This is one of the most celebrated of all the
lost Troughton stories, one of the reasons being that it was the story which
saw the final end of the Daleks – well, for five years anyway. What do I
expect? Well, part of the trouble is I do remember the synopsis of this one
quite well. It dovetails nicely with the Faceless Ones, since the TARDIS was
stolen at the end of the last episode. I can remember that it was stolen by a
guy who invented a time machine – no honestly – back in Victorian times, and is
in league with the Daleks since his daughter, Victoria, has been taken as a
hostage to ensure his cooperation. The Doctor ends up going to Skaro,
injecting, or infecting Daleks with the Human Factor, and thus starting a civil
war, in which the Dalek city, and the Emperor Dalek are destroyed. Obviously
made an impression on me when I first read the synopsis. So the real interest
for me is in how well it’s done. David Whitaker set a hell of a high standard
for a Dalek story with The Power of the Daleks, and so he has a lot to live up
to.
After
Watching
There’s a remarkable lack of preamble at the start of this story
which is really all to the good. We get a very brief recap reminding us that
the TARDIS has been stolen from Gatwick, and then our heroes, the dream team of
Troughton and Hines are off on its trail.
The plot, even when you boil it down to essentials is rather
complex. The Doctor and Jamie trace the TARDIS to one Edward Waterfield, a
dealer in Victoriana. The stock in his store seems remarkably new. When Jamie
suggests that maybe he has just popped back in time to pick up his stock, he is
poo poohed by the Doctor, and yet it turns out to be the correct explanation.
Waterfield, who has been bankrolled by eccentric, and extravagantly
bearded industrialist Theodore Maxtible, has invented a method of time travel
using static electricity. I didn’t really understand the explanation, but it’s
all done with mirrors apparently. The first time that they wired it up and
fired it up, flash, bang wallop, and an army of Daleks came out of it. The Daleks
immediately took Waterfield’s daughter, Victoria, hostage, as you do, and
insisted that Waterfield use his machine to bring them the TARDIS and the
Doctor.
Waterfield arranges a meeting with the Doctor and Jamie in 1966,
then gases them, and transports them back in time to Maxtible’s mansion. The Daleks
then explain that they are sick and tired of losing to the humans on penalties
after extra time, and so they want the Doctor to isolate what they call ‘the
human factor’ , and inject it into Daleks to give them whatever it is that
makes human beings able to defeat them. The Doctor uses Jamie to do this, and
creates some very childlike Daleks who become his friends, and learn to
question orders.
At this point the Daleks, along with the carpet chewing Maxtible,
Victoria, the Turkish Servant Kemel, Waterfield and Jamie all are transported
to Skaro, where the Doctor gets to meet the Emperor Dalek. The Doctor informs
the Emperor that he has created Daleks who question orders, who will teach
other Daleks to question orders, and this way he will eventually be overthrown,
to which the Emperor gleefully replies that the real purpose of the experiment
was to isolate the Dalek factor, and spread this to humans. It is tested on
Maxtible who does indeed become a human Dalek – and the Doctor, who, not being
human, doesn’t. He replaces the Dalek factor with his own phials of the human
factor and begins converting Daleks. A civil war soon ensues in which Skaro,
the Emperor and Maxtible are all seemingly destroyed – although it is hinted at
that one Dalek may have survived. Edward Waterfield redeems himself by saving
the Doctor’s life at the expense of his own, and thus the Doctor takes Victoria
on board the TARDIS as his newest companion.
--------------------------------------------------
Human factor – Dalek factor – Krypton Factor – X – Factor - Max
Factor - it all sounds like complete hokum and it is. Yet this story is such an
embarrassment of riches that you never stop to think that. It’s one of the
great tragedies of the wipings that only one episode of this story actually
exists. Episode 2 is not even the best episode of the story, and yet it looks
cracking. I could weep when I think that episodes 6 and 7 could have survived
instead of some of those that actually made it.
What’s so great about “The Evil of the Daleks”, then?
The use of three
settings/time periods. The story starts in the
present day (20th July, 1966 to be precise.)Now, unlike The War
Machines, TEOTD isn’t trying to be especially trendy and ‘swinging’ and as a
result the scenes with Jamie and the Doctor holding a council of war in a
coffee bar look totally authentic, as does Waterfield’s antique shop. We know
that Waterfield isn’t what he seems right from the start because he has some
rather impressive Victorian sideburns – almost into mutton chop whisker
territory.
Then the action switches to Maxtible’s mansion, which is highly
impressive with all of its acres of wood paneling, its heavy carpets and high
neo-gothic time cabinet. The state of the art Victorian laboratory with all the
beautifully shaped test tubes and equipment that Maxtible shows to the Doctor
is a joy too.
Finally we get to make our first return trip to Skaro since The Daleks.
The Dalek city is different here, or rather, it looks more developed. There’s
still the corridors and assymetrical doors, but now long pathways, and the
Emperor’s room is very arresting.
The Performances: Marius Goring, as Theodore Maxtible wasn’t the first big name to
appear in Doctor Who, but he was certainly a real triumph for the casting
director. For one thing he so looks the part. There’s a famous photo of
Isambard Kingdom of Brunel, with a cigar in his mouth and a top hat on his
head, standing by the chains of the great eastern, and I’m sure that Maxtible
has the exact same amount of cigar sticking out of his mouth in exactly the
same angle as Brunel’s in a huge number of the telesnaps. For me it’s a well-judged
performance in that Maxtible doesn’t appear as mad, or callous and indifferent
to the plight of fellow human beings at the start, you come to realize these
things. Maxtible’s continued belief that the Daleks will show him the method to
turn base metals into gold despite all the overwhelming amount of evidence to
the contrary isn’t necessarily unbelievable either, and in fact has echoes of
Mavic Chen from The Daleks’ Master Plan. I don’t know so much about the Dalekified
Maxtible in the last episode though. You see, it doesn’t really matter how you
try to imitate a Dalek – even if you don’t stick your arm out in front of you,
you will always sound like a kid in a playground pretending to be a Dalek. So I
didn’t find that to be as effective as it might have been.
John Bailey put in a lovely turn as Edward Waterfield. At first the
man seems to be just a nasty, cold, two bit villain, but once he gets the
Doctor back to Maxtible his human side starts to come through. It’s clever the
way that, of the pair, Maxtible is revealed to be the real villain of the
piece, while Waterfield, it turns out, is just a misguided scientist/inventor
(one of many in classic Doctor Who) who is in an impossible situation, and just
trying to do whatever he can to save his daughter. It’s a tribute to John
Bailey’s acting skill that his jumping in front of a Dalek gun to save the
Doctor was completely believable, and now seemed to be completely in character.
Deborah Watling, as Victoria, featured a surprisingly small amount considering
that this was her debut story, so it was difficult to judge what she brought to
the table. In fact, for the middle part of the story it’s Jo Rowbottom’s
spirited maid, Mollie, who looks the most likely candidate in the next
companion stakes.
With all of this also on offer, the fact is that this is the Doctor
and Jamie’s story. The Highlander’s faith in the Doctor seems to have been
totally destroyed when he overhears the Doctor conspiring with Waterfield and
Maxtible to use Jamie for the tests to extract the human factor. Yet by the end
, on Skaro, the Doctor asks Jamie to trust him, and he does. It’s a brief yet
perfect demonstration of the unshakeable foundations of the relationship
between these two characters, and a testament to the chemistry between Patrick
Troughton and Fraser Hines that they manage it so economically and so seemingly
effortlessly.
Is it without flaws? No, of course not, no story is. There’s Kemel,
for one thing. Now, I’m not saying that Sonny Caldinez who played him did a bad
job, but I just think he’s a bad character who introduced a worrying note into
the story. Kemel is a Turkish Wrestler, who works as a heavy for Maxtible.
After a fight with Jamie, Jamie saves his life, and he helps him from then
onwards. Here we have the only black character in the story, unable to speak,
and being referred to by other characters as possessing the mind of a child,
clearly only valued for his physical strength. Now, you may very well say, well
come on, you can’t judge something that was made in the mid 60s by the
standards we have today. Maybe not, but neither should we sweep it under the
carpet. Now, I have seen the whole of Tomb of the Cyberman a couple of years
ago, and we have to consider the fact that there is a very similar character,
called Toberman – a huge, mute, physically strong man played by a black actor.
Is it racist? Yes, I’m afraid that it is, without a corresponding black actor
in a far more positive role to offset it. Am I accusing the production team of
deliberate racism? Not necessarily, but at the least I think you have to admit
that this is lazy stereotyping, and I wish that the team had stopped to think a
little about this before going this way with Kemel.
With that admittedly jarring note, then, the story isn’t perfect.
But I have to say that for 60s Doctor Who, this is about as good as it gets.
The return to Skaro particularly intrigued me. On his previous visit, in The Daleks,
the Doctor knew nothing about them at all. Now, on his second visit, he knows
more than enough. Indeed, somewhere along the line he has also learned about
the Dalek Emperor, for when they meet for the first time the Doctor says that
he had wondered whether they would ever meet. A word of praise for the design
of the Dalek Emperor. He looks like a Dalek, but he doesn’t. He’s considerably
larger than a Dalek, and on top, instead of a single dome, he has a sort of
arrangement that puts me in mind of the ice cream head of Mr. Whippy. It has an
eye stalk but no gun, and I would guess that it’s immobile since it is
connected to external tubes, for whatever reason. I think that this is
ultimately clever design work. Nothing is actually said on screen, but this
presentation of the Emperor leads you to draw conclusions about the futility of
power and control. The Emperor has total control over all the Daleks, and yet
when one begins to question his orders, he is totally unable to defend himself,
and his power turns out to be all a façade.
All in all, even being mostly recon, The Evil of the Daleks is a
tour de force, and I can completely understand why it was chosen, at the end of
series 5, to be the first ever Doctor Who summer repeat.
What have we learned?
If you’re thinking about
using mirrors and static electricity to build your own time machine, don’t.
The Doctor has learned
that the Daleks are led by an Emperor at some time prior to this adventure.
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