Alex & Richard's Doctor Who 52: 03. Dalek

Previously…

The Doctor… The Companions… the third angle to this triumvirate is the Monsters. And the first monsters of Doctor Who will always be…

Introducing…

The Doctor's Arch Enemies (Monster Edition) – see also "Terror of the Autons".

This is set in the space year 2012: the future when it was first broadcast, now the past – which is almost as weird as "The Tenth Planet" being set in 1980.

Henry Van Statten, the man who "owns the internet" and so almost by definition the biggest monster on the planet, has a secret bunker in the Nevada desert where he keeps his museum of things that have fallen to Earth. And right at the bottom is the pride of his collection, the only living exhibit, and an example of just how far it is possible to fall. Let's just say he's not as smart as he thinks he is…

Ten Reasons To Watch "Dalek" (warning: spoilers!)

1. The Dalek – "One Dalek is capable of exterminating aaaaalllll!!!!" shrieks one of the metal meanies in 1965's all-time Dalek extravaganza "The Dalek's Master Plan (du jour)", and here writer Rob Shearman sets out to prove it, taking the Dalek through its murderous paces examining and reinventing every part – gunstick, manipulator-arm, body, shields (they've got shields!), heads-up-display and zoom-in eyestalk, and the bubbling ball of hate and genius inside; even the "dalek bumps" – and all the while inverting every joke ever made about them, death by sink plunger being perhaps the most gruesomely memorable.
   
   
   
   
   
2. The Power of the Dalek – the Dalek though is far more than just a monster; it is an icon of Doctor Who; in many ways the Daleks made the Doctor, in both Watsonian (in Universe) and Doylist (from the perspective of the series creators) senses. Confronted by their pure evil, the Doctor begins to evolve a counter morality; and with the coming of Dalekmania a series that might have been cancelled after thirteen weeks became a hit that would go on to celebrate a golden anniversary.
   
   
   
   
   And, quite rightly, the idea that the Great Time War could ultimately turn out to be against anybody else is unthinkable. Yet there was a period where it looked like the Daleks would not be returning to Doctor Who in 2005…
   
   
3. The Genesis of the Daleks… is credited not to Davros (the evil genius) and not to "laughing" Ray Cusak (the designer, who came up with the classic sixties pop-icon pepperpot shape and got paid all of £100 for his trouble) but to writer Terry Nation. And the estate of Terry Nation is (or more accurately, Hancock's their lawyers are)… uniquely sensitive to its rights as far as the deadly dustbins are concerned. Which means there can be some very tough negotiating to use them. Thankfully for history the dispute with the Nation Estate was resolved.
   
   (In the period when he didn't have Daleks, though, writer Rob and showrunner Russell had to come up with an alternative. Apropos of nothing, Russell, never one to leave an idea unused, for "Last of the Time Lords" introduced the Toclafane – bodiless children's heads flying around in armoured spheres… Just saying.)
   
   
4. The Evil of the Dalek – the new series starts with an unusually bloodless Auton invasion. Clive (who is a not-very coded analogue Doctor Who fan) gets his head blown off by an Auton hand-gun at close range… but we don't see it. Along with a burping wheelie-bin, it made us wonder whether Russell had pitched his Doctor Who down to a child-friendly level, and would be keeping the deaths safely off-screen. Ho ho, how wrong we were. If anything, it's more that they want to build us up gently to this week. The Dalek slaughters about 200 people, in a variety of sadistically inventive ways, all on screen for your and your children's viewing pleasure. Try not to think that it's just "misunderstood" when it starts getting snuffly with Rose late on.
   
   
   
   
   
5. You Would Make a Good Dalek: Christopher Eccleston – the success of reintroducing the Dalek, which let's face it is a faintly ridiculous looking thing, relies in large part on the reaction of the Doctor, and once again Chris Eccleston is stunning. Peter Capalid is (rightly) praised for the expressiveness of his acting chops, but Eccleston is capable of so much more with so much less. A shuffle of the feet and a glance down and he conveys heatbreak when it seems Rose is rejecting his offer to take her away in the TARDIS as the end of "Rose". In these early episodes he plays the Doctor as a man playing the part of a man playing a part – the Doctor putting on a front to cover something too deep to express. So when he loses it here – his veneer cracks and he goes full on berserk – it sells both his take on the Doctor, stricken by survivor guilt, and the Dalek as not a slightly ludicrous relic but absolutely the face of the enemy.
   
   
   
   
   
6. The Human Factor: Billie Piper – people mocked the idea of former pop-princess as the Dcotor's companion, but this series simply would not have worked without her giving Rose Tyler her unique mix of working-class cheek and drive to experience everything the Universe can throw at her. Dalek, in particular, hinges on Rose treating the Doctor and Dalek as essentially the same, and essentially the same as her i.e. a person. And Rose succeeds in introducing some human factor to both the Dalek and the Doctor.
   
   
   
   
   This liberal attitude, leaned from the Doctor, but that now has to be taught back to him, might at first seem like naiveté, but in fact it's the solution to the situation. The Dalek after all isn't safe; it's a ticking timebomb in the basement of Van Statten's museum! Rose's kindness might be what "sets it off" but is also in the end is what disarms it.
   
   
7. The New Dalek Paradigm: Nick Briggs. Briggsy trained himself for this role by playing a version of the Doctor for home-made audio adventures that would one day evolve into Big Finish. His take on Sherlock Holmes is also rather good but (I hope he'll forgive me) Holmes is a pretty good fit for Brigg's own character anyway. But it's as the Daleks that he's found his definitive persona. Here his acting completes the reinvention of the, basically doing here for voice work what Andy Serkis did for motion capture with Gollum – yes, I do think that the Dalek in "Dalek" is that level of achievement.
   
   
   
   
   To give character and alien emotion to rubber prop with an electronically distorted voicebox… and more than that to make us actually care about this monster, even after it's slaughtered the rest of the cast… is genius.
   
   
8. The interconnectedness of things. This season of Doctor Who – Season Twenty-Seven, "The Trip of a Lifetime" – is the most thematically unified since Season Eighteen "Change and Decay". The first three stories are a starter course in what Doctor Who can do – invasion of Earth, aliens from the future, ghosts from the past – with touches of continuity from the old series, and establishing the Doctor as survivor of a war, the Great Time War in fact. "Aliens of London" then brings us back to where we started… Rose's home and another alien invasion… except it's all gone a bit wrong and we start to mix things up. Then we do "Dalek": six weeks in and a second chance to jump on board the trip of a lifetime (and another Radio Time cover to prompt you). The revelations in "Dalek" (who actually fought the Time War) simultaneously wrap up the narrative of the first half of the season (the Doctor's mysteries stand largely revealed by now), reboot the classic monsters and make it "ok" for the series to keep bringing back the ghosts of its own past, and set up the arc of the second half of the series. And as a bluff, links to the next episode by way of Adam's story as "the companion who failed" (which cunningly disguises the fact that the Doctor actually goes from one Dalek story straight to another… if you think about it). The second half of the season features story after story about people abusing Time Travel – Adam, Rose and Jack – before "Boom Town" makes the point completely clear that this is all about consequences, the one thing the classic series never seemed to have. But we also see that these stories are about redemption: Adam doesn't get it; Rose is sorry; Jack earns his; Margaret Slitheen gets her second chance. And then the conclusion shows us how the Doctor's casual attitude to the places he leaves behind is also an abuse of Time Travel and that there are some pretty big consequences of that too… but that through what he's been through with Rose, he too can earn his redemption.
   
   
9. Bad Wolf – the "DVD easter egg" running through the 2005 season, which caught the imagination of press and public was the repeated meme of "Bad Wolf", words running through the episodes like "Blackpool" through Rock.
   
   
   
   
   This week it's the call sign of Van Statten's helicopter. It was clever because it was so inexplicable; even once you know the answer(!) The words are loaded with threat, redolent of the "big bad" concept from Joss Wheadon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer of a season "level boss" bad guy. They are invisible string, tying together disparate times and places, and (not coincidentally) the disparate episodes of the season for those who don't want to be bothered with developing themes like Rose's character growth or the Doctor's post conflict PTSD. And the solution is an ontological (bootstrap) paradox before Steven Moffat even thought he'd invented them.
   
   
10. "Elevate!" The Dalek conquers the stairs – which everyone knows the Daleks first did on screen in "Remembrance of the Daleks". (Or, by implication, as early as "The Chase", where they are able to reach the upper deck of the Marie Celeste; although toppling off into the water suggests a lack of sophistication to their powers of flight.)
    
    
    

What Else Should I Tell You About "Dalek"?

Rob Shearman, who wrote "Dalek" is the only writer from the 2005 "Eccelston Year" who has not returned to write another episode. Which is a shame, because he's also written some cracking Doctor Who for Big Finish (the adventures on CD people – you'll hear more about them as we go along).

If you need one, my score:

9/10.
Almost perfect, demolishing every argument against the Daleks as ruthlessly as the Dalek itself wipes out the inhabitants of Van Statten's concrete museum.

Plus there's a Cyberhead among the exhibits.

If You Like "Dalek", Why Not Try…

"Earthshock" – Classic monster reinvented as bigger big bad than ever before and goes on a rampage slaughtering most of the cast. With dinosaurs. Also features boy genius.

"Asylum of the Daleks" – One Dalek, alone in the most secure cell at the bottom of a bunker-institution, and the one – impossible– girl who has put a little bit of humanity inside it. Sort of.

Meanwhile on the other side…

Alex is watching "Rose".

Russell Davies does absolutely everything right and a phenomenon (do-do do-do-do) is born.

Next Time…

Grandmother's Footsteps…

Day 5382: DOCTOR WHO: The (Magician's) Apprentice – You're Fired Exterminated

Saturday:


Did everyone else get the same reaction to the recently announced latest spin-off from "Doctor Who": disappointment, regretfully, that it's not the "Missy and Clara Show"?

(Or "Dammit, Missy!" as the Verity podcasters hilariously dubbed this sadly-not-yet-to-be project – and can I also add that their "replace Clara and Michelle Gomez' Missy with Jo and Delgado's Master" game works so perfectly!)

Has there ever been a sci-fi psychodrama sit-com before? What a wasted opportunity if there hasn't. Because judging by this week's episode, it would be genius.

Because this week is all about the Time Lady and the Puppy.

I love Missy's little reminiscence at the start, getting Clara to work out "how I did it!". (Yes, yes, I scored all the points for guessing how the cliffhangers would resolve. Thankfully, Steven Moffat got the answer to the moral question posed last week right too.)

I love that – and I only spotted it on second viewing, but I'm sure most people got it first time out – they actually show three instances of the disintegration/teleport/escape trick, including the end of "Death in Heaven", to confirm that this is what happened then too (meaning last week's cheeky "Not dead. Back." was just a slap to the Saward years' habit of the Anthony Ainley Master to survive without bothering to explain how. Or why.)

I love that it's actually the Doctor's trick – he's done the working out, and on the fly I might add ("what a swot!"), and the Master (he's such a plodder) is merely copying, which seems very much in keeping with the old Jon Pertwee/Roger Delgado relationship (think "Sea Devils") where the Master would have a plan but would have to harness the Doctor's flair and improvisation.

I like to think that the scene with the invisible android assassins might have been written as a cameo for Sean Pertwee to double for his father; he can do the look and would not have had to do the voice. I mean it probably wasn't, but think of the resonance if it had been: "they're all the Doctor to me, so let's give you the frilly shirt" instead of "the eyebrows".

(Of course, that "they're all the Doctor to me" line is pinched from Iris Wildthyme, the erratic possibly-Time Lady created by Paul Magrs and brought to life by the magical Katy Manning.)

This pair of episodes, particularly the second but including moments like the naked horror of her realisation that Skaro is indeed returned in "The Magician's Apprentice", allow Michelle Gomez to transform her Master from merely bananas, however entertaining, pantomime villain Mary Poppins into a fully rounded anti-Doctor. Look at the way she encourages, coaches, even occasionally protects Clara. She's being the Doctor. Of course she might just think of it as house training the puppy, or breaking her in, but…

"If you ever let this creature live, then all this is on you."

That was Clara's accusation to the Doctor in "Death in Heaven". Complicity with the Master if he didn't stoop to the Master's level and murder his oldest frenemy.

Well, how'd'ya like them onions now, Clara Oswald?

Clara's inability to kill Missy the moment she obligingly turns her back is reassuringly human. We would think she was a monster, or a sociopath, if she could actually do it. Even if it wasn't borderline suicidal when wading knee-deep in Dalek sewer.

(The Doctor, incidentally, does to the Daleks what Missy did to the human race in "Death in Heaven": weaponising their dead against them, when he out-Xanatos-Gambits Davros (again), which pays her back for her nicking his teleport trick I suppose. And of course we're playing Time Lord "Hustle" again too ("Time Heist"). My head-canon is going to say that if Davros had taken only the regeneration energy offered rather than trying to take it all, then the Doctor would have let it go at that: that was the "out" he was being offered.)

But it's also a firm rebuke to Clara's words (spoken, to be fair, in anger) at the end of last year's finale. It is a false equivalence to say that one act of compassion is causative of all the harms that follow. This is pretty basic to all our modern morality from "an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind" to Gandalf's gentle admonition of Frodo that "it was pity that stayed Bilbo's hand" (an act of compassion that, ultimately, leads to the destruction of the One Ring and the utter ruin of evil. So you know, hard to top).

(And I do mean modern; I suspect that a Roman or a Spartan or for that matter the knights of King Arthur would all be entirely happy to stab the evil Time Lady in the back.)

Of course compassion (and mercy) are what saves Clara, in the end, from Missy's machinations trapping her inside a Dalek. That's more than merely an inspired bit of twisted sadistic play from the Master; it's virtually the entire point of the episode – what is compassion if not finding the friend inside the enemy.

Mind you, Clara seems to have forgotten the lesson she tried to teach the Clockwork Man back in "Deep Breath": "Never start with your final sanction. You've got nowhere to go but backwards." Just as Clara called the Clockwork Man's bluff, so Missy immediately calls Clara's. And thus psychologically disarms her. Before physically disarming her using what looks like another example of that super-speed she (maybe all Time Lords) sometimes appear to possess (see also Missy's murder of Osgood).

Actually, Missy was never in any danger from a pointy stick: she (though she could have been, indeed probably was, lying) told us that you would need to take out both hearts and brainstem all at once to stop her regenerating. Which more than slightly suggests that Missy deliberately left her pointy stick for Clara to pick up. Another little game. Who hasn't thrown a stick for a puppy, after all?

Moffat has struck on a rich seam of ideas to explore here. There's something Lovecraftian about the episode (even without the "something slimy lurking down below", why hello Freudian scatological horror!). The idea that humans – even ones like Clara – run into primal forces like Missy and mistake them for something… understandable.

Like the "First Ones" in "Babylon 5" – G'Kar (Andrea Katsulas) has a memorable scene where he picks up an ant on the tip of his glove – "if I put it down and another ant asks 'what was that?' how could the ant explain?". Moffat seems to get that the Time Lords, who really are the "first ones" of the Doctor Who universe are… in the old cliché …aliens beyond our comprehension. That's proper sci-fi that is.

This expands on the scene in the first episode, where Missy is genuinely (to whatever value of genuinely you think applies to her) revolted by the idea she might "love" the Doctor.

"Try, nano-brain, to rise above the reproductive frenzy of your noisy little food chain and contemplate friendship. A friendship older than your civilization, and infinitely more complex."

(I pondered last time whether they have really been at this longer than [our or Clara's] Civilization. If Missy meant modern England, which is probably the 400 years from Elizabeth I to Elizabeth II then easily; or even the nearly-thousand years from 1066 and all that, given the Doctor's now more advanced age; but the five thousand plus of human Civilisation from Mesopotamia to present day? That might be pushing it. Unless Missy means that Gallifrey is from, as long suspected, billions of years in the past.)

Andrew Cartmel and Russell Davies toyed with the idea of the Doctor as "god" before, but in Steven Moffat's hands Doctor and Master are rather more Cthulthu and Nyalothatep (horrors from the dawn of time) than magic floaty Jesus.

If this is Lovecraft, then the Daleks, all amoeboid protoplasm and rage, are the Shoggoths, the "machine creatures" of the Elder Things that made war to overthrow the gods.

Again, Moffat is just full of ideas here, gleefully binding together new notions with riffs on old bits of continuity:

The idea that Daleks are functionally immortal was made as a promise from Davros in "Revelation of the Daleks". The full horror of that can only be described as plumbing new depths here.

The third Doctor described the Daleks as moving by psychokinetic power ("Death to the Daleks"), which here translates to emotional energy firing the Dalek gunstick, and saying plainly that Cybermen repress emotion, Daleks channel it into anger. "It's why they keep yelling 'Exterminate!' – it's how they reload." It is absolute genius. As is seeing Missy work this out as she's examining Clara. (Again using her as the canary in the mine, or the test guinea pig in the experiment casing… are you getting that all these are references to Clara as a useful, useable animal, or familiar. Of course both titles refer to Clara – and to the different ways the two Time Lords see her.)

And of course Moffat is not above riffing on himself rewiring the idea of the Dalek's "cortex vault", the prison for their wrong-thinking memories from "Into the Dalek", so that it even translates the words they think/say into Dalek newspeak. Again, entirely consistent with the "computer control" that Davros saddled them with (before they exterminated him for the first time) back in (everything comes back to) "Genesis of the Daleks".

Of course it doesn't quite stack up. We've heard Daleks say things like "Mercy" and "Pity" before, even if it's just to deny they understand the concepts. And if Clara had been thinking calmly – which of course the point is she is not – then she should have been able to come up with a linguistic work-around. But then, given the way that she appears to lose the use of contractions, it's possible there's a kind of feedback occurring between her and the casing by means of the language she is allowed to use. Which is, of course, the point of Newspeak.

We are all a product of our environment, a Dalek even more so.

It's also slightly naughty that the first Dalek to be killed by the let's call them slime Daleks needs to be broached by Missy's brooch, whereas by the end they all seem to be vulnerable to the eldritch horrors of their ancestors' cells. (Oh, I'm so sorry.)

And Alex was quite right when he said how silly it was to have the Special Weapons Dalek right there and not have it be the one to blow up the TARDIS. What do you think it is for?

(I appease him slightly by saucily retconning Moffat's redubbing of the H.A.D.S. from "Displacement" to "Dispersal" by suggesting that it's a call-back to "Frontios" rather than a desperate cheat.)

Anyway, apparently the Doctor and Davros have some special time together in this episode too. But everyone else has talked about that*. And there's some guff about a prophecy and a hybrid and the Doctor's confession dial (which almost certainly contains the message "haha fooled you!"). Tediously that will no doubt turn out to be this year's arc plot. (Rather than the far more interesting hints about the Cloister War or the Master's Daughter.)

Last thought. Every Dalek ever… except for "some of our greatest mistakes". I know it's wrong of me, but in a secret place in my imagination, I see Mr Moffat crying out: "You think my Daleks are sh** Daleks? I'll give you sh** Daleks!!!"


Next time… If the Daleks are aliens from the past then these are ghosts from the future, and Christopher Eccleston needs to be put on danger money. We're going "Under the Lake".


*OK, I can't go entirely without praising the excellent work of Julian Bleach and Peter Capaldi. But I feel I talked a lot last time about the central moral dilemma – which is the thrust of the Doctor/Davros battle of wits here – whereas this week is a really good exploration of what the Master and the Daleks are about.

Day 5372: DOCTOR WHO: This Seems Very (Witch’s) Familiar

Saturday:


This seems familiar because we've seen this story play out before: the Doctor going alone to face his absolutely final death, after one final farewell party; the romp through the back-catalogue of places we’ve seen and monsters we recognise; the time-twisting trap. It’s the start of Series Six, the end of Series Seven, and several times in between. It’s the Wedding of Let’s Kill Hitler Again with the Time of the Impossible Moon.

Yet I love how this show brings me a whole new existential horror: dare I pronounce it "good" until I've seen how it resolves next week?

The return of two-parters – while welcome for the scale and scope and not-to-mention old-style cliffhanger – also spells the return of trying to comment on a story only half seen.

But this cliffhanger is so well-constructed, not merely mechanically in rounding out the episode by completing the circle back to the pre-title jaw-dropper, but in that it leaves us asking the fundamental question of the episode: “will the Doctor kill a child to save billions?”

That was, infamously, the scripted cliffhanger to Part Five of “Genesis…”, but the production team bottled it, moving the cliffhanger back to have the Doctor attacked by a random wandering (baby) monster instead of the philosophical question. So well done Moffat for restoring the question to the cliffhanger here.

And because that cliffhanger is so integral to the moral question on which the episode, indeed much of Doctor Who itself, hinges I really want to review this before the Schrödinger’s Cat gets out of the box and we see how Moffat resolves his moral dilemma.

(Publishing this, I hope, with just hours to go before part 2.)

“The Magician’s Apprentice” is, essentially, five spectacular set-pieces: the battlefield of the thousand-year war (the "hand mines" with their single eyes surrounded by finger-appendages seeming so foreshadowing of the Dalek mutants, and did they mention "clam drones" in the vicinity?); Colony Sarff's oily, slinky glide from vignette to vignette in search for the Doctor (Maldovarium, Shadow Proclamation and Karn tying together Moffat, Russell and Classic eras of the show); Clara’s eye-acting face-off with the Master (and UNIT have so clearly co-opted Roz from "Bugs" to fill the science roll of the lamented Osgood); the Doctor's Party (the two prologues, the one on Karn and the Doctor’s meditation which leads into the party, both feel like “deleted scenes”, being very integral to the action but, I think rightly, excised because they break up the Doctor-less flow); and the return to a gorgeously-realised Skaro (though didn’t he do that already in “Asylum of the Daleks”? Or at least its prequel).

And each is done very well.

Okay, I think that the Dalek control room should have looked bigger. A lot bigger. I get that it’s trying to recreate the look of the first Dalek serial (and of the first Dalek movie) but for all that is was a large set, it still looked like the Dalek Supreme and his chums were playing dressing-up in the attic.

I’d like to see the Dalek throne room looking this big.

It certainly looks like what they were aiming at

From Mechmaster's Daleks Second Empire.

And there's something of a logic flaw in the Master's spectacular "Did you Miss(y) Me" stunt. Why do writers always forget that the planet is moving, both spinning on its axis and hurtling through space; a localised "time stop" – stopping the planes in the sky but not the ground underneath them – would see the planes on one side of the Earth smashed into the ground and on the other left behind in space. You're not "freezing" the planes in space when you freeze them in time; you're making them move through spacetime in a very different and physics-defying way. And if you want to make play of the shadows that they cast on the ground then yes you are saying that the other rules of physics (light and gravity, as well as entropy et al) are all still applying to the "fixed" planes.

But, you know, Time Lord science (aka magic). And it's a call back to "The Time Monster" too.

(While: "I'll be talking to you through…" boing "…the square window" reminds us of the Master's penchant for watching children's television – "The Sea Devils" and "The Sound of Drums". And was hilarious.)

And it's a very Moffat way of making the show. Where Bob Holmes would make the worlds seem larger by alluding to events off screen, the Grand Moff has the budget and the CGI to show rather than tell.

All of which is dressing this up to be a big and important story.

But to be fair, because of the central argument, the difference of philosophy between the Doctor and – let’s say it – Davros, actually this is a big and important story.

Who is the Magician’s Apprentice of the title? I thought it was going to be Clara, but it’s got to be Davros, hasn’t it? Who is the one learning the (possibly wrong) lesson from the self-avowed Magician here?

The choice of title itself is interesting: being a mash-up of the old fable (and Micky Mouse bit in Fantasia) “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” and C.S. Lewis’s Narnia prequel “The Magician’s Nephew”. In the former, the apprentice seeks to solve his problems by creating an army of servants which he quickly loses control of with disastrous consequences. In the latter, the Magician has the (stolen) power to move between worlds, which the boy misuses to release destruction, in the person of Jadis the White Witch, into the world of Narnia. Either seems strangely apposite.

And playing off Davros against the Master makes for an interesting contrast. There is the fabulous discussion of what the Doctor and Master's – have they really been at this longer than our Civilization? possibly, yes – friendship means: the Master is the dark side of the Doctor, the Doctor gone berserk, the Doctor’s ego run rampant. But Davros is the Doctor’s inverse: the scientist-tyrant to the Doctor’s philosopher-knight-errant; the deposed emperor to the Doctor’s abdicated lord; the fascist to his liberal. Missy is the Doctor’s best friend; Davros is his arch enemy. Just as last year the Master tempted the Doctor with an army of Cybermen to see just how far a good man would go: will you do anything to people for their own good? (i.e. are you a communist?) Here were we see Davros asking the “Let’s Kill Hitler” question that “Let’s Kill Hitler” ducked: is compassion worth the price or do you put the greater number first? (i.e. are you a fascist?)

I’ll give the Mister Moffster this: he’s not shy of tackling the big questions.

The problem with the moral question first posed in "Genesis of the Daleks" is that it's just so easy to present the downsides to letting Davros live.

But the Doctor is clearly not going to "exterminate" Davros.

Apart from anything else it would be a paradox big enough to implode the Universe; wiping out the Time War and most of the Doctor's own history. In the climax to last year (also written by Steven Moffat) the Doctor explained the grandfather of time paradoxes to Clara: if she rewites her own history so that Danny's death doesn't happen, she won't have any reason to rewrite her own history. This is that times a billion. Times a billion billion. Times a google.

And I don't think it's particularly difficult to work out how the cliffhanger resolves.

Just to deal with the side-bluff of killing Missy, Clara and the TARDIS for starters… they ain’t dead. Missy and Clara are, for example, carefully established to be wearing vortex manipulators (Clara's, presumably, still got Jack's one which she acquired in "Day of the Doctor") and they are slaved together so (visible skeletons notwithstanding) the pair of them can be teleported away together to wherever Missy planned to escape to. And it’s not impossible that that’s a fake TARDIS shell, either – and the real one has been chameleon-circuited into that tank. (Which in itself might be a comment on the Daleks.)

And for the biggie: the Doctor isn't aiming the Dalek gun at Davros but at the hand mines, not to pre-execute the genocidal megalomaniac, rather try to teach him a lesson in compassion.

But by placing as the cliffhanger rather than instantly resolving this, Moffat forces us to sit and think about this for a whole week. And because Moffat has timey-wimey form, we cannot just dismiss the possibility that he (Moffat if not the Doctor) might just consider rewriting the whole of Doctor Who history. Again.

Moffat and/or the Doctor as written by Moffat is such a tricksy person to pin down, morally. I maintain that he commits genocide against the Silence in “Day of the Moon” (genocide and attempted genocide are the same crime; guilt does not require you to succeed or there would be no one Jewish left alive; and the Doctor is culpable for the order to “kill them all on sight”). But he also undoes the genocide of the Time Lords (and possibly the Daleks – although I’m pretty sure he’s still intent on getting them all killed, they do kind of become the biggest ever “shot with their own weapon” rather than shot by the Doctor).

As recently as last season, he was trying very hard not to have to treat the Boneless (“Flatline”) as monsters to be defeated until they exhausted their last chances and his excuses; and of course this is the same question that sits at the heart of “Kill the Moon”.

It certainly looks like Moffat is saying that anyone who came down on the side of killing the Moon – one life for billions – is buying Davros’ argument that “compassion is wrong”. That’s a pretty serious slap in the face to a lot of Who-fans.

What we’re hoping is that this time the Doctor will win his moral argument with Davros, rather than hand-waving or timey-wiming his way out of answering, having failed so disastrously with Saward and (incredibly) with Russell having Davros apparently shame the Doctor with his rant in “Journey’s End”.

It’s a lot easier to accept “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one” when it’s Mr Spock spouting the fascist (in the original sense of the nation must all bind together to the will of the leader) dictum rather than the creator of the Daleks.

But it also gives weight to Davros’ point of view, to Davros having a valid point of view, if quite a sizeable percentage of the audience might be thinking: “hang on though, he’s got a point about this one life for many business”.

In a way, though, that question is much better framed here, because – unlike “Kill the Moon” – we know that the outcome is not that the Earth survives unharmed/“gets away with it”, but that Davros alive is a total Universe-fracking disaster for everyone alive everywhere ever.

And of course it’s wonderful to have the ever-melodious tones of Tom frame the question for us so unambiguously. (And isn’t it nice that Davros has the BBC DVD of “Genesis of the Daleks” – available in good shops and online – for reference.)

I’ve seen this referred to in Craig Hinton’s terms as “fanwank”.

(Even aside from the “so it’s come to this, a Doctor Who clips show”, there were a number of moments that were… reminiscent of earlier Doctors, from the “Dead Planet” Daleks and the look of Skaro’s gleaming, futuristic, Dalek city; via a twelfth century Essex castle like the one the third Doctor visited in “The Time Warrior”; to the look of Skaro’s mist-haunted, blasted wasteland of mines and biplanes with lasers versus bows and arrows as visited by the fourth Doctor; via the possible nod of Colony Sarff to the Mara, the fifth Doctor’s demons, at just the moment he’s facing his shame; up to UNIT’s Tower of London base as visited by the tenth and eleventh Doctors. I’m sure there were others.)

It’s certainly very fan-pleasing. But I would have to say “fanwank” is fan-satisfying to no other purpose. It would be – to pick an example from entirely out of the air – having a story set in 1987 to clarify that the Doctor knows for a fact that there are no Thals left on Skaro before he fries the place to a cinder in 1988’s “Remembrance of the Daleks”.

But Moffat is using the history of Doctor Who to remind us over and over of the importance of his central question: “is compassion wrong?”

Hell, that’s pretty much what the Time War was fought over.

The clips that we see (or rather more hear, though they are up on Davros’ DVD wall of shame) from Peter D and Baker C are from “Resurrection of the Daleks” where the Doctor thinks he will execute Davros, but fails, and from “Revelation of the Daleks” where he castigates Davros not for turning the galaxy’s greatest funeral home into a Soylent Green factory but for not telling the deceased’s relatives. Both in their very different ways hinge on “compassion”. Even Sylv’s “unlimited rice pudding” speech (which we also hear) finishes with the Doctor having pity for Davros.

In the Saward and Davies philosophical confrontations, Davros was an enormous hypocrite. With his back against the wall, he rants and jeers, in part, because his own Daleks are on the verge of killing him. And he would rather die at their plungers than concede the Doctor might have won the argument.

But here, although he’s the mad uncle in the attic, it’s like the Daleks in the other attic have forgotten about him – Alex has a terrible thought: maybe Moffat’s going to announce that the few Daleks playing dress-up are in their attic because the whole rest of the city is run by… Their Greatest Mistakes. The Horror. Though they’d have to have those doors widened – But that brings me back to my point. Who has the Dark Lord Moff, brooding for long ages in the darkness, come to believe is the greatest evil and his arch-enemy, bringing him low since the days of his greatness (under Russell, when he only had to write one script a year, as opposed to now where he… struggles to write two scripts a year)?

The critics, that’s who. The fans. The people who watch his stories over and over again and pull them slowly to pieces until there’s nothing left.

Davros has summoned the Doctor to his DVD wall of shame to do just the same to the Doctor. Never mind “We are the Daleks” (actually, while some of it’s brilliant, I minded some of it very much); Tonight, Matthew, the curly-haired Scottish hero turns directly to camera and tells us: “You are Davros!”

“Genesis of the Daleks” concludes with Sarah Jane asking if their mission to Skaro has failed. The Doctor tells her that out of the Evil of the Daleks, will come good. I’ve previously argued – and still believe – that that good is a Universe with compassion. You can either have a Universe, a version of History, that has compassion or you can commit genocide. Your History can either be Time Lords and Daleks. Or you can be Daleks.

What makes the Doctor a moral character is that he makes choices. Davros makes one choice and creates the Daleks. Who promptly take all his choices away from him. The Doctor still has the ability to choose. Let’s see how he chooses.

Next Time… So Davros is dead and now the Quarks are the most deadly threat in the Universe… perhaps not. If Davros is the Magician’s Apprentice then Clara… “you’re the puppy” …must be “The Witch’s Familiar”.

Day 4990: Doctor Who: Strictly Come Dalek

Saturday:

How many times can we tell this story?

Terry Nation, infamously, recycled "The Daleks" on let's just say "several" occasions, but now it seems that the "good Dalek" story is giving him a run for his money.

And it turns out that what's inside a Dalek is, basically, "Doctor Who", including corridors for running up and down, bug-eyed monsters (that are literally bug eyes), gunk tank, and an archive with, of course, missing episodes. If only they'd found "The Evil of the Daleks" they could have seen what happens when Daleks "turn good", and saved a lot of bother.

David Whitaker's second Doctor classic is not only pretty much the series' definitive story already – the Doctor has adventures in present, past and future on a distant planet, with Daleks – but already explored what makes the difference between the Human Factor and the Dalek Factor. "Dalek", "Evolution of the Daleks", and "Journey's End" all feature tinpot tyrants who see the error of their ways, or at least see that the Daleks' main operating principle of "exterminate everyone else" is evil. And futile. Life, as is pointed out, prevails.

There was even the graphic novel "The Only Good Dalek" – still more ironic, in this context – and of course David Whitaker’s TV21 original… Oh, and "Children of the Revolution"… The comics like this story, don’t they?

But if we're talking about getting into the "guts" of "Doctor Who", if we're taking the reference Peter Capaldi's twelfth Doctor makes to his first self's first visit to Skaro as taking us back to the series' very beginning, then questioning our basic assumptions about who the Doctor is and who the Daleks are is good, necessary stuff.

No, that doesn't do "Into the Dalek" justice – and I feel bad, having watched "Doctor Who Extra" and seeing Nick Briggs so enthused that this is a "new" thing to do with the Daleks.

Much as we "Doctor Who" fans love to laud our series as capable of doing anything, telling any story, infinite in variety, it is in the nature of the show to go in cycles, as each generation matures and a new audience comes along. People who were eleven when they saw Rose and the Doctor face the Dalek in "Dalek" will now be starting their twenties. Even Millennium is a teenager now! Finding new ways to tell old stories is as necessary as telling new ones.

And: "Can Daleks be good?" is about as important a question as the series can ask. So it should keep asking it.

Actually, everyone seems to proceed from the idea that a Dalek that wants to kill other Daleks is "good". As opposed to "differently psychotic". Fortunately, by the end of the episode, the Doctor has, with some help from Clara (let's skate over that unnecessary slap), reached the realisation that this is not good.

Actually, let's not skate over that slap. The Doctor comes to the self-defeating, self-satisfying conclusion that Daleks just are evil. Clara manages to arrest the Doctor's depression with a look. She has got through to him: he's asking what the look is for. It's totally unnecessary actually to hit him. And as a good teacher – which she is – she would know better. The whole of the rest of the episode is about not using violence against the Dalek but trying to do better. That slap really should not be there.

But aside from that, she is completely right that that is not what we have learned.

The show, never mind the Doctor, often treats monsters, especially the deadly dustbins, as irretrievably evil. And therefore it's okay to kill them.

Except, and "Into the Dalek" makes this abundantly clear, the Daleks are as much victims of their evil as perpetrators. That memory vault in their heads – "evil refined as engineering", brilliant line – doesn't so much keep them "pure" as take away their free will.

And taking away free will is about as close as we get to "Doctor Who's" definition of pure evil.

That memory-controlling vault is a very Moffat meme too, and as a further exploration of the mechanics of the Daleks goes very well with the Dalek pathweb from Moffat's "Asylum of the Daleks", and proto-Clara Oswin Oswald's power to make them all forget about the Doctor.

Also it's really quite hard not to think of it as the evolved remnant of Davros' computer limitation that he installed in the very first generation of Daleks, as seen back in "Genesis of the Daleks", nicely tying new series and old series together. You can see how the Daleks, geniuses but conditioned to obey their orders, would improve that to make them even better at obeying. From a certain point of view – Cornell, Topping, Day – that is the "weakness" that the Doctor retroactively adds to the Daleks, making them vulnerable, in the long run, to defeat, thus enabling "Genesis" to be counted as a "win".

I've said before that I disagree. I think that the Doctor wins philosophically by rejecting genocide – yes, he blows up the incubation chamber later, but only once the "limited" Daleks have been sent out and it's no longer the sole repository of the entirety of Dalek-kind. But, importantly, "do I have that right" is an exercise in free will, defining the Doctor – as ever – in opposition to the Daleks.

(And then we've got the Doctor inside the Dalek's head, holding two cables about to make a huge moral decision in yet another "quote".)

Where "Into the Dalek" is very interesting, is that its conclusion restores free will to "Rusty" – and it chooses to find hatred in the Doctor. So the Dalek does not "turn good".



So, this is a brilliant piece of Doctor Who, from the moment that Capaldi appears sneering down at Journey Blue and ticking her off for not being properly grateful, from the (simultaneous – timey-wimey) moment that new boy Danny Pink sits there headdesking intercut with his epic fail response to Clara's chatting him up. It is everything we want our Doctor Who to be: challenging, brave, darkly funny, with an idea that needs thinking about. And the special effects knock it out of the park.

On Facebook, I remarked that the Daleks boarding the Aristotle, while virtually a shot-for-shot remake of a scene from "Resurrection of the Daleks", is a case of someone showing Eric Saward how it's done. (And I know Matthew Robinson not Eric Saward was the director – he actually makes a lot of the rest of the story very brilliant and watchable, but that attack is pretty much unfilmable in a four-camera studio on the budget they had in the Eighties. And as script editor Saward should have known that.)

But never mind that, the opening effect shot of the Dalek saucer pursuing Journey Blue's space fighter through asteroids is… well, almost everyone has seen the opening of "Star Wars", haven't they. That's the league we're playing in now.

In fact I generally thought much more highly of the direction this week, too, Ben Wheatley bringing a real cinematic scope to the adventures. A lot of very interesting direct looks into the camera – in particular the moment they all look into the Dalek-eyestalk-point-of-view before entering the lens (what a trippy journey into the eye of the Dalek too) and the shift in perspective on the Doctor when he goes from "standing in front of Rusty's eye" to "inside Rusty's mind".

And after last time's very literal use of mirrors, there were many more metaphoric reflections here: not least the Doctor and the Dalek, of course, but also soldiers Danny Pink and Journey Blue (and, via the Verity podcast, the Doctor meeting the Dalek with hatred as Clara meets Danny with… flirting).

And, although I don't really want to tread on the mystery of Missy (Hmmm, Missy, Miss Tery… Nah.), but thought that in among the reflections the arrival of Gretchen in "Heaven" mirrored the arrival of Journey Blue in the TARDIS console, making me wonder if Missy wasn't materialising a time-capsule around the "dead". (Unlucky Ross, of course, is definitely physically dead because the Doctor tracks his remains.)

Capaldi continues to impress as the Doctor. Putting the alienation into the alien. Making Journey Blue ask for a lift properly; suddenly being a bastard about Ross's death – "he's the top layer if you want to say a few words"; jumping from despair to delight when Clara teaches him that Daleks are not predestined to be evil; his horror and self-recognition when he realises that what the Dalek chooses to see in his mind is his own worst side.

I have seen people criticising the line: "You are a good Dalek" as a poor man's knockoff of Rob Shearman's "You would make a good Dalek".

But to me it's another example of reflection: the Dalek's statement is definitive – "You are a good Dalek" – as inversion of the Doctor's question, "Am I a good man?". Again, recalling "The Evil of the Daleks", asking questions is a sign of the Human Factor and the antithesis of the Dalek Factor.

And it's more of Moffat-era playing with ambiguity (see last week). Where the Dalek in "Dalek" means it only one way (and a nasty way, at that), here we ask does Rusty the Dalek mean: "You are good at being a Dalek" (good in the Dalek sense); or "You are what a Dalek would be if it really were good"? (good as the Doctor would understand it). The Doctor's fear and horror is that it's the first.

It's good that the Doctor knows he should be better than that but isn't.

Remember, this Doctor has just come back (literally from the dead) from the siege of Trenzalore, hundreds and hundreds of years of stand-off against the Daleks, and just seen them overrun the planet, very nearly win, and then get wiped out alongside his chance of getting Gallifrey back… a Time War in miniature all over again. So he's had those hatreds stoked all over again. But also the unexpected reprieve from the regenerations limit may have given him cause to look back, reflect on his lives once more.

The prospect of actual death may have led to the eleventh Doctor living without thinking of the consequences. He wrecked lives – Amelia's, River's, Rory got killed more than anyone deserves – and, to borrow from Captain Kirk, patted himself on the back for his cleverness in dodging the consequences. Much like Moffat himself, in fact.

Capaldi, rather like Eccleston, has the gravitas and reputation to bring off this more introverted side to the Doctor's character, and if his arrival has raised Moffat's game to match that first glorious series from Russell, so much the better.

Equally, Clara continues to flourish thanks to seeing her life outside the TARDIS. It is a bit of a shame that she goes straight from "I'm not your boyfriend" to "hello salty goodness", but having her meet Danny, and how she engages with him start to add an actual second dimension to her. And at the same time she has a stronger relationship with the Doctor now that he is her hobby, rather than she being a puzzle for him to solve.

"Doctor Who" is often at its best when it operates on the fringes of great events. That old Bob Holmes technique for painting a bigger canvas by alluding to the larger story off. Think backstory in "Pyramids of Mars" or the galactic politics that drop the Graff Vynda K into "The Ribos Operation". So I like that what we see here is the fringe of a galactic war. We don't go straight to the Emperor and learn about the Master Plan; we take the view from the trenches. Leave the rest of the story to your imagination – it's bigger on the inside, that way.

Next time: Mark Gatiss writes what looks like a comedy historical. There's Ben Miller in the Sheriff of Nottingham's castle, wearing the Sheriff of Nottingham's hose; sporting the Sheriff of Nottingham's sticky-on beard.

Is he the baddy?

(Hat tip: Warped Factor)

But who's that blank-faced automaton… or is Jason Connery not in this one? Twang! It's "Robot of Sherwood".

Day 4697: Millennium’s Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Top Trunks #17: DAVROS

Sunday:

Age: Slept through all of Dalek history
Stories: 18 (plus something called “War of the Daleks”)
Awesomeness: Inventor of the Daleks. Also the spork.
Cuddles: Nyder (denied)
AKA: Roy Tromelly, naughty, naughty Terry Molloy

Day 4693 BONUS2: Millennium’s Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Top Trunks #10: JOE LIDSTER

Still Wednesday:

Age: Disgustingly young
Stories: 14
Awesomeness: Wizard vs Aliens
Cuddles: Rapture
AKA: writer of TORCHWOOD: A Day In The Death (aka the good one); THE SARAH JANE ADVENTURES: Mark of the Berserker, The Mad Woman in the Attic, The Nightmare Man (aka the AMAZINGLY good one); The Rapture, Master, Terra Firma (aka the good one with DALEKS in it) and far, far too much more.

Day 4641: A Doctor Woo Metaphor for Conference

Sunday:

If the Conservatories are the dastardly DALEKS… and Hard Labour are the soulless CYBERMEN… are the Liberal Democrats:

a) The SILURIANS – green-tinged former rulers of Earth; now caught in a suspended animation time-warp…

b) The SONTARANS – bit shouty; always keen for a fight; treated as a bit of a joke by everyone else…

or

c) The WEEPING ANGELS – kill you with kindness; change position suddenly when you’re not looking; can’t even look at each other…

Day 4535: DOCTOR WHO: Matt Finish

Saturday:


We are sad because Matt Smith has announced that he will be handing on the mantle of The Doctor.

It feels too soon.

It shouldn’t. By the time he goes, he’ll have appeared in thirty-nine stories over forty-four episodes, which is either slightly more or slightly fewer than David Tennant (who did thirty-four in forty-seven), and his three seasons will have covered four years, much as David’s three-years-plus-specials did.

But perhaps it’s the way the split seasons felt like cheating, maybe it’s that the Ponds stuck around so long, but something about the eleventh Doctor feels like unfulfilled potential.

Is the lifespan of a Doctor measured in numbers of companions rather than screen time? David went adventuring with three companions – Rose, Martha and Donna – and travelled alone after, giving a distinct sense of three or four “eras” of the tenth Doctor. Matt’s eleventh Doctor clung on to Amy for longer even than Rose, and River Song has hung on even longer. A second – and full – season with Clara would have felt more balanced. As it is, the eight episodes this year feel more tacked on than the start of a new era that they deserve to be.

Or do we measure Doctor’s by the number of “classics” that they appear in? Alex said he was still waiting for Matt to be given the string of great stories that his performance as the Doctor deserved, and he’s right.

Billy sets the bar high from the very first episode, “An Unearthly Child”, and has “The Daleks”, “Marco Polo”, “The Aztecs”, “The Dalek Invasion of Earth”, “The Crusade”, “The Daleks’ Master Plan” (and maybe “The Massacre” if only we could see it); Pat has two Daleks stories, “Tomb of the Cybermen”, “The Web of Fear”, “The Mind Robber”, “The Invasion” and “The War Games”; Jon can point to “...and the Silurians”, “Inferno”, “The Dæmons”, “The Curse of Peladon”, “Carnival of Monsters” and “The Green Death” among others; Tom has “Genesis of the Daleks”, “Pyramids of Mars”, “The Deadly Assassin”, “The Talons of Weng-Chiang”, “City of Death”, “Logopolis” and (as K-9 K-Tel would say) many, many more. Even Chris has “Dalek”, “The Empty Child” and “Parting of the Ways” on his list from one too short a season, while David can lay claim to “Human Nature” and “Blink”, and arguably “Doomsday” and “Last of the Time Lords”, with “Tooth and Claw”, “Gridlock”, “Turn Left,” “Midnight” and “The Waters of Mars” all bubbling under. These eras all feel “big”.

Conversely, Peter only feels like he’s getting into the swing of it with “The Caves of Androzani”, and although Sylv has “Remembrance of the Daleks” and “The Curse of Fenric”, Colin and Paul have to wait for the invention of Big Finish for any decent stories at all.

Judged on that scale, Matt has had stories that have been crying out to be magnificent that just kind of haven’t been. “The Time of Angels” is almost awesome, but then “Flesh and Stone” starts buggering around with the Angels unique shtick, and begins the confusion over what “erased from time” actually means; “The Pandorica Opens” is let down by the WTF reboot of the universe in “The Big Bang” (and the too-colourful presence of the Tellytubby Daleks); “The Impossible Astronaut”/”The Day of the Moon”... in fact the whole of 2011 yearns to be a grand epic, but it’s deeply undermined by Steven Moffat’s impenetrable, over-extended story arc and a touch of light genocide; by the time we get to “A Good Man Goes to War” and “The Wedding of River Song” the arc is collapsing under its own weight of expectations – largely set up by the Grand Moff’s teasing – and we’re showing off our set pieces, forgetting to tell actual stories in their own right.

So although there are some cracking stories along the way – “Amy’s Choice”, “Vincent and the Doctor”, “The God Complex” and “The Crimson Horror”, even Moffat’s own “Asylum of the Daleks” or “The Snowmen”, not to mention the fan-pleasuring “The Name of the Doctor” – their highs are muffled by the disappointment of story arcs that don’t pay off, seasons without the unity that Russell (or Cartmel, or Bidmead, or Holmes, or Dicks) used to bring, and let’s face it a few real duffer episodes along the way.

And, do you know, thinking about it, I do wonder if it doesn’t all come down to the total disaster that is the last fifteen minutes of “Victory of the Daleks”... just as everything seems to be going brilliantly... THEY appear and suddenly no one is taking this seriously any more.

(And defeating a planet busting bomb with the power of lurve is pretty unspeakable too, and a sign of the direction this series will be heading under Moffat, and unlike the Dalek design decision, that probably is Gatiss fault.)

Would we have been more forgiving of the eleventh Doctor’s first season if we hadn’t already seen the New Paradigm? Did the decision to redesign the series’ iconic villain – and how badly wrong they got it – burn up all of Moffat’s benefit of the doubt? Particularly the way that it was sold: “yeah, we’re changing everything else so we thought we’d redesign the Daleks too”, with hindsight perhaps the braggadocio of a desperate man who’s seen what they’ve made and is having doubts, but coming across as the arrogance of someone who thinks he knows better.

Well, no. It’s not just that.

The errors do compound. A reliance on magic thinking rather than plot logic; a habit of throwing in another “ingenious” idea or another set piece rather than developing the story; a juvenile approach to the sexuality of the lead character (that Amy might react to a trauma like “The Time of Angels” by wanting sex is quite sophisticated; the Doctor responding like a goosed John Inman is not); a conviction that you can bring anyone back from death (especially the endless deaths of Rory Pond)because “it’s science fiction”, when death should be the most serious thing – “nobody dies” was supposed to be “just this once”, not every damn week; a failure to explain in clear terms how major plot threads actually resolved – why the hell did the TARDIS blow up and crack the Universe? Is Madam Kovarian actually dead or did that timeline not really happen? Why were the Silence at “war” with the Doctor? How did he convince River she didn’t want to murder him in “Let’s Kill Hitler”? – and finally a lack of emotional awareness, of understanding that terrible events have consequences, more than anything that baffling decision to make the crucial follow-up to the emotionally charged revelations of “A Good Man Goes to War” an episode of comedy Nazis, indeed a farce, of all things...

Russell wrote a lot of stories that didn’t make a great deal of sense when you looked at them later, or where he pulled a solution out of his hat, but where you felt there was a solid reason why they played out the way they did.

Steven, on the other hand, writes intricate constructions from ideas, not always all his own, with dialogue either wittily clever or poetically moving, which are spectacular but hollow.

e.g. When Russell writes the stars going out, he ties it directly to the nihilistic insanity of Davros, this man who hates everything else so much that he’d rather annihilate it all than suffer it to continue to exist.

When Steven writes the stars going out, it’s the result of a convoluted series of events orchestrated by someone we don’t actually in order to blow up the TARDIS for reasons that we don’t understand and never get explained.

(The most likely candidates remain the Silence, who blow up the TARDIS to stop the Doctor reaching Trenzalore, and the entire Universe was destroyed only by accident. Which has to be embarrassing, even if the whole purpose of your cult wasn’t, apparently, to stop the Doctor reaching Trenzalore in order to, er, prevent the entire Universe being destroyed.)

More bluntly, Russell wrote some great stories with rubbish plots; Moffat has the reverse problem.

Except, he is getting better.

People seem to have wearied of Moffat’s bag of conjuring tricks recently, unfortunately just at the point where he seems to have been pulling out of his rut. The 2013 series seems to have come in for unwarranted heavy criticism, from the professional critics as well as the usual fan assassins, and I seem to be in a definite minority in thinking that the stories this year have shown a marked sense of improvement over the lacklustre 2010 and horrible mess of 2011. Whether it’s because Caro Skinner was good for him behind the scenes or because the (maybe I’m reading too much into it) apparent decision to theme an episode for each of the “classic” Doctors gave them some extra impetus to the “movie of the week” style he said he’d adopted for season seven, they’ve all felt much more like stories that had a reason for telling them, moreso even than the five episodes in 2012.

They’re still hamstrung by the shortness of the running time, and if I were producer I’d be pushing for more not fewer (or no!) two-part stories, or at least an extra quarter of an hour each episode (even if it meant only ten episodes in a series. You know, like “Game of Thrones”, which doesn’t do too badly, I understand). And Clara still seems to have no character (which is a shame because I’ve liked Jenna-Louise all along). But even when they’re getting it wrong – “Akhaten”, “Journey...” – at least they’re now getting it wrong for the right reasons: ambition of storytelling exceeding the running time or resources available.

And “The Name of the Doctor” is very nearly right. Sure, it’s still a bit stringing set-pieces together, but there’s a lot more science stuff injected into the fairytale: time travel on the astral plane and a conference call by telepathy, these feel like the sorts of things Doctor Who used to do; and the idea that the Doctor’s travels are a scar on the face of the Universe, that his death is a wound that allows access to all of history, specifically his history (which surely includes the dreaded Time War), these aren’t just conceptually intriguing, but they’re the sort of thing that used to allow us to have the Doctor’s good and bad angels (Clara and the Intelligence) fighting for his soul over the length of his lifetime. And it’s actually about something: “The Name of the Doctor” is about the name of the Doctor being “The Doctor”, that it’s a choice and how and why that is important, to him and to us.

It’s a tragedy that, at least until “The Name of the Doctor”, “The Eleventh Hour” was probably Matt’s best overall story. “The Eleventh Hour” promised so much, and Matt delivered, he’s been terrific every single week, but we are left still waiting for a story that is as great as he is.

Do you hear me, Mr Moffster? The fiftieth anniversary show had better be BLOODY good!

Matt Smith: saluté!

PS:
...and the other sad thing is that this will be the end of the eleventh Doctor’s theme tune. No, not the current tortuous reworking of Ron Grainer: Murray Gold’s lovely eleventh Doctor anthem “Every Star and Every Planet” (“I Am The Doctor”) which is as engrained in this era as “Dance of the Macra” (“All The Strange, Strange Creatures”) was in the tenth Doctor’s, possibly even more so.


Coming Soon...If I ever manage to find some time, I hope to be doing reviews of the two episodes of 2013 I didn’t get around to – “Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS” which I disliked and “The Crimson Horror” which I adored – and a couple of those classics I mentioned above: Tom Baker in “The Talons of Weng-Chiang” and Jon Pertwee in the beautiful new restoration of “The Mind of Evil”. Before that, one of the best bits of Doctor Who you’re likely to come across this year... it’s a book, and obviously the Doctor isn’t in it. Obverse Books’ new Faction Paradox novel: Lawrence Burton’s “Against Nature”. Seriously, go read it!

Day 2491: DOCTOR WHO: The Dalek Masterplan

Saturday:


We return to Portsmouth to see Mr Nick Scovell and his Interalia Theatre present their follow-up to last year's "The Evil of the Daleks".

GOOD NEWS! It was fantastic! BAD NEWS! It was their last ever Doctor Who production.

Originally starring the ORIGINAL Dr Who, Mr Billy Hartnell, "The Daleks' Master Plan" is (beaten only by the fourteen-part "Trial of a Time Lord") the second-longest story in Doctor Who history at thirteen episodes if you count the unique one-off one-week "Mission to the Unknown", which acted as a kind of twenty-five-minute trailer, staring none of the usual TARDIS crew, a month before the main action begins.

(The play clearly DOES count it this way, because it has got the character of Mr Marc Cory from "Mission to the Unknown" in it!)

Although previously having adapted missing stories from Mr Dr Pat's time for his own interpretation of the Doctor – "The Web of Fear", "Fury from the Deep" and, of course, "The Evil of the Daleks" – this time Mr Nick has gone with Mr Dr Billy's classic in order that they might go out on a REALLY high note.

Six-and–a-half hours of television obviously needs a bit of SQUEEZING to fit onto the stage at the New Theatre Royal in Portsmouth, so there have been a few trims and changes.

This is another of the so-called LOST stories – well, so-called by the BBC… who are the ones who MADE them LOST in the first place! For those of you who do NOT know the story, I had better quickly run through the version that was broadcast in 1966…

The Daleks' Master Plan on Television

It is 4000 A.D. In "Mission to the Unknown", Space Special Security Agent Marc Cory discovers a Dalek plot to take over the Universe, only to get exterminated before he can tell anyone. "The Daleks' Master Plan" then begins (after Dr Who and chums have spent a month in ancient Troy) with another Space Special Security Agent, this time Bret Vyon, searching for Cory and instead finding Dr Who and the TARDIS on planet Kembel.

Dr Who insists on discovering the Daleks' plan and it's a DOOZEY! They have allied themselves with a bunch of weird-looking aliens from the outer galaxies and are planning to invade the Solar System, using their spanking new ultimate weapon, the Time Destructor. Aiding them in this villainy is Mr Mavic Chen, Guardian of the Solar System and great big TRAITOR to humanity. He provides the Daleks with both some much needed CAMP and a full Emm of Taranium (short for Terry-Nation-ium) the most rare and powerful element in the magic toybox. (This year.)

Dr Who steals the Taranium and, cut off from the TARDIS, he and his friends Steven and Katarina along with butch Bret make their escape by stealing Mr Mavic's spaceship. The chase is ON! First to the prison planet Desperus, where innocent Trojan handmaiden Katarina sacrifices herself, then to Earth where poor old Bret is gunned down in cold blood, and then to distant planet Mira, where Dr Who manages to turn Bret's killer, Sara Kingdom, back to the light side before the Daleks capture them and drag them back to Kembel.

But that's not the end! Fooling them with a fake Taranium Core, Dr Who eludes the Daleks and escapes with Steven and Sara in his TARDIS. The chase is ON! Again! Hijinks in time and space ensue, not least in the notorious Christmas episode: "The Feast of Steven (no relation)". After stopping off on the planet Tigus, they arrive on an Ancient Egyptian building site – yes, it's the pyramids – where the Daleks finally get the Taranium back.

But that's not the end! By stealing the directional unit from the time machine of rival Time Lord mysterious alien of the same race as Dr Who though we do not know who they are yet, the Meddling Monk, Dr Who is able to chase the Daleks back to Kembel. There he discovers that the Daleks have (unsurprisingly) betrayed their alien allies, and that Mr Mavic has finally gone right round the twist. While the Daleks are busy exterminating the traitorous nut-job, Dr Who pinches their Time Destructor, inadvisably setting it off in the process. Sara comes from the TARDIS to try and save Dr Who, probably saving his life but ageing to death herself – Steven, seeing this, also comes to help and manages to reverse the weapon, so that the Daleks all age backwards into goo, while the surface of Kembel is reduced to dust.

Phew!

The Dalek Masterplan on Stage

The two biggest changes [A: aside from the title's punctuation] are, first, to get rid of all the aliens (Daleks excepted) and replace the representatives of the outer galaxies with representatives of the "Seven Systems", the worlds colonised by humans; and, second, to do away with MOST of the chasing about in space and ALL of the chasing about in time.

The story opens with some of Interalia's trademark filmed inserts: some rather corking – if, like the music, heavily Babylon 5-influenced – computer generated spaceship shots with a voiceover giving a brief potted history of humans colonising the Seven Systems.

The Seven Systems has a suspiciously Blake's Seven-esque S7 logo… though that is fair enough as the Solar System of the "The Daleks' Master Plan" era is obviously a DRY RUN for Mr Nation's later series' Terran Federation. In fact, if you believe books like "Corpse Marker" and audios like "Kaldor City" (and why shouldn't you – they're ACE!) which imply that Blake's Seven takes place in the Doctor Who universe, then there's a good chance that it IS the (embryonic) Terran Federation.

Anyway, one of the seven systems is Kalastar wherein lies the planet Kembel, site of a human base. Marc Cory is working undercover there and on New Year's Eve 3999 is trying to get a message through to the Space Special Security Agency. Before he succeeds, Governor Zephon (a human and not a walking plant as on telly) shoots him and betrays the planet into the suckers of the Daleks.

In response to this, Guardian of the seven Systems, Mr Mavic Chen gathers the Executive… and promptly hands them over to the Daleks because he's a traitor too. Only representative Trantis comes over to his side, so the Daleks exterminate the rest of them – using Movie-like FIRE EXTINGUISHER blasts! So real, you MUST be there… and we WERE!

Fortunately, Dr Who was near enough to intercept Mr Marc's message, and arrives on Kembel. He rescues Mr Marc's girlfriend Katarina and a pilot called Steven. Here Steven and Katarina are brother and sister, rather than both friends of Dr Who who arrive with him at the start. They escape from the base in the TARDIS and meet up with Mr Marc's contact, Agent Bret Vyon. Together, they watch as the Daleks start to incinerate the vegetation on Kembel. Dr Who goes back to find out what the Daleks are up to. Inside, he sees Mr Mavic about to hand over the taranium – or t'RAN-ee-um rather than the TV pronunciation of t'RAY-ne-um – which he promptly thieves out of Mr Mavic's fingers.

Dr Who, Steven, Katarina and Bret all escape aboard Mr Mavic's crusier, but – as they are passing the planet Mira – the Daleks teleport one of their agents on board. They have used their genetic technology to make a DUPLICATE of Mr Marc. (Dalek Duplicates like this are a big part of the 1980's story "Resurrection of the Daleks" with Mr Dr Peter, BUT the Daleks ALSO made a duplicate of Dr Who himself in the 1960's story "The Chase", so this idea is not SO out of place after all.)

Although Katarina saves them from the duplicate Cory by sacrificing herself (like on telly), they still crash on the planet Mira… END OF PART ONE!

Intermission… time for ICE CREAM! I impress all the kiddies with Sonic Screwdrivers by brandishing my LASER Screwdriver. Hahahahahaaaaa

PART TWO! They crash on the planet Mira only to be rescued by Agent Sara Kingdom… except she's been sent there by Mr Mavic to recover the stolen taranium. She shoots Bret (like on telly) and then joins Dr Who and Steven in returning to Kembel.

Pretending to do a deal with Mr Mavic, Dr Who hands him a handy fake taranium, which he then goes and gives to the Daleks proving he is BAAAAAD. They plug it straight into the Time Destructor and test it… on HIM! So, on the one fluffy foot, the fake taranium saves him from being Time Destructed… on the other fluffy foot, this gets him EXTERMINATED instead.

Dr Who has worked out what the Time Destructor actually does – it uses DNA for targeting to destruct the time of one individual or species. He gives the Daleks the REAL taranium, telling them that he has wiped it clean of targeting DNA, so they cannot use it without destructing EVERYTHING… but, being Daleks, the Daleks go and use it anyway. Well, Dr Who expected that and REALLY put in some Dalek DNA so the Daleks end up time-destructing themselves.

But that's not the end! (See, you can do it on stage too!) The Dalek Supreme (played by Dalek Sec himself!) survives long enough to restart the Time Destructor so that it WILL destruct everything. So, Dr Who has to absorb the time energies himself (like in "The Parting of the Ways") even though it will kill him.

At the last moment, Sara comes out of the TARDIS and, because she absorbs some of the destruction, Dr Who is able to survive by regenerating… into Mr Nicholas Briggs!

Phew!

So WHAT did we think of THAT?

Well, for a start it is a more COHERENT, a more FOCUSED story that the one that appeared on television. The original "The Daleks' Master Plan" has plot holes that arise from the struggle to get two different people (plus Mr Terry Nation) to write a continuous story that lasts a quarter of a year, often with no idea what was coming next or frequently before!

In practical terms, the TV version is really several stories, at least three and maybe four or five. It has to be, since they couldn't and didn't expect the audience to be following it religiously. Rather, viewers would drop in and out and pick up what was going on at the time. The play can do away with that, and the necessary redundancy of having to explain the exposition again every few weeks. It can also take advantage of the fact that it KNOWS where it's going to end up in order to make the story head towards that place rather than just arrive there.

On the whole, the editing works very well, scaling the story down to fit the ninety-minute format of a New Series two-parter (including exciting "Next time…" trailer at the interval!)

It does mean losing some of the MASSIVE SCOPE of the television version: galaxies become just star systems; weird aliens become ordinary humans; and the backdrop of a chase all across space and time is (necessarily) truncated.

Along the way, it fixes some of those problems with the original.

The TV story's biggest whoopsie is that the VITAL message recorded by Mr Marc Cory in "Mission to the Unknown"… ends up going nowhere; nothing is made of it at all. The play fixes that by having it be the "inciting incident" that draws Dr Who into the goings-on. (Of course, in the original, Dr Who had no power to control where his TARDIS took him – not until years later after his exile could he control the thing – so they couldn't have used it that way back then.)

Another thing wrong with the telly version is that no one is quite sure what the Time Destructor is actually FOR. On the television, it just accelerates time – ageing people to death. The Daleks don't mind that because they are designed to be practically immortal; it is only when it goes haywire and starts reversing time that they get their comeuppance. This makes it a powerful but FINITE weapon, not perhaps ultimate ENOUGH for the significance it is given by the plot. (Obviously it's MEANT to be a metaphor for the ATOM BOMB – a weapon so powerful that it stops a war just by existing. But then Daleks are not going to build a weapon for NOT using!)

The play makes the Time Destruction much, much more ultimate, having it do what a lot of people think that the D-Mat Gun (another "ultimate weapon") is supposed to do – namely blast you and everyone you know entirely out of time.

This makes the story a LOT MORE like "The Evil of the Daleks", in that not only are the Daleks completely wiped out (AGAIN!) but they are destroyed by their own amorality.

In fact, I remember that Mr Nick made a tweak to the story of "Evil…" too: where originally the Daleks' Dalek-ising machine didn't work on Mr Dr Pat just because he was an alien (which the Daleks didn't just KNOW but had made an important part of their plot!), in his version it was Dr Who's connection to his friends (when the Daleks REJECT friendship) that saves him and ultimately DOOMS them.

Also like the stage "Evil…", which had Mr Edward Waterfield turned into a doubting reverend, there are a lot of RELIGIOUS overtones added. Dr Who refers to the Daleks' own "GOSPEL" (destroy… everything!), and justifies their destruction – to himself – because they are "made things", artificial, not a "proper" part of creation. Daddy Alex thinks he recognises the signs of a CHURCH UPBRINGING!

This means not only that the Masterplan of the title is more than JUST the (mundane) invasion of the galaxy, but also that the conclusion is based around the MORALITY of their choice: would they rather let humans anyone else? exist or destroy everything, themselves included.

Unfortunately, this also leads to a logical error in the stage story. Dr Who tricks the Daleks into wiping themselves out by giving them a choice between using the Time Destructor when it will destruct EVERYTHING and not using it at all. Except, the Daleks really do have a "Plan B" at this point – their fleets have massed on the borders of human space and the human news are all saying that they think the Daleks will WIN. The Time Destructor ploy is to make it EASY for the Daleks, but it is not essential.

So, the choice that Dr Who gives them is a FALSE choice. Giving up using the Time Destructor is NOT the end of their invasion plans, and only a few minutes earlier they were getting ready to go ahead without it anyway! Besides, what is to stop them SHOOTING the irritating Time Lord, REMOVING the taranium from the machine and re-reprogramming it themselves?


It seems that the script is trying to reach the HIGHPOINT of Doctor Who MORAL PHILOSOPHY: "Genesis of the Daleks", a story that hangs entirely around two essential moral questions. The one everyone remembers is the Doctor's "Do I have that right?" speech when contemplating genocide of the nascent Dalek embryos. The other, though, is more relevant here. The Doctor, recognising that Davros while obviously obsessed with his creation is also highly intelligent, suggests to him a thought-experiment: "if you had created a virus in your laboratory, something contagious and infectious that killed on contact, a virus that would destroy all other forms of life – would you allow its use?"

SUPERFICIALLY this looks like a similar question to the one Dr Who offers the Daleks over their Time Destructor here. Change your mind or kill everything. Except it's NOT the same, because in "Genesis…" Dr Who is trying to make Davros see the dangers of creating a force of destruction that will not ever stop, he is trying to make Davros see reason and temper the Daleks. (Davros, of course, for all his genius, is also a NUTTER, so he doesn't see the downside.)

In this "Dalek Masterplan", Dr Who is playing HUSTLE: he is offering the Daleks a BOOBY TRAP but, like the long-con artists, has left them with an OUT.

When the Doctor asks the Daleks: will you give up and go home or blow up everything, he's ACTUALLY echoing Davros' offer at his "trial" in the Kaled bunker: here's a big "blow up everything" button – if you won't side with me, I dare you to use it!

In fact this ending is very much more "Remembrance of the Daleks", another story where the Doctor provokes the Daleks into using what THEY think is an ultimate weapon only to reveal that he has previously programmed it to BACKFIRE on them!

"I beg of you, Davros, do not use the Haaaaaand!"

Sorry, Doctor, but it IS still genocide even when you sucker the other side into pushing the button on themselves!

The script is consciously riffing on other Dalek stories too, both earlier and later ones in their chronology (plus mention of Sanctuary Base design from "The Impossible Planet" linked to the Scott-Bailey principle from "The Brain of Morbius" and one snuck in from "Revenge of the Cybermen": a reference to "phobic energy discharge" during teleportation). "Destiny" is casually mentioned – it's their second favourite word, says Dr Who dismissively. And Mr Mavic invites the members of the Executive to come and stand with him, a la Mr Davros in "Genesis of the Daleks", and then likewise tells them that he offered them power and they chose extermination.

When he immobilises a random Dalek grunt, Dr Who mentions doing something similar on Spiridon (the "Planet of the Daleks"). Mind you, THAT'S a line from "Remembrance…" as well!

Ideas from the New Series creep in as well. When the Doctor refers to the Daleks' gospel of hate, he says that all they desire is to be alone, the worst thing in the universe. It is a clear foreshadowing of the loneliness of the ninth and tenth Dr Whos. Likewise, the implication at the end, when Sara's sacrifice saves him, is that he survives BECAUSE he is not alone – it is a REITERATION of the idea from the stage version of "Evil…" that having FRIENDS is the key to salvation; that living depends on the OPPOSITE of being a Dalek.

And the Dalek Supreme's last line… "Emergency Temporal… Restart!" is surely a cheeky reference to the Cult of Skaro's getaway in "Doomsday".

Possibly the BEST lines though are from the original "The Daleks' Master Plan" on telly: "I'm a citizen of the Universe, and a gentleman to boot" and "Oh, it's New Year; am I too late to wish a Merry Christmas to everyone at home?" (Both of which, IRONICALLY, come from "The Feast of Steven"!)

Daddy Alex spotted another couple of other BLOOPERS that arose from the trims to the story.

The first is when Dr Who and his chums escape from the planet the first time. On the telly, it has been established that (a) the Daleks have found the TARDIS and (b) the flames of Operation Inferno have cut off Dr Who and so he cannot get back to his own ship. Under those circumstances, he takes the next best option and nicks Mr Mavic's Spar. By giving him more control of the TARDIS and having him still using it to bounce around Kembel, the play doesn't really HAVE a reason for escaping by spaceship rather than TARDIS.

(And, come to think of it, neither play NOR telly has a good explanation of WHY the Daleks decide to start flame-throwering the jungle. Apart from it looking REALLY COOL!)

The second booboo is when Agent Sara shoots Agent Bret, who it turns out is her brother, remember. She goes into shock at what she has done, and so when Dr Who puts himself in harm's way she cannot shoot him and essentially turns to his side. But then, shortly later, she has a go at Dr Who and Steven about them being the traitors and Dr Who has to talk her round to his side AGAIN.

Equally, from the original, Agent Bret meets a friend, Daskar, on Earth who accidentally gives away that he knows about the taranium – which must mean he is in with the traitorous Mr Mavic. So Bret shoots him. In the play, it is Sara who slips up and reveals her knowledge of the taranium so Bret realises she's not on his side… but he DOESN'T shoot her, or even draw his gun, which makes him look just a little bit STUPID when SHE shoots HIM five seconds later.

And it is a LITTLE BIT cheesy when the Dalek Supreme, who the Time Destructor is supposed to have wiped out of history, gets just… one… last… gasp… Still, that's villains for you.


The set is a return to the minimalist approach that worked so very well for "The Web of Fear": mainly an empty stage, with a raised platform to either side, with two large triangular columns – or giant Dalek Toblerones, as we called them – that move from the sides to the centre depending on where they are needed to change the dynamic of the stage. At the end, they rotate and come together – like a theatrical Transformer – to become the Time Destructor. (Not QUITE as cool as last year's Dalek Emperor reveal, though!) However, the best use of them is when they become the airlock of the stolen spaceship for the dramatic moment where Katarina, held hostage by Dalekised Mr Marc, ejects him and herself into space rather than surrender.

This is a CRUCIAL moment in the story – on stage as it was on television – because as "Dr Who's girl" Katarina ought to be death-proof. That she's NOT shows that the stakes are higher than EVER BEFORE. There were audible GASPS of HORROR from children in the audience when they realised what had happened!

The Daleks themselves are, always, a triumph of design. Here, as last year, they a in most part a curious blend of old-style Daleks, in silver with blue bumps, with added New Series ear-lights. Sadly we do NOT get to see Daleks equipped with PYROFLAMES for the Operation Inferno scene, though TECH OPS Daleks, with green and red highlighting and claw arms instead of suckers do turn up to operate the Time Destructor. A red Dalek Commander seems to rule the roost, until a VERY swish Black Dalek Supreme turns up to take over. This one is a PERFECT new series model, right down to the separately articulated mid-section (for final surprise EXTERMINATION!), painted Dalek name-tag under the eyestalk, and extraordinarily powerful blue light in the eye – particularly visible in the darkened scenes as an extra spotlight!

In fact, a LOT of the lighting is exceptionally clever, but never better than the moments where Dr Who, Steven, Katarina and Bret gaze out from one of the platforms over the burning jungles of Kembel – done entirely with flickering crimson light.

The acting was the usual mixed bag: Mr Nick (S) as Dr Who was as excellent, as ever as was Mr James George, last year's magnificent Theodore Maxtible, this year as Mr Mavic. (What a shame we won't get to see his Tobias Vaughn!) Ms Helen Stoddart playing Katarina was also terrific; but Laura Eggerton's Sara Kingdom was a bit drippy, unfortunately, especially compared to Ms Cathy-Gale-in-Space Jean Marsh. The boys were a bit wet too – and NOT in a moist way! – leaving us sorely missing a last outing for Mr John-Paul McCrohon as this Dr Who's Jamie. (And we were not QUITE sure why Steven said he just wanted to go home and then went and got into the TARDIS.) Mr Nick (B) was brilliant as the Daleks – in no less than four different voices – but, perhaps surprisingly, a bit too over-the-top as TV's Dr Who. We THINK he was trying to catch some of the adrenaline-rush-wacky that Mr David (and Mr John Simm as the Master, for that matter) got after regenerating. Except it's not ENTIRELY appropriate when the floor is covered in CORPSES. (At least Mr Christopher had had the GOOD TASTE to get aboard the TARDIS and get out of the Dalek Dust before HE exploded into Mr David!)

I have already mentioned the video inserts, presented in glorious back-projection. The CG stuff at the beginning was probably the best; the second half included faux-video footage of the cough-cough interstellar News Network, covering the accelerating Dalek crisis. It worked to raise the stakes and give us a sense of the threat involved, though it did look a little naff! On the other fluffy foot, the scrolling news-ticker at the bottom was a GREAT LAUGH: "Historians ask… where is the Doctor?" Better still was Dr Who's surprise phone call to Mr Mavic, which was charming and cheeky in equally generous measures.

It's the end, I suppose, and they prepared for it by rewriting the conclusion to have Dr Who regenerate, thus finally putting the role behind him for (a) Mr Nick. Actually, that isn't even THAT much of a change from the original, since the HURT that Mr Dr Billy takes from being Time Destructed is – you can make a case for saying – the beginning of what leads to his eventual regeneration. Aging him, draining him, in the end will leave "…this old body of mine getting a bit thin".

(Mind you, he lasts another eight adventures, which is almost as long as the whole of Mr Christopher's entire run! They bred Doctors stronger in them days, I reckon!)

And so an era ends: sad but strangely satisfying. Well done, Mr Dr Nick!