Resurrection of the Daleks Part Two

The one where Tegan leaves...

It's great that the Fifth Doctor's first encounter with the Daleks on screen sees them rush into the room from off-camera and pin him to the wall, screaming "Exterminate!" over and over like crazed lunatics. That's the Daleks of children's nightmares! The strange thing is that the Daleks want him dead instantly, because he is their sworn enemy, but in truth their boss, the Supreme Dalek, wants him alive so that he can be duplicated (we'll come on to that). As Lytton says: "They'll kill anybody, even if they need them." Did these bloodthirsty Daleks not get the Supreme Dalek's memo?

Meanwhile, devious Davros is recruiting like there's no tomorrow, having first converted Kiston to his side, who then converts an unnamed chemist, followed by some of Lytton's troops and eventually, two entire Daleks. They willingly flip their lids up to allow Kiston to inject them with Davros's mysterious toxin, and I love the disgusted expression on Leslie Grantham's face as he peers inside the Daleks' innards.

Resurrection of the Daleks Part One

The one where the Daleks rescue Davros from imprisonment...

At last, the Fifth Doctor gets to face his oldest enemies, the Daleks, in a story originally slated to end Season 20 before industrial action put the kibosh on it. Resurrected for Season 21, the story was filmed as a traditional four-parter, but was re-edited into two 45-minute episodes in order to free up slots to cover the 1984 Winter Olympics. This made the story even more of an event, doubling its episodic length in a move that would become the norm for the following Season 22.

The story opens with an eerie tracking shot through the dank, grey, abandoned location of Butler's Wharf at Shad Thames. Malcolm Clarke's baleful music is reminiscent of the otherworldly output of Lasry-Baschet's Structures Sonores, used during the black and white era. Director Matthew Robinson succeeds at building a spooky tension, which is interrupted by warehouse doors flying open and a crowd of confused and frightened escapees flooding out. These escaping prisoners are then mercilessly gunned down by two ordinary-looking British policemen wielding machine guns! The sequence is shot with uncompromising grit, and as well as being shocking, it's also intriguing, such as when Lytton appears, dematerialises the corpses, and the other two bobbies return to their beat as if nothing happened. Wonderful! What an opening!