angelophile | Review: Doctor Who - Victory of the Daleks

Well, I said last week that it was hard to see how they could possibly screw up a story in which Daleks fight Spitfires in space while Winston Churchill watches on, but there appeared to be a fairly concerted effort on the part of the production team to do so.

This episode was a very strange mix of the wonderful and the staggeringly awful rubbing shoulders in equal measure. You could see the great ideas bubbling there - the Daleks hiding in plain sight and infiltrating the British war effort. The fantastic Spitfire sequence. The cyborg inventor. But then there was the awful - barely sketched characters that presumably we're meant to care about, but don't. Ropey special effects. Some weak performances from the leads. Rushed pacing. And, worst of all, some of the worst acting I've seen in nu-Who. The delivery of some of the lines, notably the watchman with his "Take that Adolf!" which had me cringing.

I guess I'm feeling spoiled by the last WWII set entry in Doctor Who, The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances two parter from Eccleston's era, which was drenched in atmosphere. This episode had none and completely failed to capture the feel of the era, except, perhaps for five minutes at the beginning while the Daleks were scuttling around Whitehall offering tea.

I'll give credit to Ian McNeice, who gamely embraced the role of Churchill without making it a dodgy impression, although he didn't instill him with any of the gravitas or charisma I'd have hoped for. He did get some good lines, though. Although the best, like the line about Hitler invading Hell and the "keep buggering on" quote were Churchillisms, so not so much well written as just dipping into a book of Churchill quotes. They resisted the urge to insert the obvious ones, though, and for that I'm grateful.

There was the definite impression this was one of the first episodes the leads worked on, if not the first, before Gillan and Smith had found their comfort zone. Either that or there's some cracks starting to show in their acting chops already, which is a bit disconcerting after two episodes in which I thought they were excellent. Smith's certainly didn't seem to have much of a presence with the shouty, threateningy stuff. As redscharlach's review notes very succinctly:

"Now, Nine was the ultimate shouty Doctor: you would have bloody done what he said, because he had such scary conviction about him. This also made him the best at talking to Daleks, because wit and eccentricity is a bit wasted on them: you might as well just YELL. When Eleven says "I won't let you get away this time, I won't!", you can almost hear the Dalek thinking "Yadda-di-yadda, hairstyle boy." Whereas when Nine talked about Daleks being afraid of him, you could believe it."

Then there was the fact that even when the Daleks told him they were rebuilding the masterrace he stood around for ten minutes while they convieniently explained, doing nothing but toy with a Jammy Dodger until it was too late.

And so, we reach the aforementioned masterrace. And I was disappointed to realise that even the parts I'd rather liked on the Dalek redesign in the publicity pics, such as the designed vents, looked like arse when on screen. They conveniently proved, in one foul swoop, why fucking with the Daleks design is not the done thing after almost forty years. I think, perhaps, if they'd been in dull gunmetal grey I could have lived with them. Even the splash of bronze of the nu-Who Daleks makes me twitchy. But the Power Ranger Daleks in varying lurid colours made me reach for my eyes with the intention of poking them out. Dreadful and unnecessary.

All in all, the episode simply felt rushed and would've seriously benefitted from being a 2-parter to allow the story to breathe. The first 10 minutes were actually really good fun as the Daleks pretended to be subservient to the humans. I actually appreciated the fact that the Daleks turning up again wasn't a huge revelation and it could have played out as a decent Dalek episode with they just being world conquering rather than fitting into the mold of the nu-Who stores where they always have to be something more. But then, very quickly the Daleks drop their charade and the episode becomes pretty routine stuff with the Daleks implementing a grand plan to resurrect their race. Again. Yaddah yaddah yaddah.

So! Jammie Dodgers. Spitfires in space. Daleks and tea. There was still some fun to take away from this episode, but some serious fail too and it just felt like it was trying to hard throughout and just came away limp. Disappointing.