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!

Straightaway the scene cross-fades to a spaceship cruising through space, which tells the audience that this is storytelling on an epic scale (by Doctor Who standards). The modelwork in this story is very convincing, including when the cruiser attacks the prison ship, and then docks with it (the detail of an escape of atmosphere as the two connect). Aboard the prison ship, the crew are unusually multinational, with Kenyan Sneh Gupta (Osborn) joined by a refreshingly non-white cast made up of Jim Findley (Mercer) and John Adam Baker (known as Seaton in the novelisation). There's also a healthy number of women in the supporting cast. After all, this is The Future! It all has a distinctly Blake's 7 feel to it too, with a splash of Star Wars of course.

What's also notable is that the strong-willed Osborn smokes! Smoking was on TV all the time back in the 1980s, but very rarely in family shows like Doctor Who, so to have a female character smoking adds an extra layer of maturity to the story. Later, we see one of the army soldiers smoking too.

There's a palpable atmosphere of tension running through this entire episode, and the attack on the prison ship is very well staged by Robinson, aided by Clarke's queasy score. The build-up, with the crewmembers preparing for the assault as the two ships dock, is unsettling, with Mercer telling Osborn to "destroy the prisoner" if they are boarded. Who is the prisoner?

The shoot-out between the crew and the Daleks - revealed in a stunning explosion as they blast through the bulkhead door - is marred by the fact the humans' guns sound like cats meowing into a vocoder, and don't have rays, so end up looking like the light-bulb props that they are. The Daleks, on the other hand, are merciless, shooting down almost every human in sight, and working their way through the ship to the bridge, where they finish off the stragglers. Coupled with that familiar battle cry of "Exterminate!", it's a fitting return to form for the Daleks.

Retreating to the prison area to destroy the prisoner, Osborn and Seaton struggle to make the controls work (the ship hasn't had an inspection for some time, and is falling apart). An outbreak of Dalek gas turns poor Seaton into a mutilated mess, and Robinson milks the moment for all it's worth by having actor John Adam Baker turn to camera to reveal the full icky splendour of make-up supervisor Eileen Mair's work. The make-up is grisly (as it was for the close-up on the dead crewmember during the airlock assault), made all the more horrifying when Seaton staggers towards Osborn, begging: "Help me! What's happening to me?"

And what does Osborn do? Does she try and reassure him, get medical help from Dr Styles? Nope, she shoots him dead, in cold blood. And it's not long until Commander Lytton - in the employ of the deliciously black Supreme Dalek - brings this full circle by having her executed too. There's an awful lot of death in this episode (a good few happen in the first five minutes), and the uncompromisingly grim nature of Eric Saward's story makes this feel less like Doctor Who and more like 1970s drama Gangsters (also starring Maurice Colbourne).

So why are the Daleks hijacking this prison ship? Davros, of course! His presence is revealed with splendid nonchalance by Robinson, first seen in the background of shots involving Osborn and Seaton. Normally I might criticise the reveal of a monster with such little fanfare, but the way Robinson purposefully frames Davros in his smoky suspended animation chamber makes it more, not less, effective. When Davros is fully revealed, it's done with the right level of shock value, the chamber door sliding slowly up to reveal the scientist's gruesome visage.

The new Davros mask looks stunning too, much better than the ill-fitting one recycled by David Gooderson in Destiny of the Daleks. There's more detail to the new mask, and Davros looks even more misshapen and disfigured than before. He's been in suspended animation for 90 years, his mind mercilessly active all those decades ("Ninety years of mind-numbing boredom," sneers Davros. "The creatures of Earth have no stomach for judicial murder. They prefer to leave you to slowly rot and die. They call it being humane. It is a planet I will destroy at my leisure.")

Equally, actor Terry Molloy gives Davros a newfound creep factor largely absent from his first two stories. Michael Wisher was obviously the guv'nor when it comes to Davros portrayals, but his Davros was a cold, calculating despot, while Molloy's is post-trauma, post-humiliation, and consequently that bit more unhinged. His vocal performance is wonderfully unsettling, ranging from the understated sniping common to Wisher, but rising to a crescendo of unbound mania whenever Davros gets excited. This character trait of rising from quiet, brooding menace to uncontrollable rant would become Molloy's greatest contribution to the part throughout the decade.

The Daleks' plan seems straightforward at the moment. They lost their war with the Movellans, who developed a virus that destroyed the Daleks, who were forced to retreat to survive. The Supreme Dalek (now in charge) needs Davros's scientific skills to engineer an antidote to the virus, but has no intention of letting their creator regain control. "So they have returned to their creator, like an errant child," moots Davros. "They have come home once more, but this time they will not abuse me." You sure of that, Davros? I do like the inherent distrust that has developed between the creator and his creations, echoing similar in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

But what of the Doctor and his friends? Last seen clinging to the TARDIS console being dragged to the centre of the universe, they actually end up following a time corridor to London, Earth, 1984 (obviously that was the centre of the universe at the time!). The TARDIS materialises on the edge of the Thames in the shadow of the derelict Butler's Wharf. "Such neglect," admonishes the Doctor. "A hundred years ago this place would have been bustling with activity." At the time, the whole warehouse area seen here was out of use and falling apart, but underwent extensive renovation subsequently to become a thriving residential and retail zone. It's interesting to have the wharf captured in this state of dereliction before the dawning of a new age (as it was in various music videos of the time, including Kim Wilde's Love Blonde).

Teaming up with the jittery Stien (an oddly cast Rodney Bewes), the TARDIS trio investigate a warehouse, bumping into a bomb disposal crew sent there to look at some sinister gas canisters discovered by builders. Before you can say "button your jacket", Turlough goes mysteriously missing, after stumbling through a time corridor onto the Dalek cruiser in space. Predictably, Mark Strickson spends the rest of the episode skulking about achieving very little, but managing to look magnificently suspicious at all times.

The Doctor's not having a good day. First his TARDIS is almost torn apart by a time corridor, then Turlough goes missing, then a Dalek appears from nowhere to try and kill them all, resulting in Tegan getting knocked unconscious and consigned to bed for the rest of the episode (Eric Saward always seemed far more interested in his guest characters than the stars of the show). The sequence where the Doctor wrestles with the Dalek and pushes it out of an open loading bay is well shot, resulting in the creature smashing explosively onto the road below. Editing parts 1 and 2 into a double-length special really sells this instalment as an action-packed thriller.

Just when you think things can't get any grimmer, Saward decides to mix a bit of Alien into proceedings, and has a mutant Dalek on the loose, now free of its destroyed casing and with murder in mind. The green creature attacks a resting trooper (played by ubiquitous supporting player Mike Mungarvan, whose earliest bit part in Doctor Who was 1972's The Mutants, and most recently appeared in 2005's The Christmas Invasion). It's a gruesome sequence, obviously inspired by Ridley Scott's Alien, and results in the unsettling sight of the Fifth Doctor firing a handgun. No Doctor should ever be seen with a gun in their hand, but this incarnation seems even more uncomfortable with it.

There's a lot of plot in this episode (enough for two!). There's two distinct strands running parallel - events in the warehouse in 1984, and those in space - but there are connections between them, such as Turlough's journey from one to the other via the time corridor, and the Supreme Dalek's awareness of the Doctor's presence on Earth. The Doctor doesn't get involved in the more Dalek-oriented side of events until the very end, by which point the viewer is fully conversant with what's going on, and who's up to what.

There's also all the stuff with the policemen killing Archer, and his return as an obvious duplicate, along with Carver and two soldiers. I'm not sure how the Daleks had enough time to duplicate Carver in particular, but then nothing about these duplicates quite works for me. Tegan notices that Archer is different - "That's not Colonel Archer. He gave the Doctor his gun-belt, yet he's wearing one" - but the duplicate shouldn't have a gun-belt at all if he didn't have it on when he was copied.

By concentrating so much on packing the plot with incident, Saward sometimes forgets to have it all make sense. Such as the scene in which Lytton tells Davros the plot of Destiny of the Daleks, and then says: "If only I'd been there." Well, you were there mate, that's how you came to be slammed in the deep freeze for 90 years! Why does the Supreme Dalek allow Turlough to "roam freely" on the ship to act as bait for the Doctor, when the Doctor has no means of getting to the Dalek ship and taking the bait because the Daleks have closed the time corridor? In fact, why is so little being done to capture the Doctor, who's by and large been left to his own devices down on Earth in 1984 when it's obvious the Daleks need him on board their ship pronto?

I like the cliffhanger (the only one the story as broadcast has, but actually the second of three intended) because it's completely out of the blue. Bewes might be an unusual choice of casting, but he shifts from jittery coward to hard-nosed mercenary in the blink of an eye, and does it so well. Stien was a Dalek agent all along! Fabulous twist!

Resurrection of the Daleks part 1 benefits enormously from being re-edited. We get loads of plot and plenty of character introductions (some better than others - Chloe Ashcroft's Professor Laird is disappointingly wet), and there's enough going on to maintain the interest and intrigue the viewer further. It's directed with pace and style by Matthew Robinson, and written with implacable grit by Eric Saward, who's obviously trying to do for the Daleks what he did so successfully for the Cybermen in Earthshock. Season 21 continues to impress.

First broadcast: February 8th, 1984

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: That mournful opening sequence, with the baleful silence punctured by the escaping prisoners and a hail of bullets.
The Bad: Chloe Ashcroft. She's about as convincing as a chocolate fireguard.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★★★★★☆

NEXT TIME: Part Two...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Part Two

Find out birth/death dates, career information, and facts and trivia about this story's cast and crew at the Doctor Who Cast & Crew site.

Resurrection of the Daleks is available on BBC DVD as part of the Revisitations 2 box set. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Revisitations-Carnival-Monsters-Resurrection/dp/B004FV4R9A/