Dark Night Of The Soul (Of The Daleks)

Doctor Who
Into The Dalek
Series Eight, Episode Two


"Where are we going?"  "Into darkness."  Yeah, he's not kidding.  Into The Dalek is some seriously gloomy Doctor Who.

This is a good thing, of course.  We've collectively followed the show for fifty years, and it's important that it finds ways to surprise us.  Steven Moffat said we'd begin to wonder how well we know the Doctor, and to my surprise, he's delivering on it.  (As is Phil Ford, who once again shares a writing credit.)  Peter Capaldi is fascinating to watch, gripping, funny, everything you'd want from the Doctor, but he's not necessarily your friend.  When he asks Clara if he's a good man, he requests that her answer be "Honest, cold and considered, without kindness or restraint."  Never mind Scottish: that's how he is now.  I'm not sure if I like it, which is the point.

INT. TARDIS: "Clara, tell me.  Am I a good man?"
"Yes.  I've met your previous selves, and they were good men.
They're you, so you're empirically good as well."
"Oh, right you are, silly me." END TITLES.

He's rude, and without any social niceties.  When he rescues a woman from an exploding spaceship, her already-dead brother is left behind.  He looks at her with utter detachment.  "He's dead.  You're not.  By all means, keep crying."  But that's just a lack of tact, and that's not new, it's just out of fashion.  Tom Baker, Colin Baker and Christopher Eccleston were all tactless sometimes; the Doctor is an alien, after all.

The big talking point is the death of one of the rebels, Ross.  Once he triggers a Dalek's antibodies, there's nothing that can be done to stop it.  The Doctor shows no remorse – he told him not to do it, he did it anyway, so he's "dead already".  But he seemingly offers hope, which turns out to be a way of tracking his remains to a safe location, thus saving the rest of them.  No magic solutions, no agonising about it afterwards, he just does what he can to save who he can.  Fair enough, but false hope is pretty grim, even for a darker Doctor.

And yet, as unpleasant as he can be, he's still the Doctor.  Remember William Hartnell?  There was a Doctor with a character arc: a dangerous misanthrope, he kidnapped his companions to stop them telling anyone about the TARDIS.  In Episode #3, he tried to kill a caveman to save the bother of carrying him.  But he learned from his companions and became the Doctor we know, as much about saving individual lives as the worlds they live on.  Capaldi is the start of a new set of regenerations.  Perhaps that's why he's a bit of a bastard again.

It's a process and we'll have to see where it goes, but some of it already doesn't add up.  His dislike of soldiers is seeded through the episode, just as it was in The Sontaran Stratagem.  It didn't convince me back then, either: the Doctor's been around long enough to know you don't need a gun to kill people, and that guns don't make you a soldier.  His total disregard for the death of Ross takes the moral high-ground away, but he's still stomping on it when he refuses to take on a new companion, Journey Blue, citing her job description.  I can't help feeling they're making an issue out of this just so it can be overcome later.

Which brings us to Danny Pink, the new teacher at Clara's school, who is an ex-soldier.  Clara and Danny's scenes provide much needed light in an episode that's all shade.  Some fans will automatically cry "Soap opera!", but they're nuts.  Danny is immediately likeable, and funny without making a big thing about it.  The bit where Clara asks him out is brilliantly-edited and (relax, let it happen) hilarious.  Best of all, Clara feels more grounded just for taking an interest in him, which is something her character needed.  It's disappointing that the TARDIS is merely "one of her hobbies", but at least that disconnect makes more sense this series.  Clara was just an accessory to Matt's Doctor, a pretty girl who wasn't Amy Pond; with Peter, she is a necessary moral counterpoint, and isn't just along for the trip of a lifetime.  Obviously she'll need the occasional breather.  Danny, who offends the Doctor's sensibilities without having met him, adds an interesting ingredient to the mix.

A wibbly effect, eerie noises, moving slowly and pretending it's slo-mo...
Sniff!  It's just like the good old days!  (The sad thing is, I mean it.)

Not so good, though, Danny's Post Traumatic Stress stuff.  Time is an issue, so they dive right in: asked if he ever killed a civilian, he cries silent tears.  It's clearly an important part of who he is, they need to communicate it visually, and Samuel Anderson does it well, but it's no less wince-inducing.  Tears, straight away?  Really?

The plot is equally direct, though there are niggles, some bordering on... the word for big niggles, whatever that is.  (Biggles?)  The Doctor rescues Journey and returns her to the rebel base – this is a future where the Daleks are on the rampage, there isn't time to go into specifics, and that's fine by me.  It feels like Classic Who, just having a Dalek war going on somewhere.  The rebels are about to kill the Doctor to ensure their base stays a secret, when it's suggested he help their patient instead.  A Dalek, damaged and no longer wishing to kill everything in the universe.  It just wants to kill Daleks.  The Doctor agrees to help it (hold that thought), and rushes to collect Clara.

Plot niggle #1: why do they let him go?  They were going to kill him just to keep the base under wraps, and they still don't trust him afterwards, as they keep him under armed guard.  Why did they trust him not to summon the Daleks?  Scene missing.  Hmm.  With Clara in tow, the Doctor and three guards are miniaturised and put in the Dalek, because they have miniaturising equipment on board, so why not.  Plot niggle #2: actually, why not?  Is this really their first resort?  Have they tried X-Rays and monkey wrenches?  They never really say what's wrong with it, so it's a bit "Huh?" that they immediately opt for the crazy sci-fi solution instead of a mechanic.

Straight onto plot niggle #3 then, which is a biggle: what are they trying to achieve?  "A Dalek so damaged it's turned good.  Morality as malfunction.  How do I resist?"  Er, I would think not wanting to do anything that might turn it the other way would be a pretty good deterrent.  Sure enough, they discover the reason for the malfunction (a radiation leak), and the Doctor fixes it without pausing to consider the consequences.  The Dalek reboots, of course.  What were they expecting it to do?

Best just to go with it.  The stuff inside the Dalek is creepy, if familiar; movies like Fantastic Voyage and InnerSpace are dutifully referenced, the journey through the eyepiece is weirdly reminiscent of cheap old Who effects (which I love), the rubbish chute is unavoidably a bit Star Wars, and the robot antibodies are on loan from Let's Kill Hitler – but this is an unimaginably better episode than Let's Kill Hitler, so I'm not complaining.  What this stuff is really here for is to juxtapose the new Doctor against a Dalek.  It's a time-honoured way to set his moral compass, and he's never needed it more.  So, how do they get on?

As it happens, I recently saw Victory Of The Daleks (urgh), and one of things it tried to do was pit the Doctor against "good" Daleks and see how he'd cope.  Of course, that episode couldn't examine an idea if it was printed in luminous paint on a billboard.  This one gives the Doctor genuine hope, which is thrown heart-rendingly out the window when the Dalek reboots.  (Capaldi is brilliant here.)  It then pushes him to admit he thinks a "good Dalek" is impossible.  Clara is horrified, forcing him to give it further thought.  He concludes that there is still, and always is, hope.  That's a great mix of Doctor/Dalek prejudice and the power of the trusty, ever-optimistic companion.  It's Doctor Who to a tee.

"Welcome to the most dangerous place in the universe."  What, inside a Dalek?
Is that really worse than, say, stood in front of a Dalek?

For all his darker moments, this Doctor makes perfect sense when he goes one-to-one with (urgh) Rusty.  Their conversation is a great reminder of the positive way he sees the universe (which is all part of the plan, of course), but the highlight is this note-perfect summary of their relationship, and his character: "I went to Skaro, and then I met you lot, and I understood who I was.  The Doctor was not the Daleks."  Yes!  Hole in one.

Of course, it doesn't end well.  The Doctor is convincing at first, but the Dalek just zeroes in on his hatred for all things pepperpot-shaped.  And this is a fair point.  He's never made it a secret that he hates their guts, and for all this Dalek's new Jeff Goldblumy ideas about life being indomitable, it's obviously going to gravitate towards the angry bit of the Doctor's psyche.  Quite right.  I was concerned we'd get a thoroughly friendly Dalek at the end of it, which is where 2005's Dalek went, and that's an episode they've obviously watched again for research.  Don't panic: Ford and Moffat manage to change a Dalek without betraying what a Dalek is.

And yeah, on the subject of Daleks, when they finally arrive: ho-lee-crap, they are terrifying.  These are the Daleks of old, doing nothing whimsical, no zooming around, no Murray Gold choirs.  They just show up and kill everything.  There's a sheer hopelessness to the attack scenes, a crushing, saddening doom.  And then Rusty The Not Exactly Friendly Dalek trundles in to blast them to kingdom come – which he somehow manages to do without bringing the scariness of Daleks down around him.  Their deaths are equally horrifying, and tragic because it's not what the Doctor wanted, and might be the Doctor's fault.  Daleks who want to kill us and Daleks who don't; they're equally scary, as they should be.

With the "bad" Daleks dealt with and the Doctor's faith almost in tatters, Rusty can't resist a parting shot.  "I am not a good Dalek.  You are a good Dalek."  The aforementioned Dalek episode from 2005 made the same assessment, and sorry to say, it was balderdash then as well.  Does the Doctor destroy heaps of things, sometimes without pity?  Yes.  Does he also do a bunch of other stuff and act in loads of ways that have nothing to do with Daleks?  Again, yes.  It's just too simple to label him like that – and it's eye-crossingly bizarre to do it when they so perfectly summed him up as the opposite earlier.  The Doctor thinks, he feels, he loves, he regrets, he also happens to kill things.  He's still not a ruddy Dalek.

A couple of moments don't ring true, and a couple of plot points don't add up.  Is all of that annoying?  Yes.  Is that enough to make Into The Dalek a bad episode?  No, silly!  This is a relentless look into the Doctor's soul, and that of the Daleks, and you won't like everything you see, but the Doctor, the Daleks and Clara are more interesting for having looked.  It's quite something.

Space Under Siege

Doctor Who
The Waters Of Mars
2009 Winter Special


And now for something slightly different.

On the face of it, The Waters Of Mars is business as usual.  A base under siege?  Most of us Doctor Who fans (and sci-fi fans in general) bought that T-shirt many times over.  Russell T Davies and Phil Ford shake it up a bit, making it a fixed point in time so the Doctor cannot intercede.  But we've seen that before too, in The Fires Of Pompeii.  This time, however, the Doctor's not going to let it happen.  He's the last Time Lord, so why not?  What's the worst that can happen?  The Waters Of Mars is at its most interesting when it's asking these questions.

"You could have shot Andy Stone, but you didn't.  I loved you for that."
What, for endangering everyone's lives?  Pacifism is super, but it's not
that simple if you know you'll have to "deal with them" later anyway.
Which he does.

Mind you, there's a lot of business (as usual) to get through first – after all, you can't turn it upside down unless it's right-side-up to begin with.  Please find enclosed 1 x Base, 1 x Alien Menace, 1 x Group Of Survivors Picked Off One By One and 1 x Doctor.  There's a lot of running back and forth, and making jokes about running back and forth, and locking doors to keep the monsters out, and making jokes about how that doesn't seem to work, and then doing it some more anyway.  "Routine" is a fair description; you just wait for them to get on with it.  As for what the monsters want, take a wild guess.  (It rhymes with "Blinvade Flanet Mirth".)  All in all, The Impossible Planet pushed this setup further in 2006.

But if we must do it all again, at least they've come up with a decent monster.  A water-borne virus is turning the pioneers of Mars's Bowie Base One into something new.  Think 28 Days Later zombies with water pouring out of their mouths and hands.  It's a simple idea, oh-dear-god disturbing to look at.  The obvious suggestion of insanity gives them an extra (arguably excessive) scare-factor, particularly the one that doesn't come with reassuringly alien contact lenses.  (No reason given: she's just "closer to human" than the rest of them, because terrifying.)  Water makes a suitably ambiguous and ever-present threat, and as it's set on Mars, it allows for a bit of name-dropping for the Ice Warriors.  Which this fanboy was more than happy with.

As soon as the Doctor arrives, we learn that Adelaide Brooke and the rest of her team will die in the next 24 hours.  And let's just get this out of the way: we learn all of this in due course, seeded in dialogue and in the Doctor's attitude, which is beautifully understated but still makes it clear.  It's very well done, but there's a lot of blunt flashbacks and computer-screens full of information to help us along as well.  This stuff is completely unnecessary.  Accompanied by ridiculous "Crash, boom!" sound effects, it's literally the clunkiest exposition I've ever seen.  Thanks, guys, but I was already paying attention to the dialogue and the acting.  I wish it were possible to remove these steaming info-dumps and let the story make its own way.  We're not idiots.

Right, back to it: their deaths will propel the human race into a realm of space exploration, so the Doctor must let it happen.  It's a neat idea to put a fixed point in the future, as the audience is automatically more ambiguous about changing it.  Does it really matter?  I never really liked the whole "our deaths = incentive for our descendants" idea, but they do set it up with Adelaide's history.  She went into space because of a personal tragedy, and the same happens to her granddaughter.  Fair enough, they need to go.  (Although, about that: a Dalek spared Adelaide's life because it knew her death was a fixed point.  So it must have also known the Dalek plan would fall on its arse.  "Uh, guys...")

The Doctor's conflicting emotions make sense.  Without a Donna, a Martha or a Rose, he's got no one to argue that he must help no matter what, so he could just get on with letting it happen – but he knows what they would say, and he's tired of letting this sort of thing happen.  David Tennant is fantastic, wrestling with this the whole way through, and it's absolutely captivating to watch – one of his top performances.  (And on that note, how bloomin' amazing is Lindsay Duncan?  Just goes to show you don't need to drum up a "companion" in these Specials – you can just pit the Doctor against another brilliant character.)  I can believe that after losing everything again and again, the Doctor's ready to snap.

Which he certainly does.  When the Doctor finally comes around and decides to hell with it, he'll rescue them anyway, all his usual manic energy is amped up to complete madness.  This juxtaposition, as he does what would be entirely normal if there wasn't a fixed point, i.e. rescuing people, is amazingly jarring.  Coupled with the monsters succeeding way more than usual (breezing into the base and killing nearly everybody), this makes for an intensely horrifying and unforgettable second-to-last-act.  It's powerful stuff.  (Also, I like that he uses a little robot to zoom across Mars with the TARDIS key.  Fixed-point-wrongness aside, it's really cool.)

Wait – does the robot trundle through the water?  The infected water?
It sure looks like it.  But the Doctor drops that sucker on Earth!
Better hope nobody touches it...

Dropping off the three survivors, the Doctor then has a rant about how powerful he is, and how "little" almost everyone else is, much to the horror of Adelaide – and us.  It's a new dimension for the Doctor, like that bit in The Armageddon Factor where he pretends he's gone nuts, only for real this time.  Is it believable?  Well, yes and no.  These are extreme circumstances.  He's going directly against what it means to be a Time Lord, and he pays for it.  Ood Sigma appears (more or less) to signal that he's gone too far and this is it, regeneration soon.  He knows at once that it was wrong to behave like this, and that in all likelihood, this is how bad Time Lords get started.  His urge to do good and to survive are not innately destructive things, but The Waters Of Mars pushes them to extremes.  It's bold.  Though inevitably, divisive.

Because on the other hand, that crack about "little people" goes beyond nervous breakdown and into Acting Like Someone Else Entirely.  The Doctor loves everybody.  It's who he is.  I can believe that he'd do all this in a moment of madness, and that power corrupts, but sneering at the humans he's going out of his way to save is a nearly impossible sell.  Wasn't the moment loaded enough already, rocking back and forth in five minutes from "Time Lord Victorious!" to "Is this how I die?" to "No!", without throwing in a completely new personality as well?  I think so.  Oh well.  For good or ill, there is a hell of a lot to chew on.

And that's not all.  Finally accepting her place in history, Adelaide takes matters into her own hands and shoots herself.  History gets right back on course, despite the Doctor's interference.  This is impressively shocking at first, but as often happens when Doctor Who gets clever, it raises further questions.  If her granddaughter was inspired by her mysterious death on Mars, does it go without saying that she will be inspired in exactly the same way by a suicidal corpse turning up in her living room?  Even in the throes of (what I assume to be) a nervous breakdown, the Doctor seems confident that history will stay the course.  And it does – two of them survive, and no harm done.  Would Adelaide's survival, and her ensuing support for little Suzie, really prevent all that space travel?  Is her corpse automatically a better solution?  As the Doctor says, the details may change, but the story stays the same.

Speaking of other solutions, the Doctor brings up The Fires Of Pompeii.  As well he should, it being another fixed point and all that, but aren't we missing a sort of elephant-shaped-thingie in the room?  In Pompeii, faced with a fixed point in which everybody died, the Doctor still managed to save a group of people.  He just tucked them away somewhere else.  (And presumably told them not to mention Pompeii.)  What's stopping him sneaking Adelaide and everyone else somewhere they won't do any damage?  It's a big universe.  All they'd have to do is live quietly.  Their mysterious deaths are a part of history, but their corpses aren't.

Hmm.  It's definitely dark, unsettling drama, but also puzzling and perhaps a bit muddled as well.  Where the really good stuff is concerned, it's great that Doctor Who can go there, especially on a prolonged home stretch when you're not expecting very much.  You've no idea where the story will go from this point, other than the fact that it's nearly over, and kudos for that.  More's the pity The Waters Of Mars still goes exactly where you'd expect for the first 45 minutes.  It's a toss-up between The Fires Of Pompeii and Every Base Under Siege Ever, at least until the end, which is the bit you'll remember anyway.