November 8: Resurrection of the Daleks Part Two

The Doctor prepares to execute Davros. (Resurrection of the
Daleks Part Two) ©BBC

So the Daleks have a couple plans running at the same time -- one offensive, one defensive -- and I think they generally make sense.  I'm just not sure why they're both happening in the same place at the same time.

The offensive plan seems to involve making Dalek duplicates of key individuals so that the Daleks can bring various places down from the inside.  This is what takes up the majority of the first half of part two, as they hook the Doctor up to their duplicate-making machine and record the contents of his mind -- which seems to mainly consist of companions (and far be it from me to buck the trend and not point out that they've forgotten Leela -- although apparently that's a genuine mistake, as a clip was prepared).  The Daleks want to use the Doctor to infiltrate the High Council and kill them all -- although one wonders how much damage that would cause, given that The Five Doctors wiped most of them out.  Maybe the Time Lords would just shrug and say, "Well, here we go again."  There's also some stuff at the end of the episode about how the Daleks have replaced key people around the Earth with Dalek duplicates -- but as Stien illustrated and the Doctor hopes, the duplicates are unstable and will presumably break their conditioning.  (This is a plot element that's never followed up on or even mentioned again.  About Time speculates that it might be intended to be a joke at the expense of 1984's world leaders.)  The plan makes some sense and is nicely devious for the Daleks, but the conditioning problem is always lurking in the background, even though they don't actually get to make their Dalek duplicate of the Doctor.

The defensive plan involves trying to cure this Movellan virus -- that seems to have backfired on the Daleks, though, since Davros is more interested in reestablishing a power base than in helping the Daleks.  Still, it makes sense -- it's just not clear why this is happening in the exact same location as the duplication plan.  And there's still no clear reason to involve Earth in this (beyond some hand-wavy "it's a secure location" guff).  You'd think having both of these things happening in the same place would cause problems.  Except it doesn't end up mattering anyway; other than placing the Doctor and Davros in the same place, these plots have little interaction with each other.

The Doctor and Turlough say goodbye to Tegan. (Resurrection
of the Daleks Part Two) ©BBC

But the real thing to notice is how brutal this continues to be, particularly in the second half of the episode, as all sorts of people are killed once they've outlived their usefulness to the plot.  We even get the Doctor in on the action, prepared to cold-bloodedly kill Davros at point-blank range (he only fails because he walks through a door which locks behind him), and then killing a bunch of Daleks with the Movellan virus.  Huge numbers of people are dead by the end of this (Resurrection of the Daleks notoriously has more on-screen deaths than any other Doctor Who story), and in fact the only people to emerge from this unscathed are the Doctor, Tegan, Turlough, Lytton and his two policemen, and (as we find out next season) Davros.  It's been pointed out that this is essentially a war story, so of course people will die, but there's still a sense in which people are being killed off just so Eric Saward doesn't have to deal with them anymore (notice the way in particular Lytton kills off the guard with him just before the end of the story).  All the deaths even get to Tegan, who decides to leave the TARDIS for good this time.  "It's stopped being fun, Doctor," she tells him emotionally.  "No, no, don't leave, not like this," the Doctor protests, but it's too late; she's gone.  "It's strange," the Doctor says bleakly.  "I left Gallifrey for similar reasons.  I'd grown tired of their lifestyle.  It seems I must mend my ways."

Being an action-packed war story isn't the worst of sins, but the problem with Resurrection of the Daleks is that there's nothing redemptive about any of it.  It's an incredibly bleak story that no one comes out of well (with the possible exception of Turlough, who's managed to spend most of it uninvolved with the main plots) -- not even the Doctor, who should normally be relied on to be our moral compass for things like this.  (Although I'll be floating the argument that this does help make his regeneration in two stories' time more meaningful -- but we'll get there when we get there.)  There's nothing particularly wrong with the plotting, but Resurrection of the Daleks is told in such an unpleasantly dark fashion that one simply feels exhausted and numb at the end, and this makes it a very difficult tale to derive any real enjoyment from.