Destiny of the Daleks is not very good.
It is quite hard to put your finger on what exactly is wrong with it. I think the answer is probably “everything.”
Perhaps we could have overlooked the story’s worse than usual production values if it had been based on some interesting or whacky idea. And if there had been some slickness and panache in the presentation, perhaps we could have overlooked the fact that the one idea it does contain makes absolutely no sense.
Wind back half a decade to, say, Planet of the Daleks, and you’ll find a similar ideas-famine: but that story manages to radiate a certain degree of Elusive Magic. Genesis of the Daleks, of course, was overstuffed with ideas and characters and astonishingly good writing, which makes up for the fact that it’s not particularly a Dalek story.
But Destiny of the Daleks is, well, just not very good.
It throws established mythos to the wolves. Doctor Who never had much in the way of canon or continuity, but there are things which everybody can be expected to know. The TARDIS travels through time; Time Lords physically change their appearance; stuff like that. Douglas Adams had watched Doctor Who when he was a kid; he snaffled scenes and ideas to use in his own Hitchhiker scripts. But he wasn’t necessarily a Fan, and he might have been labouring under the misconception that the Daleks had been hyper-logical automata for the last sixteen years. Terry Nation, who wrote the scripts, must have known better.
When Deadly Assassin debunked Established Time-Lord Canon, it was a conscious piece of iconoclasm, calculated to annoy a certain kind of fan. Genesis of the Daleks jettisoned Established Dalek Mythos because Terry Nation or Robert Holmes had thought up some new mythos which was more fun. Destiny seems to scupper the whole idea of Daleks without quite realising that that is what it is doing.
The production is bad. Laughably, can’t be arsed, who gives a shit bad. The interior of the ruined Dalek city feels like the Blackpool Haunted House exhibit during the off-season. There are some flats and some metal grills and strips of fabric standing in for doors. At the climax of Episode One a D-A-L-E-K smashes through a wall. It’s a pretty astonishing twist that no-one saw coming, given the title of the story. The wall is made of cardboard. No-one makes the slightest attempt to pretend that the wall is not made of cardboard. When we return to the same location a few episodes later, the wall is still made of cardboard.
I bet there is some fan fiction which reveals that the Dalek city literally was constructed from special anti-radiation cardboard, in the same way that the idea of bubble wrap was imprinted on human consciousness by ancient contact with the Wirrn.
There are a few tips of the hat to every previous Dalek story. Human slaves dig, dig, dig in a mine because as well as climbing stairs, automating drilling is one thing Daleks can’t do. The Daleks say that if one human tries to escape it will kill all of them, a bit like my old PE teacher. There is an interrogation scene with a lie detector, which at least means that no-one has to say “no, no, not the mind probe.” There is a Mexican stand off between the Doctor and Davros and the Daleks and the humans. And in fairness, Lalla Ward acts a lot. A lot. When the Daleks arrest and interrogate her she screams and yells and tries to make us believe that she is scared and angry and that these dilapidated props really are a species of outer space robot Nazi. In those scenes, I could almost convince myself that I was watching a Dalek story, that these beasts were as terrifying as I had always been promised they were.
Is it enough for the Daleks simply to be? Does Destiny of the Daleks exist simply to tickle our memories of chocolate and mint ice lollies and saying Extermenate, Extermenate in the playground? We see rows of Daleks gliding down corridors. We see them gliding past various windows and apertures. In the final episode we see kamikaze Daleks in formation in different parts of the quarry: background, foreground, middle distance, which makes the hearts of those of us who failed to pass the Anti-Dalek Force aptitude test three years running quicken. Just a little bit. The scene reminds us of something we used to love.
If you had drilling machines, a slyther and an army of humankind slaves, you might be able to excavate an idea from Destiny of the Daleks. It’s admittedly the kind of idea that might have appealed to Douglas Adams. Two huge war fleets, controlled by computers: each computer able to foresee the next move of the other, locked in an eternal, centuries long-stalemate, to be broken only when one side turns off the computer and does something stupid.
I think it was a Star Trek plot. If it wasn’t, it certainly should have been.
But what should have been a premise is presented as a twist, revealed in the final episode with very little build up or foreshadowing. Should we not have seen the horribly be-weaponed starfleets staring at each other in the opening establishing shot? Daleks and McVillains doing nothing in their long echoey corridors, waiting centuries for the command to go over the top which will never come? Douglas Adams might even have introduced some lemon-soaked paper napkins.
But neither Terry Nation nor Douglas Adams seems to have the faintest idea what “logic” means. Granted, Leonard Nimoy sometimes used “illogical” to mean “untrue” or “foolish”, and granted, some schoolboys started to use the word in that way, to their parents' intense irritation. But there are quite a lot of episodes where Spock really does use logic to solve a problem.
Home computers were a year or two in the future: but surely Davros ought to have understood the “garbage in, garbage out principle”? Presented with the syllogism “All elephants are pink, Nellie is an elephant, therefore Nellie is pink” the brilliant scientist would have said “That is perfectly logical provided the premises are correct” or “Yes, but this tells us nothing whatsoever about elephants” or indeed, “What you have told me is logically valid, but I do not have sufficient data to know whether or not it is logically sound”.
The Daleks opponents are the McVillains—a long hair dark skinned generic spaceship crew who are peculiarly embarrassed about the fact that they are robots in disguise. To demonstrate how the stalemate has come about, the Doctor teaches them to play paper/scissors/stone. Sometimes the Doctor beats Romana, sometimes Romana beats the Doctor. But the Doctor always beats the McVillains, and the McVillains always stalemate each other.
Perhaps a human could learn to consistently beat a machine at the game—complete randomness is relatively hard to simulate. But this doesn’t mean that the human would beat the machine on every throw of the hand; only that he would do better on average over hundreds of iterations. Darren Brown did a stunt where he appeared to consistently beat punters at the game: I assume he was closely observing "tells" to skew the odds in his favour or using misdirection to fractionally delay his choice. (Or he have just been cheating, like when he demonstrated his ability to toss ten consecutive heads by spending a week in a studio tossing the same coins several thousand times.) What does any of this have to do with logic, or intergalactic space-ship tactics?
In Genesis of the Daleks, Davros eliminated “pity” from the Daleks psychological make up: but “pity” is not the opposite of logic. He thought that the only way the Daleks could survive was by killing everything in the universe that was not a Dalek. This is pretty callous and quite possibly a bad evolutionary strategy: but “callous” and “logical” are not synonyms. Up to now, the Daleks have been driven, not by excessive rationality, but by hatred. ("Seething bubbling masses of hatred" the Doctor called them in Death to the Daleks.) Certainly at the beginning they were a very thinly veiled metaphor for fascism. Hitler and Mussolini were not renowned logicians.
The story can't make up its own mind about what's supposed to be going on. The Doctor says that the McVillains are “another race of robots, no better than the Daleks” and that “one race of robots is fighting another”. Davros says that the McVillains are “another race of robots” and therefore worthy foes of the Daleks. Romana, on the other hand, says that the Daleks “were humanoid, once”. And there is a strange, orphan scene in which the Doctor finds a lump of green goo which he claims is a Kaled mutation. “Of course! The Daleks were originally organic lifeforms. I think you've just told me what the Daleks want with Davros, haven't you?” Possibly: but he never shares the insight with us, and the subject is never mentioned again.
The Cybermen were originally conceived as humans with such advanced transplant technology that they eventually replaced their entire bodies with prosthetics. This was also the original back-story for the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz. The question of whether a “prosthetic brain” is any different from a computer, and whether a Cyberman is any different from any other robot, and why, in fact, they need a supply of humans to turn into next generation Cyberpeople is never very clearly thought through. Latter iterations seem to assume that they retain a certain amount of human wetware inside them.
Is the thought that the Daleks have somehow replaced their organic core with cybernetic brains and realised this is a step too far, but one which they cannot undo? And that they have to run back to Daddy so that he can restore the biological component into their make up?
Or is Terry Nation merely using the word "robot" in some esoteric way? Doctor Who scripts sometimes say "universe" when what they mean is "solar system."
“What a brain” says the Doctor as he dismantles K9, again. The Doctor certainly treats K9 as if he is a person; although he might just be being deliberately exasperating. If K9’s brain can generate a mind, then it doesn’t really matter if it evolved or was constructed: and that must apply to the Daleks and the McVillains as well. “It’s what’s on the inside that counts”. It transpires that K9 is suffering from laryngitis. The term computer virus wasn’t coined until 1983, but Douglas Adams has a fairly good track record as an accidental prophet. So is this scene a set-up for the rest of the story, making the point that, organic or cybernetic, it is the Dalek’s software that is at fault?
Actually, not. The scene is there because John Leeson is unavailable, and the voice of K9 will be played by one David Brierly in his three appearances in this Season. (Given that there is an eight month gap between Armageddon Factor and Creature from the Pit, it is doubtful if anyone would have noticed.)
Does the story have any redeeming features at all? Well, the script is edited by Douglas Adams: indeed, it seems probable that Adams wrote it from the ground up, working from a minimal treatment by Nation. And we do get glimpses of authentic Adamic humour. Romana goes back to the TARDIS to fetch K9, leaving the Doctor stuck under a big rock.
“Don’t go away” she says.
“I rather hoped you’d have resisted the temptation to say that” he replies.
But most of Adams’ input seems to be rather puerile word play.
"Oh, seismic. I thought you said psychic."
"Sidekick?"
"Like it? I haven't seen it yet."
It is hard to tell which jokes come from one of the funniest writers of the twentieth century and which are just Tom Baker arsing around. When the Doctor gets a glimpse of the quarry on the TARDIS monitor screen, he exclaims “Oh look! Rocks!”, which is very funny if you happen to be a cheeky thirteen year old. Escaping from the Daleks through a raised tunnel, he remarks “If you're supposed to be the superior race of the universe, why don't you try climbing after us?” Hold the front pages: Daleks can’t climb up stairs! Whether from Tom Baker, Terry Nation or Douglas Adams, it’s an unforgivable breaking of the fourth wall. Oh, if only the "floating" special effect from Remembrance of the Daleks had been available in 1979, so the Dalek could have wiped the smug grin off the Doctor’s face!
The one thing I would be inclined would be the infamous regeneration sequence: in which Romana appears to “try on” a series of bodies before settling on that of Princess Astra from the previous story. The Doctor continues to tinker with K9, and Romana continues to act as if she were literally picking a new outfit. (“The arms are a bit long; I could always take them in.”) One wonders if the whole scene was suggested by a weak pun on the word "changing"?
The Doctor has "changed" three times in the history of the show: once through some kind of rejuvenation or renewal; once as a deliberate act by the Time Lords; and once through a process called Regeneration, conceived as a natural part of the Time Lords’ life cycle. Douglas Adams’ writerly instinct—not to pastiche the regeneration scene from Planet of the Spiders but to come up with something entirely different—is mostly harmless. A year and a bit later, the change from Doctor Tom to Doctor Peter will involve prophecies and a future zombie version of the Doctor. Romana is an up-to-date, fully qualified Time Lord, where the Doctor is an out of date fossil with a ton of field experience. The TARDIS is the place where two utterly alien beings retreat, out of the view of mere mortals. And we all know that there has been a change of cast. So instead of exposition, Adams gives us a quite funny sketch.
And in doing so, he gives us a perhaps needed signal. This is a playful riff. This is twenty five minutes of fun. This is entertainment. This is not an attempt to reveal new data about an emerging imaginary cosmos. This is not a programme you are meant to take seriously. But here is a glimpse of some battered old Dalek props as a consolation prize to your loyal old guard.
Is there an unintentional message here? The clunky old past it’s sell by date show running back to its roots to try to escape from the rut? A half-hearted pastiche of what the show had been like in the 1960s, while a spunky 1980 version struggles to be born? A clash in the actual script between what had been the voice of the old show, and what would be the voice of the new show? A cobweb shrouded version of Doctor Who twitches its fingers and comes back to life, but is shown to be comically out of its time, pushed around like an old relative in a wheel chair quite unaware how ludicrous it looks…
I wish I could say "but when I was thirteen years old I loved it; when I was thirteen years old I overlooked the faults; when I was thirteen years old it was enough that the Daleks were there, like that man who told Tom Baker that he was the only thing that made life in the orphanage bearable." But in fact I knew that people thought I was faintly absurd for identifying as a Doctor Who fan and I knew that this laughable amateurish piece of TV would be one more reason to bully me on Monday morning.
Destiny of the Daleks is really not very good at all.
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