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| "Will we be able to fend off Russell with these?" |
This two-parter really is just the biggest pain in the biggest ass. Namely my own.
For the most part, this I can't even blame on Russell T. Davies. The Pig Men and the Human Dalek (which didn't have the decency to die offscreen between the previous episode and this one) are bad and were gotten to by stupid logic for stupid reasons, but well...I'd say the worst part is over, but that's not at all true.
Buckle up, people. It's about to get really, really dumb in here.
So, we pick up from where we left off last time after a brief recap. Sec has fully recovered from shoving an entire man up his rectum (nope, never gonna let that one go - what the hell, Russell?) and declared himself the future of the Human race - a Human Dalek, if you will. Or if you won't. Either way, the horror of the moment is again ruined by the hilarious make up job and the ass shoving.
Sec orders the humans to be prepared for the hybridization process when the Doctor pops in with 1930's radio to distract them. Sec explains that the Cult of Skaro escaped from Canary Wharf using Emergency Temporal Shift, which left them stranded in New York in the 1930's and...I'm sorry, I just can't get over it. The Human Dalek. Prepare for a tirade.
I didn't get into it during my review of the last episode, mostly due to it literally appearing in the last minute, but the Human Dalek effect is maligned with extremely good reason. It looks just horrible, even by 2007 standards. The design is basically a purple-ish take on the regular green Dalek squid, but it has a bunch of rubbery protuberances that look suspiciously like a certain part of the male anatomy. It looks like someone melted a Dalek and stretched it over their face as a mask.
Scaroth from City of Death looks better, and that at least had the excuse of being in 1979. This, not so much.
The only saving grace of this episode is that the other Human Dalek hybrids do not look like this. This is also another instance where I have to rebuff anyone who says that David Tennant isn't one of the greatest actors alive. Anyone who can act opposite of that (and he does so in several scenes) without falling over into hysterical laughter deserves a medal, much less credit as a fantastic actor. I really do wonder how many takes it took to get him to not laugh.
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| I don't have a joke here, I'm just still shocked this happened without someone dying of laughter on set. |
Anyway, getting away from the rant, the Doctor questions Sec on his new human-ishness, Sec giving the predictable responses for a Dalek. Using his sonic, the Doctor actually does something related to sonic waves and causes the radio to have an extreme feedback which harms Sec and the other three Dalek Daleks. The Doctor escapes with Martha and Frank (meeting a wandering Tallulah along the way) Sec ordering for them to be captured. However, once they have left to pursue, Sec picks up the broken radio and runs a hand over it almost...wistfully. Hmm...
The TARDIS crew and friends escape, and Dalek Thay and Caan discuss their growing doubts about Sec...
Back in Hooverville, the Doctor has caught Solomon up to speed on the Daleks. While the Doctor suggests that they all leave Hooverville, Solomon insists that the Daleks can be reasoned with. Solomon, in spite of his namesake, is a moron. Pig Men attack soon after, Hooverville putting up a pretty decent resistance as the Pig Men circle the wagons...and then two Daleks show up to remind us that, yes, they're still in this episode and 1930's firearms will do all of squat against them.
Frank shoots one (which does nothing) and, while Sec and the fourth Dalek watch, the two Daleks there (Thay and Caan, I presume, making the fourth Jast - feel free to not correct me if I'm wrong) start laying waste to Hooverville and demanding humanity's surrender. Solomon steps forward, attempting to reason with them. To give him credit, he lasts one minute and seven seconds longer than you'd expect him to before Caan uses him for target practice.
...yes, I actually timed it.
The Doctor has a bit of insanity break, loudly and angrily demanding the Daleks kill him. Caan is only too happy to take the shot, but Sec orders him to cease fire. Caan is reluctant, but obeys the chain of command - ordering the Doctor to come with him. The Doctor is intrigued by this, as Daleks never change their minds. After he negotiates for the safety of the people of Hooverville, the Doctor follows Caan...but not before slipping Martha his psychic paper.
Back at the ranch, Sec rationalizes that they can use the Doctor's genius to help them. Even so, this doesn't seem to sit well with Jast.
At Hooverville, Martha is helping the wounded out with Tallulah as aid. She explains psychic paper to her, Martha rationalizing that the Doctor must want her to do something.
Back in the Dalek Lab, the Doctor berates Sec for the attack on Hooverville and is completely taken aback when Sec says that the deaths were wrong. Sec is becoming more human, finding value in traits such as courage and compassion. The Doctor, surprised, hears him out. Sec explains their attempts recreate the Dalek race, eventually coming to the conclusion that Humans were the Earth's greatest resource. Flipping a switch, he reveals thousands of bodies in stasis - taken by the Daleks and their minds wiped so they can be "programmed" as needed.
The Doctor shows some minimal disgust at this, though he does ask if they can be restored (though the answer is no). He questions how they plan to do this, saying they'll need a lot of power - Sec ordering the energy converter plans to be opened.
Back at Hooverville, Martha works out that the Daleks have some sort of energy conductor. She and Tallulah question Frank, who points them in the direction of the Empire State Building. As the Doctor finds out, the Daleks have timed everything so that they could use a blast of gamma radiation to combine the Dalek and Human DNA strands into a new hybrid race.
Gamma radiation.
Gamma. Radiation.
From what we later find out is lightning, which most scientific theories do say does carry gamma radiation, but not so much that it doesn't get caught up in the atmosphere. This, understandably, makes the Dalek's plan very, very stupid unless the laws of physics in Doctor Who are different from our own...which they admittedly are on more than one occasion, though usually only with alien races that can rearrange reality like a kitten playing with a ball of string.
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| Because lightning is totally a tool of genetic manipulation...right? |
That isn't getting into how the gamma radiation would transfer genetic material to begin with without horrifically mutating it, but that's a whole other bucket of stupidity. What I'm saying is, essentially, this would have been a perfect opportunity for a Dalek Hulk, because then it would have at least been somewhat entertaining.
Bad, but at least entertaining.
Regardless, the Doctor agrees to help the Daleks (paying lip-service to saving the Pig Men - particularly Lazlo). Lazlo asks if the Doctor believes Sec, and the Doctor says he has to believe - the right man, in the right place, at the right time could make all the difference.
Many floors above, Martha, Lazlo, and Tallulah have gotten to the roof. We have the smell of Russell's paw prints on the script as Martha and Tallulah talk about Martha's totally subtle feelings for the Doctor...and a Rose reference, because this episode wasn't painful enough. When Lazlo gets brought up in the conversation, Tallulah (in contrast to how she was in the last episode and pretty much all otherwise of this episode) has the most underwhelming line read of something soul-crushing in history.
I have no words.
Martha looks through the blueprints and finds the change to the mast of the Empire State Building - it's bars of Dalekanium.
In the basement, as you'd expect, the Dalek Daleks have taken over the operation - putting both the Doctor and Dalek Sec on the chopping block. Now, the new soldiers will be 100% Dalek. The Pig Men are ordered to restrain them, the Doctor and Lazlo escaping since the latter grabbed the former. They take the elevator up, Lazlo out of breath much to the Doctor's worry - seeing as the pig slaves are only known to survive a few weeks at most.
The Doctor heads up remove the Dalekanium from the mast (having a few flashbacks to Logopolis, I'm sure), leaving Martha to fight alongside Frank, Lazlo, and Tallulah. As they prepare, Lazlo takes ill - his body is being overcome. Tallulah comes to his side, leaving Martha and Frank to fight. However, with the coming lightning strike, Martha gets the idea to weaponize it via a series of pipes connected to the lift.
At the last second, before he can remove the plates, the Doctor drops his sonic screwdriver and decides the only logical plan is to climb up onto the mast and hold on tight...hitting him with the full force of a lightning bolt. Don't worry, Tennant fangirls that I know aren't reading - we aren't getting Matt Smith a few years early. The blast does knock him out for a bit, though, as well as flash frying all the Pig Men before they depart the lift.
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| THUNDERSTRUCK!!! |
Unfortunately, the damage is done. The Human Daleks begin to awaken and mobilize.
Up at the roof, Martha does have a moment where she acknowledges that she killed those Pig Men with the lightning strike. They were people, once, just like Lazlo. Of course, Lazlo is the first person to tell her that the Daleks killed them - they were dead from the moment the Daleks corrupted them.
Speaking of the Daleks, they prep their army and tell them to take battle positions - Caan taking the position of Controller from Sec, much to his chagrin. Martha gets up to the top and brings the Doctor his sonic, happy to find that he's had his clock cleaned by the lightning but is still alive. The Doctor comes up with a desperate gamble to draw the Daleks out - using Tallulah's connection to get them into the theater.
Using his sonic, he draws the Daleks to the theater. He and Martha bicker about whether or not she's going to leave, but the point is rendered moot when the Human Daleks bust in with their Dalek tommy guns and Dalek Jast and Thay bringing Sec into the theater with chains around his neck. The Doctor stands before them, berating them for putting Sec through this, saying he was the only one who could have led the Daleks out of the darkness. Sec reinforces this, telling his fellow Daleks that if they choose death in destruction, it will choose them.
They, naturally, refute this with laser blasts to Sec's back. Well, actually, they intend to kill the Doctor and he jumps in the way at the last second.
Why they didn't just kill Sec I'm really still confused by.
The Doctor, in full Oncoming Storm mode, eggs the Daleks into getting the new Human Daleks to shoot him. They order them to do so...and then one of the Human Daleks asks a simple question: why?
When the Daleks claim that Daleks do not question their masters, he tells them that the Daleks are not their masters, and they are not Daleks.
It seems that the Doctor holding onto the mast during the strike caused some Time Lord DNA to get mixed in. They have free will, which makes the Daleks very antsy. A shoot out occurs that kills most of the Human Daleks and both Dalek Jast and Dalek Thay. Dalek Caan uses his connection to the hybrids to kill them all. While this should result in a bunch of regenerations all of a sudden, we don't have the budget for that in 2007.
The Doctor, full of great vengeance and furious anger, returns to the Dalek lab to confront Caan. He tells the Dalek that he's the only being in creation capable of showing him compassion, and offers to help. Caan's response?
"EMER-GEN-CY TEM-POR-AL SHIFT!"
And he is gone, much to the Doctor's frustration.
Lazlo is dying, however, and the Doctor declares no more. With the Daleks' laboratory, he gets to work dropping science. Cut to what we presume is the next day - Lazlo pulling a TMNT disguise as Frank breaks the good news to him - he can live in Hooverville.
...which will be really awkward if he lives too far beyond the 1930's, but nevermind.
Back at the Statue of Liberty, the Doctor and Martha get the wrap up. They crack a joke about Lazlo, a pig man, and Tallulah, a giant ham, working it out. Martha says that there's someone out there for everyone and asks the Doctor if he thinks he'll ever see that Dalek again. The Doctor says he will...some day.
Perhaps, at a Journey's End, if you will?
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| Also kind of shocked the Daleks didn't just kill Sec right off. It's weird, right? It's weird. |
Evolution of the Daleks is, like its first part, a bit of a mess. The science isn't at all grounded in reality (I know, nitpicking in Doctor Who), but it goes to ludicrous levels when the Human Daleks are revealed to have a bit of Time Lord in them via a lightning strike. Given what we'll later see in The Doctor's Daughter, the fact that we don't have a bunch regenerating Human-Dalek-Time Lord hybrids running around after this episode is both a big relief and really kind of depressing all at once.
Apart from that, the accents are still pretty bad - including from the only speaking Human Dalek who is very clearly a UK actor trying to do a completely neutral American accent (the kind that shows up in movies and television but in no way exists in reality). Tallulah chews less scenery in this episode, though presumably because she had her fill last episode and felt impolite about asking for seconds.
Also, I don't want to give too much grief to Miranda Raison, her actress. She does very well in other productions (or so I'm told), including several Sixth Doctor audio dramas for Big Finish. This episode, though...her talent is among the many casualties along with good taste in production design.
The Human Dalek Sec I've already railed against last week, so I won't do that again. Needless to say, though, it and the Pig Men are really, really bad even by Doctor Who standards. One of the few saving graces, as I said before is that all the Human Daleks weren't made to look like this - sparing us the utter joy that would be The Web Planet 2007 Edition. It is a pity that we didn't get to see this story without Russell's meddling in it. It might not have been an all-time classic on par with The Caves of Androzani or Genesis of the Daleks, but it would have probably been a decent two-parter with some extremely stupid science wedged into it.
Come to think of it, I'll needle on one particular point - why did Lazlo keep his individuality, but none of the other Pig Men did? The implication is (and by implication, I mean it's directly stated by Lazlo) is that Tallulah kept him from losing his mind...which also implies that literally no one else who was a Pig Man had any reason to keep on fighting to hold on to their humanity. While you couldn't do that for every character, since we only have about an hour to play around with and that'd be so much padding after a while, it doesn't explain why he looks different from the other Pig Men.
It's not that great, and ultimately we don't really need it for the overall story of the Daleks. Then again, this logic can be applied to pretty much all the Dalek episodes in the Russell T. Davies era, so hush my mouth, I guess. I will say that this two-parter is definitely the worst Dalek episode of the New Series so far, though we'll see some worse ones later on.
Next time, we'll be getting into some extraneous science that doesn't make reality cry, although it's no less completely ridiculous. Next time, Mark Gatiss makes his first of several appearances in New Who as Professor Lazarus. With his scientific mind, he has created a process by which one can change what it means to be human...by becoming a hideous super predator creature.
As you do. Stay tuned for The Lazarus Experiment!
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