5.18: Resurrection of the Daleks

In which it’s stopped being fun, Doctor.

Broadcast: February 1984

Watched: January 2021

Resurrection of the Daleks, Part One

“Just ‘cos I can’t get worked up about a load of crumbling brickwork.”    

I’ve definitely seen this before, but I retain almost literally no memory of it, possibly in part because there’s no novelisation. I know it’s going to end up a complete clusterf*ck, but thought that episode was actually... quite good?

Okay, it’s truly brutal, making even Earthshock look like Playschool. Davison spends a lot of time holding a gun. The loose Dalek mutant killing people, horribly. The random shots of people whose faces have melted or who are dying of an unexplained plague. It gets a bit Threads [the nuclear war film broadcast the following September; if you’ve never seen it, don’t].

But, charitably, this is an attempt to make the Daleks properly scary again – this is not just any Doctor Who monster, these things are *terrifying*. And the opening action sequence, with escaped space prisoners running about Shad Thames and getting mown down by fake policemen, is actually really good and compelling. It’s a good cast, too (Rodney Bewes! Rula Lenska! Leslie Grantham!); and, in the future scenes, a strikingly multiracial one.

On the downside: it’s a total f*cking mess. Mercer can’t act. The Cloister Bell goes off and is meant to be scary but nobody explains it, so if you’re not a fan you don’t know what it means. It is very unclear what is happening at several points – I didn’t even realise that Lytton and Rula Lenska were on different spacecraft until one started attacking the other. Why do we need an info dump about what happened in a war we saw five minutes of, four seasons ago? Why should we care?

So: far better, and more watchable, than I expected. But what a f*cking mess.

Other things. Turlough knows far more about time travel and the TARDIS than he has any right to. The “get the shields down” bit where a bunch of extras have to pretend something is very, very heavy is a funny bit of Doctor Who pantomime. I like the bit where they think they’ve found the Dalek mutant but it’s a cat under a bag. Blimey, the Sergeant is the conman from Only Fools: Chain Gang.

I assume the cliffhanger in the four part version was “Release Davros”? Or perhaps “A Dalek!!!”? [This was shown as two 45-ish minute episodes, rather than the usual four 25-ish minute ones, because of scheduling changes brought about by the Winter Olympics.]

Resurrection of the Daleks, Part Two

“Davros must die.” The confrontation which I imagined would come right at the end is only a few moments into what would be episode 4. The Doctor isn’t wrong when he says there’s a moral case for getting rid of Davros. Davros isn’t wrong when he says the Doctor is too cowardly to do the act himself. It’s not in itself a problematic debate to play out in Who – [writer and script editor Eric] Saward just lacks RTD’s ability to do it without undermining the show.

Anyway. Enjoyed it less than part 1, because it’s more fun watching set up than a dwindling cast getting blown to bits. It’s not bad exactly, but I can’t work out what it’s trying to do, it’s ridiculously hard to follow the story.

At the most basic level: why do the Daleks awaken Davros if they’re going to immediately decide to kill him? Have I missed something or is this just the script being bad? And was the duplicate plot setting up a sequel that never came? Oh wait they dismiss that in two lines of dialogue at the end, great stuff.

Tegan’s departure scene is actually good though. Fielding plays a blinder. And the fact she comes back to find the TARDIS gone is almost affecting.

“It looks complicated.” Oh you’d rather a very simple self destruct sequence would you? The fact this plot goes nowhere and ends with the Daleks breaking in and killing Styles just before she pulls the lever is quite irritating.

People called Styles almost blowing Daleks up: discuss. [This also happens in 1972’s Day of the Daleks.]

“You are destroying my mind!” is a Saward cliche. A Sawardism. I had forgotten that “I can’t stand the confusion in my mind!” was an actual line of dialogue.

The part 3 cliffhanger: Davros ranting?

Stein being a Dalek agent was a nice twist even if you can kind of see why Bewes’ career petered out. The effect when he blows up the space station is the same we get when the Doctor regenerates two stories later.

Why does the Supreme Dalek have a different outfit from his mates?

What is Davros injecting people with that switches their loyalty and why has he had it to hand for 90 years?

The flashback to all the old cast members is kind of sweet yet weirdly pointless.

Is this called Resurrection… because a version of it was cancelled the previous season, then?