Remembrance of the Dalek

Well, given the presence of the excellent Rob Shearman as scriptwriter, and Joe Ahearne of Ultraviolet directing, Dalek was always going to be fantastic. It turned out to be the best episode of the new series so far, and only the nostalgia factor attached to Genesis of the Daleks and Remembrance of the Daleks prevents it from being the best Dalek story ever.

The treatment of the title character (and the use of characters as titles in this series is interesting in itself: Doctor Who, Rose, Dalek... Bad Wolf?) was as thorough and inspired a reinvention of a British icon as the new series itself.

Arguably it would have worked best for those who were already familiar with the Dalek-as-icon, but not too familiar -- the "My God, but it can climb stairs!" moment would have fallen a little flat for a viewer who had no reason to suppose that a race of evil cyborg supersoldiers wouldn't be able to negotiate a standard architectural feature, just as it did for those of us who are obsessive enough to remember the previous occasions when they did. Still, the visual aspects of the creature -- from its first appearance in the dark, to the extreme close-ups on its eyestalk during conversations, to the faithful replication of the horrifying electrocution-death-ray effect -- were handled deftly and chillingly.

I particularly enjoyed the fact that the radical redesign affected the functionality of the Dalek -- the killing sucker, the rotating midsection, the more effective antigravity, the force-field -- whilst retaining the appearance pretty much unchanged. (The one design idea which didn't work so well was the sudden separation of all the hemispheres in the final self-desctruct scene -- what the Bad Wolf was that supposed to be about?)

I loved the way that the Dalek was allowed to be properly threatening before it became pathetic. So often in classic Who the Daleks acted as cannon-fodder, disposable tools of a mouthpiece character like the Emperor Dalek or Davros, who were as inept at shooting and as fragile as Star Wars Stormtroopers or Star Trek redshirts. This Dalek -- although it was explicitly just a footsoldier, and already unhinged from solitude and torture even before its intimate moment with Rose -- was shown to be manipulative, resourceful, ingenious, efficient, merciless and very, very deadly. The scene where it dispatches Van Statten's entire security force with three shots may have owed a little to Hollywood cliché, but it makes the Doctor's dire warnings ("Population?" "One million." "All dead.") seem horrifyingly plausible. This Dalek would not explode from having a hat put over its eyestalk and being pushed out of a window, nor would it say things like "The prisoners have escaped! I have failed! Self-destruct!"

The other side of the Dalek's character -- its pitiful need for orders, its friendship with the Doctor's companion, the emergence of its long-suppressed humanity and its eventual suicide -- was handled with great skill. This is partly because it's a story Shearman has already told, in his audio drama Jubilee -- although Dalek is a tighter and more effective treatment of the theme. The intrinsic absurdity of empathising with an armoured dustbin never threatened to topple the emotional drama, and although the sunbathing Kaled slithered a narrow line, the pathos in its cry of "Obey! Obey! Obey!" when begging Rose to kill it redeemed the scene admirably. (If only the subsequent self-destruct effect had been more convincing, and, as previously mentioned, less daftly designed. But if the episode had been perfect we would have had nothing to look forward to in the rest of the series.)

As for the other characters... the Doctor was as good as Eccleston has ever been, with his hatred and contempt for the Dalek visibly overwhelming his pity and humanity. Although he insists in their first confrontation that he killed the Dalek's entire species because "I had no choice", he can't look the creature in the eyestalk as he says it, and by the end, as the threat to Rose and Earth pushes him to his limits, we see his own ruthlessness in action. On this occasion Rose prevents him from pulling the trigger -- but she wasn't there when he destroyed the rest of the Daleks or, it now seems, the Time Lords. The line "You would make a good Dalek", predictable though it was, chilled me to the bone. All this, along with the "Bad Wolf" foreshadowing (which this week appeared to bear no possible relation to the earlier mentions) is pretty clearly working up to some nasty revelations about this Doctor's past actions. (One theory doing the rounds, which I'm finding oddly convincing, is that the character Christopher Eccleston is playing is not the Doctor, but an enemy who's taken on the rôle, whether for his own sinister purposes or out of remorse at killing the real Doctor.)

Rose was a general-purpose companion, acting as the Doctor's conscience (though that in itself is a fairly recent development, and previously almost invisible on television) and showing a pity which, although misplaced at first, eventually proved self-justifying. I'm consistently amazed by how much Piper's acting doesn't suck compared with how much I expected it to... not that she's a particularly good actor, just that she really, really doesn't suck at all. The new companion, Adam, was permitted more dimensions -- particularly his non-heroic (but hardly cowardly) saving of himself when Rose appeared beyond saving. His joining-the-TARDIS scene, with the Doctor and Rose squabbling over whether to let him on board amid his evident incomprehension, was possibly the best ever, introductions of regular characters being notoriously awkward.

The other characters were two-dimensional at best, but in the face of the Doctor / Dalek conflict, that was all they were required to be. Admittedly I could have done without Van Statten's Hollywoodish I'm-the-mayor-of-this-town-and-we're-not-evacuating-until-I-say-so-meteorite-impact-or-no-meteorite-impact stupidity, but his initial face-off with the Doctor was very nice. The human characters in Shearman's Who work, like Mark Gatiss', have always tended towards the grotesque.

...And that's about it, except to say that I also liked the setting -- a museum of the alien on Earth is a clever conceit, and a very apt place for the TARDIS to end up. The very simplicity of the episode, though -- the fact that Dalek tells a story which, while linear, makes clear sense and lacks obvious plot holes or other solecisms -- shows how far above most of the rest of this season it comes.

I was less enthralled by the trailer for The Long Game, but perhaps that was just by contrast with what I'd just been watching. Simon Pegg is always great, at least, as is Tamsin Grieg. Given that every episode so far has featured either an extremely famous guest star (Zoe Wanamaker, Simon Callow, Penelope Wilton) or an old enemy (Autons, Daleks), I can confidently predict that the Editor will not turn out to be the Master.

As for the Bad Wolf, though... well, who knows.