I’ve been here before.
Wheeling out the Daleks to start Doctor Who‘s twenty-fifth season, in Ben Aaronovitch’s “Remembrance of the Daleks” (Story Production Code 7H), carries with it the faintest whiff of desperation. These iconic pepper pots helped catapult the series to popularity on their debut in late 1963, and every Doctor since has faced off against them, often to open or close a season, such is their popular potency. But how do you create something new with the Doctor’s eternal enemies? Returning them to 1963 London, to the Coal Hill School and I.M. Forman’s scrap yard on Totters Lane, feels like such a blatant attempt at fan service that the initial impulse, on seeing the Seventh Doctor and Ace return to the First Doctor, Susan, Barbara, and Ian’s stomping grounds—particularly so soon after the Sixth Doctor made a social call—tends towards the less-than-charitable, the final flailings of a series that has run out of fresh ideas.
Opening with Ace toting a boombox into a corner caff for bacon sarnies and struggling with pre-decimal coinage while the Doctor climbs atop a van with a strange aerial outside the hallowed school doesn’t inspire much confidence, suggesting a flippant attitude from the start. And yet Aaronovitch, producer John Nathan-Turner, and script editor Andrew Cartmel manage to conjure an air of mystery and menace around the Daleks regardless, no mean feat given that they have yet to defeat the Doctor in over a dozen tries. Their last appearance, in “Revelation of the Daleks” some three and a half years prior, leans heavily into the omnipresence of the titular foes, rolling around everywhere and in numbers. Here, a single Dalek occupies proceedings for the majority of the first of four episodes, holed up in, yes, I.M. Forman’s yard, a reminder of how fearsome this foe can be.
After the Doctor pops into the van and meets Rachel (Pamela Salem), a scientist working with the British military to investigate strange frequencies at the school and the scrap yard, he accompanies her to the scene, where Group Captain Gilmore (Simon Williams), a Lethbridge-Stewart stand-in, is organizing an attack after one of his men has been killed via a “death ray” from an unknown assailant. It’s a Dalek, of course, as the Doctor knows at once, and he urges Gilmore to pull his troops back—calling him “Brigadier” at one point, in case the comparison to what will likely become UNIT weren’t obvious—before the Dalek kills them all. After furious yet futile fusillades with bullets and grenades, given loving attention by director Andrew Morgan, only Ace’s Nitro Nine saves the day, blowing the top off the combat casing to reveal trademark Dalek goo.
The story proceeds with remarkable directness, keeping the focus mainly on the Doctor, all the better to establish, and obscure, the various levels of conspiracy that begin to unwind. The Doctor, it turns out, knows the Daleks are following him, looking for the “Hand of Omega” which he left in 1963 London as the First Doctor. Creating events in the Doctor’s past that are unseen on screen is certainly nothing new, but choosing the very beginnings of the series to hide a McGuffin comes across quite boldly, turning what could have been throw-away canonical references into valid and intriguing plot points. Further shenanigans are afoot in the Coal Hill School itself, watched over by a creepy child (Jasmine Breaks) and a mind-controlled Headmaster (Michael Sheard), and within the military command structure, as a man named Ratcliffe (George Sewell, in a very George Sewell role) vouched for by Mike (Dursley McLinden), a member of Gilmore’s team, hauls away the Dalek remains to an underground lair at the orders of a shadowy figure seated in a Dalek casing…
Genuine mystery, at last! Viewers are left uncertain, in the dark not just regarding the plans of the Doctor’s foes—nor indeed the identity of the multiple factions in play—but also about the Doctor’s own culpability in events, knowing only that the Hand of Omega is “very dangerous,” leading to it being hidden, a far more fearsome cliffhanger than the Doctor being trapped in the cellar of the school by a Dalek that can climb stairs.
Not just any Dalek, though. This one sports a cream colored casing with gold roundels and trim, denoting it, for those with a nose for such things, as one of the “new” Daleks created by Davros in “Revelation of the Daleks” with human brain tissue as the primary operating unit. The Dalek encountered at the scrapyard, by contrast, wears the more traditional grey color scheme associated with the Dalek hierarchy. The end of that prior Dalek story sees Davros apprehended by the forces of the Supreme Dalek, the surviving new Daleks “reconditioned” to serve the hierarchy. Aaronovich alludes to none of these details, however, and in truth their absence does not diminish the impact of the story. It suffices for viewers lacking encyclopedic knowledge of the series that there are two factions of Daleks seeking the Hand of Omega.
And yet, for those who do recall “Revelation of the Daleks,” the association of the cream-and-gold Daleks with the Imperial Dalek Forces—appearing from a Trans Mat in the school cellar—and the grey Daleks with the Renegades, linked to Ratcliffe and the mysterious seated figure, comes as a significant shock. Davros’ Daleks, his vision for the continual tinkering with the Kaled species, has won out. The former ruling grey Daleks now constitute a rebel faction. Aaronovitch, Nathan-Turner, and Cartmel thread the canonical needle with precision—finally, a reference to an earlier story that significantly deepens understanding of the current narrative while simultaneously not impacting the experience for, shall we say, normal viewers. (They do get a bit cutesy, alas, with Ace turning on a television in a boarding house and then leaving just as a continuity announcer proclaims “an adventure in the new science fiction series, Doc…” That’s a meta-textual leap too far.)
The Doctor takes a moment to claim a casket he left at a funeral home roughly a month before the time the story is set, with the mortician’s assistant (William Thomas) commenting to his boss on the phone, “I thought you said he was an old geezer with white hair,” cementing the fact that the First Doctor sets the plan in motion, hiding the Hand of Omega within the coffin sometime before whisking Ian, Barbara, and Susan back to prehistoric times. A blind Vicar (Peter Halliday) oversees the burial ceremony, rather fortuitous given that the casket floats on its own. The Seventh Doctor continually disregards anachronistic timeline bleeding, both with his cavalier sharing of knowledge with Rachel and her assistant Allison (Karen Gledhill) and by allowing Ace to walk around ’60s London with a boombox and leather jacket festooned with patches depicting the Space Shuttle, so a hover casket isn’t too far fetched for his tastes, it would appear. His later satisfaction when her microchip-laden device is destroyed does little to atone for his initial carelessness with the timeline.
Technology is not the only “futuristic” notion the Doctor and Ace bring to proceedings, however. They also pointedly detail the legacy of racism in the 1960s, with Ace disgustedly finding a “No Coloureds” sign in a boarding house window and the Doctor discussing the triangular slave trade that led to cafe worker John’s (Joseph Marcell) father having been born in Jamaica. Doctor Who has certainly tackled inequality and racism before, most notably in “The Mutants” from 1972, but seldom with direct analogues to real-world instances. This sub-narrative in “Remembrance of the Daleks” serves to set up the background for the conflict at hand—one, again, deepened by knowledge of “Revelation of the Daleks“—namely that the two Dalek factions have split over the fault line of racial purity. (That the “pure” Renegades ally with a human fascist sympathizer in Ratcliffe, though a bit on the nose, further heightens the stakes.)
These new, “improved” Daleks have “functional appendages and some kind of mechanical prosthesis grafted into its very body,” as Rachel notes on examining an exploded Imperial Dalek casing, as opposed to the original Daleks, which are “underdeveloped, with vestigial limbs and sensory organs almost amoeboid” in nature. All signs, of course, point to Davros, but instead we are treated to the appearance of the Emperor Dalek on the mothership orbiting Earth, with a bulbous headpiece that calls back, vaguely, to the room-sized Emperor Dalek from “The Evil of the Daleks” a good twenty years prior. The end credits for the third episode, where the Emperor Dalek is revealed, tag the role to one “Roy Tromelly,” a bit of nomenclatural legerdemain to hide Terry Molloy, aka Davros, from audiences, much as Anthony Ainley was credited, with less skill, as Leon Ny Taiy in “Time-Flight.” Anagrams are hard. But for viewers who recall the voice, even with some additional Dalek vocal processing, it’s clear who sits beneath the big head.
Both Davros’ Daleks and the Renegades seek the Hand of Omega in order to perfect their crude time travel capabilities; a “remote stellar manipulator,” the device (not Omega‘s literal hand) powered the Time Lords’ initial experiments with temporal mechanics, and the Doctor, in a slight fit of narrative exposition, reveals to Ace that he fully intends for them to get it, albeit not without a feigned fight. He’s set a trap, long in the making; everything that happens in this story happens because of him, one of the rare times the Doctor acts, rather than reacts. But two factions, plus the intervention of the military, compound the difficulty, particularly if the body count is to be kept at an acceptable, pre-watershed level. Again, viewers are left without an understanding of just why the Doctor intends for this powerful tool to fall into his mortal enemy’s hands, a pleasant bit of unknowing.
The narrative shifts continue as Ratcliffe receives his just desserts, dying at the hands of the Renegade Daleks, who are led by a Black Dalek and guided by the creepy young girl. She is plugged into a “battle computer” to provide the “ingenuity and creativity” of a young human child. The Daleks have long realized that they lack a crucial element in their tactics (q.v. “Destiny of the Daleks” where they unearth Davros for updated programming to end their long stalemate against the Movellan disco androids, and the aforementioned “The Evil of the Daleks,” where they try to distill the “human factor” responsible for their many defeats), the battle computer being the latest attempt to solve the problem.
Quite a bit of Keystone Kops-style running to and fro dominates the latter half of the story; narrative nuances give way to the spectacle of the Imperial Daleks, replete with a “Special Weapons Dalek,” facing off against the Renegade Daleks, with a few fracas with the military thrown in for good measure. The effects and stunt teams put in quite a bit of effort in “Remembrance of the Daleks,” as befits a season opener, and the money spent shows on screen. They’re not shy about blowing up Daleks. In particular, the presentation of the Imperial Assault Shuttle landing in the courtyard at Coal Hill School comes across quite well, with an obviously expensive practical effect (involving a crane and a large mock-up) standing in for the expected model and green screen/CSO work.
Packing superior firepower, the Imperial Daleks wrest control of the Hand of Omega from the Renegades and return it to the orbiting mothership. Some techno-wizardry by the Doctor sees a television and a film camera turned into a primitive video broadcasting system, enabling him to confront Davros, who is finally revealed. The Daleks’ creator intends to turn Skaro’s sun into a source of power that will enable them to wipe away Gallifrey and the Time Lords once and for all. As often happens, the Doctor warns Davros not to use the Hand of Omega, though more as a legalistic formality than with the intention of actually dissuading him.
The Doctor’s ruse works; the Hand of Omega flies into Skaro’s sun, on Davros’ command, and vaporizes the star, not on Davros’ command, taking Skaro with it. The Daleks, for all intents, have been wiped out. Though the domino was pushed by Davros, the Doctor set up all the slabs in the chain. The Fourth Doctor agonized over preventing the Daleks from ever existing; the Fifth had a gun to Davros’ head before relenting; the Seventh (and, indeed, the First) go all the way. Davros escapes when the feedback from the explosion (somehow) destroys the Dalek mothership in Earth orbit, leaving future writers access to Terry Nation’s creation, but the destruction remains on a scale beyond any previously contemplated, to say nothing of enacted, by any prior Doctor. It’s remarkable that this moment is simply glossed over by the script, but such is the direction being taken by Nathan-Turner and Cartmel.
Once the Doctor convinces the last remaining Dalek, the Renegade Black Dalek, that it is alone—leading to it blowing up, both existentially and pyrotechnically—the young girl returns to normal, and the Doctor and Ace skip out, in the Doctor’s grand tradition, before a reckoning comes due. Aaronovitch adds a least a bit of circumspection to what has just occurred to conclude the story:
Ace: We did good, didn’t we?
The Doctor: Perhaps. Time will tell. It always does.
With a veritable army of guest actors, it’s notable that they do not, by and large, occupy larger roles in proceedings; Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor remains paramount throughout. George Sewell gets no chance to develop the odious dimensions of Ratcliffe, and his co-conspirator Mike, played by Dursley McLinden, likewise has scant scope; they serve as racist ciphers meant to hammer home the notion of Dalek purity. Pamela Salem as Rachel receives the most opportunity, as a beleaguered scientist obviously aware of the Doctor’s superior scientific knowledge while still prideful in her own capabilities. One might have appreciated seeing the Doctor use her skills more directly rather than as a sounding board for narrative exposition, but Salem gives a credible account of the character, who must come to terms with the entirety of her life’s work being redefined in an instant.
Though Ace receives quite fulsome development in her debut story, “Dragonfire,” Sophie Aldred takes the reins of the teenager fully in “Remembrance of the Daleks,” delivering a character who is, quite obviously, young while still possessed of what might be termed “street smarts,” setting her apart from the other precious youths like Adric, Nyssa, and Zoe who have taken up residence in the TARDIS. Louise Jameson’s Leela provides perhaps the closest analogue, given that Ace does not shirk away from smacking Daleks over the eyestalk with a baseball bat and has a near-pathological obsession with explosives, but her worldly—which is to say, from 1980s Earth—nature makes her less a “fish out of water” than the brave warrior of the Sevateem. Aldred and McCoy seem to get on well, and the Time Lord has a quasi-parental, quasi-teacher role that, while undefined, nevertheless puts the Doctor in the lead without making him seem imperious.
Because Sylvester McCoy just doesn’t do imperious very well, try as he might. The harsher tone the Seventh Doctor takes in this story feels like an ill-tailored suit, particularly relative to the more easy-going, careful, introspective character developed in Season Twenty-Four. McCoy gives it his all, and the overall effect remains successful—a particularly important consideration given that the Doctor occupies the absolute narrative center of “Remembrance of the Daleks”—but the change in tone comes across as somewhat jarring. Ostensibly he has just eliminated the entire Dalek species, or at least the huge majority on Skaro at the moment its sun goes supernova via his programming of the Hand of Omega, yet it weighs but slightly on the Doctor’s mien, the reflective coda notwithstanding.
Change feels in the air here—again—as though Nathan-Turner and Cartmel have flipped a switch from a lighter tone to a more serious tone, the very switch they toggled in the other direction moving from the Sixth Doctor to the Seventh Doctor. Quibbles about how well the Seventh Doctor suits this shift aside, “Remembrance of the Daleks” succeeds in making a grand statement; in terms of spectacle, in terms of hewing closely to the core of what Doctor Who is all about, Aaronovitch’s story stands as one of the best in years. If the series needs an marker of what it can be, when the plot, direction, acting, and effects all come together, in order to continue on for years to come, “Remembrance of the Daleks” provides that example. Though hindsight tells us it does not suffice, the attempt here, by effortlessly blending of decades of lore with rousing action, competent acting, and coherent plot, remains valiant.
(Previous Story: Dragonfire)
Post 158 of the Doctor Who Project