I’m still confused by one thing from last night – who were those three million people who chose to watch Celebrity Wrestling rather than ‘Dalek’ and are they allowed to vote on Thursday? As always, look away now if you don’t want to read about last night’s Who.
One of the main reasons for the iconic place the Daleks hold in the mythos of Doctor Who is that they – perhaps alone amongst Who monsters and villains – are utterly irredeemable. In a universe that’s notable for its use of shades of grey in morality, they represent evil in its purest form, seeking not just to conquer or to assimilate but to destroy everything that they’re not. They’re Terminators on a universal scale:
It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.
But all fiction – and especially all sf – revolves around the words ‘what if?’ What if a Dalek discovered emotion? What if a Dalek truly discovered fear? And what if you wanted to keep it just as scary as it legendarily was? Then you get what could well be a classic episode of Doctor Who.
It’s interesting to consider this story from the Dalek’s perspective. It’s spent fifty years on Earth, powerless, chained up in cellars and bunkers all round the globe, tortured, steadily going insane and then, one day, an old enemy turns up to gloat. And not just any enemy, this is the big one – the Doctor, the one who’s stopped the Dalek plans for domination all across the continuum, coming to tell you that he’s not only defeated the Daleks again but wiped them out entirely. Even if you weren’t a creature dedicated entirely to hate and destruction you’d want a bit of revenge, wouldn’t you?
And just when you’re at your absolute lowest, your first strand of luck in fifty years turns up. You’ve tried to draw power from humans all this time, but they just don’t have enough potential, there’s nothing special in their biology, but now here’s one who’s travelled in time. So, you get cunning, play pathetic and hope for her to touch you. Once she falls for that, you’re made and it’s an easy job to break the chains, get out of the cage and properly recharge yourself.
So what’s the well-charged Dalek about town going to do next? Kill of course – anyone and everyone until you get to the Doctor and finally do what every other member of your race has failed to do. It’s just that you didn’t realise that to get this far you had to make a deal with the Devil, and the price you have to pay is too much. You can only be the ‘ultimate in racial cleansing’ if you’re pure in yourself, and once you look inward and see how much you’ve changed, there’s only one way out.
That’s why the Daleks are the perfect monster – in everything else, you can see the potenial for redemption, even if it’s just the faintest possibility, but for a Dalek that doesn’t exist. To even have the potential to be redeemed is to be impure, and anything impure must be exterminated. That the Daleks are an allegory for the Nazis is well-known, but this showed just how much further down the path of evil they’ve travelled. For a Dalek, the self has been annihlated in favour of the race and even the last of the Daleks can’t accept any deviation from that concept of perception. It was offered the choice between the freedom of impurity and death, but chose the latter.
Yes, we felt sympathy for a racist who chose suicide rather than impurity. You’re a clever bastard, Robert Shearman.
And what of the Doctor? We’re watching the hero of a series who’s proud to admit that he instigated a genocide (‘they all burned…I made it happen!‘) and is willing to correct the error when he finds out he may not have killed them all. There’s something big and dark in his past and I think last night was confirmation that he’s a walking, talking example of PTSD and survivor guilt all rolled up in one package. More than any incarnation before him, perhaps, this Doctor needs a companion just to stop him going over the edge again. Maybe he’ll have to make the choice between freedom and death sometime?
So, what else is there to say? The direction (by Joe Ahearne, who previously created the excellent Ultravolet) was amongst the best of the new series, the special effects were good, not becoming the point of the story, but bringing it to life and it was a clever inversion of the Who staple ‘base under siege’ story – this time the monster was inside. If I had to quibble, I’d say the ending veered slightly too close to mawkish for my liking, the supporting characters – with the exception of VanStatten – were little more than cannon fodder redshirts and I’m not entirely sure what the point of Adam was, though maybe we’ll find out more about him next week.
Oh, and for those watching out for such things, the helicopter was called ‘Bad Wolf 1′. Something, somewhere (or somewhen) is making these references crop up, you know.
Next week: The Earth Empire, space stations and Simon Pegg looking rather creepy. Can’t wait, except for the fact that 22 minutes into the episode we’ll be halfway through the season.
