An Hour of Who a Day: January 3: "Dalek"

January 3: "Dalek"

This episode ultimately had one goal: to reintroduce the Daleks to the British public, and to do so in a way that made them unquestionably scary again. That's a goal that Rob Shearman delivered on in spades. But what's perhaps more impressive about "Dalek" is everything else going on in this story.

Making the Daleks scary again wasn't automatically an easy task -- after all, they'd spent the last couple decades being the butt of jokes about their inability to climb stairs (because, again, no one watched Remembrance of the Daleks) and the uselessness of their plunger arms. They'd also spent a lot of time in the show's later years either playing second fiddle to Davros or getting blown up (usually spectacularly). But here we're presented with a single Dalek, and it's treated like the deadliest thing we've ever seen. It's also nice how Shearman systematically takes every comment about the Daleks and their appearance and abilities and turns them into a weapon for the Dalek. The plunger becomes a universal appendage that can absorb power, information, manipulate controls, and kill a man by crushing his skull. A shield protects it from gunfire, and its central "turret" section can rotate 360 degrees. Even the "bumps" serve a purpose, acting as a self-destruct mechanism. (Well, maybe; there's a school of thought that this Dalek doesn't actually kill itself but instead transports to the future to set up its own empire and become the Dalek Emperor; this would explain why all the reality shows we see in "Bad Wolf" look like early 21st-century shows -- they're what the Dalek knows about after downloading the Internet.)

But what's equally impressive is how cunning this Dalek is. It's able to kill a large group of soldiers with three blasts -- one to set off the sprinklers, one to electrocute everyone standing in puddles on the floor, and one to electrocute the people on the scaffolding. It's able to trick Rose into touching it (in what looks like a massively out-of-character scene -- "But I am glad that before I die I have met a human who was not afraid" -- until you realize that the Dalek is simply being manipulative) so that it can be regenerated, and it's also quite good at taunting the Doctor. "You would make a good Dalek," it tells him after the Doctor's spittle-flecked rant at it ("Why don't you just die?!"). "Dalek" takes one representative of the Daleks and turns it into one of the most fearsome enemies ever seen on Doctor Who.

That alone probably would have been enough, but Shearman also takes the time to examine each of the four main characters: the Doctor, Rose, Van Statten, and the Dalek itself. He takes the Doctor, the champion of goodness and justice, and turns him into a bigoted, hate-filled man, who despises the Dalek and everything it stands for -- because it turns out the Daleks were the ones fighting the Time Lords in the last great Time War -- and is willing to sink to its level ("We're not the same! I'm not— No, wait. Maybe we are. You're right. Yeah, okay. You've got a point. 'Cause I know what to do. I know what should happen. I know what you deserve. Exterminate") to destroy the Dalek. The Dalek is the Doctor's opposite, dedicated to exterminating everything that's different from it -- and, as the episode makes clear a number of times, it's a razor-thin line between love and hate. Van Statten is greed, looking to acquire things without considering their true worth -- note how he becomes completely uninterested in the alien musical instrument once he knows what it is -- and he's willing to do anything to hold on to his things. He's more concerned about damaging the Dalek than the fact that it's killing all his people. "They're dispensable," he says. "That Dalek is unique."

Meanwhile, Rose is caught in the middle, with no preconceptions about Daleks, wondering why the man she's come to trust because of his goodness is filled with such hate toward something. "Rose, get out of the way now!" the Doctor tells Rose, ready to blast the Dalek to pieces. "No, I won't let you do this," Rose replies, standing between the Doctor and the Dalek. "That thing killed hundreds of people," the Doctor says. "It's not the one pointing the gun at me," Rose responds. It's through Rose that the Doctor is able to come through to the other side, to let go of his hate, letting the Dalek kill itself out of pity for it rather than shooting it out of anger. Van Statten, on the other hand, can't let go of his greed and pays the price at the end, deposed by his assistant. "Two hundred personnel dead, and all because of you, sir," she tells him.

It would have been enough just to make this Dalek a deadly killer again -- the redesign (which keeps all the right parts in the right proportions (other than a slight size increase so that it can look Rose in the eye) to maintain that iconic look while just beefing it up a bit) is a winner, and Joe Ahearne's direction makes this feel like an action movie. That alone would have made this a standout episode. But Rob Shearman takes it that step farther, to give us a reason to care about these characters, to see what happens when they interact with each other. This turns "Dalek" into one of the highlights of the entire series. We now know that the Daleks will be back again -- but they'll never be quite as dangerous, as terrifying, and as intense as a lone Dalek was here.