*End-of-serial spoilers.*
On different instances, this serial has been packaged as two hour-long episodes instead of four half-hour ones (including on the DVD,) but for whatever reason, I still think of it as a four-part serial. Maybe because each episode of the “two-parter” has such a clear midpoint cliffhanger in addition to its end-of-episode cliffhanger that it’s obvious it was written and shot to be shown in four parts? Maybe because, despite the show’s present-day successes, the following season shows that classic Who was not ready for an hour-long format? At any rate, however you want to number it, this is “Resurrection of the Daleks.”
A time corridor links 1980s London with a space station in the far future, and it pulls the TARDIS off course with the Fifth Doctor, Tegan, and Turlough inside. As our heroes move between the two spaces and times, they discover a Dalek fleet with some lab-grown human slaves, who are in search of one particular prisoner being held on the space station: their creator, Davros. The stakes are high, and the price is even higher.
Some decent supporting characters here. This story introduces Commander Lytton, who will later crop up a second time in “Attack of the Cybermen” (he does like working with the big-name villains, doesn’t he?) The space-station end of the time corridor gives us Dr. Styles and Lt. Mercer, who have an interesting tug-and-pull dynamic as they argue about the best way to combat the Daleks. Turlough winds up spending a lot of his time with them, while the Doctor is paired with Stien, a troubled escapee with a secret. Tegan, on the other hand, is in London for most of the serial, and she finds an ally in Professor Laird, who’s smart and brave and rolls with the alien punches surprisingly well.
I’m more mixed on the story itself, which tends to confuse grimness with quality. Not that dark is bad, but this story is awfully dark for classic Who, and more significantly, it feels like it’s going “edgy” purely for the sake of it. Some of the minor characters meet pretty horrific ends, and this one of a few Five-era serials with notoriously high death tolls. And while it’s one thing to get darkness from the Daleks, it’s another to get it from the Doctor himself. I know that, however much the Doctor may wish for things to get otherwise, he usually winds up having to kill the bad guys instead of just disarming them, capturing them, or getting them to agree to leave. But in the context of a TV show, there’s a difference between rigging one a device to blow up a bunch of identical monsters and stepping forward to personally kill an individual we know, even a terrible one. In light of that, it’s always going to be disturbing to see the Doctor holding Davros at gunpoint. I know it’s a murky situation—one could argue, and people have, that the Doctor has somehow “allowed” the destruction and murder the Daleks have spread across the universe by not definitively destroying them once and for all, and Davros is tied up in that—but although there are no easy choices, it still feels wrong to see the Doctor even preparing to make one like this.
Of course, all of this is there in part to facilitate Tegan’s exit from the show. Hers is a curious departure. She doesn’t decide to stay somewhere new for the sake of love or service, and while she’s returning home, it’s more about what she’s leaving than what she’s going back to. This last adventure is too much for her—not just all the people who are killed, but what the Doctor does and what she does in order to defeat the Daleks—and she can’t do it anymore. It’s a different exit than most on the show, and I like that she doesn’t actively blame the Doctor for what’s happened, but at the same time, it gets a little too close to the whole “the Doctor’s way of life wrecks those who get close to them” thing that the new series has brought up from time to time, and I never like that thread. Because yes, running with the Doctor is dangerous and frightening, and it can leave scars, but I like the show best when it reminds us why it’s worth it, every time. Endings like this tend to feel too defeatist for me.
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