Tom Salinsky

Doctor Who Series 5 Episode 3 - Victory of the Daleks

Please note: this review contains spoilers throughout

This was probably the episode I was looking forward to the most – Winston Churchill! The Daleks! Mark Gatiss! What could go wrong? Er, quite a bit.

The set-up is gorgeous. The Doctor and Amy arrive in a wonderful and wonderfully-realised location – Churchill’s wartime bunker. A nervous young radio girl fears for the safety of her man. Soldiers push tin representations of their forces around a map. Then, up pops Bill Patterson, looking remarkably like Bill Pertwee in that tin hat, and unveils his “Ironsides” – obedient, polite tea-making, union jack-sporting Daleks, whose awesome firepower Churchill eagerly endorses.

So, we’re all set for a nifty retread of Power of the Daleks, with a (fairly) newly-regenerated Doctor having to desperately convince a group of trusting humans, isolated in a claustrophobic location that the docile metal pepperpots in their midst are actually the most lethally antagonistic force in the universe.

And then, about 15 minutes in, it all starts to unravel.

To be fair, it goes along at a fair clip, and a lot of the flaws I’m about to dwell so lovingly on, were not immediately apparent to me. And, to be even fairer, accusations of nonsensical plotting can also be levelled at The Beast Below, but my reaction to Beast, was that – despite lapses in logic – I was carried away by the big emotions, the wonderful symbolism of those FORGET and PROTEST buttons and the sheer charming oddness of it all. But what little there is to like in Victory is shopworn and underpowered.

Almost as soon as the Daleks are unmasked, which itself happens a bit too quickly and easily, they remove themselves from the action, and they and the Doctor repair to a much more spacious, far less interesting location. So, the gullible humans who bring these murderous creatures into their lives never remotely pay the price for this foolishness. Where Dalek succeeded so brilliantly in demonstrating how effective a killing machine even a single Dalek could be, Victory contents itself with just telling us how mean they are, but they only ever actually off two nameless squaddies.

So, now we’ve robbed the story of all its atmosphere and power, we can learn the Daleks’ plan. They possess something called a Progenitor, which makes Daleks (out of what?), but which can only be ordered so to do by other Daleks (why?), in which category the current Daleks do not qualify (why not?), so rather than reprogramming it the not-quite-Daleks lay a trap for the Doctor, whose identification of these Daleks will be proof enough for the Progenitor (but it wouldn’t take the word of an android Doctor, which might have been a simpler plan given that these Daleks are pretty nifty android-builders) whereupon the Progenitor builds things which look a bit like Daleks, but which perfectly-clearly aren’t. What!?

Throughout this muddled Dalek info-dump, the Doctor does very little except to wave a jammy dodger at them, which is a nice touch in a story which is pretty short on them, but he doesn’t really do very much.

Meanwhile, the real heart of the story is supposed to be in Bill Patterson’s capable hands (or hand). And Patterson does make a decent fist (sorry) of the plight of the Dickian android Bracewell who believed himself to be a brilliant human inventor. But again, the plotting destroys not only any sense that there might be in this idea, but drains out most of the drama too, since Bracewell instantly and obediently changes sides to fight the Daleks, with barely a hint of regret or internal conflict.

But we aren’t done with Patterson just yet. The Daleks can use Bracewell’s energy supply as a bomb, which will if detonated, crack the planet open like an egg. Rather than detonate it straight away, despite being safely in orbit, they elect to set a rather long timer, which gives the Doctor and Amy just time enough to remind him of a lost love, and the recollection of this implanted memory prevents the detonation from taking place, for reasons which are never made clear.

What also isn’t clear is why the Doctor didn’t just bundle Bracewell into the TARDIS and remove him from any populated area. Now, there are many, many similar moments in Doctor Who stories, hence all of those Hartnell stories which feature the TARDIS trapped or falling off a cliff or lost in a bet. But it’s symptomatic of the plotting weaknesses in this story that Gatiss doesn’t bother removing the TARDIS from the Doctor’s control at this point, even though he had included a subplot of Churchill repeatedly trying to steal the TARDIS key!

Well, it wouldn’t have been exactly fair play to portray Churchill as a thief, you might argue; Churchill is one of the greatest tacticians and one of the most formidable orators in the world – we don’t want to see him portrayed as a selfish and foolish pickpocket who threatens the safety of the earth for the sake of getting one over on the Doctor. This is a good argument, but it would be stronger if Churchill’s skills in leadership and battle-planning had contributed anything at all to the story. Gatiss sets up and then ignores the promise of a wartime prime minister who will invite death into the heart of the British camp if it will give him a tactical edge. But as soon as the Daleks disappear back to their ship, Winston has no further part to play in the story. Previous “celebrity historicals” have tended to make their heroes’ talents key to the plot Shakespeare’s gift for language, Agatha Christie’s problem-solving skills, Charles Dickens’ humanity – but Victory of the Daleks just expects us to go “ooh, it’s Churchill” and not notice that the character with more screen time than anyone except the Doctor and Amy doesn’t actually do anything except recite catchphrases, and further ignore the fact that Ian MacNeice is far fatter and jowlier than Britain’s most famous PM.

Any moral conflict in Churchill is sidestepped, Bracewell is suitably appalled by the truth of his existence and everyone else is firmly on the side of the Allies and the elevation of the conflict from geopolitical to galactic is also entirely ignored, since the story features no Nazis. So, once Bracewell turns Spitfires into spaceships – by magic – the Doctor has the Daleks where he wants them, and FINALLY someone has to make a moral choice. The Doctor, inevitably chooses saving the Earth over eradicating the Daleks, but by this time, I’m too bored to really care, except to notice in passing that Russell T Davies did this exact same plotline with real emotion and tension in The Parting of the Ways.

By the time the Doctor is laboriously giving ticking time bomb planet-killer Bracewell time enough to escape so that the Daleks can zoom back and blow up the planet whenever they wish, I’m totally fed up with this episode. We learn that our radio girl’s chap has indeed been shot down, in what must have been a fossil left over from a previous draft, since it has no bearing on the rest of the story at all, and the Doctor and Amy depart leaving only another crack in reality behind.

I’m mildly curious as to why Amy doesn’t remember the events of The Stolen Earth, but I fear that the real legacy of Victory of the Daleks will only be this ghastly redesign of British television’s most iconic badguys. The rest is all just missed opportunities. Even Doctor Smith wasn’t given many opportunities to sparkle, although – bless ‘im – he did grab a couple with both hands.

Let’s hope the next episode will be doing something other than taking set-pieces and concepts from old stories and rehashing them. What’s the next one about again…?

Two stars.