Revisiting Old Doctor Who: Remembrance of the Daleks

[Broomstick]

Remembrance of the Daleks
(The Doctor as Chessmaster and Ace beats up a Dalek with a baseball bat)

Yes, this is the one with the famous Ace beats up a Dalek with a baseball bat scene. What I didn't know was that it was a baseball bat tweaked with Gallifreyan technology. Still.... GO ACE, YOU ROCK, GIRL! Striking a blow (literally) on behalf of all short tomboys (yep, I do identify with her). That actually makes more sense than just "fiesty Earth woman whacks Dalek with big stick". And we finally see Daleks conquering stairs. Along with gooey Dalek-bits in some scenes.

Lots of allusions to the very first Doctor Who episode, the "Unearthly Child". Including one creepy little girl, the Totter's Lane junkyard, and probably a few others I didn't get along the way. Creepy Little Girl in fact reminded me quite a bit of Mercy Hartigan from "The Next Doctor" though, of course, she proceeded Ms. Hartigan by quite a bit from the viewer's viewpoint (in the Whoverse timeline, Hartigan did come first, being 19the Century and this Creepy Little Girl being 1963). I didn't see the identity of the Dalek battlecomputer coming - I was suspecting it was Davros, actually, so the reveal was a surprise. Davros is, course, in the mix and is his usual bastard self.

Anyhow, this is an episode where McCoy's Doctor is playing chessmaster, deliberately trying to hide in the background and pull strings to manipulate events, although this time we see more of the string pulling than usual. About halfway through you get the impression this whole dueling Dalek factions thing was why he was in 1963 the first time and Susan bringing home Barbara and Ian derailed and distracted him until his Eighth Regeneration... then again, when you're a time traveler I suppose you can drop something and resume the next morning even if the next morning is, from your viewpoint, a few years, decades, or even centuries later. Masterfully played by the Doctor, despite upsets, the unexpected, and odd chance getting in his way. The Doctor displays not only an understanding of Human psychology (apparently the "give me some of the Nitro-9 you aren't carrying" is an on-going theme for Eight and Ace) but also an understanding of Dalek psychology. This is one of those instances when you really do get the gut-level feeling that the Doctor is just that smart, WAY more intelligent than just about anyone else he encounters. It's not an arrogant intelligence (though he certainly can be arrogant) but just a self-evident intelligence. He's smart. He knows it. He doesn't (usually) rub others' faces in it, though at times he does get frustrated with their lack of insight

The thing I keep coming back to, though, is that the Hand of Omega seems to be alive or sentient in some manner. Now, we know that both the Time Lords and Gallifreyans at large seem to have no more objection to either abducting an entity or enslaving entities if it serves their purpose than Humans do - that is to say, not much at all though some groups and individuals do object. The Doctor does tend to object to entity abductions and slavery most of the time, but doesn't seem to have an issue with either the Hand of Omega or the TARDIS (which we unequivocally know is intelligent and sentient, whether alive or not in the sense we use the term, and having a very different viewpoint/outlook/mind than we have). The Doctor talks to the Hand of Omega much as he would to the TARDIS, and it does seem to have some ability to either follow orders or act on its own accord. Which leads me to wonder which of the following may apply:

Time Lord technology incorporates artificial intelligence. Well, it could. The TARDIS is a machine, and she's intelligent (although very different than human or even, apparently, Time Lord intelligence). It could also be a highly sophisticated sort of user interface as well, perhaps not exactly self-aware intelligence but something that appears to be so to us primitives.

Time Lord technology somehow implants entities into the machinery. This would, essentially, mean slavery of an intelligent creature worst case, though it's not impossible some entities would volunteer for such a thing, or accept it as a trade-off for something else (like Sexy Thing wanting to travel and see the universe). In "The Five Doctors" we see that the Time Lords can imprison an entity (in that case, Time Lords) in an object (Rassilon's Tomb) indefinitely, which leads me to wonder if the apparent sentience of the Hand of Omega might be a Time Lord fused to a superweapon, or some other entity fused to a superweapon.

The intelligence/sentience of Time Lord objects is emergent. That is, the properties of such high advanced tech result in some sort of intelligence emerging from the complex system. This would be consistent with the notion that a TARDIS grows (though clearly a TARDIS, or TARDIS-like device can be constructed as we see in "The Two Doctors" and "The Doctor's Wife" just to name two instances off the top of my head).

[Eternal_Freedom]

This was always one of my favourites.

As for the battle computer thing, the voice actor (John Leeson, who did K-9) tried to make the voice sound as much like Davros as possible, to mislead the viewer and make it all that much more impressive when the truth emerges.

On the matter of TL technology and sentience, I woudl think it is a cross between advanced AI and TL technology being good enough for sentience to emerge. For instance, the Validium "living metal" from Silver Nemesis, which was most definitely alive and conscious.

Two stand out momemnts of AWESOME for me (besides the baseball bat incident) would be the Doctor calling the Dalek ship with the rather impressive list of credentials:

"This is the Doctor. President-Elect of the High Council of Time Lords. Keeper of the Legacy of Rassilon. Protector of Galifrey. Defender of the Laws of Time." - I mean, damn.

And the way he deals with the Dalek Supreme. That's just hilarious.

NB: if this kind of stuff interests you, you might enjoy watching the DVD's with the information text on. It's available on just about every DW DVD (I have yet to buy one that doesn't have it) and can be found in the Special Features section. It provides all sorts of useful info, especially on how shots were achieved and other production notes. Fascinating, in a nerdy kind of way.)

[Patrick Degan]

A fantastic episode all around. Ben Aaronovich works the Daleks the best way they can be used in Doctor Who —as analogues to the Nazis and incorporating the historical tie-in with Radcliffe, who was imprisoned as a member of Oswald Mosley's fascist National Front during the war, to help reinforce the parallel. Confronting Ace with the racist reality of 1963 Britain was another of this script's strengths, as it builds on one of the more subtle themes of the Ace story arc; her coming of age. It would be in "Ghost Light" that we would learn that her best friend, a Pakistani girl named Manisha, died when her flat was firebomed by white racists —following up on Ace's disgust at the sign she finds in Mrs. Smith's drawing room window ("No Coloureds") and how she becomes almost physically ill when she realises the sort of person she had let herself be attracted to in the form of Mike Smith.

Appearing for his fifth and last Doctor Who guest shot is veteran character actor Michael Sheard —the Max VonSydow of British SF. Every character he plays winds up dead. He's died in every Doctor Who story he's ever been in, he dies horribly in the Space: 1999 episode "Dragon's Domain", and of course he's most famous as the late and unlamented Admiral Ozzel, who fails Darth Vader one time too many, in The Empire Strikes Back.

This episode also features one of the best "quiet moments" in Doctor Who: the late-night diner scene with the Doctor and the night manager. While doing very little to advance the plot, it does add to the tapestry of the episode and the character arc of the Seventh Doctor, as we witness his Gethsemene moment before he carries on with the elaborate con he's constructed to trick the Daleks into destroying themselves.

Best "awesome" moment is just after Davros realises he's been tricked and that the Doctor had manipulated him into incinerating Skaro:

"You have TRICKED ME!"

"No, Davros, you tricked yourself. Did you really think I would LET you have control of the Hand of Omega"

"OMEGA DEVICE RETURNING! IMPACT IN FIFTEEN SECONDS!"

"Do not do this, I beg of you!"

"Nothing can stop it now!"

"Have pity on me!"

"I have pity for you. Goodbye, Davros. It hasn't been pleasant."

[NecronLord]

Time Lord technology incorporates artificial intelligence. Well, it could. The TARDIS is a machine, and she's intelligent (although very different than human or even, apparently, Time Lord intelligence). It could also be a highly sophisticated sort of user interface as well, perhaps not exactly self-aware intelligence but something that appears to be so to us primitives.

This is much more clearly the case in a similar episode, Silver Nemesis.

[mr friendly guy]

A few years ago I had the pleasure of watching Katy Manning, Sylvester McCoy and Colin Baker visit Perth and discuss their time with the show. I remember McCoy mentioning two facts about this particular story.

1. The scene with the explosion and then Daleks come out. The police actually thought it was a terrorist attack by the IRA, and arrived. Imagine their surprise when they saw freaking daleks come out.

2. They initially wanted to take out the "no coloured allowed" sign because it might be considered offensive (which it was). However McCoy convinced them to keep it there, which IMO was the right choice. It conveyed the theme of the story so well. The two dalek factions fought each other over something as bullshit as racial purity. Meanwhile on Earth, racist humans were doing a similar thing.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Ace explaining the Dalek conflic was pretty sweet too.

"Renegade Daleks are blobs. Imperial Daleks are...bionic blobs with bits added. You can tell the Daleks are into racial purity. So, one group of Daleks thinks the other group of Daleks aren't good enough...not pure in their blobbiness."
"Result?"
"They hate each other's chromosomes. War to the death."

[Parallax]

A few years ago I had the pleasure of watching Katy Manning, Sylvester McCoy and Colin Baker visit Perth and discuss their time with the show.

The 'Inside the TARDIS' show hosted by Tim Ferguson?
I saw it when it was in Victoria. Damn brilliant stuff. McCoy was hilarious throughout and Baker could be seen without terrible scripts ruining his character - he's really a remarkable actor when he has something to work with.

[mr friendly guy]

A few years ago I had the pleasure of watching Katy Manning, Sylvester McCoy and Colin Baker visit Perth and discuss their time with the show.

The 'Inside the TARDIS' show hosted by Tim Ferguson?
I saw it when it was in Victoria. Damn brilliant stuff. McCoy was hilarious throughout and Baker could be seen without terrible scripts ruining his character - he's really a remarkable actor when he has something to work with.

Thats the one. I saw it in Perth. Baker has a great voice and larger than life personality. There was a question about the violence in DW perhaps personified when a character gets destroyed in acid in Vengeance of Varos after the Doctor dodged the assault, and narrowly avoided being pushed into acid himself. Baker replied that is was common sense for the Doctor to not want to get killed in such a manner.