by Catriona Mills

Live-blogging Doctor Who Season Five: "Victory of the Daleks"

Posted 2 May 2010 in by Catriona

Full live-blogging disclosure: I’ve been working all through this long weekend, and am crazy tired (and a bit tipsy). Also, when I’m finished here, I have to raise a dark menace from the depths of the ocean and frighten some children with it.

So though this live-blogging has been described as a love-fest, and I like to make that true, this one might be a bit cranky.

We open in a bunker that is shaking. People babble incomprehensible war jargon to one another—I catch the word “Messerschmitts,” though I can’t spell it.

Winston Churchill—yes, really—asks if the German planes are out of range.

“Normally, sir, yes,” says one of the women operatives.

“Well, then,” says Churchill. “Time to roll out the secret weapon.”

Credits.

The TARDIS materialises, and the Doctor pops out to be confronted by armed soldiers and Winston Churchill, who asks the Doctor for a TARDIS key.

Churchill recognises the Doctor, even though he’s regenerated. And he tells the Doctor that he rang (at the end of “The Beast Below”) a month ago. A month is much less than twelve years. Imagine if Churchill had to wait twelve years!

An operative tells Churchill that there’s another formation coming in, and he invites the Doctor to come up to the roof and see something.

On the roof is Professor Bracewell, head of the Ironside Project. He’s watching the sky through binoculars as Amy is stunned by the barrage balloons. But the Doctor is distracted by the destruction of the entire squadron by something that is not human technology.

Indeed, it’s not human technology.

It’s a Dalek. A Dalek in camoflague paint.

The Doctor demands to know what the Dalek is doing here, but it only says, “I am one of your soldiers.”

Bracewell says that this is one of his Ironsides. But the Doctor, in the Cabinet war bunker, tells Churchill that despite the plans, the photographs, and the field tests, these are not Bracewell’s inventions. They’re alien and totally hostile, he says.

Exactly, says Churchill, and they’ll win him the war. He slaps a rather gorgeous propaganda poster on the table—and I’ll provide a link to that later, if you fancy.

Churchill tells the Doctor that he might have been a bit freaked out a month ago, but now he thinks the Ironsides can win him the war.

The Doctor demands that Amy tells Churchill about the Daleks.

What do I know about the Daleks, she says?

They invaded your world, he says.

No, they didn’t, Amy says.

The Doctor looks at her in astonishment, but she insists that she has no memory of the Dalek invasion of Earth. Or the more recent Dalek invasion of Earth.

Then the TiVo goes wabby, and Nick takes five minutes to fix it. But it’s five minutes that, I’m pretty sure, was only the Doctor insisting that the Daleks are aliens and Churchill insisting they’re not.

The all-clear sounds.

In Bracewell’s lab, a Dalek offers him a cup of tea, and he says that would be lovely.

The Doctor swans in with Amy, and challenges Bracewell to provide him with some details about the Dalek construction. Bracewell shows the Doctor some other plans he’s come up with, for gravity bubbles and the like, as the Dalek slides up with a cup of tea on a tray balanced on his sucker.

The Doctor tells Bracewell that whatever the Daleks have offered him, they won’t keep their promise.

The Dalek offers the Doctor a cup of tea, but the Doctor knocks the tray off his sucker, and demands the Dalek tell him what they’re here for. Which war are they trying to win, World War II or the war against everything that’s not Dalek?

He starts whaling on the Dalek with a crowbar (or perhaps a tyre iron, or some other sort of metal bar), while the Dalek bleats, “Do you not want a cup of tea?”

DOCTOR: I am the Doctor. And you are the Daleks.
(Pause)
DALEK: Correct. Review testimony.

They transmit the testimony to the Dalek ship, where it activates something called a “progenitor cube,” which looks like a Dalek-shaped pepperpot. I’d like a Dalek-shaped pepperpot.

Bracewell insists that the Daleks stop, because they’re his Ironsides. He created them, he says.

No, say the Daleks: they created him. And they shoot off his lower arm, showing us that he’s a robot.

The Doctor heads straight back to the TARDIS but leaves Amy behind to stay safe. “In the middle of the London Blitz?” she asks. “Safe as it gets around me,” he says.

AMY: What does he expect us to do now?
CHURCHILL: KBO, of course.
AMY: What?
CHURCHILL: Keep buggering on.

On the Dalek ship, the Doctor pops up. The Daleks aim their weapons at him, but he’s says no, he has a self-destruct button for the TARDIS, and he’ll detonate the ship if he has to.

I’m pretty sure that’s a biscuit.

The Doctor asks what the Daleks are doing, and they say, as usual, that one ship survived. They fell through time, tracing one of the progenitor cubes, which contains pure Dalek DNA.

But, as the Doctor points out, the cube wouldn’t recognise them as Dalek—their DNA is too corrupted. They needed the Doctor’s testimony to prove that they were Daleks, though they don’t make it clear how the progenitor cube can recognise testimony.

The Daleks tells the Doctor to withdraw before they destroy the city, but he says the ship is a wreck. They don’t have the power.

They don’t need the power, they say. They just need to turn on London’s lights and let the Germans do the exterminating.

The Daleks say they’ll return to their own time and begin again, but the Doctor says he won’t let them get away this time.

But the Daleks are distracted by the appearance of the new Daleks from the progenitor cube.

DALEK: Behold, Doctor. A new Dalek paradigm.
NICK (in Dalek voice): More comfortable chairs inside!

They are much bigger. I don’t care for them, though. That bright yellow one is particularly festive.

Back in the Cabinet war bunker, Bracewell is preparing to kill himself, but Amy and Churchill talk him back from the edge. Amy tells him that he’s alien tech, so he should be as clever as the Daleks themselves.

And he is: because with his gravity bubble, it is technically possible to send something up into space. Churchill tells him it’s time to think big.

Back on the Dalek ship, the old Daleks praise the new Daleks and the new Daleks disintegrate the old Daleks, on the grounds that they’re inferior.

DOCTOR: Blimey, what do you do with the ones that mess up?
DALEK: You are the Doctor. You must be exterminated.
DOCTOR: Don’t mess with me, sweetheart.

In the Cabinet war bunker, they watch video of the Doctor facing off against the new, shiny, white Dalek Supreme.

Oh.My.God. The new Dalek Supreme is an Apple product! That explains everything!

The Doctor threatens to blow up the TARDIS again, but the Daleks say there is no detonation device.

DOCTOR: All right, it’s a Jammy Dodger. But I was promised tea!

At this point, three fighter jets show up.

No, honestly.

Fighter jets in gravity bubbles. In space.

At least a nice RAF-on-Dalek dog fight in space gives me a chance to catch up on my typing.

[Author’s belated note: I need to acknowledge my wonderfully clever readers here, who have pointed out en masse that these were Spitfires, and therefore don’t qualify as “fighter jets.” But I’m too lazy to change all my references at this stage.]

The jets have calls signs like “Danny Boy” and “Jubilee.” And keep saying, “Good show!” This is like a boys’ own adventure story from the future via the past.

The jets aren’t having much luck until the Doctor, in the TARDIS, manages to block the shield on the dish. Then Danny Boy is able to blow up the dish, and London sinks back into darkness.

Danny Boy wheels round to make another run at the ship, and the Doctor tells him to blow the ship out of the sky.

But the Daleks threaten that if they don’t call off the attack, they’ll blow up the planet. He thinks they’re bluffing, but they say that Bracewell’s design is based on an oblivion continuum, and they’ll detonate him if Danny Boy doesn’t withdraw.

The Doctor has to make the decision, and it’s a hard one for him. He knows this is the best chance he’s has since, ooh, season four to destroy the Daleks, but he can’t see the planet blow up, either.

He doesn’t hesitate for long, but calls off Danny Boy, dashes back to Earth while the Daleks gloat, and punches Bracewell in the face.

While Bracewell is stuttering—and no small blame to him, frankly—the Daleks detonate the bomb anyway.

Bracewell starts ticking down, as Churchill says that he can’t work it out, since Bracewell has all these memories of his past life, including the Great War. Why Churchill is freaking out about this now, and not when he first found out that Bracewell as an alien android, I don’t know.

The Doctor talks Bracewell through past memories, especially his painful ones about his parents’ death. He says Bracewell needs to feel that pain, concentrate on it, because that pain is what makes him human. And, he adds, the Daleks can’t detonate that bomb, because he’s a human being.

That doesn’t seem like very sound science to me. Does the bomb know what Bracewell is thinking? Isn’t he going to blow up anyway, and just be really, really sad in his last moments?

Apparently not. It looks as though he’ll explode, but then Amy coaxes him to talk about his lost love, Dorabella, and the bomb ticks back down.

So that’s good news. But, in the interim, the festive Daleks have initiated a time jump, and they’ve got away from the Doctor again.

Oh, well, that’s that, then. This seems an unusually short episode.

The Doctor is staggered by this news, and not immediately consoled by Amy pointing out that at least he saved the Earth.

Then we have a flag-raising scene ripped from a thousand war memorials. As Nick points out, there’s something particularly Iwo Jima about the scene.

Back in the Cabinet war bunker, the Doctor is removing alien tech from Churchill’s Spitfires, as one of the operative weeps at the news that her young man was shot down over the English Channel.

The Doctor and Churchill embrace, and Amy tells Winston that it’s been amazing meeting him, but that he needs to give the Doctor back the TARDIS key he just lifted from the Doctor’s pocket.

The Doctor chokes on the tea he finally managed to get.

Churchill wanders off, repeating “KBO,” while the Doctor insists that Amy hand back his key. Why doesn’t Amy get a key? Is it just too early in the season for that particular moment?

The Doctor and Amy wander back to Bracewell’s lab. Bracewell is prepared to be deactivated, and the Doctor says that he’s going to be so deactivated—in about twenty minutes or so, when he and Amy have finished doing what they need to do.

BRACEWELL: Very well, Doctor. I shall wait here and prepare myself.
AMY: Blimey, alien tech but a bit slow on the uptake.

Eventually, he catches on, and as Amy and the Doctor leave, he starts packing.

AMY: You’ve got enemies.
DOCTOR: Everyone’s got enemies.
AMY: Yeah, but mine’s the woman outside Budgens with the mental Jack Russell. You’ve got, like, arch enemies.

The Doctor, though, is more worried about the fact that Amy didn’t know who the Daleks were.

And, as the TARDIS dematerialises, we see the same crack on the wall behind them.

Next week: River Song and the weeping angels.

Share your thoughts [21]

1

Tim wrote at May 2, 02:08 pm

> He starts whaling on the Dalek with a crowbar (or perhaps a tyre iron, or some other sort of metal bar), while the Dalek bleats, “Do you not want a cup of tea?”

It looked to me like a wrench.

Also, I think the Daleks refer to the Progenitor as a device rather than a cube.

> Behold, Doctor. A new Dalek paradigm.

This line sounded to me a bit too much like some PR flack at a product launch. ‘Apple presents iDalek: a new paradigm in extermination!’

I also don’t like the new Daleks. The colours might hark back to the movie versions, but as the five new models came out, Nancie and I burst out laughing. They look too much like toys. And their gun boxes and back ends look horribly blocky. (Insert cheap joke about ‘does my butt look big in this casing?’)

It strained my belief somewhat that Bracewell and the RAF put together a functioning gravity bubble around three Spitfires that the pilots successfully fly up into space (with no prior training or experience of gravity bubbles or space flight) in ten minutes. But even that pales beside the moving but ludicrous defusing of an android bomb by the power of love.

> The Doctor has to make the decision, and it’s a hard one for him. He knows this is the best chance he’s has since, ooh, season four to destroy the Daleks, but he can’t see the planet blow up, either.

I just rewatched ‘The Parting of the Ways’, which may have exacerbated my boredom at this bit. Matt Smith makes it convincing, but really, we know he’s not going to blow up the Earth. He keeps trying to stop them. They keep coming back via one last ship or one last cult or whatever. He was more or less over that and willing to make peace with Dalek Sec, and then was whinging that his double had committed genocide in ‘Journey’s End’. Now we have to go through all this again? Yawn.

> Back in the Cabinet war bunker, the Doctor is removing alien tech from Churchill’s Spitfires, as one of the operative weeps at the news that her young man was shot down over the English Channel.

That seemed an oddly hamfisted insertion. I thought they were going to do something with the young man — the Doctor would turn out to have saved him or something — but it’s a thread that goes nowhere and provides period colour no viewer really needs. (Pilots died in World War II? OMG!) Unlike the ‘put that light out’ gag, which had a similarly poor setup but actually had something clever done with it.

2

Catriona wrote at May 2, 02:30 pm

See, “wrench” makes sense. But this was after the TiVo went wabby, which threw me off balance, so I was typing quickly and not really looking at the screen, and by the time I looked up, he was already swinging the thing around and I couldn’t see it clearly, so I panicked and just picked the name of the first long metal object that came into my mind. Then I panicked again, and started listing synonyms, in case my first panicked choice was too silly.

The same goes for what I will stubbornly continue to call the “progenitor cube.” Even though it was more of a pepperpot.

Here endeth your insight into the mind of the TV-drama live-blogger.

I’m with you on the new Dalek design. Nick tells me they’re more comfortable to operate, and I can believe that, but I prefer the classic design. However, I do foresee a raft of iDalek jokes in the future.

The gravity bubbled fighter jets strained my credulity, too. In fact, that’s the point at which I decided that on my loose spectrum of Mark Gatiss episodes, I was putting this one down the “Idiot’s Lantern” end, not the “Unquiet Dead” end.

Plus, that whole bit was so “What ho, chaps!” that I half expected one of the pilots to be Bertie Wooster.

I agree that we’ve seen the Doctor facing the “Daleks or the Earth?” dilemma so many times that it’s ceased to provide much dramatic tension. But I’d hate to see the Daleks removed from the show, so I put up with it. (Plus, I didn’t think this was the best episode, so perhaps it can be done in a more exciting way at a later point?)

I think part of my problem with the episode as a whole (and this ties in with the weeping woman) was that it was thin. Thin and short. We never really saw anything fleshed out, and the whole thing felt a little under-developed to me.

3

Wendy wrote at May 2, 09:09 pm

I actually fell asleep just as the M and M Daleks appeared…..

4

Tim wrote at May 3, 01:37 am

Something horrible has happened to your fonts!

I agree it was weak, but I don’t think it was as dull as ‘The Idiot’s Lantern’. I thought it also did a fairly good job of sounding a parallel between human total war and Dalek extermination without beating us over the head with it.

5

Deb wrote at May 3, 03:26 am

I christened them the Smartileks here because they looked so much like Smarties … good to see someone else was thinking of candy, thanks Wendy.

I too thought the ‘young man shot down’ part was going somewhere, my suspicion was that Amy would get the Doctor to rescue him or something similar.

This episode very nearly convinced me the Doctor Who and I had come to the parting of the ways, so thin and improbable.

6

Nick wrote at May 3, 05:44 am

Hey, Tim, email me a browser screenshot if the type doesn’t look right. I might be able to tweak the display a little.

If you just don’t like my selections, I have a raspberry sound-effect somewhere that I’ll post you :-)

7

Catriona wrote at May 3, 05:44 am

Tim, I agree it’s not as poor as “The Idiot’s Lantern,” but for me it’s definitely down that end of the Gatiss spectrum. It did raise some thoughtful ideas and I can see the appeal of the all-good-chaps-together-in-space madness, though it didn’t really work for me.

It just felt so thin, as Deb says.

8

Drew wrote at May 3, 07:14 am

“gravity bubbled fighter jets” not jets, propeller-driven Spitfires. How the propellers manage to drive them inside their own bubbles is beyond me.

I didn’t like this episode. Like Tim I am so over the Daleks. Classic Who had the Daleks appear once, maybe twice per Doctor (on average, or so it seems), but every season in the new Who is way too much. DW has done to the Daleks exactly what Next Gen did to the Borg, overused them, watered them down, made them laughable. Such a shame after the way that season one made them so fantastic again.

The “danny-boy, tally ho, you beauty!” dialogue made me cringe. No, not as bad as the Idiot Lantern, but not far behind it. Thank god for the next two episodes.

Like the new look blog btw.

9

Drew wrote at May 3, 07:27 am

Oh, and the Smartidaleks, Apple-Daleks, whatever. Really didn’t like them.

10

Catriona wrote at May 3, 08:22 am

Ah, thank you, Drew! That makes sense, what with the Doctor later removing the alien tech from Churchill’s Spitfires. I should have realised those were the same planes (though it still wouldn’t have cued me in on the difference between jet propulsion and propellor propulsion), but I just assumed Bracewell had some other projects on the boil, and the Doctor was dismantling them all.

Your point (and Tim’s) about the Daleks is a good one, but it seems to me there’s a double problem—I think Doctor Who is also over-using the historical celebrity angle. I mean, Dickens was fun, Shakespeare was a bit over-wrought but had his moments, Queen Victoria meeting werewolves ended in a rather silly fashion but at least had ninja monks—but now Churchill?

I’m all about the historical episodes. I love it when the Doctor travels back in time. But he doesn’t need to always meet celebrities. Why not focus on “Human Nature”/“Family of Blood”-style episodes where he’s immersed in a historical period without having to meet celebrities?

Thankfully, that seems to be what they’re heading for with an up-coming episode that shall remain nameless. Bless you, Toby Whithouse: you make life almost as fun as Steven Moffat does.

11

Sam wrote at May 3, 09:03 am

I thought this episode was worse than Idiot’s Lantern. It was weak, broke the suspension of disbelief and the new Daleks looked terrible.

Bring on the weeping angels.

12

Catriona wrote at May 3, 11:04 am

At least it didn’t show the Doctor leap-frogging over a dead guy in the street in order to light the Olympic flame, so we could all understand that the Olympics are a beacon of hope and joy or something.

13

Tim wrote at May 3, 12:10 pm

To be fair, the torchbearer just fell over; we don’t know that he died, do we?

14

Catriona wrote at May 3, 01:38 pm

No, we don’t know he died: I’m just extrapolating to express how disturbed I am by that sequence.

Even if he just fell over, you think the Doctor could bother saying, “God, mate, are you all right?” before nicking his torch and legging it.

15

Tim wrote at May 3, 01:42 pm

Oh, indeed. (Except for the ‘God’ bit. ;))

16

Catriona wrote at May 3, 09:13 pm

I always find a bit of well-placed blasphemy is a helpful outlet for the emotions when you’re not sure if someone’s dead or not.

17

Drew wrote at May 4, 06:09 am

you’ve changed the font size. were there complaints? I liked it better when it was smaller. :)

18

Catriona wrote at May 4, 06:38 am

Changed it from the old design or changed it from the new design? I can’t tell if there’s any difference, but then Nick doesn’t let me take part in design decisions.

;)

19

Drew wrote at May 4, 12:55 pm

changed it from the new design, it was smaller

20

Nick wrote at May 4, 01:04 pm

Drew, have you used more than one browser to view the site? Different browsers on Windows have quite divergent type-rendering.

21

Drew wrote at May 5, 07:45 am

nope, only Firefox.

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