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Doctor Who: The Evil of the Daleks [1967] Intended as a resolution to the overall storyline of the Daleks, initiated back in The Dead Planet and winding up in a last episode tautologically entitled The Final End, this was an early instance of Doctor Who mingling its science fiction remit with the historical settings the show had otherwise abandoned - featuring Marius Goring as an enormously-bearded, cigar-puffing Victorian scientist and introducing Deborah Watling as continuing character Victoria, a prim miss upbraided by an especially nasty Dalek for losing weight while imprisoned. It picks up from the close of The Faceless Ones, with the TARDIS stolen from Heathrow in 1966 and ingeniously gets into its story with a first episode mystery about a dodgy antiques firm which has a range of genuine 19th Century pieces which happen to be brand new. As in The Chase, the hook is the Daleks setting out to trap the Doctor; here, not for revenge but as part of a larger scheme. David Whitaker's scripts have a clever concept: the Daleks ostensibly want to run Jamie [Frazer Hines] through a series of tests so they can isolate 'the human factor', the complexity of character which has always enabled people to defeat the monsters in the past; the Doctor applies this to some test Daleks, who are interestingly humanised, as part of a scheme to wreck the entire race of Daleks; it turns out that the villains have foreseen this and the actual objective is to isolate the exact opposite of the human factor, 'the Dalek factor', which can be used to convert human beings into ruthless footsoldiers of the Dalek cause. Uniquely, one cliffhanger doesn't depend on danger but on conceptual breakthrough - as three newly-humanised Daleks act like children, and the Doctor realises 'they're playing'. Terry Nation had always written the Daleks like children in tantrums, but Whitaker makes the humanised Daleks, croaking 'you are my friend' and questioning orders with 'why-yy?', surprisingly affecting, perhaps writing to the fond feeling kids had begun to have for the creatures [which would pay off decades later in the new series' Dalek]. However, the benign move is a set-up for the final episode transformation of Goring's Maxtable into a Dalekised human, a genuinely disturbing creation - especially since the actor has shown how human emotions Daleks don't have [greed, cowardice, self-deception] are part of his journey to inhuman villainy. With a switch between 1966 and 1866 [that exact hundred-year gap is typical 1960s think] and later episodes on Skaro, where we meet the giant Emperor Dalek, there's enough variation to offset the repetition that sets in, especially since this is a seven-parter. Among the supporting ingredients are some nearly-fey '60s antique dealers, the inventively designed Dalek and Victorian time cabinets, Bridget Forsyth as a Victorian miss, Windsor Davies as a dirty-faced thug, Sonny Caldinez as a Turkish wrestler and Gary Watson as a Crimean war veteran villain who turns out to be a mind-controlled zombie. The juxtaposition of the Daleks and the Forsyte Saga milieu is especially pleasing, and set a tone the show would return to for The Talons of Weng-Chiang and others. Though unusually repeated within the original run - its second showing
was explicitly set-up as a flashback as the Doctor used a helmet to
impress new regular Zoe [Wendy Padbury] on the kind of dangers she would
be facing with the TARDIS - it has sadly been lost, except for the audio,
Episode Two and some snips of the ambitious final battle. I remember
this well from its original showings, but regret the loss of the whole
thing - especially the towering Emperor Dalek and the full-on Dalek
internecine war. First published in this form here. Visit Kim's Official Website at www.johnnyalucard.com
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