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| "Haven't you been here before already?" "And I'm gonna be here a surprisingly high amount of times after, too." |
Single most stupidly awesome thing in a Doctor Who episode coming in just a few paragraphs.
Just you wait!
Believe me, if you don't know what happens in this episode it will very likely blow your mind.
And I'm not even kidding!
...mostly.
Victory of the Daleks picks up in the Cabinet War Room of one Baron Vladmir Harkonne-I mean, Winston Churchill. During an attack, he orders that "the secret weapon" be rolled out and a figurine of a Dalek is pushed out onto the war map.
After the title sequence, the TARDIS materializes and the Doctor is greeted by the barrels of rifles and Winston Churchill. He and the Doctor have a playful bit of banter where Winston tries to take the TARDIS key from the Doctor and gets rebuffed. Churchill informs the Doctor that the phone call they received at the end of The Beast Below was over a month ago, but now he had something to show the Doctor. They are brought up to the roof, where Churchill introduces the Doctor and Amy to the Scottish Professor Bracewell of the "Ironsides Project". The pair witness London under siege, a moment of pause given before a German air raid comes sweeping through... and gets taken out by blasts from a Dalek gun.
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| "I was considering mood lighting... or possessing my granddaughter." "What?" "What?" |
Yes, the "Ironside" is indeed a Dalek as if we didn't already know that from the teaser. When confronted by the Doctor, the Dalek replies that "I AM YOUR SOLDIER!". Bracewell insists that they were his creations and they are here to win the war. The Doctor calls malarkey, insisting that the Daleks are evil beyond any that Churchill has ever dealt with, but the Prime Minister doesn't care in the least. He's desperate to win the war. The Doctor tries to get Amy to tell Churchhill about the Daleks... but Amy has never seen them before. When the Doctor mentions planets in the sky, Amy has no idea what he's talking about, something which the Doctor insists should be impossible.
Baron Churchill insists to the last that he who controls the Daleks controls the univer-I mean, the war effort, so the Doctor is essentially stonewalled there. The Doctor comes up with a cunning plan to reveal the Daleks... namely interrogating Bracewell about the Ironsides. He's apparently worked on plans for the Daleks, and has had other ideas seemingly just dropped into his head. When this gets him nowhere, the Doctor decides to go all out in the full on ham acting and gets an oversized spanner, beating a Dalek as he screams at it to fight back.
Then he makes the final mistake when the Dalek once more insists that it's just "your soldier".
"YOU! ARE! MY ENEMY! AND I AM YOURS! You are everything I despise, the worst sin in all creation. I've defeated you time and time again, I've defeated you. I sent you back into the Void, I saved the whole of reality from you! I am the Doctor! And you are the Daleks!"
That last word emphasized by a kick that sends the Dalek back and the entire demeanor in the room changes as the Dalek replies "Correct". The Doctor's rage - a "testimony" is replayed and transmitted to a Dalek ship in orbit, where a third Dalek is activating a device called a progenitor.
Churchill calls in two redshirts just in time for them to get 86'd, Bracewell protesting that he created the Ironsides. The Daleks shoot off his left hand, revealing that Bracewell... is a robot! It seems they created him! They transmat away, leaving the Doctor realizing that he just got played big time, having done exactly what the Daleks wanted. The Doctor heads off to try to fix the snafu while, on the Dalek ship, the progenitor is activating for... whatever purpose. The Doctor leaves Amy behind in the bunker, thinking this too dangerous for her.
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| [Ron Wasserman guitar rifts intensify] |
He pops on the Dalek ship and bluffs them with a biscuit that he insists is a TARDIS self-destruct. The Daleks explain that a single ship fell back through time from the 2008 (or 2009?) Dalek Invasion of Earth, finding a progenitor with pure Dalek DNA in it. However, because the device didn't recognize them as pure Daleks, it wouldn't work for them. Hence, they set a trap for the Doctor and he fell right into it. The Daleks congratulate the Doctor on this by (somehow?) managing to turn on all the lights in London to give the Nazis a nice, big target to bomb. With the stalemate on, Amy realizes that the Daleks have left them a gift they can use and she and Churchill get to work.
Above, the progenitor opens and the Daleks have... look, this episode is over a decade old by the time you're reading this, so this joke has been done to death, but... the Daleks have recruited a team of Daleks with attitude - the New Dalek Paradigm. I'll talk more on this in a bit.
Back on Earth, Amy and Churchill convince Bracewell to not kill himself over finding out that his life is a lie. Granted, if Karen Gillan were trying to sweet talk me out of suicide, I'd probably be convinced, too. However, when the gravity bubble gets mentioned, Churchill gets an idea. With them someone managing to somehow get them a transmission to onboard the Dalek ship and thus have the perfect timing to put their plan into action.
The new Daleks call the Doctor's bluff about the sugary sweet self-destruct device, but are soon accosted by...
...okay, are you ready for this?
SPITFIRES IN SPACE!
...crank up the "Aces High"! The boys at the RAF, with souped up planes, engage the Dalek ship and... immediately get slaughtered down to just one member - Danny Boy.
Ah, well, it was fun while it lasted.
The Doctor, back in the TARDIS, disrupts the shields long enough for Danny Boy to destroy the dish keeping London lit up. Danny Boy is ready to run in for another round of fire, now that the Daleks are vulnerable... only for them to call up the Doctor and reveal their coup de grace - Bracewell is not only their invention, but also a bomb that will destroy the entire Earth. The Doctor laments that this is the one chance to destroy the Daleks once and for all... but, unlike the last time he did this, the Doctor chooses to withdraw. He returns to Earth to knock Bracewell down... and they find that the Daleks have begun the countdown sequence on the bomb anyway.
The Doctor can't do anything on a technological level, trying instead to play on the memories that Bracewell has from his humanity, he remembered World War I and his life before the war. Despite his efforts, the timer counts down more and more... and then Amy appeals to the power of his arousa-I mean, true love. Yeah, that. Bracewell's memories of a woman named Dorabella that he is/was in love with. This, somehow, works and the bomb winds down. Bracewell's bomb gets deactivated. However, the Daleks have escaped through a time corridor... gone again.
So, the episode's title isn't ironic... Victory of the Daleks. They won.
Amy tries to comfort the Doctor with the knowledge that he's saved the Earth, which seems to cheer him up.
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| "So, we were in the 1940s and nobody asked why I was running around in this skirt?" |
We get the wrap up, the Doctor having removed the last of the Dalek tech from the Spitfires despite Winston's protests. Goodbyes are exchanged. Before she and the Doctor leave, however, Amy tells the Prime Minister to give back the TARDIS key he took from the Doctor's pocket as they embraced. In his lab, Bracewell is apparently waiting to be deactivated. The Doctor, however, decides to let him go and live a life of his own... and then rather problematically sends him after a woman who may be an imagined memory or might be married by now to the real Bracewell or something of the kind... but minor note. A very, very potentially disturbing and upsetting minor note, but a minor note nonetheless.
As the two prepare to leave, the Doctor circles back to the discussion from earlier after Amy reaffirms that she does indeed still want to travel with the Doctor in spite of the danger. The Doctor mentions earlier that Amy didn't know the Daleks, and there was no reason for her not to have. As the TARDIS dematerializes, we see a crack in time on the wall behind it.
That's really all there is to say about Victory of the Daleks. It's not a great episode, but it's an introduction to a New Dalek Paradigm... which, sadly, won't get used because the color-coded tanks elicit more laughter than they do fear. While the deeper voice modulated from Nick Briggs does work for the Supreme, we aren't really getting much of any of that from the rest. This was a neat idea, but the change in appearance for the Daleks was pretty unnecessary given how the Russell T. Davies era with the gold-brown look pretty much had the best looking Dalek design thus far.
The Spitfires in Space are stupidly awesome, and I will absolutely die on this hill. In fact, they'll be a small part in a not as good as this episode next Series, so be looking forward to that. That's all I have on this one for now.
Next time, we'll be seeing an old friend and an old foe pop up. Doctor River Song, long before having the longest stayover in a library ever sends the Doctor a call and we get a spaceship full of a villain that's kind of going to start going on a downward slide from here on out, sad to say.
Next time is time... The Time of Angels!
Be there!
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