The TARDIS lands on Skaro, where the Doctor and a brand-new Romana (see below) discover the Daleks have returned to their home planet and are digging down into the ruins of the old Kaled city (destroyed in Genesis of the Daleks). To do the work for them, they have a slave labor force of prisoners captured in raids on planets and ships around the galaxy as part of the ongoing Dalek wars. They’re callously working the prisoners to death as they drive the excavations down into the old city.
Landing on the planet soon after the TARDIS arrives, a force of Movellans— another power at war with the Daleks, and locked in an ongoing stalemate. The Movellan ship has been sent to find out what the Daleks are up to, and at first it seems like they’ll be the good guys, allies of the Doctor against his old enemies, as the Thals have been in older Dalek stories. But the Doctor soon discovers the truth: the Movellans are a race of robots, as aggressive as the Daleks themselves, and the stalemate in their war with each other has spared the galaxy the ravages of both. The Doctor has to find a way to make sure neither side finds a way to break that stalemate— which involves discovering what the Daleks are after and preventing either them or the Movellans from getting their hands on it.
For the first half of this story, we get a glimpse of the classic Daleks, as they were in their heyday in the sixties. Following the tradition for Dalek stories, their first appearance is saved for the episode 1 cliffhanger and dramatically treated as a surprise (even though the episode title gives it away from the start) but their presence is felt throughout episode 1 as we see signs of what they’re up to: the ominous, pervasive sound of underground drilling, glimpses of a party of starving prisoners burying one who’s died, the arrival of the Movellans and their talk of a terrible enemy they’re fighting. In episode 2 the Daleks take center stage, playing their old role of “Space Nazis” to the hilt as they interrogate Romana, then put her to work among the prisoners, chase the Doctor and the Movellans around the underground passages of the Kaled city, and finally reach their goal which, typical of the Daleks, is simultaneously brilliant and unbelievable: they’re trying to dig up their creator, Davros. It was the Daleks themselves who killed him, but they take it for granted they’ll be able to revive him and that, when they do, he’ll invent something new for them to break the stalemate.
Unfortunately, the moment Davros does wake up, it all falls apart. The revived Davros is a far more one-dimensional character than he was in Genesis. His megalomania is all that’s left of him, and he spends his time talking about his own inevitable supremacy over the universe, and not much else. Meanwhile, the Daleks are instantly reduced to mere henchmen, meekly promising to obey him and showing no trace of their own initiative from that point on— even sending messages to their war fleet to dance to Davros’ tune, and not arguing when he declares there’ll be no such title as “Supreme Dalek” any more.
You’d like to imagine that they’re just playing up to him, all the while planning to betray him once again just as soon as they get what they need. This would fit well into the great Dalek stories of the past: at their best, they were master manipulators and strategists, and were more dangerous for that than for their ray guns (The Power of the Daleks is a prime example, convincing a colony of humans that they are faithful servants). Unfortunately, we’re given no hint of that in the story, or ever again in the Classic series until their final appearance in the Seventh Doctor episode Remembrance of the Daleks. From now on, the Daleks are nothing but Davros’ redshirts, which is too bad.
That aside, the story is enjoyable enough. It keeps moving, and the addition of the Movellans prevents the “Decline of the Daleks” from dragging it down— they’re revealed as villains at the same time as the boringly one-note Davros takes over the Daleks, and they provide interesting villains to keep the story going. Defeating them turns out to be the trickier and more exciting climax than stopping Davros and the Daleks (although blowing up a whole lot of Daleks is also, always, a satisfying moment).
Romana
At the end of last season, Mary Tamm decided not to return to play Romana for another year. Producer Graham Williams remained convinced that he could talk her into changing her mind and so did not include any departure scene at the end of The Armageddon Factor, and when commissioning scripts for the next season he had the writers still using Romana as the companion. When Tamm remained firm, that created a problem. Someone eventually came up with the solution: Romana’s a Time Lady. She can regenerate, just as the Doctor has done.
Tome Baker suggested Lalla Ward, who played Princess Astra in the previous story, to take over the role, and new script editor Douglas Adams wrote a scene in which Romana regenerates into her new form. There’s two things to talk about: the scene itself, and Lalla Ward’s take on the character.
The regeneration itself is controversial among fans, because it seems to contradict what we know about regeneration. First, there’s no evident reason for it. Romana walks into the console room looking like Princess Astra, and explains she’s regenerated. But why? What we’ve seen before is that regeneration is a traumatic near-death experience (treated explicitly as a kind of death when the Third Doctor regenerated to the Fourth). What happened to Romana to cause it? Fans who like “playing the game” and so need to explain it suggest that perhaps it was caused by the torture she suffered at the hands of the Shadow in the previous episode, but she seemed okay after that. Or perhaps there was some off-screen accident, but the Doctor doesn’t seem remotely alarmed or worried. He doesn’t ask “what happened?” In fact it’s treated as something she just decided to do.
The best “we must have internal continuity” explanation is to attach it to the feature of Romana’s character we’ve seen before: she’s big on the book learning, but not on experience. Perhaps Time Lords living on Gallifrey, where they’re unlikely to ever meet with any trauma severe enough to force regeneration, sometimes do choose to regenerate just to make a change. But this isn’t very satisfying. Even if they can do that, we’ve already introduced the 12-regeneration limit and by now Romana’s had enough life-or-death adventures that she should be smart enough to think she ought to save her supply of new lives for an actual emergency.
Following on, we get a comedy scene where the Doctor says she can’t go around looking like Princess Astra, so she goes off to try a series of other bodies in a sort of version of the Doctor’s traditional costuming scene, deliberately choosing ridiculous ones until the Doctor relents and lets her look like Astra as she wanted in the first place. Douglas Adams, writing the scene, intended it to be another example of Romana’s “I got better grades than the Doctor” attitude— we’ve seen her know more about TARDIS navigation than him, here we see that while regeneration is a haphazard practice for the Doctor, Romana has the skill to carefully select her own new appearance. Unfortunately this isn’t communicated to the viewer properly. Neither she nor the Doctor comments on the superior ability she’s showing, they both act like this voluntary body-shopping is entirely routine— as if the producers knew or cared nothing about how regeneration had been presented before
So the regeneration itself is controversial among fans, most of whom would like to pretend it never happened (it’s an opportunity for missing-adventure fan fiction: write the unseen adventure in which Romana was injured, regenerated, and said something to the Doctor like “don’t worry, I’m much better at this than you are, it won’t be a problem” right before the scene we saw on screen).
But what about Lalla Ward taking over the role? She becomes the only actor in the series (and Romana the only character) to face the challenge of every new Doctor: show us a character who is still the same person as before, but also different. (The Master’s regenerations are a substantially different case, and although we’ll eventually see the Doctor’s old teacher Borusa played by a different actor every time he appears, nothing much is ever made of it.) Ward is helped by having a script written for Mary Tamm, so the essence of Romana is there in the writing, but she immediately plays it in a very different way than Tamm.
The new Romana is far more playful, replacing the First Romana’s aristocratic coolness, and as such make a better friend and partner for the Doctor. She and the Doctor have genuine chemistry from the start (off screen as well as on: Tom Baker and Lalla Ward eventually got married, although the marriage didn’t last and she’s now married to Richard Dawkins). In this first outing, she costumes herself in a sort of “girly version” of the Doctor’s own costume: all in pink and white, with the same long scarf and frock coat (and that’s after convincing him to let her look like Astra by wearing a fully-identical costume to his for a short while).
When she first encounters the Daleks, she’s briefly overwhelmed and terrified, but doesn’t take long to regain her nerve and stand up to them (and the other perils of the story) with as much bravado as the Doctor himself. She finds a very clever way to escape from their slave labor camp, and in general shows herself to be an adventurer ready to be an equal partner with the Doctor.
Romana II and the Doctor will make an interesting pairing in the episodes to come.
Details
- Douglas Adams takes over the role of script editor, a role he’ll only fill for this one season. About halfway through the production year, the first Hitchhiker’s Guide novel will come out and unexpectedly shoot onto the bestsellers lists. Adams will be transformed at one stroke from “just another BBC employee” to “guy in charge of a massive media enterprise” and after this season will move on to handle his own business.
- This was the last Dr Who story written by original Dalek creator Terry Nation. He was apparently upset by the extensive rewriting Douglas Adams did on his script, and refused later offers to write about the Daleks again. On the DVD commentary, the episode’s director says 98% of the final script was written by Adams rather than Nation, though it’s hard to say exactly what that means. In this era, it wasn’t at all unusual to have the script editor do a final rewrite on each script, changing the dialog throughout to match the “house style” of Dr Who at that time, so that might be all that Adams did, or it might be he made more substantial changes. Either way, Nation was apparently offended. He moved to America in 1980, where he continued working for US television, writing among other things 2 episodes of MacGyver.
- Perhaps one sign of this rewriting is that someone— either Nation or Adams— commits a severe continuity error regarding the Daleks. Although it’s mentioned that the Daleks “were once organic creatures” they are referred to throughout as being, at present, a “race of robots.” They and the Movellans are described as being exactly the same as each other. But they aren’t— the Movellans are calm, logical and emotionless. They act like robots. The Daleks never have: they shout their way through life in a perpetual state of rage and hatred. The stalemate between them is said to result from two perfectly logical, robotic forces exactly anticipating each other’s moves. Again, you can never imagine this description applying to the highly emotional but master strategist Daleks. If they’d said “the Daleks rely on their battle computers” you could believe it, or even “the Daleks, however skilled their strategy, have no concept of creativity” (though it would be hard to swallow in speaking of a force that once plotted to convert the Earth into a mobile battleship) but “perfectly logical, emotionless robots?” That is not the Daleks. It doesn’t even fit the Daleks as they behave in this story. It’s a serious problem at the heart of this story.
- K-9 is absent from this story. It was to feature a lot of location work and the producers remembered how many problems that caused them in last season’s Stones of Blood. So as the episode opens the Doctor is repairing him, but doesn’t finish the repairs, leaving K-9 behind until returning to the TARDIS at the end. He remarks that K-9 has “laryngitis,” a line inserted to explain why, when K-9 does return later, he’ll have a different voice. (Behind the scenes, actor John Leeson was unavailable this year, though he’ll return to providing K-9’s voice next season.)
- Barely worth mentioning is that at the end of last week’s story, the Doctor installed a “randomizer” in the TARDIS navigation circuits. The reason is to prevent the angry Black Guardian from finding them— presumably a Guardian knows enough to anticipate the Doctor’s choice of destinations, so the randomizer will deliver the TARDIS to entirely random coordinates every time. The Doctor and Romana won’t even know where they’ve landed until getting out to look. The problem here is twofold: 1) except for the Key to Time series, the Doctor has always wandered pretty much at random, and 2) the first completely random destination is the Daleks’ home planet— somewhere distinctly significant to the Doctor. Problem 2 will get worse next week. Overall, the randomizer will have little importance and will be largely forgotten very soon. (But I wish the new series would install one— the perfect navigation of the new series’ TARDIS causes a variety of narrative problems [a topic for another day]).
Next Week
“City of Death,” 4 episodes.
