It’s official: Classic Dr Who is not even trying to have Dalek story titles make sense any more.
“You called us?” —The Daleks (really).
Story
Hearing that a famed scientist of his acquaintance has died, the Doctor decides to pay his respects. He takes the TARDIS to the planet Necros, home to (apparently) the central funeral home of the entire Galactic civilization of the time. “Tranquil Repose” keeps the deceased in cryogenic suspension, awaiting the day when whatever killed them is cured so they can be revived— or so the official story goes. Some diseases have actually been cured but the government paperwork to get those people revived is so onerous no one’s ever actually succeeded in getting anyone back. A woman and her boyfriend suspect the truth: because of the drain on public resources, not to mention the legal difficulties of estates and inheritances, the government is actually determined that no one will actually be revived under any circumstances. She’s here for a bit of body-snatching: to get her father out of cryogenic storage and revive him, despite the lack of official approval.
Meanwhile the Doctor and Peri have arrived on the planet, and are promptly attacked by a horribly mutated man who claims he was experimented on by the “Great Healer,” as the mysterious figure who runs Tranquil Repose is known. Investigating further, the Doctor finds his own face on a tombstone in the garden of remembrance, but when it proves to be a fake (and not a glimpse of his future) he realizes someone is playing games with him.
Meanwhile again one of the assistant embalmers has a crush on her boss, who ignores her. We learn that the “Great Healer” is revered as the inventor of a concentrated protein that has solved the problem of famine across the Galaxy (and if at this point you don’t realize that “soylent green is people,” you’re not paying attention). The woman who runs the protein factory hires a very pretentious assassin to kill the Great Healer, who has been blackmailing her in order to keep the secret. The Great Healer is none other than Davros, who while turning most of the dead into a food supply has been taking just a few of the most talented (by his standards) and is biologically altering them into a new race of Daleks, ones that will be loyal only to Davros and will never betray him like the original Daleks did.
And while all this is going on, a parody version of a rock-n-roll DJ watches everything on security cameras and plays Greek Chorus, commenting on everything that happens.
Review
Yes, it is every bit as bad as it sounds. I hardly have the heart to say anything more about it than that.
First off: it should always be exciting when the Daleks return to Dr Who, but the cardinal sin of this story is that the Daleks are barely in it. Maybe Genesis of the Daleks had fewer minutes of actual screen time for them, but their malevolent presence hovered over everything in that story. This episode is the Davros show, from start to end. His new white-and-gold Daleks are completely his lapdogs and never do anything except stand guard and kill a few people he tells him to. At the end of the episode, the “real” Daleks show up but even they just aren’t themselves: it turns out they were called in by two employees of Tranquil Repose who want to expose Davros’ actions, and they cooperatively arrest Davros and take him away for trial, without even threatening to harm anyone else. Memo to the writer: if a couple of human dimwits are stupid enough to call the Daleks to “arrest” someone for them, they land and proceed to massacre everything in their path, because that’s who they are. For one brief moment it seemed like their arrival would at least provide the story with a genuine climax, and a glimpse of the real terror of the Daleks (a better episode title, really, than “revelation”) but no, they’re just there to gratuitously remove Davros after the episode’s filled up the required airtime.
The characters in the story, if you describe them in a series of character sketches, sound intriguingly well-rounded, but they’re both scripted and played as pantomime caricatures rather than characters. The worst part of the whole story is the DJ, who makes you cringe in embarrassment every time he appears. He’s a character that belongs in The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy— except that if Douglas Adams had been writing him, he’d have been actually funny.
Revelation of the Daleks was written by script editor Eric Saward, who was trying for a very dark, black comedy. Saward’s given us better scripts before this one, when he wasn’t trying to imitate Douglas Adams— this is just not his strong point. It seems like following Adams’ path to fame was an ambition of Saward’s around this time: during the 18-month hiatus that followed this season, BBC radio commissioned a Dr Who radio play for which Eric Saward wrote the script as well as a novelization for the Target book series. Called Slipback, the novelization shows Saward slavishly imitating the style of Adam’s Hitch-hiker’s Guide novels while failing to be funny, and the result is unreadable. The same thing happened in this story, with a horde of characters sadly trying to be comical figures in Douglas Adams’ distinctive dark way, without succeeding in the least. All you feel when you finally get to the closing credits is relief.
Hiatus
This was the final story of season 22, and as the BBC announced when The Two Doctors was on the air, the show went into an 18-month hiatus. A full set of scripts planned for season 23, and already written, paid for, and in some cases in preliminary production, were scrapped. It’s likely that had the hiatus not happened, season 23 would have looked a lot like season 22— so perhaps we can’t be too sad that it never happened. The most notable of the planned stories, and the one which perhaps we should regret whether it would have been good or not, was The Nightmare Fair, which was to have featured a second appearance by the Celestial Toymaker, who the First Doctor had met back in season 3. Actor Michael Gough, who played the Toymaker back in the sixties, had already signed on to reprise the role, and whatever else it might have been like, it would have surely been very interesting.
When the show finally returned for the season 23 that actually broadcast, it would be with a new set of stories, with some retooling of its style ordered by the powers on high, and with a return to its traditional 22.5 minute episodes and 4-part serials. The return to the old format would allow the BBC to slip in another significant change: since 1970, Dr Who had broadcast 26 episode seasons (plus or minus the occasional shift due to scheduling changes). When it went to 45-minute episodes, the season was cut to 13 episode— the same total number of minutes, and stories, in a season. With the return to shorter episodes, however, the BBC kept the season length at the shorter 13 (plus one, it would turn out). From now to the end of Classic, Dr Who seasons would be only half as long as they used to be.
Next Week:
“The Trial of a Time Lord, part 1: The Mysterious Planet” 4-episodes, the season 23 premiere. I’ll explain the double title in next week’s entry.
