“I’m beginning to wish I had never started all this.” —The Doctor
Story
The Doctor and Ace arrive in 1963, near the IM Foreman junkyard where the TARDIS was parked way back when it all began… and something is up. A military unit is investigating mysterious transmissions from the area, centering on the junkyard and on the Coal Hill School (which the Doctor’s granddaughter Susan attended). We soon learn that Daleks are on the scene, seeking a powerful Gallifreyan artifact the Doctor left behind on his last visit: the “Hand of Omega,” the device Omega used long ago to create the supernova that provided the Gallifreyans with the power to achieve time travel and become Time Lords.
It appears (though it’s never quite spelled out) that back then the Doctor had made arrangements to have the dangerous artifact buried in an anonymous cemetery, presumably to remain safely lost forever. But the Seventh Doctor has something else in mind: as the story unfolds we gradually realize he hasn’t just stumbled into this adventure, the way he usually has in the past. He’s lured the Daleks here to seize the Hand of Omega— but his plan has already gone wrong. He didn’t expect a human military unit to get in the line of fire. Worse still, a second faction of Daleks arrives: in turns out the Daleks are in the middle of a civil war, the originals against a new faction that have upgraded themselves (with the result that each Dalek faction regards the other as impure and wants to exterminate them). The Doctor has to make sure the right set of Daleks get the Hand of Omega, and keep the humans, along with the whole of London, from being exterminated in a Dalek crossfire.
Review
Ah, now this is more like it! It’s been a long time since we’ve seen the Daleks done this well— perhaps not since Genesis of the Daleks first introduced Davros, and inadvertently relegated the Daleks themselves to the role of mere henchmen in subsequent appearances. Davros puts in an appearance at the climax of this story, but for the majority of it the Daleks (in two warring factions) are back on the villain center stage, where they belong. The Doctor and the Daleks— nothing disappoints a Dr Who fan quite like a Dalek episode done badly, and equally nothing’s quite as wonderful as a truly worthy encounter between the Doctor and his oldest enemies. To my taste, this is one of the two best episodes of Sylvester McCoy’s era of Dr Who, and without hesitation I place it (and the other, which we’ll get to in due course) in my top ten list of best Dr Who episodes ever.
Collaborating with the Daleks (until he learns, as many past collaborators have before him, that the Daleks don’t really have partners) is the villainous Mr Ratcliffe, a Nazi sympathizer who believes Britain picked the wrong side in World War II and thinks the Daleks will help him put things right— his inclusion provides the story with an excellent reminder of what the Daleks really are, and what side of us they represent. We get less comfortable reminders as well: the good guys of the story stay in a boarding house owned by the mother of one of them— and when Ace spots a sign in the window saying “No coloureds,” she’s about to say something about it, before realizing it would be futile and instead deciding to go out “for some fresh air.”
Turning away from the uncomfortable mirror that the Daleks represent, there’s plenty of straightforward fun in the story. Remembrance opens the 25th season of Dr Who, and while it was too soon after The Five Doctors to contemplate a big hoopla (not that the BBC would have gone along anyway, with the series then in such disfavor among the bosses) JN-T still wanted to acknowledge the silver anniversary. The “official” 25 anniversary episode is Silver Nemesis, coming up a couple of stories from now, but JN-T decided to bring back the Daleks to kick off the season, and the story itself is full of allusions to the series’ past. Besides the setting and the year, the dialog frequently references past stories, and new-to-Who writer Ben Aaronovitch manages to do the callbacks properly: in a way that makes those who recognize them smile, without confusing those who don’t. The military unit that get involved in the story is clearly meant to recall UNIT (although in the series’ continuity they’re not UNIT yet) and the Doctor at one point even absent-mindedly calls their commanding officer “Brigadier.” Their scientific advisor, Rachel, has the same backstory as Third Doctor companion Liz Shaw, while thanks to the 1963 time period she looks and dresses like First Doctor companion Barbara Wright. During a scene in the Coal Hill School, Ace finds the textbook on the French Revolution that Susan read and then left behind back in the first episode.
And capping off the celebratory tone, at one point as a scene ends we focus on a TV set as the announcer says “And as our Saturday night viewing continues, the premiere of a new science fiction series, Doc—” Script editor Andrew Cartmel is clear that if we hadn’t cut away, then of course the rest of that title would not have been “Doctor Who.” We just cut away in time to make it seem like it could not be.
Finally, it’s not a callback to the past but it’s a terrific moment: this is the story where Ace gets to beat the tar out of a Dalek with an electrically-charged aluminum baseball bat and then escape by hurling herself through a plate glass window. Actress Sophie Aldred, who did her own stunt for the scene, to this day calls it a highlight of her acting career. It is definitely a Crowning Moment of Awesome for the entire tribe of Dr Who companions, and no companion but Ace could have done it so well.
But with all of this good stuff going on, perhaps the most intriguing development is the new direction the Doctor’s character. He didn’t stumble into this adventure, he set it up. And although things go wrong and he’s forced to improvise to avoid a disastrous outcome, he remains in charge throughout. He doesn’t react to what the Daleks do; for the whole story the Daleks are reacting to what he does. And his plan, as we finally come to realize it, is not just to stop the Daleks from whatever evil plan they’re up to. He’s decided to go after them, and his goal is nothing less than to destroy the Daleks once and for all.
This is a new kind of action from the Doctor, and he seems to realize himself he’s embarking on a dangerous, and questionable, path. In a remarkable scene about halfway through the story, he goes for a cup of tea at a diner that (it seems) the First Doctor used to frequent during his stay in the area. He has a conversation with the cook that both touches on the racial issues behind the Daleks, but also involves the Doctor contemplating the consequences of decisions made by those have the power to make them for the whole world (or universe).
This new approach from the Doctor was the idea of script editor Andrew Cartmel, and is part of what fans would eventually come to call the “Cartmel Master Plan,” although from interviews it doesn’t seem that there was really a “master” plan at the time— just a new direction. Cartmel had noticed that the Doctor often seemed to be at the mercy of events, rather than being three steps ahead and driving the story the way he ought to if he was as clever as the series always made out. That idea came into this particular story with the question: “What if the Doctor decided he’d had enough, he couldn’t just wait around and stop the Daleks after they’d already done a lot of harm, and instead decided to eliminate them once and for all?”
Some fans (including me) feel things eventually went too far in this direction. It’s one thing if the Doctor sees three steps ahead and so cleverly triumphs against the evils he encounters; it’s another if he deliberately seeks out and initiates conflicts with forces he’s deemed evil, and therefore bears responsibility for all the death and damage that results. It’s not without reason fans started to call this version of the character “the Dark Doctor.” To my taste, at least, the new series has struck a better balance in this area. But then, hindsight also changes the way things look: at the start of the Pertwee era, the producer went too far in exiling the Doctor to Earth and removing all space and time travel from the series, but since we now know that was a temporary situation we can look back on the UNIT era as an enjoyable exploration of an alternative style. Likewise, the Doctor’s future selves will back away from some of the Seventh’s dark excesses, and we can view this era as another exploration of a road not to be traveled forever.
The second aspect of Cartmel’s “Master Plan” was the restore mystery to the character. Back when he first took the reigns during Tom Baker’s last season, producer John Nathan-Turner also felt the Doctor had lost most of his mystery now that we knew so much about the Time Lords. JN-T’s solution, oddly, was to have him start wearing question marks on his costume. Cartmel had a better idea: he started to drop into the scripts lines suggesting an identity for the Doctor well beyond what we’d come to understand. In Remembrance, when talking about the Hand of Omega, the Doctor speaks— and then hastily corrects himself— as if he was there when Omega and Rassilon used the device, even though it was previously established that was in the ancient past far before the Doctor’s time. At the climax of the story, in a line that ended up on the cutting room floor (and so must be considered non-canonical) Davros taunted the Doctor by saying “You are merely another Time Lord,” to which the Doctor replied, “I am very much more than a Time Lord.”
Cartmel would eventually explain the mystery in one of the novels published during the years after the Classic series ended. It seems, however, that he did not have the eventually-published explanation, or any explanation, in mind from the start: he just wanted to add cryptic remarks with no explanation in order to restore a sense of mystery around the Doctor. The published explanation has been pretty firmly contradicted at various points in the new series, and so must be considered non-canonical (and good thing, too: I didn’t like it at all).
One final note: Davros and the Daleks want the Hand of Omega so they can gain superior time travel technology (they’d had some time travel ability for a long time), use it to attack Gallifrey, destroy the Time Lords, and then replace them. With hindsight, we can say that by this point in Dr Who history, the Time War had begun.
Next Week:
“The Happiness Patrol,” 3 episodes.
