November 7: Resurrection of the Daleks Part One

Standard and special edition DVDs

So remember how season 20 was going to conclude with a Dalek story called The Return, only for that story to be killed by industrial action?  Well here's that story, now retitled Resurrection of the Daleks and reedited into two 45-minute episodes (in order to work around the BBC's coverage of the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo).  Was it worth the wait?  Well...

The first thing you notice about this episode is how brutal it is.  Fleeing people are shot down in London streets with machine guns, station personnel in the future are gassed with some sort of horrific deformity-causing agent while others are shot down by Daleks, Dalek mutants are attacking British soldiers by biting them in the neck... even the Doctor gets in on the action, pointing a pistol around a warehouse and (apparently) unloading several rounds into said Dalek mutant.  ("Apparently" because after this he immediately hands the pistol to Professor Laird, who takes it by the barrel without any problems -- suggesting that it wasn't actually fired.  Or that the actors didn't think about this when they worked it out.)  And while watching the Doctor and company shove a Dalek out of an upper-story window to the street below, where it explodes spectacularly, is a satisfying viewing experience, it doesn't help with the feeling of brutality prevalent in this episode.

It's also worth noting how quickly writer Eric Saward sidelines the two companions.  Tegan suffers a head wound after the Dalek appears (in what would have been -- and was for overseas viewers, who got the four-part version -- the cliffhanger to part one) and is confined to a sleeping bag in the bomb disposal unit's temporary headquarters, while Turlough disappears not long after the TARDIS arrives in 1984 London -- it transpires that he's entered the time corridor that brought the TARDIS to this location in the first place, but he spends the rest of his time this episode wandering first the Dalek ship, and then the space station that the ship is docked with, and not much of anything else.

Davros prepares to take control of engineer Kiston.
(Resurrection of the Daleks Part One) ©BBC

No, here the action is focused squarely on two figures: the Doctor, and Davros, who's been locked up for ninety years after the events of Destiny of the Daleks and is the reason the Daleks have attacked the space station.  In a somewhat rare nod to previous events (albeit very much in keeping with this phase of the show's (often slavish) adherence to continuity), this story is pitched as a direct sequel to Destiny of the Daleks, with the Daleks unable to find a cure to the Movellan virus that was introduced in between these two stories -- thus, they're hoping that Davros will be able to help them find that cure.  Davros has been recast again -- this time as Terry Molloy, who is significantly better than David Gooderson was in Destiny of the Daleks but isn't quite as controlled as Michael Wisher was in Genesis of the Daleks -- Terry Molloy's version seems to be more inclined to rant.  It's not just ranting, though, and Molloy excels in the quiet moments as well -- they made a good choice this time around. 

And while Davros remains cunning as ever, the Doctor seems still in the dark -- he knows that the Daleks are involved, and that they've established a time corridor between Davros's time and 1984 London for no obvious reason whatsoever (maybe they'll explain in part two), but that's about it.  And so he leaves Tegan in the hands of the army while he goes to the TARDIS with escaped Dalek prisoner Stien to trace the time corridor back to its source.  He doesn't know that the leader of the bomb disposal squad (there because some Dalek tech was mistakenly thought to be a UXB (UneXploded Bomb -- typically left over from World War II, though it doesn't have to be)), Colonel Archer, has been taken over/replaced with a Dalek agent (thanks to some sinister fake policemen wandering around) and now has Tegan and Professor Laird under his control.  No, the Doctor is too busy arriving on the Dalek ship and being betrayed by Stien, who, it turns out, has also been a Dalek agent all along...