Doctor Who Series 1: Episode 6
Dalek written by Robert Shearman
In the darkness, a blue light appears, exactly as if an eye has opened.
“Dok-tor?” A metallic voice rasps. “Dok-tor? The Dok-tor?”
In some ways, maybe the old version of Doctor Who had to be off air for 16 years, to allow time for a new generation to grow up, but the finest indicator that perhaps enough time had passed to allow the series to be truly re-invented was with Dalek.
The Doctor and his companion Rose materialize at the start of the episode in a huge warehouse-like museum, full of odd artefacts. It’s 2012, and the building is somewhere near Salt Lake City.
Before the viewer can pause for breath, Rose and the Doctor are captured and taken to see the museum’s owner, Henry van Stratton, who on learning that the Doctor is an alien responds by torturing him – instantly establishing his credentials as the villain of the piece. The curator is obsessed by collecting alien space-junk and sends the Doctor down to make contact with his prize specimen.
When the metallic voice identifies him, the viewer sees the normally imperturbable Doctor behaving more like a panicked animal, desperate to escape their mutual cage. The lights go up, to reveal a chained Dalek, whose immediate response is the classic line, “Exterminate!”
Brought back to van Stratton’s office, the still-terrified Doctor tries to convince him to kill the creature while he still can – but it is already too late.
Rose has, prompted by innocent compassion, touched the Dalek, and suddenly it is as if an engine has been kick-started. The Dalek bursts free of its chains to an operatic score, and Rose flees for her life, with the Dalek in hot pursuit.
It is slow compared to the humans, but relentless. When they halt at the top of a flight of stairs, believing it unable to pursue, it simply levitates and kills the guard placed to delay it. In a reversal of the already standard Who format of the main protagonists running up and down corridors, Rose and her companion flee for their lives from a relentless killing machine. Van Stratton orders guards to set up a blockade; in a moment of marvellous misdirection, the Dalek shoots off the locks on the sprinkler system, drenching the soldiers manning the blockade in water, and then levitates. It then cunningly fires an electric charge into the standing water to use it as a conductor and fry the soldiers.
When Rose’s guide abandons her to face the Dalek alone, she turns to face what seems to be certain death; but in starting the Dalek up, her DNA has had an unexpected side-effect…
Dalek is full of drop-dead dramatic moments, but there is more to it than simple set pieces. There is pathos and gallows humour side by side (“You would make a good Dalek,” the Dalek tells the Doctor) Davies and scriptwriter Robert Shearman approach a classic story from a completely unexpected direction, using all the viewer’s preconceptions to throw them, judo-fashion. The Doctor’s back-story is spotlighted in a halogen lamp of drama showing us a new, vulnerable, grieving doctor, and his desperate need to save Rose springs from more than simple paternalism; in going back for her he reveals nothing less than a slowly unfolding love story.
Dalek is absolutely consummate drama of the highest order, worthy of any multi-million dollar epic staffed by superstars, and was the outstanding episode in the outstanding drama series of 2005. It was as close to great art as any mass market medium is likely to get.
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