Dr Who does Fantastic Voyage (and gives proper credit with the Doctor’s “fantastic idea for a movie” line) but with an unusual choice of patient: a malfunctioning Dalek that’s turned “good” (but see below). The last time the series came this way was The Invisible Enemy, with miniaturized clones of the Doctor and Leela going inside the brain of the Doctor himself, and Into the Dalek is a far better use of the concept than that rather absurd story.
The story only takes the Fantastic Voyage premise partway before changing course into an entirely different story: a meditation on good and evil as they pertain to Dr Who’s central conflict, the Doctor versus the Daleks. I’m of two minds about this. On the one hand, it’s a surprising twist on what could otherwise have been a predictable plotline (there’s only so many ways a Fantastic Voyage clone can go). On the other, the issue of “morals and Daleks” is one Dr Who has revisited too many times for my taste, going (in the modern series) all the way back to Christopher Eccleston’s meeting with the lone Dalek in the new series’ season 1— an episode which touched most of the same issues Into the Dalek raises and in my opinion did so better. Rose’s armor-piercing question “What are you changing into, Doctor?” at the climax of the older story manages to make the point more efficiently than the Twelfth Doctor and Clara arguing about it at greater length.
Besides, there’s nothing wrong with following the source material all the way through— enough of Classic Who’s greatest episodes did so for one critic back in Classic times to say “Dr Who is always at its best when its roots are showing.”
I also felt this story got a little lost trying to figure out what it wanted to say— unless a bit of a moral muddle was actually the point, which is possible. Has a Dalek really turned “good” if it has simply redirected its hate toward its own kind? The story seems to be of two minds on this question. On the one hand saying “Daleks must be destroyed” seems to be enough for the Doctor to say the malfunction has “turned it good.” Later, though, he’s dismayed when “Rusty” picks up his own hatred of the Daleks and attacks them. “That’s what you do,” he says, infinitely depressed and seeming to conclude that this means Rusty is actually no better than the other Daleks, it’s just that its “target” has changed. Of course in between those two moments we have: Rusty talking about seeing a star born and realized that life will prevail, giving a reason for it to now hate what other Daleks do, the Doctor talking about how it was his first meeting with the Daleks that turned him from a selfish wanderer into someone who knew evil had to be fought, and then Rusty seeing both the Doctor’s view of the beauty of the universe and his hatred of the Daleks and taking the latter as its motivation. What do all those things add up to?
I’m not sure, and I’m also not sure whether the story wants me to be unsure, or if it just couldn’t make up its own mind. There’s a clear analogy drawn between the Doctor and Rusty. The Doctor’s hatred of the Daleks is directly connected to the beauty he sees them destroy, just as Rusty’s original decision to oppose its own kind was directly connected to seeing the beauty of a star being born. So what’s the conclusion? That Rusty is good after all, and its newfound determination to exterminate its own kind is also good? That the Doctor is ultimately no better than the Daleks because he hates them just as they hate everything else? Or that the Doctor is good but Rusty isn’t because, being a Dalek, in the end it couldn’t see the reason to oppose other Daleks and only liked the hate part of the picture?
Again, I’m not sure which of these (or something else) the story wants me to conclude. No doubt everyone will have their own opinion about it.
Note: none of this is bad. If the writer wanted us to reach a crystal clear conclusion, then I suppose it counts as a failure (at least in my case) but it’s also possible the intention was to raise these questions and show they have no easy answer. That’s a legitimate dramatic approach and for me, at least, that’s what the story did.
It also, I think, wanted to point out how central the conflict of “The Doctor versus the Daleks” has been to Dr Who as a series. At one point the Doctor recalls his first meeting with them, and what he says isn’t a retcon: it’s a fair description of what you can actually see on screen if you go back and look at the first Dalek story with William Hartnell. At the start of it all, the Doctor was presented to us as essentially selfish and amoral, helping his human companions Ian and Barbara escape from a situation he got them into only because he and Susan are in it with them. He’s in the same place at the start of The Daleks, Dr Who’s second ever story, but you can actually see the very moment that he changes, and it’s the Daleks who prompt it. They have the Doctor and Susan captive and they plan to detonate a neutron bomb to exterminate the pacifist Thals. The Doctor tries to convince them that peaceful coexistence is both possible and preferable but the Daleks cut him off: “Only one race can survive.” He stares. It sinks in. Then he speaks and his voice almost has a Dalek-like tone as he grates out, “This senseless… evil… killing…”
The Daleks made the Doctor in that moment— and I like hearing the Twelfth Doctor remember it.
One thing I did not like about the story was a seeming attempt to draw a parallel between the Daleks and soldiers of any kind. Like the Doctor/Daleks issue above, the story seems to be aiming at a bit of ambiguity on the question, but I don’t buy even the analogy. Over the years the Doctor has had too many friends and allies among the military for it to play. I’m not just talking about UNIT: British military allies go back at least as far as the First Doctor’s The War Machines, and he’s allied with soldiers of various alien planets even more often. The Doctor has been both aided and opposed by soldiers, politicians, scientists, and just about ever other walk of life, and the important question has been which side they’re on— those defending themselves or others against monsters and tyrants, or those working for the aliens and tyrants— rather than which job they hold with their respective sides.
The Doctor’s too inherently chaotic to ever work well in a military structure, but in the past, any time he’s expressed a general disdain for soldiers it’s been in a story that promptly shows him a soldier that he likes in order to contradict his attitude (Jenny in The Doctor’s Daughter is perhaps the supreme example). We get such a character again here— more than one, the soldier who sacrifices her life and ends up in Missy’s garden, and Journey Blue (while watching I thought she was another Jenny but in the end credits the character’s name is Journey)— but this time the Doctor’s attitude is that Journey being a soldier contradicts her being “nice, kind and brave.” Clara at the end seems to distance herself from the Doctor’s attitude when she makes a date with soon-to-be boyfriend Danny Pink, but I don’t buy it: her earlier snarky comment in response to Danny saying there’s more to being a soldier than shooting people seems more telling, and the story itself seems to suggest Danny is only acceptable because he actually does now cry over shooting people in the past.
So no, I didn’t buy that aspect of this episode.
But enough weighty issues.
The new tone that Steven Moffat has played up in the pages of DWM is definitely in sight here, although the pacing slipped back into too-fast-to-follow territory a couple of times, mostly during the action scenes. But I’m really seeing the Doctor taking hold of his calmer, more serious persona and I like it. I hope the series continues to develop in this direction as the era of the Twelfth Doctor settles in. Next week looks like a more lighthearted episode all around, we’ll see how the new style holds up in a lighter tone. Even the new arrangement of the theme song has grown on me just a tiny bit compared to last week, although not so much that I can say I like it. I do really love the new animation for the opening credits— if you haven’t heard the story, a fan in the computer graphics business did them on his own during the hiatus, Steven Moffat saw the YouTube video and loved it, and hired the fan to do the real credits for the new season. That’s a nice little story there!
Next Week:
“The Robot of Sherwood” — I’ll be out of town on vacation the next two weeks, but I’ll have a post on this and the following episode after I get back.
