguished, and Britain lives to suffer another few years of wartime uncertainty and hardship under Winston Churchill’s government. The Daleks naff comprehensively off for a second time, claiming victory. Bracewell, we learn, will probably go looking for Dorabella – and what we wouldn’t give to be a fly on the wall for that meeting. “Hi honey, I’m home, and now I’m an emotionally unstable hyper-bomb!” 

The point about Victory of the Daleks, ultimately, is that it had a lot to do. It was determined to be a riff on Power of the Daleks, with sneaky Daleks seeming to serve humans. It had to act as a celebrity historical, bringing Churchill into the fold of the Doctor’s on-screen friends, though the idea that they’ve met before had long been established. It had to pitch a brand new design of Dalek to the audience, in such a way as to erase the previous iteration and if possible spark a new wave of retail Dalekmania. And, while it was at it, it was determined to get as many war movie references in as possible, more or less for the joy of it. 

It succeeds in doing a lot of that – the subservient Daleks are effectively creepy, especially when, unwatched, they turn and observe the humans. Churchill emerges as a person the Doctor can support (albeit there’s a good deal of printing the legend there). And the war movie elements are fun, if in no sense logical. 

Where it falls down is in the very thin strands of logic that hold the thing together – the Genesis Ark believing the Doctor but not the Daleks, the likelihood of Churchill as a good locus-point by which to wait for the Doctor to show up, the logistics of preparing the Spitfires for their space dogfight, etc. 

And most of all, it falls down in that the New Paradigm Daleks look, all the way through, like a desperate plea by the production team to get people to buy new Dalek models and products, rather than as anything that was fundamentally necessary to the Daleks’ ongoing story. 

So you can still get a whole lot of fun out of Victory of the Daleks, 11 years on – but the New Paradigm Daleks, in retrospect, look like an idea forced into being for the wrong reasons, and so act as the cherry on a highly illogical, if always fun, cake.