April 24: "Victory of the Daleks"

Despite the fact that what we've gotten onscreen so far has seemed to be largely business as usual, despite the change-over, there have been signs that the new production team want to be seen as a bold new beginning.  Part of this was the (frankly bizarre) insistence that Matt Smith's first series would be known as series 1, rather than series 5 (although almost no one, including the BBC marketing people, took them up on this), but now we're presented with another change: that of the Daleks.

The Doctor confronts the new Dalek paradigm. ("Victory of the
Daleks") ©BBC

This isn't necessarily a disaster in the making -- after all, the new titles, sonic screwdriver, and TARDIS interior (and exterior, a bit) are all similar reenvisionings without too much trouble -- but the problem with "Victory of the Daleks" is that it ultimately feels like that's all there is to this episode.  They give us a story set during the Blitz with Winston Churchill (played admirably by Ian McNeice), and instead of exploring this at all, we get a remake of The Power of the Daleks instead.  I mean, I suppose if you're going to remake old Who stories, start with the best, but while it's effectively surreal to hear Daleks saying things like, "Would you care for some tea?", and they look surprisingly good in their olive khaki paintjob, we don't get the same payoff here as we did in the Troughton story.  Instead of holding back the Daleks only to unleash them at the end while the humans are busy infighting, here their big plan is to, er... get the Doctor to confirm that they're actually Daleks.  It's not the most exciting thing ever, and the new Daleks we get as a result are problematic.  Even setting aside the designer color scheme (which I don't really mind), the new design just seems clunkier.  I think they were probably going for "more powerful", but what they actually ended up with is "fat".  I doubt that they were actually designed purely to sell more toys, but it does rather look that way, with the bright colors and the overt plastic look.

But again, just because they've come up with a crap design for their brand-new Daleks, that doesn't mean the episode is bad.  No, that comes as a result of what looks like the result of too few drafts for the script.  Why else would we get Spitfires retrofitted with fancy new technology in the space of a few minutes (that itself seems to be purely theoretical twenty minutes earlier) just so they can dogfight with the Dalek saucer?  Why do we get a bomb that is literally defused by the power of love?  As with much of the rest of the script, this seems to have been thrown together with an eye toward "what would look cool?", rather than "what would make any bit of sense?"  It also doesn't help that there's a distinct sense of unresolved business at the end of this; rather than the Daleks being defeated -- or even the Doctor being defeated, which, despite what he says, doesn't seem to be the case -- they head off at the end, leaving the sense that they're going to show up in a major way down the line.  If they actually had this might be OK, but while we've had subsequent Dalek stories, none of them have remotely felt like the follow-up to this.

Any good things?  Matt Smith continues to impress, with the Jammie Dodger bit being a nice highlight that contrasts well with his attack on the Dalek soldier -- "Kill me!" he yells at the Dalek, and while it's not quite on the same level as David Tennant's similar performance in "Evolution of the Daleks", it's still very good.  Ian McNeice, as I said before, is well-suited to the role of Churchill, and Bill Paterson does an excellent job in the rather thankless role of Professor Bracewell.  The curiosity of how Amy has no memory of the events of "The Stolen Earth" / "Journey's End" is handled well, and the appearance of another crack ties in nicely with that.

But if they wanted to update the Daleks with a bang, they've failed rather miserably.  It's telling that, while these new Paradigm Daleks don't disappear completely, they fade into the background in favor of the RTD-era design -- suggesting that even the production team realized this was a mistake.  If they'd had a story that hadn't had that reveal as its centerpiece, "Victory of the Daleks" might have been OK.  If they'd actually gone further down the road of remaking The Power of the Daleks, it might have been OK.  If they'd done anything risky and clever, such as exploring Churchill's character or the Doctor's hatred of the Daleks, instead of merely opting for things that look good, it might have been OK.  But they didn't, and so it's not.