by K-Box » Tue May 25, 2010 1:43 pm
My thoughts on the current season, reposted from my blog:
Daleks: No longer the Technodrome of NuWho
Once upon a time, way back when I was still in middle school and high school, the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon was still on the air, and yes, this does actually tie back into Doctor Who, and the most recently aired episode of the same, so please bear with me on this one.
See, one of the Turtles' enemies on the cartoon was Krang, the evil brain from Dimension X, and one of Krang's weapons - in fact, arguably THE weapon in Krang's arsenal - was the Technodrome, a heavily armed, fully mobile battle station that was basically a smaller version of the Death Star on tank treads, with a creepy-ass giant mechanical eye on top, which somehow made the whole thing even worse.
From the moment that the Technodrome was introduced, in the Turtles' first cartoon miniseries, it was explicitly defined - and understood by all the characters involved - to be an Armageddon-level threat, to the point that, if it ever became fully operational, then everyone on the show (both those IN the show and those WRITING the show) knew that it would be, in the words of Bill Paxton in Aliens, "GAME OVER, MAN!!! GAME OVER!!!"
Of course, the problem with promoting the Technodrome to such a Final Boss level was that it was necessarily rendered an ANTI-Chekhov's Gun as a direct result - it became the weapon that could NEVER be fired, because as far as the show's need to preserve its own status quo was concerned, it was literally too awesome to exist.
Which was why the show inexorably devolved into an increasingly repetitive series of episodes devoted to Krang trying to find some way or another of getting the Technodrome going again, and the Turtles stopping him just in time to preserve the show's status quo, until even the suspension of disbelief of the little kids in the audience - who were willing to buy off on four mutant turtles learning ninjutsu, talking like California surfer dudes and subsisting on pizza - was finally snapped like a rubber band.
So, what does any of this have to do with the Daleks?
"Victory of the Daleks" is the episode that will go down in history as rescuing the Daleks from the dead-end role they'd gained as the Technodrome of NuWho.
Both the best and the worst thing that Russell T. Davies ever did for the Daleks was to get them taken seriously again, not only by the Classic Who fans who'd grown jaded about the Daleks over the course of the original series, but also by new viewers who didn't even know the difference between Gallifrey and Skaro, much less why it mattered.
"Dalek" was delivered as powerfully as a punch to the chest, and while the Daleks' role in the otherwise fine Season 1 finale was a bit muddled, their apocalyptic confrontation with the Cybermen in the Season 2 finale felt almost operatic, and perhaps more importantly, the fact that they managed to come back, from what we were told was inescapable extinction at each of those times, was given plausible and inventive enough "outs" not to seem overly silly or tiresome just yet.
And then came the Daleks during the Depression in Season 3, reduced by the end to just one Dalek who had actually been around before the Time War, and then came the finale for Season 4, and OH LOOK THERE'S AN ENTIRE DALEK ARMY YET AGAIN, and okay, I was willing to hand-wave it because, you know, DAVROS, but then, all the Daleks were supposedly wiped out YET AGAIN, and I'm pretty sure I wound up spraining my eyes from rolling them so hard.
But, hey, the heroes' evil enemies tend to come back from the dead as a matter of habit in genre fiction, so why is it so wrong to continue that trope in NuWho? Well, for one thing, it's problematic because Davies himself treated these "final" extinctions of the Daleks - all FIVE of them that occurred during his run - as ACTUALLY being final, each and every time, by deliberately painting the show into corners with regard to the Daleks' ability to restore themselves to the full status of a viable surviving species and credible threat, and after enough times that groups of Daleks hid out from the Time War, or lone Daleks escaped via emergency temporal shifts, not even the newest of NuWho fans was fooled anymore.
At this point, everyone knows that the Daleks will ALWAYS come back, so for the show itself to try and pretend otherwise, much less to go further and further out of its way to make those inevitable future returns that much more difficult to explain within the stories themselves, is not only pointless, but also actively damaging to the franchise.
The only reason that the Daleks arguably needed to appear to be wiped out on all those previous occasions during Davies' run was because Davies' hyperbolic style of storytelling - which was constantly playing a game of "Can you top this?" with itself - had elevated the Daleks to the level of literal reality-killers, which made their mere existence intolerable to the Doctor, because much like the anti-Chekhov's Gun of the Technodrome, the Daleks were boxed into the role of the weapon too awesome to be fired.
Until now, because Steven Moffat seems to believe that he can get away with restoring the Daleks' more Cold War-style Classic Who status as The Enemy In Residence, and so long as he doesn't start emulating Davies' show-running tic of trying to one-up himself with each new episode and season finale, I'm inclined to agree with him.
Was the safe escape of the restored and upgraded Daleks a huge defeat for the Doctor? Undoubtedly so, but it's long since past the time for him to have finally lost that fight, so that their war proper can begin again.
And you know what? I don't care what anybody else says - I LOVE THE SKITTLES DALEKS. THEY ARE THE MOST AWESOME DALEK DESIGNS EVER.
