Reviews (14)

A first-rate Dalek story. The peak of an under-rated era.
The Doctor and Peri arrive on Necros, the 'planet of the dead', where there is a whole complex filled with people in suspended animation whilst the Great Healer works on cures for whatever diseases they are suffering from.

But before long the 'Great Healer' is revealed to be none other than Davros, sinister genetic engineer and creator of the Daleks. Having been abandoned by the original Daleks, he is engineering replacements.

This is not only the best Colin Baker story, but also one of the finest Dalek adventures ever made. There is a very grown-up feel about it with genuine suspence, sexual undercurrents and horror which is suggestive rather than tasteless. The whole thing is filled with strong characters such as bounty hunters (a space-age knight and his squire), a superbly cold-hearted female villain and a futuristically-weird DJ. Davros and the Daleks (with impressive new white casings) are at their dramatic best and the music and scenery are first-rate. Watch for one partically memorable scene involving a glass Dalek.

Highly recommended. Even if you dislike Colin Baker (though personally I think he was an under-rated Doctor who should have been given more time in the series), this adventure is still unmissable.

Saward is God!
I loved Resurrection of the Daleks and Earthshock is my all time favourite story, but this is still a very good example of the brilliance of Eric Saward and is as radically different to everything he wrote before as The Visitation was to what he did after it! Amazing man and an amazing time in Who history! This is the pinnacle of Colin Baker's era, where the mix of comedy and horror which his era attempted right from the start finally fulfills it's promise completely. If you liked psycho Peri-choking post reneration Baker, grisly TV violence on Varos, hand crushing Cybermen and bad puns from the Doctor on Telos, and the canabalistic butchery of Vegetarians with a little help from Pat Troughton, then this trip to the biggest funeral parlour in the galaxy where people eat their own dead and your dead's head is inside a see though Dalek with brains popping out will make your day! Left unchecked, Colin Baker's era may have evolved into a work of art unsurpassed in TV history, if this story is any indication of the direction it was taking. Dark satire with slick style and wicked humour, this is the blackest, smoothest dose of Dr.Who ever. It is not for everyone and that's for sure, but what a shame we never got to see what came next. Instead, BBC head honcho Grade stepped in (he hated the show!) and the Trial of a Time Lord followed instead. Ah, well.

Welcome to Tranquil Repose...and to ivory and gold Daleks
The final story of the 22nd season of Doctor Who has the Time Lord dealing with his worst enemies, those Dalek pepperpots, only this time they have a really nice ivory and gold colour scheme.

The Doctor and Peri are paying their respects to Arthur Stengos, one of the galaxy's finest agronomists. His body is lying in the Tranquil Repose on the planet Nekros (perfect place for a funeral planet!). TR is a cryogenics repository where people with incurable diseases are suspended and later restored to life when a cure for their condition has been found. At the same time, TR's vain and arrogant supervisor, Jobel is ready to make funerary history, as he has just finished the president's wife and is ready, with his staff to receive the president. Jobel is played by Clive Swift, best known as Richard, Hyacinth's husband in Keeping Up Appearances. He has a great line at the Doctor's expense. After being insulted by the Doctor, who has survived a phony statue falling on him, Jobel retorts, "If the statue had been made of stone I doubt if would've killed you. ... It would take a mountain to crush an ego like yours."

Then there's Grigori and Natasha, the latter Stengos's daughter, who break into the catacombs, where the vaults are. She suspects her father's body has been stolen, and indeed it has. But where's the head? She and her partner find it, and it's being put to grotesque use.

However, that's not all the work going on at Tranquil Repose. The turbaned Kara (Eleanor Bron) is in charge of a factory manufacturing a high protein concentrate ready to sell to developing planets at such a low price, their accountants are embarrassed. Whatever profit she gains is being squeezed by the Great Healer, an alias used by Davros, creator of the Daleks and now master of a new breed of Daleks subservient to him rather than the Supreme Dalek. However, not to worry-she has hired Orcini, a professional assassin and excommunicated member of the Grand Order of the Knights of Oberon to get rid of Davros, and he is dedicated. He has an artificial leg with a faulty hydraulic valve, and rather than getting it replaced, he prefers the inconvenience as a reminder of his mortality and to keep his mind alert. He's also conscientious, as he gives any fees he gets to charity. Assassinating Davros is an honourary job he is willing to undertake.

Davros himself is aware of the Doctor's presence, but he has eyes and ears around TR. He rants against Jobel, who refused his offer of immortality, and uses Tasambeker, played by Jenny Tomasin (Ruby from Upstairs Downstairs) a fawning and not too good looking female employee infatuated with him, as a loyal servant, and later, orders her to kill Jobel, who conspires with employees Takis and Lilt against him. And he thinks the DJ, a prattling disc jockey, played funnily by Alexi Sayle, who pipes in announcements and 50's/60's music to the bodies in state, knows too much.

There is all sorts of violence here. A leg is blown off one person, a hand off another, but Script Editor Eric Saward defended the violence as being realistic instead of the phony violence one sees in US action movies. If you shoot someone's hand at close range, it gets blown off, plain and simple.

Saward had read Evelyn's Waugh's The Loved One, which takes place in a funeral parlour, where Aimee Thanatogenos, a crematorium cosmetician becomes infatuated with artiste embalmer Mr. Joyboy. Here, Joyboy becomes Jobel, and Thanatogenos becomes Tasambeker. Indeed, a line from Jobel on the president's wife also mentions the title: "she's a loved one who's passed on to pastures finer and lusher than those she knew in life."

There are actually places like Tranquil Repose on Earth, but would they be economically feasible? With overpopulation, future generations have no incentive to cure the sick from generations back, as they would be technologically and culturally out-of-date. What could they do if cured?

A worthwhile story, given that most of the story dealt with the non-Dalek shenanigans going on in TR, but afterwards, it was clear that Doctor Who was living on borrowed time.

Flashy Tedium
Even when I was 12 I knew there was something "off" about the Colin Baker years. In the beginning I just wanted to watch "Doctor Who", so I never turned a critical eye to stories like "The Twin Dilemma" or "Vengeance on Varos". I was only bothered by the nonsensical formatting of the episodes screened in the US: I didn't know that Doctor Who had been converted to 45-minute episodes, because they were still screened here in 25-minute blocks. Each story from Season 22 had arbitrary cliffhangers ("Can you show us to this hacienda?" "Of course, it is this way") mixed in with the "real" ones. And that made no sense.

Through the years my individual opinions on the Season 22 stories have fluctuated. I have "Vengeance on Varos" on my "ugh" list even though I loved it once, and "Revelation of the Daleks" was usually on the "good" list. You had Daleks, and Graeme Harper directing, and a layered script with lots of action going on... what wasn't to like?

But tonight, I'm just wondering what the fuss is about.

Well, the direction is still superb, obviously. Graeme Harper brings back welcome tricks from his previous story, "The Caves of Androzani" -- there's someone walking behind a hologram again -- but there's now expanded use of computer graphics, and a wonderful sight gag with the vertical hold in which the screen appears to start flipping. The opening frames of the story show the TARDIS crash-landing on Necros, and the exteriors (a snowbound landscape with steam escaping from the water) are gorgeous.

Only towards the end does it start to look silly: suddenly, Davros's chair can levitate, and he can blast forks of blue fire from his fingertips. The scene after that is totally incomprehensible, as a Dalek begins flying, exterminates two people, and then explodes into pixels for no good reason.

So this is, I think, a case of great direction crushing an empty script. To be exceedingly reductionist, the supporting cast of "Revelation of the Daleks" is just a bunch of people with annoying voices, shouting at one another. Every time Tasambeker the love-struck medical student raised her voice ("Meanwhile... find the intruders!"), I cringed. It's neat that Kara, the greedy industrialist, has such great chemistry with Vogel, her administrative assistant from the John Waters school of acting, but it's all spoiled when another character has to peer into the camera and tell us they're "like a double act".

"Revelation" is often compared to "Androzani", probably because they were both directed by Graeme Harper. But consider this: one lacks the themes of the other. There is no grand opera in "Revelation", pitting Morgus against Sharaz Jek. There is no higher morality, of the Doctor trying to save Peri's life by finding the antidote. There is no grand political bantering between Morgus and the President. In "Androzani", the Doctor's presence served as a catalyst to change the motivations of the guest characters (Morgus, Jek); here, the entire story happens without the Doctor's involvement. In "Revelation", Kara would still have been killed by Orcini, and the Skaro Daleks would still have arrested Davros, and Orcini would still have destroyed Davros's laboratory, even if the Doctor never walked into Tranquil Repose.

Maybe comparison to "Androzani" is unfair, but I'm still not convinced of the merit of what's left standing alone. The tragic figure of "Revelation", Orcini, a disgraced space knight, prattles on and on about honor and noble self-sacrifice until he blows up an empty room (with a thousand unseen Daleks allegedly off camera). So? And the other incidental characters have been overpraised: Vogel's death scene is ludricous -- if the Daleks were truly scary, their death-rays wouldn't have left him time to scowl comically before falling. Jobel's dialogue is some of the worst Doctor Who ever saw -- the TV series wasn't really about a mann who'd comb his toupee, or talk about nose picking, or lips meant for kissing. Grigory (the definition of "cipher") is the most inebriated character in "Doctor Who" history -- he's even tortured with a whiskey hip flask, for goodness sakes! This may have worked on "Red Dwarf", but not for the man in the blue box.

The best part of "Revelation of the Daleks" -- again, I'm going against popular opinion -- is the DJ. Yes, he falls into the annoying-voice syndrome with everyone else in Part One. But once he's introduced to Peri in Part Two, we see this DJ really is a decent guy. Alexei Sayle even affects the best "American" accent we ever got in the show. When he destroys a few Daleks with a "highly directional, ultrasonic beam of rock and roll!", it's a stand up and cheer moment, finally -- we're getting the self-aware humor that Jobel and Orcini so conspicuously lacked. But when the DJ is exterminated, so is the story's moral centerpiece. The only guest characters who survive are ones we really don't care about.

The Doctor's final lesson, that you can build an economy on flowers rather than corpses, allows "Revelation of the Daleks" to breathe again, to stand proudly with the lessons of, say, "The Savages" and "Enlightenment". But by then, it's too late.

I mean it when I say this is the *best* of the whole series.
My title really means something, considering that Doctor Who lasted 26 years and featured 160 different stories. But indeed, "Revelation of the Daleks" is in my opinion the very best of not only Colin Baker's all-too-brief reign as the Doctor, but of the entire series. It really has it all, starting with a great Doctor/Companion partnership... the Sixth Doctor and Peri interact marvellously, and have been together long enough for anyone to see that they have become good friends (even if the Doctor can still be snappy and childishly passive-aggressive... Peri's used to it by now, and doesn't take it personally). Each have a number of fantastic scenes, from scrambling over the wall after being unable to find a door ('watch it, Porky!'), to individual moments with the Doctor ('ah! There you are! They went that way.') But the heart of this story isn't the Doctor and Peri... it's Davros, and the colourful cast of characters that share the world on Necros with him.

But first let me comment on Necros... I love that planet! From the first shot of the frozen lake the TARDIS materializes beside, to the exterior shots of the Tranquil Repose Mortuary, where the story is for the most part set, it really feels REAL. Necros feels like a world that really extends beyond the little we see of it in the story, unlike the majority of the planets we see on Doctor Who, and I appreciate it. All the grim stuff that happens there aside, it's really a place I'd like to visit. Plus, the sets of the interiors to Tranquil Repose are vast and intricately detailed... a real treat after so much sterility in so many of the stories that came before this one. I mean really... is there one location in this story that can be described as boring? From the hallways to the catacombs to even the waiting room where the Doctor and Peri arrive to unravel the mystery of the place?

Now, the characters. There seems to be no end of them, and each one is bizarre and interesting. From Mr. Jobel to the DeeJay to Orsini... all are brilliantly thought out and performed. Though many don't like the DeeJay, as played by "The Young Ones"' Alexei Sayle, I actually find him to be the best guest character in the story. I mean, his obnoxious radio voice is after all, just a part of his character's performance... the man behind the voice is revealed to be a very kind and warm-hearted man, and his scenes with Peri are absolutely wonderful.

Davros is the centrepiece of the story, though. I sometimes feel that his name should have been in the story title rather than his creations'. I hate to give away too much of the plot, but his scheme, though a complicated one, is by far his most villainous (touches of the revelation of "Soylent Green" aside, it's his method of "healing" the sick people under his care that really send chills down my spine). Terry Molloy deserves more credit... true, he isn't Michael Wisher, but he still did a fabulous job with the character.

Let me just close by saying that "Revelation of the Daleks" is the one Doctor Who story to watch if you want to be entertained by something truly atmospheric and different. There's so much going for it that you'll never get tired of seeing it, and will probably appreciate it more with each repeated viewing. If you're one of those Doctor Who fans who can't stand the Colin Baker era, at least give this one a try. Even if it doesn't change your mind about him (though it should!), I have a feeling you'll still enjoy this story.

Carry on Carry on,

MN ... Read more