Day of the Daleks

Earth is once more teetering on the edge of war. Peace talks have failed and troops are massing on borders between rival nations. UNIT is on full alert, the Brigadier's orders are to liaise with local military should an emergency arise. The key figure to the success of peace talks is Sir Reginald Styles, another puffed up civil servant but one who is trusted by all the involved nations. Only problem there is that someone is trying to kill him; a man in combat fatigues appears out of nowhere but vanishes again like a ghost before he can follow through. The Doctor is intrigued, and upon investigation discovers a desperate group of resistance fighters from the future where the Daleks have taken over the Earth following a dreadful war. The resistance believe that killing Styles will avert the war to come and prevent a Dalek invasion - but are they right?

Chaos theory is the device being used to power this one through; the notion that the future and the past can interact and influence each other. It's a horrible cliche in my books - no matter how clever a writer thinks they are being it just leaves me wishing they had been smart enough to not use the worst science fiction cop-out as the driver behind a story. Example being: tomorrow I gain access to time travel, so I use it to go back to 2011 and stop myself from selling my Star Wars collection before I move house to Nova Scotia. So I succeed and I move out here with all my Kenner toys and eventually I come to present day, the day I departed for the past. Only this time I have no motivation to go back in time because I have all my toys in my house. So I never go back in time, thus I never convince myself not to sell the collection, I move here without it and then when I get the chance to correct things I take it. And I get caught in a loop. This is, generally speaking, how chaos theory works. It was employed in The Terminator with a character from the future sending a man into the past who would become his father and no-one really processed it much because it was Arnold Schwarzenegger shooting things so why ask questions. And it was used far too much as a cop out ending to too many Doctor Who episodes from 2010 to present day, which was part of why I fell out of love with the new series after a while.

But here we are doing it back in 1971, and this time there are Daleks. And beasts called Orgrons. And UNIT. Ah the good old days. The Master is behind bars so UNIT can get back to saving the world from itself - whatever peace initiatives were made in the conference in The Mind of Evil have not worked and war is looming. The Doctor remains aloof about the whole thing, commenting on how silly humans are to allow themselves to get this close to annihilation when they could be doing so many other things; he's got the TARDIS to fix, the console outside the machine once more although he's using the same lab from Ambassadors of Death.

Did it need to be a Dalek story though? The production team freely admit that the Daleks were added to the mix very late in the game, so it's no wonder their presence isn't as effective as it has been in the past. But they had not been seen for five years by now, and they are in colour for the first time so of course make one of them gold to show that off. But any alien race could have done what they have done here - it lacks the guile the Daleks should have and just makes them seem opportunistic. And if it's not bad enough that Day is tinkering with sloppy time travel theories, the paradox that is created here actually over-writes The Dalek Invasion of Earth, which would mean the Daleks in 2164 would have had a far greater foothold and perhaps there would not have been a victory there, and Susan would not have been left behind by the first Doctor. And at one point the gold Dalek (is this the new Dalek Supreme? we never really know) tells the Doctor "We have invaded Earth again,"... again?  Does this mean the Daleks are aware of an invasion which never happened now? Still some slack has to be cut for the production team at the time; having gotten the rights to the Daleks back they would have been eager to use them again. These days the new program trots them out every season without fail and has made them a little less menacing than they used to be since they can be seen off on a regular basis. These ones once they get going do overpower and mow over the UNIT forces and really could have easily conquered the Earth if they had shown up in 1972 instead.

Day of the Daleks is one of the few titles to have been released in almost every format available; it has seen numerous reprints as a Target novel and it has been released on Beta, VHS, laserdisc and ultimately on DVD with a special edition added. There is not a fan out there who will stand up and say they liked the Dalek voices from the original broadcast - they were just wrong. Totally wrong. How the director went into this not knowing how a Dalek was supposed to sound boggles the mind. But with the special edition DVD the voices are overdubbed by the current voice of the Daleks, Nicholas Briggs, and the entire special effects package is lovingly re-done to give the serial a lot more gloss. They were careful to not go too far with it and make it too up-to-date but I was pleased to see that as with the enhanced version of The Dalek Invasion of Earth the same Dalek saucer ships were used as are used in current episodes. But you can pretty it up as much as you like, I will still maintain that the whole concept of the script and its resolution are ultimately flawed. Still... Daleks.

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