Into Daleks

I love Daleks. My favourite coffee mug has a picture of one threatening instant destruction with its ray-gun or instant unblocking with the sink plunger. I’ll freely admit that they are a bit rubbish and one dimensional as baddies and they still come across as a bit useless where staircases are concerned but there’s nothing that brightens my Saturday night up more than a bunch of the metal pepper pots exterminating the crap out of everything and everyone only to be thwarted at the end by a dubious bit of deus ex machina plotting or a decent shag-pile carpet.

The one big problem with the Daleks in recent years is that they are pretty much mandated to appear in every series and after 50 years’ worth of attempting to exterminate the Doctor most plot lines have been tried. To make matters worse they increasingly never get to exterminate anyone anymore - merely floating about shouting “EXTERMINATE!” without ever lighting up some poor sod like a fairy lamp. The first problem was addressed in last year’s Asylum Of The Daleks when a completely different take on Dalek society threw up a rather different menace. However the total lack of extermination went right through the 50th Anniversary and Christmas specials when really they should have been letting rip in no uncertain terms.

Into The Dalek restores the Daleks to their menacing violent best - in fact the body count was remarkably high: not quite up there with the Peter Davison adventure Resurrection of the Daleks but it was pretty much up there. However, the general sense of menace was present from the start and not only from the obvious foes – we are still left wondering about the true nature of Capaldi’s Doctor. The key line here was right at the beginning when he was questioning whether he was a “good man”. So far he has been but very much in a utilitarian manner in terms of acting in the greater good. His behaviour in the episodes so far has occasionally been callous: "He was dead already; I was saving us," was a particular line of note but not that far removed from an early First Doctor episode when schoolteacher Ian had to stop the Doctor from bricking in the head of an injured caveman to aid their escape. Matt Smith was great at not entirely understanding human emotions – Capaldi takes this to another level.

I did have great hopes for Capaldi as the Doctor. So far I haven’t been disappointed although as some wag pointed out, as a short-tempered, grey-haired man from Scotland with a caffeine addiction he appears to have been modelled on me! I’m wondering how much of an input he has had to the writing and characterisation. He is a very talented writer and director in his own right (he has won an Oscar for this after all) but I suspect he wants to keep at least a little distance between the roles of the actor and those of writer and director (apparently Tom Baker caused ructions by being somewhat domineering in this respect). So far the writing and acting have matched perfectly and the strong philosophical bent of the scripts is perfect both for Who and sci-fi in general.

I’m still not sure where the back stories and series arcs are heading. Danny Pink seems to be a similar kind of damaged goods to the Doctor. In what would seem to be an obvious homage to the original 1963 series he is also a teacher with a former military background, similar to Ian Chesterton, although I suspect the character may develop in a rather different fashion. The character of “Missy” also remains something of an enigma: seemingly collecting the souls of those that fall foul of the doctors meddling? Next week sees Robot Of Sherwood which has me somewhat worried that we will get a “romp”: aimless action with no story. However, this is written by Mark Gatiss who I have regarded as one of the better Who writers so we’ll have to see.