Episode Review: Doctor Who - Victory of the Daleks

The more I mull over Victory of the Daleks, the more disappointed I find myself. Perhaps it's because the 2010 series of Doctor Who has been so good so far; the first two episodes have been almost flawless in terms of plot, dialogue and feel. This third episodes feels almost phoned in, however.

The thing that seems to have upset a lot of the fans, more than any other, is the redesign of the Daleks themselves. Some see it as a cynical ploy to shift brand new merchandising, and the fact that each dalek came in a different, plasticky colour isn't helping dispel that impression; they looked like an armored version of the Power Rangers. Beyond the colours themselves, the new Dalek design doesn't really bother me, however. It's nice to see them looking taller and bulkier (if not, dare I say, a little fat), and this coupled with the deeper voice and slight changes to the SFX certainly makes them seem more intimidating.

I do wish this amount of planning had been put into the set for the Dalek ship interior, which looked like (nay, was) some office building's basement, complete with air conditioning ducts and sprinkler system, sparsely dressed with a bit of mood lighting and very spare looking alien control consoles, which looked as though they'd been wheeled onto set and then forgotten.Even this low budget approach to scenery I could cope with, however. I grew up in the era of DoctorWho where spaceships were clearly made from washing up liquid bottles and silver spray paint; I can vividly remember an episode from the Jon Pertwee era where an alien planet shown from orbit couldn't have more obviously have been an satsuma orange shot through a blue filter...

No, the saddening part is the whole script seems to have had the same lack of attention paid to it. Matt Smith and Karen Gillan seem void of clever dialogue this week, and instead we get a lot of reasonably predictable back and forth. Matt also doesn't seem to be able to get a solid angry froth on when confronted with the Daleks; he certainly tries hard, including belting one repeatedly with a heavy spanner, but the performance falls short of Chris Eccleston or David Tennant's reactions to the pepperpots. Again, I'll stress I've been very impressed with him as the Doctor so far, which possibly is why it seems all the more disappointing to see a less than full on performance. Likewise, we know Mark Gatiss can write better dialogue than this; to think that one of the League of Gentlemen could come up with this pale script...

It wasn't all terrible, mind. Ian McNiece played a great Winston Churchill, and Bill Paterson as Bracewell was probably the best performance in the whole episode. And of course, we have a two parter from Steven Moffat to look forward to now we've gotten the inevitable Daleks out of the way, at least until (probably) the end of the season.