Destiny of the Daleks

If you're supposed to be the superior race of the universe, why don't you try climbing after us.

Growing up, I have fairly solid recollections of three Doctor Who stories: Masque of Mandragora, The Face of Evil, and The Invasion of Time. However, I have a vague recollection of another story and I think it might be Destiny of the Daleks so I'm curious to see if I was right. I'm also curious to see if this story is as bad as it's reputation suggests as it is generally regarded as the worst of all the classic Dalek stories.

Plot Summary

Romana regenerates into a form similar to Princess Astra, although she tries a couple of other styles before settling on it. The Doctor is meanwhile tinkering with K-9 and accidentally faults his voicebox, giving him a robotic version of laryngitis. Using the randomizer to avoid the Black Guardian, they land on an unknown planet in the middle of a rocky ruin.

Noting high levels of radiation, they take anti-radiation pills and leave to explore. While exploring the ruins, they observe a group of humanoids performing a quick burial, piling the body with stones. They also observe a space ship landing and then burying itself part way into the ground. They attempt to approach it, but it fires at them and drives them into one of the buildings for shelter.

In the building, an earthquake occurs and the Doctor ends up trapped under a column. Romana heads back to the TARDIS to get K-9 to help lift the beam but the same earthquake dislodged stones, blocking the entrance to the TARDIS. While she is gone, the Doctor is captured by a squad from the spaceship who are called Movellans. They take him back to their ship where they reveal that they are on the planet Skaro.

Romana returns to find the Doctor gone. She is startled by the appearance of a humanoid and backing away from him, she falls into the lower level. Her fall alerts the Daleks who break through a section and take her prisoner. The human who startled her observes this and is shortly afterward captured by the Movellans. His name is Tyssan and he was a prisoner of the Daleks who escaped. He tells the Doctor and the Movellans of the Daleks capture of Romana and that they are drilling for something, using captured humanoids to clear away the debris as they do.

Romana is interrogated by the Daleks and once she is found to not be an agent against the Daleks, she is sent into the tunnels to work. Feeling the effects of radiation exposure, she is weakened but informed by other prisoners that the only way out is death. Romana continues to work for a while and then stops her hearts, putting herself in suspended animation, simulating death. When the work cycle is finished, the Daleks order other prisoners to take her to the surface and bury her.

The Doctor, Tyssan, Commander Sharrel and two other Movellans enter the tunnel to find out what the Daleks are up to and to rescue Romana. Their presence alerts the Daleks who investigate. This clears the control room and the Doctor examines their plans, deducing that the Daleks are digging to find the old Kaled science bunker. The Doctor also realizes that the Daleks are unaware of an old service shaft leading to the level below the bunker. He and the Movellans leave to make for the shaft. The Daleks discover one of the Movellan guards left behind to guard and shoots him down, but the rest of the party escapes.

They discover Romana's grave on the surface but she has already emerged from it and rejoins the Doctor. The group heads down the service shaft and enters the fourth level where they find the preserved body of Davros, which the Doctor had suspected they were looking for. As the Daleks begin to drill in, a cave in buries one Movellan while leaving Commander Sharrel on the other side. Davros begins to reanimate and calls out for the Daleks, attracting the attention of the Doctor, Romana and Tyssan. With the Daleks about to drill in, the Doctor pushes Davros down the hallway to a room where a window to the surface has been exposed. He sends Romana and Tyssan out to the Movellan spacecraft while he stays with Davros.

Romana and Tyssan make their way through the country, trying to avoid Dalek patrols. They spot one Dalek and separate with Tyssan trying to attract the Dalek's attention. The Dalek fires towards him, but this action attracts the attention of the Movellans who destroy the Dalek with a long range cannon. Romana then makes her way to the ship. Inside, she informs the Movellans that the Doctor is in trouble but notices that they already have a feed of Davros and that the Movellan who was buried in the cave in is alive and working like normal. They stun Romana, knocking her out.

The Doctor sees the Daleks approaching but holds them off with a blasting explosive he picked up, saying that he will kill Davros. The Daleks leave but return with the humanoids they had used in the mines and begin killing them. The Doctor orders them to stop and agrees to turn over Davros if the people are allowed to go free and if he is given a one minute head start. Davros agrees and the prisoners are sent out. The Doctor attaches the bomb to Davros' chair, threatening to blow it up remotely and then leaves via the window. Davros orders the Daleks to remove the bomb and as he leaves the room the Doctor detonates it, destroying the two Daleks holding it but leaving Davros alive.

The Doctor is found by Tyssan who had just sent the released prisoners into hiding. They are captured by a Dalek patrol but the Dalek is destroyed by a Movellan guard. The guard tries to take the Doctor prisoner but he manages to short circuit it as he has realized the Movellans are androids.

With the failure to capture the Doctor, the Movellans place Romana in an isolation tube in the open with an incendiary device. The Doctor observes Romana in the tube and approaches it alone, telling Tyssan to stay in hiding. As he crouches near the tube, the Movellan's knock him out and take both him and Romana back into the ship, having elected not to waste the bomb on Romana with the Doctor captured. Tyssan then runs back to where the other prisoners are hiding.

The Doctor wakes on the Movellan ship where they explain that they are caught in a stalemate with the Dalek fleet. The Doctor demonstrates with Romana and a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors how their and the Dalek's slavery to logic has produced the stalemate. The Movellans decide to take the Doctor with them to reprogram their computers to fight the Daleks. The Doctor reasons this is why the Daleks have awakened Davros as well.

Commander Sharrel dispatches one of his men to set up the bomb that will ignite the Skaroan atmosphere and destroy the Daleks with the man to stay behind to ensure detonation manually. He goes and sets up the bomb but is disarmed and reprogrammed by Tyssan and the other prisoners who get the drop on him. They do the same for another Movellan sent to investigate. Using the two as cover, the prisoners storm the ship and deactivate all the Movellans except for Commander Sharrel who slips away.

The Doctor leaves the prisoners and Romana to rework the Movellan ship while he goes after Davros. On his way he observes a number of Daleks equipped with detonation charges heading towards the Movellan ship. He slips in to the Dalek base and confronts Davros who is planning to sacrifice those Daleks to destroy the Movellans as a Dalek transport ship is coming to pick him up. One Dalek is left behind to guard Davros and it takes the Doctor prisoner.

After finishing repairs to the ship, Romana notices that Commander Sharrel is missing just as the Daleks arrive. She races out of the ship while several other prisoners come out and hold back the Daleks using the Movellan weapons. Romana gets free but the prisoners are pushed back into the Movellan ship. Romana finds a damaged Sharrel and manages to stop him from detonating the bomb. She then pulls off his power pack and leaves the powerless body as she takes the bomb away.

The Doctor takes his hat and props in on the Dalek guard's eyestalk. The Dalek begins firing indiscriminately until it runs into a wall and explodes. The Doctor then wrestles with Davros but gives way deliberately, letting him fall forward on the button that sets off the explosives on the Daleks. The Daleks explode before they can circle the Movellan ship, leaving it undamaged.

The Doctor takes Davros to the Movellan ship and places him in cryogenic stasis while Tyssan programs the Movellan ship to rendezvous with an Earth transport to take Davros away for trial against all civilized races. Before the ship can take off, the Doctor and Romana dash out and return to the TARDIS where they depart Skaro.

Analysis

This wasn't as bad as I was expecting. In many ways, it's actually a decent story, one of the more engaging ones that Terry Nation put together. Admittedly, Douglas Adams rewrote a good portion of it and most of the stuff that I didn't care for was blatantly Douglas Adams' additions. But there were other problems that took this down from a good story to a more middling story.

The Doctor is good in this one but rather dark. He is witty and snappy and it works very well. But he also has a few quips that are rather needling and play up the Daleks as fools. He also goes so far as to detonate the bomb he set up, which could have easily killed Davros had he not removed it. Granted, the Doctor was probably assuming that the first thing Davros would do would be to remove the bomb, but it is still much closer to murder than we've seen the Doctor do in quite awhile. It just seems a bit out of character for him to go that far without an open provocation.

I like Romana in this too. I think from an overall perspective, I prefer the first Romana, but in this instance, the new Romana works well with the Doctor. She is not a damsel and her wearing a feminine version of the Doctor's outfit really suits her as she works very much as the Doctor's counterpart in this story. I especially like her taking the onus on herself to escape from the Dalek's mines by faking her own death. It didn't muck about in terms of time and she didn't spend any time pining about waiting for someone to rescue her. She saw how to do it and in a way that wouldn't cause anyone else to be harmed and just did it.

I did not really care for the joke generation. That and the scene with K-9 (a prep for introducing the new voice of K-9 in The Creature From the Pit) we're very obviously written by Douglas Adams and don't quite work for me. What bothers me is not the multiple bodies she goes through while regenerating (presumably as she has a measure of control over the changes before settling on a final form) but just in the fact that it wasn't that funny. Even if it had been funny, it would have been out of place given the dark and somewhat grim nature of this story. It's one thing to crack a joke to break tension in a dark story, but a scene like this belongs in an overt comedy story and it just doesn't work relative to the rest of the story.

One of the best things about this story is the camera work. Obviously anything on film look better than stuff on tape. But they also used a steady cam which gave such a smooth and sharp picture in the action scenes. On top of that, the director chose some excellent angles to film the Daleks, giving them the illusion of seeming to loom over the others. It made the Daleks seem much more menacing than you might have otherwise thought. It was really good work and enjoyable to watch, regardless of what was going on in the actual story.

Outside of the good points and the small flaws noted earlier, there are probably four points where the story falls short. First is Davros. Michael Wisher was not available so another actor was brought in. Unfortunately, the Davros mask from Genesis of the Daleks was the only one available and it was both falling apart and didn't fit the new actor very well. So it looks odd in any type of close up. He also sounds off. For people watching with four years separating the two appearances of Davros, they probably wouldn't have noticed, but when watched close you notice the voice changes and the total lack of subtlety. Davros is ranting from the start. Even in the moment between Davros and the Doctor in Episode Four where they try to talk as scientists, attempting to recreate the scene in Genesis, Davros is still going off half-cocked and sounds completely insane. It takes all the menace out of him that was there the first time around where his cold calculation was what really scared you.

Second is the production values. No way about it, the Daleks look bad. They are run down, their heads wobble when they spin and you could actually see the Dalek operators walking the Daleks toward the Movellan ship because they couldn't roll across the sand in the quarry. You can also see studio lights acting as the side lighting. There are also a couple of moments where the camera should have cut away but instead caught small mistakes like Davros bumping into the wall when driving away with the Daleks in Episode Three. The budget was being stretched and it unfortunately showed.

Third is the shift of the Daleks to robots. I'm sure any and all references to the Daleks being robots is a Douglas Adams change as Terry Nation would never have made that mistake. It is something impossible to reconcile and goes against everything ever known about the Daleks. Davros' whole point was to create the superior organic being. The idea of the Daleks being robots only would have insulted him. Having the Daleks be slaves to logic is fine but they were never nor should ever be considered as robots. It's a dumb change that could have easily been worked around.

Fourth is how the Movellans were done as androids. The design of the Movellans is very Seventies but that's fine. What doesn't quite work is how the Movellans were taken down. Rather than needing to fight them and blow parts of them off, they simply have belt clip power cells taken off and that seems overly weak. When they go down, it is also like they are in a slow motion dance which just looks weird. Half the time you don't even know what has happened, they just start dancing. The only instance where a fight seems real is when Romana breaks off Sharrel's arm and you see the wires coming out of it. Even then, Sharrel dances about until she rips off the power pack. It just looks silly and reduces what could have been a good idea in the Movellans to something ineffective.

There are other instances where the story gets a bit silly, most notably when the Doctor destroys a Dalek by putting his hat on the eyestalk. If there was anything that made the Daleks look pathetic, it was that. There is a story that Terry Nation deliberately didn't include K-9 (and Douglas Adams explained his absence) because he didn't want the robot dog to show up the Daleks. I'm not sure the Daleks could have been more shown up than they were at the end.

I think what makes all of this most frustrating is that there was so much good that was going for the story for about two and a half episodes. The production values and the problems with Davros were still minimal and the story ripped along and kept you engaged. But as soon as the Movellans' true motives came through and the Doctor and Romana had to work against them, all these other problems came to the fore and just dragged the story down.

That said, it is still an entertaining story and it keeps you engaged. At no point can I actively remember looking at the time and wondering when the story was going to be over because I was done with it. It worked fairly well, it just had a number of problems, many of which could have been fixed with a little more time, effort and focus on the heart of the story. But it does have those flaws and to give it anything better than a middling score would be asking to overlook too much.

Overall personal score: 2.5 out of 5