#5 (1.6): Dalek.

The best of enemies: The Doctor and the Dalek.

1 episode. Approx. 45 minutes. Written by: Robert Shearman. Directed by: Joe Ahearne. Produced by: Phil Collinson.


THE PLOT

The Doctor follows a distress signal to Utah, 2012 - specifically, to the underground museum of Internet billionaire Henry van Statten (Corey Johnson). Van Statten has turned a fortune into an empire by studying alien artifacts that have fallen to Earth, adapting their technology for the marketplace ("Broadband? Roswell!").

But the prize of his collection is a living being which he has dubbed "The Metaltron." The creature is encased in a protective machine, and it refuses to speak. Van Statten's men have tortured it to make it scream, but it still won't talk. Until the Doctor walks into its cage, determined to rescue it from captivity.

Only this machine is no simple victim. It is the last surviving member of the most evil race the Doctor has ever faced. It is a Dalek!


CHARACTERS

The Doctor: For the Ninth Doctor, the cheerful cover was never more than a very thin veneer even at the best of times. Christopher Eccleston delivers his best Who performance, showing that cover not so much stripped away as shattered. From the instant he recognizes the Dalek right up to the story's end, he is intensely and nakedly emotional: terrified, desperate, and overflowing with rage. The Doctor's not wrong to call for the creature's death, as the entire first 30 minutes chillingly demonstrate, but it's still disconcerting to see spittle literally fly from his lips as he screams at the Dalek: "Why don't you just die!?!"

Rose: Her compassion compels her to rush to the Dalek's cage when she sees van Statten's men torturing it. She knows nothing of its nature, and it is easily able to manipulate her into touching it - allowing it to extrapolate from her DNA to repair itself. In this way, Rose's compassion sets off the events that lead to so many deaths, something the Doctor's harshness would have prevented had he not been stopped. Still, Rose's ability to identify with the Dalek stops the killing in the end, as the Dalek extrapolates too much of her into itself. More importantly, she is able to defuse the Doctor's rage, leading him back to his usual self by the show's end.

Adam: The first of two stories featuring interim companion Adam Mitchell (Bruno Langley). Rose responds strongly to Adam, openly flirting in their very first proper scene together. Adam's intelligence and lack of respect for authority remind her of the Doctor - a younger, sexually available version of the Doctor. Adam does manage to get on the Doctor's bad side by saving himself by ducking under a descending bulkhead rather than trying to help Rose, but I don't think he can be condemned there. Rose was too many steps behind - All he would have accomplished by lingering would be trapping himself on the wrong side of the bulkhead with her, which would surely have ended in his death in a way that would have been no help to Rose at all.

Dalek: Quite possibly the only new series story in which the Daleks really work.  The story strips the threat down to a single Dalek. Battered and old, it looks more pathetic than frightening. Which makes it all the more effective as it rips through van Statten's small army of guards with no effort at all. We are shown its intelligence, not only through decoding the lock to its cage and "absorbing the Internet," but also viscerally. Surrounded by guards, the Dalek takes in the room. It observes the fire alarm, the sprinkler system, the metal all around... and in three expertly-judged shots, a matter of seconds, it performs a massacre. The spectacle is enough to make Van Statten finally take the thing seriously - and more than enough to sell every viewer on the threat of the Daleks.


THOUGHTS

The episode opens with an effective aside, working both as a nod to the old series and the old fans and as a thematic tie-in with this story. The Doctor and Rose are poking around Van Statten's private museum, when the Doctor comes across the head of a classic series Cyberman. He stares at it through the glass, shocked and a little disgusted at seeing "the stuff of nightmares reduced to an exhibit." There's not even a pause in breath between him observing that and stating that he's "getting old."

Like the Cybermen, the Time Lords and the Daleks are all gone. The stuff of myth and nightmares, reduced to one Time Lord and one Dalek, living relics of an age long past. If van Statten has his way, both Dalek and Doctor will be reduced to museum exhibits - intelligent animals, kept in a private cage for his own entertainment.

Dalek is loosely based on writer Robert Shearman's Big Finish audio, Jubilee. The two stories are very different, however.  Their only real similarities are the idea of a single, imprisioned Dalek and a similar (though not identical) Doctor/Dalek confrontation scene.

I like Jubilee better overall, but the Doctor/Dalek scene in Dalek is by far the stronger confrontation. With the Time War backstory, it's more meaningful. Instead of simply being a verbal confrontation between the Doctor and a Dalek, it is a confrontation between the last Time Lord and the last Dalek, the start of what would seem to be the final battle of that war. All "Doctorish" elements drop away from Eccleston's performance in an instant, as he taunts his enemy, blocks out its words about them being the same, and finally embraces that charge by attempting to kill the Dalek - even preceding his attempt by intoning the Dalek catchphrase: "Exterminate!" It's been seven years since Doctor Who returned to television as I write this, and this remains the most intense scene the series has presented.

The first thirty minutes of Dalek are magnificent. It's a very stripped-down episode: a single Dalek on a rampage, Rose and Adam on the run from it, and the Doctor determined to not only stop it but obliterate it. The script is taut, smart, and suspenseful, the pace driving relentlessly right up to the instant that bulkhead closes with Rose caught on the wrong side of it.

And then, it all falls apart.

There is nothing in the first thirty minutes of Dalek that does not work for me. Unfortunately, there is little in the last ten minutes that does work. The Dalek doesn't transform gradually. Despite an attempt to plant something early on in the Dalek focusing on Rose, it still behaves as a traditional Dalek - albeit a traditional Dalek on steroids. But once that bulkhead closes, it suddenly becomes a completely different entity.

Maybe if the Dalek spared only Rose, because of its connection with her, but continued to exterminate everyone else... Maybe then it wouldn't feel so completely out of place dramatically. But its sparing of van Statten and Goddard (Anna-Louise Plowman) is a step too far. The Dalek goes from "alien death machine" to "grumpy puppy" with practically no transition, and that last ten minutes feels like it belongs to a very different episode, a very much worse one.

If I was as enthusiastic about the show's ending as I am about the rest of it, this would be the best Ninth Doctor episode. It's still a decidedly above-average episode, with a stunning performance by Christopher Eccleston and some of the best moments in the entire new series. The ending fails badly for me, though, transforming a great episode into merely a very good one.


Rating: 8/10.