Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks

I am a human-Dalek.

This is what putting off unpleasant things does to you. I had not intended to finish the Tenth Doctor with the Series Three two-parter involving the Daleks but here we are. These two episodes were very poorly received by the fans, enough so that they somewhat poisoned the well for the Sontaran two-parter in Series Four. When the writer, Helen Raynor, went back and read comments about both stories, she turned about face and never wrote for the show again. I don't recall enjoying this one that much but I also don't recall having the avowed hatred that some fans did.

Plot Summary

In 1930 New York, a man named Lazlo is wishing good luck to his girlfriend Tallulah as she heads on stage for a performance. He is distracted by a noise and follows it down to a store room where he is attacked by a humanoid pig.

The Doctor and Martha arrive on Liberty Island two weeks later where the Doctor is immediately keyed in to a series of disappearances in the Central Park shantytown called Hooverville. In the shantytown, they observe a man named Solomon breaking up a fight between two people. The Doctor notes his leadership and asks him about the disappearances. Solomon acknowledges them but they had been unable to do anything as they happen too fast and the authorities don't care about missing vagrants.

Meanwhile at the nearly completed Empire State Building, the lead engineer, Mr. Diagoras, is threatening the foreman to finish the spire of the building by that night. The foreman refuses and Diagoras tells him to take it up with the new bosses. A Dalek emerges from the elevator with two pig-men who seize the foreman and take him below. The Dalek then orders Diagoras to bring in additional labor.

Diagoras arrives at the Hooverville and offers money to clear a blockage in the sewer. Curious, the Doctor volunteers, joined by Martha, Solomon and a young man named Frank. The four journey into the sewers under the Empire State Building but find no blockage. Instead, they find a glowing sample of alien tissue. The Doctor is unsure of what it is and pockets it. They then see a pig-man sitting in one tunnel. The Doctor goes to examine him but is surprised by a larger group of pig-men who emerge from the shadows.

The mutants chase the group down the tunnels until they find a ladder. The Doctor unseals the manhole cover and he, Martha and Solomon climb to safety. Frank, who had lagged behind to fend off the pig-men, is grabbed off the ladder and dragged away. The Doctor prepares to plan to go after Frank when Tallulah emerges with a gun, demanding to know where Lazlo is.

After setting the workers to install the new panels on the spire, Diagoras is summoned to the lair of the Daleks in the basement. There he is confronted by Dalek Sec, leader of the Cult of Skaro, who escaped with three other members of the cult after their defeat at the Battle of Canary Wharf (Doomsday). Sec sees potential in Diagoras and orders him dragged to a holding cell while the plan is carried out.

After admitting she is using a prop gun, Tallulah tells the Doctor of Lazlo's disappearance from the same theater she performs at. That theater has an entrance to the sewer in the prop storage room, which is where the Doctor, Martha and Solomon emerged from. Martha stays with Tallulah while the Doctor cannibalizes some equipment to examine the alien tissue. Solomon heads back to Hooverville to rally the men to a defense and possibly rescue Frank.

Tallulah goes on stage while Martha watches from the wings. On the other wing, she sees a deformed man watching from the shadows. She tries to sneak across stage but trips over a dancer. She points out the man who then runs off. Martha runs after him but is grabbed by a pig-man and dragged back into the sewers.

The Doctor discovers the tissue is artificially constructed with Skaro DNA. Realizing that the Daleks are involved, he goes to look for Martha but Tallulah tells him that she has disappeared. Suspecting that she was taken, he runs into the sewers with Tallulah insisting on following him. In the sewers, they are forced to hide as a Dalek roams around on patrol.

They discover the disfigured man hiding nearby. It is Lazlo who managed to escape before the transformation is complete. His mind still functions but his features are a blend of human and porcine. The send Tallulah back through the sewers for the safety of the theater but she gets lost on the way. The Doctor and Lazlo find Martha and Frank being herded by two Daleks to the laboratory for further experimentation. The Doctor slips in between them while Lazlo poses as a pig guard.

The group is brought into the lab where Dalek Sec has taken Diagoras into his casing. The Daleks announce their new evolution and from the casing emerges a bipedal creature, calling itself a human-Dalek. Sec orders the humans to be processed with the other Daleks but the Doctor shows himself, distracting the Daleks. He creates a noise through a radio that induces pain in the Daleks and the pig-men and he and the group of humans flee through the sewers.

The return to Hooverville and the Doctor urges everyone to flee New York. Most resist, with no where else to go, and the camp is attacked by pig-men. The humans beat the creatures back but two Daleks come after them and begin to destroy the camp. Solomon steps forward to try and negotiate but the Daleks kill him.

The Doctor, angry at Solomon's death, offers himself up but Sec orders the Doctor taken alive. As he is taken away, the Doctor gives Martha his psychic paper. He is then taken back to the lab where Sec explains how he intends to blend Dalek and human DNA in people who have become empty shells and lay in stasis. The power for this will come from a gamma ray infused lightning on the spire of the Empire State Building. Seeing a glimmers of emotion in Sec, the Doctor agrees to help.

In Hooverville, Martha realizes that the Daleks needed a workforce and would lure men with the promise of work. Frank tells her that most men were hired to work on the Empire State Building. She, Frank and Tallulah use the psychic paper to get into the building and up to the planning office near the top. They find a set of blueprints that had just been updated and comparing them with an older set, they realize that the Daleks have installed extra panels on spire of the building.

The Doctor and Sec finalize the serum to infuse the human shells with the hybrid DNA. However as it flows, an alarm goes off and they realize that it is pure Dalek DNA being pumped in. The other three Daleks have rebelled against Sec for threatening Dalek purity and order him and the Doctor seized. The Doctor is grabbed by Lazlo, who had also summoned the elevator. When it opens, the two dash into it and head up to the top floor.

At the top, Martha tells the Doctor where the Daleks have installed their panels. He orders Martha, Tallulah, Frank and Lazlo to fight off the pig-men pursuers while he removes the panels. Lazlo collapses, the mutation designed to end the life of the pig-men after a few weeks, leaving them a man down. Martha then realizes that with a lightning strike, she can electrify the elevator by channeling the bolt through sets of metal tubing. She and Frank work to set this up.

On the spire, the Doctor removes one panel but drops his screwdriver before he can finish removing the second and third panels. Unable to remove them, he wraps himself around the spire as the lightning hits. It electrifies him and passes through the building. The pig-men emerging from the elevator are electrocuted while the human shells injected with Dalek DNA come to life. The Daleks arms the humans and send them through the sewers to ambush sites throughout the city. Martha wakes the Doctor, having passed out after the lightning strike and they head back downstairs.

Needing a large space, the group breaks into Tallulah's theater and the Doctor alerts the Daleks to his presence with his sonic screwdriver. The Daleks dispatch a group of humans to destroy them along with two of the three Daleks, dragging Sec in tow. The Daleks move to kill the Doctor but Sec stands up and steps in the path of the beam, killing him. The Daleks order the humans to destroy the Doctor but they refuse to fire, questioning why. The Doctor tells the Daleks that he infused a small amount of Time Lord DNA into the mix, giving them the ability to question orders.

Angered, the Daleks start killing the infected humans who return fire. The Daleks kill several but the shots overwhelm their armor and both Daleks are destroyed. Seeing the humans rebel Dalek Caan, who had taken over the leadership role, activates a self destruct in the hybrids, killing all of them. The Doctor return to the lab, offering Caan compassion as the only Dalek left. Caan instead activates an emergency temporal shift and disappears.

Martha, Frank, Tallulah and Lazlo enter the lab and Lazlo collapses, nearing the end of his adjusted life cycle. The Doctor however grabs genetic equipment from the lab and develops a serum to counteract the shortened span. In the morning, they take Lazlo to Hooverville and Frank arranges for Lazlo to stay there. The Doctor and Martha then depart, the Doctor sure Dalek Caan will emerge once again.

Analysis

Because Doctor Who is a family oriented show, you expect plots and stories to come along that are rather silly. Many of these are made more palatable for adults with comedy, witty writing and good acting. The downfall of stories that are poorly regarded is a general deficiency in these areas. Unfortunately, Daleks in Manhattan and Evolution of the Daleks falls into that category. The plot is generally silly but I can take that is certain doses. Where the story really falls flat is in the annoying nature or ambivalence generated towards the various characters.

This story puts the shoe on the other foot in terms of understanding how British people feel about Dick Van Dyke's accent in Mary Poppins. The accents in this story are atrocious. To disguise their own British accents, the characters are all adopting extreme versions of the New York gangster accent that is usually associated with James Cagney or Edward G. Robinson. But those accents have become a joke in and of themselves and to hear them taken a level further shifts it from just being tired to outright annoying. Frank has a southern accent but it is also done in an exaggerated fashion that feels fake.

The one exception on the accent front is Solomon. He is more understated in his American accent and that plays better. But he has other drawbacks. He is painted as the natural peacemaker who abhors violence but a number of his characteristics come across as tropes that have been done many times before. Even his death falls into the cliché. A true subversion of it would have been if the Dalek had shot him mid-sentence, cutting things off. Instead, he is allowed to finish his speech and deliver the full weight of his nobility to Sec.

As silly as the human-Dalek Sec was in his appearance and his initial delivery of lines, he did start to grow on me as Evolution of the Daleks progressed. His halting speech wasn't great, but I wonder if some of that was because the actor couldn't breathe under the mask. But in a similar fashion in Dalek, the infusion of humanity and the realization of the horror of their purified existence made the modified Dalek become more sympathetic. It's still not a particularly good adaptation but it at least it creates a certain level of interest and drama in an otherwise boring character.

As this story is in the first half of Series 3, it lingers quite a bit on the Martha pining for the Doctor plotline. This does generate a couple of amusing lines from Tallulah, suggesting that the Doctor is gay, but other than that, it is just as tedious as the other times where Martha complains about the Doctor not returning her affection instead of appreciating his friendship or the adventure they are currently on. I also didn't care for the leap of logic that she had to make to find the Doctor at the Empire State Building once he was taken. That whole scene just played out like writer's convenience, to say nothing of the silliness of hearing Martha and Tallulah saying "Dalekanium" every couple of minutes.

I did enjoy the Doctor's performance. It was probably one of the few things I genuinely enjoyed in this story. There is a certain level of gravitas that the Doctor brings that feel genuine no matter how silly the situation or the level of acting around him. He conveys deep emotion as well as intensity, which can go a little off the rails at times. He did get a tad over the top when swearing to save Lazlo but it was only a quick scene and easily overlooked.

Unlike The Angels Take Manhattan, this story didn't really use New York. It was fairly obvious that the whole thing was just a series of sets and that the skyline and backdrop pictures of New York were taken by a second-unit crew, sans actors. This didn't bother me but it did feel like they missed a trick as a quick shot of some of the characters in a real New York location would have been a nice touch. Still, the setting and overall layout was actually done fairly well and was one of the stronger parts of this story.

I've railed on the acting quite a bit but I can't dismiss the writing either. Its not bad, but its also not particularly good either. There is no real spark in the dialogue and the lofty talk of Solomon is built more on clichés and sincerity of the actor. I found some of the timing and set up with the Dalek's plan needlessly overdone. There was no need for the run around story about getting the Dalekanium pieces put on the spire at the last minute. That was just a device to give the Daleks a weakness in their plans as well as kill some time.

I think it's the time thing that gets me. This did not feel deserving of a two-parter. Fat could easily have been cut and if you combine a few scenes and reduce the amount of doubling back, this could have been a tight 42-minute story that would have really zipped along. It would have reduced the exposure of some of the lesser actors and let the Doctor and the Daleks go hard mono-y-mono. But with bloat comes drag and exposure of the lesser elements and that certainly happened here.

I think it's safe to say that this is the worst of the two-parters from the Tenth Doctor era. There are some ideas here but they mostly cover ground that's been gone over before and then a large amount of bad acting and silliness get tossed on top of it. I hate to end on a down note but I think I was right in wanting to avoid this story as its just not one that is worth revisiting on any kind of regular basis. Even if it does have an early Andrew Garfield sighting.

Overall personal score: Daleks in Manhattan - 1; Evolution of the Daleks - 1