The long dark teatime of the Daleks

[vilakins]

I doubt anyone needs another Doctor Who post, but this is a fairly brief one.

The long dark teatime of the Daleks

I was looking forward to this as being a different riff on Daleks, but I was disappointed (and still heartily sick of Daleks). Ian McNiece was great as Churchill, and I loved the war room and the blimps and even the retro Daleks with their belts and cups of tea, but that was about it. I was disappointed. And the plot holes annoyed me. Why did Churchill even call the Doctor when there wasn't a crisis at that point? Why did Bracewell feeling emotions (and he already had when he was suicidal) turn off the bomb? How come none of the windows in London were blacked out as they would have been? How did Bracewell adapt the Spitfires in about an hour, and how did they, with their propellers move in space when they were enclosed in a bubble of air, and wouldn't they have used up said air very quickly with their internal combustion? Yeah, I know I'm nitpicky, but these things mightn't have mattered as much with a better story. I did like the Dalek serving tea, the poster, the fact that the Daleks were never known to the public back then (so this seems to be our intact timeline), and Amy not remembering Daleks. Does she remember other alien invasions? Who's been meddling in time--the Daleks or someone else? That bit's intriguing, but I was expecting a lot more, and Eleven to be more Eleveny. He felt more like Ten in a new body here.

Wow, Amy is tall. She towered over Churchill and Bracewell.

Next week we're back to Moffat again and that looks very good: stone angels and River Song.

Comments

[zoefruitcake]

I agree, it wasn't one to remember. I did like the poster though :0)

[vilakins]

I expect to see the poster and the tea-serving Dalek in a lot of icons. :-) They were pretty good, but it went downhill after that.

I'm also surprised no one asked Amy about the missing bits of her skirt, or that she didn't dress more appropriately like Donna did in the 30s. The TARDIS must have a wardrobe room as big as a the Liberator's.

[zoefruitcake]

yes, the skirt bit crossed my mind too. I've always liked it when they dressed up

[blencathra.livejournal.com]

I think you've highlighted the things I wasn't keen on.

Call me old-fashioned but I don't like the idea of brightly coloured Daleks. They are supposed to be menacing, murderous, functional... not pretty. Though I like them being bigger and sounding bad ass. :D

I was much taken with the Dalek outside having little black out covers over his "ears" and as for the Doctor holding the Daleks off with a jammy dodger - brilliant!

Anyway, roll on next week. I'm looking forward to the return of the weeping angels & River Song. :)

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

I had no idea what that thing was he had in his hand! I heard mention of some sort of biscuit but didn't connect it. [light dawns] :-P

Haven't they had the occasional coloured Dalek before: red, gold, silver? Why would Daleks even care what colour they were unless it's a rank thing; maybe it is? I did like the retro WW2 khaki Daleks with their canvas, belts, and eagerness to be of service, but sadly the old models were phased out somewhat abruptly. But in general I am soooo up to here with Daleks (and Cybermen) and for sure the Daleks will be baaaaack.

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

I identified it as a jammy dodger in about a second! Clearly the Daleks had never worked on a biscuit stall in their break at primary school - you'd have thought they might have found out while learning to make tea.

As I said chez Astro, the Confidential documentary said that the colours denote new castes, which they called Drone, Scientist, Strategist, Supreme and the Eternal (apparently red, orange, blue, white and yellow respectively.)

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Ah. And this alone is a sign that we will be subjected to many more Dalek episodes. Sigh.

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

You thought they'd build shiny new Daleks and not use them?

I suppose they could have had a twist in which he'd hidden the TARDIS destruct inside a jammy dodger, a bit like them hiding a bomb inside Bracewell. But then, it was pretty obvious he wasn't really going to blow the TARDIS up and was going to eat the jammy dodger.

[muscadinegril.livejournal.com]

Spitfires in Spaaaace! I was sitting there humming the theme to Battle of Britain. The first time I watched it I thought they were spacecraft made to look like Spitfires; the second time I noticed the propellors. This episode was so cracky and fannish it was pitiful.

The new Dalek design does nothing for me either.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Propeller planes in space in a bubble of air might seem cool but it makes no scientific sense whatsoever. [is disappointed]

[jaxomsride.livejournal.com]

I suppose it would depend a lot on how the said "gravity bubble" was supposed to work.

The split in time is a clear indication someone had been meddling. Yes Amy didn't remember the Daleks was interesting.

I loved the poster with the Dalek on it.
I'm not impressed by the "new" Daleks. I know they are hearking back to the original designs, but bright yellow plastic look doesn't seem nearly as menacing.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

I still don't see how the planes were propelled, and the pilots would hardly have learned a complete new system in an hour or so.

I liked the khaki ones so much better. Maybe the colours are a rank thing?

[astrogirl2.livejournal.com]

I know that often as not, I'm the one saying, "oh, but you're just focusing on nitpicky stuff, and if you can get past that, it's good," but in this case, I agree completely. The "nitpicky" stuff here kind of adds up to the whole episode. I really do think this one needed to be longer, because if they'd explained and developed things like the relationship between Bracewell's emotions and the bomb, and taken a bit of time with the spitfires, and so on, this would have been a much better episode.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

And even the pilots; surely flying up into space would have been overwhelming for a WW2 pilot, even one lacking in imagination. All the cool stuff was at the front, then it was rather Rusty-like, and of course the coloured new-look Daleks (ho hum) got away so we'll have to put up with them again this season. Still, next week looks good!

[astrogirl2.livejournal.com]

Man, it could have been fun watching the pilots taking a little while to freak out before going up there. There were just so many things in this ep that could have been expanded out to good effect. Ah, well. Next week's does look promising!

[gair.livejournal.com]

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

[jhall1.livejournal.com]

I too thought that even for a who story this had an awful lot of plot holes. There were a lot of things to like, though, in particular how they worked in a couple of genuine Churchill sayings.

I think I would acquit them of one of your "accusations": "Why did Churchill even call the Doctor when there wasn't a crisis at that point?" Presumably when he called him, a month previously remember, he thought that we were in danger of losing the Battle of Britain, which would have been crisis enough. But that gives rise to another problem. If I understand the story correctly, the Daleks supposedly provoked the Doctor's arrival, that being the whole aim of their plan. But how would they even know that Churcill was in contact with the Doctor? Also surely providing Churchill with a seemingly war-winning weapon would make him less likely rather than more likely to call on the Doctor?

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

Um... well, I didn't think it hung together very well either, but if the Doctor and Churchill had met as often as implied, maybe there were records of that somewhere that the Daleks could access.

Also surely providing Churchill with a seemingly war-winning weapon would make him less likely rather than more likely to call on the Doctor?

Perhaps they were faking some sort of malfunction and Churchill thought the Doctor was the sort of boffin who could fix it. But once they heard the Doctor was coming they probably had some stake in keeping London safish until he arrived, so they might have allowed Bracewell to "fix" the malfunction at an appropriate moment.

[jhall1.livejournal.com]

That mostly sounds plausible. But surely any previous meetings between the Doctor and Churchill would have had to be kept very secret so that Torchwood wouldn't find out about them.

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

I don't have a problem with Daleks being more competent at finding things out than Torchwood!

[jhall1.livejournal.com]

Good point. :)

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

I did like the early part of the ep, but then it degenerated into a standard RTD-style Dalek story, and I didn't find Eleven all that different from Ten here. He was more manic and a lot of his lines were very Ten.

I can maybe gloss over a few holes if I really like a story, but this one was riddled with gaping holes and disappointed me, and I was looking forward to a fun retro romp.

[jhall1.livejournal.com]

Given his history with the Daleks, I can understand the Doctor being rather manic when they are around, especially when he thought that he had destroyed the last of them. Though that leads to another plot hole. How did he know without being told that these Daleks originally came from after that time rather than before it? More broadly, why does the Doctor's own sequence of events always seem to be in synch with that of any Daleks he meets, regardless of the time in which they actually meet?

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

I know, that's a plot weakness, when the fact that (eventually) both parties can travel through time and can meet out of sequence ought to be a strength. Though perhaps we can imagine that most of the episodes where no timeline is indicated (apart from the Daleks recognising the Doctor as someone they've met before) actually occur in random order.

The one stated exception that I can think of is the second time they appear, in The Dalek Invasion of Earth. Chesterton expresses surprise as they have already destroyed the Daleks on Skaro, and the Doctor says that is far in the future and suggests this is the "middle history" of the race. And in Earth terms it's 2164, so there's no problem about 20th/21st-century humans not remembering it.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

I think the TARDIS usually chooses where and when they go to avert crisis, but this time that's not so; he went in response to Churchill's call. Maybe they have some subspace connection to the TARDIS?