12.2: Into the Dalek

In which the Doctor is a dick about soldiers.

Broadcast: August 2014

Watched: February 2022

“I am not a good Dalek, you are a good Dalek.” Although I also think there’s a case for, “Fantastic idea for a movie, terrible idea for a proctologist.”

It’s starting to feel like season 8 is “standard RTD season gone wrong”, as everything is a bit off. Last week, the new character is terrifying not comforting; next week, the historical figure is fictional. This time we get a standard “see the new Doctor face off against the Daleks” thing, but again, twisted: the good Dalek stuff, the Inner Space stuff...

...but also in the fact it’s the nastiest Dalek story in *ages*. There are no jokes, unless you count “top layer, if you want to say a few words”. Normally the Daleks are mass killers but also a bit comic. This time they’re just genocidal metal space dicks. I think it’s the first time since, well, Dalek?

It’s really well made. Top guest cast (Smiley, Compton, especially Zawe Ashton). The battle sequences look great, and there are loads of nice design touches – the sloped walls inside the Dalek, Clara’s eyeball-design shirt mirroring the antibodies. It also I think marks the sort of farthest that you can go in making the new Doctor a complete and utter prick: it turns out that, instead of taking Clara for chips, he abandoned her, in Glasgow; he lets Ross believe he’s saving him and then makes a joke about his death; he makes shitty comments about Clara’s appearance, which he only gets away with because a) she’s obviously gorgeous and b) she obviously knows it.

But... it’s hard to completely ignore the fact that the basic premise is incredibly stupid. Why are the humans helping the Dalek? What is their best case scenario here? Also, obviously fixing the thing that drove it mad will just mean they’ve got a normal Dalek on board again.

More than that, the message is confused: the Doctor doesn’t want Rusty to see hatred, but the fact he does so is what gets them out of this shit the Doctor’s put them into. The show seems to want us to feel bad he destroys the other Daleks, too. What is it trying to say?

Oh, also the zipwire bit looks rubbish.

Other things:

• The welded-on Moffat romcom scenes are fun but they don’t fit at all. Also, Danny is very likeable, in the way he talks to himself about messing it up with Clara, but the bit where he starts crying in class is a bit unsubtle.

• The Doctor talks of visiting Skaro turning him into the Doctor we know – another of Moffat’s literalisations/turning fan stuff into text?

• Rejecting Journey as a companion at the end feels like it might be a sort of Night of the Doctor inversion, but maybe that’s seeing patterns in dust. It is not clear, beyond plot convenience, why the Doctor suddenly hates soldiers though.

• “Mortuaries and larders, always the easiest to break out of” sort of points to the finale.

• “You're not my boss, you're one of my hobbies” – wow who else is Clara running about with on the side?