Doctor Who “Into the Dalek” review
Hi there! Cariad here again, with my review of the second episode of this eighth season of Doctor Who, “Into the Dalek”. After last week’s generally-good episode, “Deep Breath”, will this new season of Doctor Who continue riding high? Let’s find out!
Synopsis of “Into the Dalek”
A small spacecraft is racing away from a Dalek saucer in pursuit. The human crew are radioing ahead to their mothership, the Aristotle, for assistance, but their ship is hit by Dalek fire and explodes…
…but the pilot — Journey Blue — wakes up, finding herself on the floor on the TARDIS. She grabs her gun and points it at the Doctor, demanding to know where her brother is. The Doctor explains that he materialised the TARDIS around her a second before her ship exploded, and no-one else survived.
He takes her back to the Aristotle where the commander is grateful to the Doctor for saving Journey, but he has to kill the Doctor because he might be a Dalek spy. Journey stops him, pointing out that he’s a doctor and they have a patient.
On their way to the patient, they pass a moleculon nanoscaler which is used to shrink surgeons so they can operate from within a body. The patient is then revealed to be a damaged Dalek. The Doctor is ready to turn his back rather than help it, until the Dalek says “All Daleks must die.” — it wants to kill the Dalek race.
Back on Earth, Clara is in school and watches a PE teacher — Danny Pink — with his class. Later in the day, he teaches a math class when a student asks Danny if he has ever killed anyone. A tear rolls down Danny’s face, and the class is dismissed.
After the class, Danny is introduced to Clara, who discovers that he used to be a soldier. She invites him out for a drink later, and he agrees.
Clara goes into a supply cupboard and bumps into the Doctor, who had landed the TARDIS in there. The Doctor takes her back to the Aristotle to meet the “good” Dalek. The Doctor, Clara, Journey and two other soldiers are miniaturised and enter the Dalek to repair it. They walk through the eye stalk, then look down inside the body to see the living being inside. They need to go down to it, so one of the soldiers fires a rappel line. The dart at the end penetrates the Dalek’s armour and triggers its nervous system to release antibodies, which kill the soldier who fired it.
As they progress through the Dalek, the Doctor asks it why it has changed — why it wants to kill the other Daleks. It says it “saw beauty”; it saw the birth of a star, and realised that no matter how much the Daleks tried to destroy everything, life would always find a way to persevere. Extermination, it seems, is irrelevant to this Dalek.
They discover the damage; a power cell has cracked and is leaking radiation inside the Dalek. The Doctor fixes it, and the Dalek brings itself to full power — including charging its weapons, and it starts firing on the crew of the Aristotle. It finds a communications console, and hails the Dalek fleet to reveal the Aristotle’s hidden position.
Inside the Dalek, the Doctor realises that the radiation leak had affected the Dalek’s brain to make it “good”, but now the leak was repaired it was back to normal — a normal, “evil” Dalek. The Doctor says all Daleks are evil, irreversibly so, but Clara slaps him and tells him that’s not the lesson they’ve learned. She asks him why he came into the Dalek to fix it; it was the hope that there could be at least one good Dalek in the universe. Clara points out what they really learned was that it’s possible to change a Dalek, and if you can change one, then why not more?
The Doctor formulates a plan: Clara needs to crawl into the Dalek’s electronic memory vault and reactivate its suppressed memories of the star being born, which he hopes will make the Dalek suggestible, and then he’ll talk it out of its destructive instincts.
The quickest way for Clara to get to the memory vault is via a rappel line. One of the soldiers — Gretchen — fires the line, knowing that the Dalek’s antibodies will kill her. She fights off the antibodies for as long as she can, but they eventually reach her and kill her…
…and then she wakes up in a tea room, sitting opposite Missy, who tells her than she’s in Heaven.
At the Dalek’s memory vault, Clara reactivates the suppressed memories and the Doctor makes a psychic link with the Dalek; the Dalek sees the beauty of the universe through the Doctor’s eyes. However, he also sees the Doctor’s hatred of the Daleks. The Doctor pleads with him to see beyond the hatred, but the Dalek can’t. The Dalek feeds off the hatred, and starts exterminating the Daleks boarding from their saucer ship.
With all the other Daleks destroyed, it transmits a retreat signal to the saucer so no more will board, and it returns to its ship. The Doctor takes Clara back to the supply cupboard, and leaves her to her date with Danny.
The Good
The chase scene at the beginning, with the Dalek saucer chasing Wasp Delta, was really good! It was fast-paced, exciting, and looked great!
Zawe Ashton was brilliant as Journey Blue! By far, she was the best actor in this episode, and played the only character I cared about at all. Plus, she got to pin the Doctor to a wall and yell at him for making an awful joke about her dead comrade, which was super-gratifying to see.
The Interesting
From Clara’s timeframe, this episode take places three weeks after the previous one. From the Doctor’s timeframe, he’s only just picked up the coffee which Clara wanted at the end of the previous episode, and is on his way back to her.
The student who says the secretary “wishes” she knew Danny was the same bully from Clara’s flashback in the previous episode.
Twice in the episode, the Dalek says “resistance is futile” — which is also the catchphrase of the Borg in Star Trek.
It was really interesting that the blue “lens” at the end of the Dalek eye stalks is a penetrable liquid or gel! I’d always assumed that it was solid, like a glass camera lens. After all these years, it’s cool to find new interpretations of an old recurring species!
And speaking of blue eyes, did you notice that Clara’s blouse was decorated with blue eyes?
Gretchen’s appearance in Heaven after she dies is a continuation of the “promised land” story from the previous episode. Assuming that the place isn’t really Heaven, where could it be? A shared consciousness? A computer program like Doctor Moon in “Silence in the Library”? Who could “Missy” be? River Song? Possibly River Song in the distant future, still inside Doctor Moon? Or another of the Doctor’s companions? Is Missy only meeting-and-greeting people whose death involved the Doctor? Did the other soldier — the first to be killed by the antibodies — also go to this Heaven? I’m intrigued by this plot!
The Bad
Okay, here we go…
The audio in this episode was awful. The first time I watched it, I could barely make out any of the Doctor’s or the Aristotle’s commander’s lines. The second time around, to make notes for the review, I had to watch with captioning on.
“Why does a hospital need a doctor?” Is that supposed to be a joke? Why doesn’t anybody react like it’s a joke? Or is it just a stupid question in a terrible script?
Still, it isn’t as bad as Danny asking his class “What are you, children?” Yes, Danny. Yes, they are. They’re children. You’re in a school. You’re a teacher.
I don’t understand the attitude of the secretary saying “I bet you did” and “I bet you were” to Danny’s answers to her questions about his weekend. Was she being sarcastic? Was she trying to rile him? Why would she be rude to him if she likes him, as the student implied? Is there going to be a payoff to her weird repetition, or was it just weird writing? What purpose did she serve? What purpose did the scene serve?
When the student asked Danny if he had ever killed anyone, an appropriate answer would’ve been “I’m not going to talk about my military career,” rather than getting trapped in questions about people he’d killed. We just saw a couple of scenes ago that he wasn’t afraid of shouting at and intimidating his students, so why would be back down now and let them railroad him?
The headmaster introduces Danny as a “ladykiller”. Given that he’s just been revealed as someone who has killed, I cringed at the word. I assumed the writers chose that word on purpose to illicit a response, but Danny didn’t react to it at all and the scene moved on. So, was it just an unfortunate word to choose? Will there be payoff in a future episode?
After the nanoscaler pod is miniaturised with the crew inside, we see it get picked up with a pair of tweezers. The grip looked terrible — it was being held by the glass on top, not the supports on the side! For me, this was literally the scariest part of the episode; it was the worst way to carry the pod, and the worst grip position to choose. It would’ve fallen! It was terrifying!
Why is there so much empty space inside the Dalek? Why are there miniature walkways, with cables pinned to the top of them? I’m no expert, but if you looked at the cabling inside a car, airplane or tank, I don’t think it would look so much like a Borrower’s science lab.
How are they breathing inside the Dalek? Aren’t the molecules of the atmosphere too big for their miniaturised lungs to process? Aren’t Daleks airtight anyway? In fact, wouldn’t it make sense for the Dalek’s electrical compartments to be flooded with a noble gas like argon, rather than risk electrical sparks around compressed oxygen?
Clara: “So, how big is it — that living part — compared to me and you right now?”
The Doctor: “You see all those cables?”
C: “Yeah?”
D: “They’re not all cables.”
…and then Clara laughs. I don’t get the joke. What are they? I assumed they were blood vessels, or nerve lines or something. But.. what’s the joke?
“Bolt hole! Actually… a hole for a bolt.”
Again, what’s the joke? What’s wrong with me? Why don’t I understand what’s happening?
Why would Davros design Dalek memory vaults with tiny little lights? Why would he design a light to correspond to a memory? Why would he make a light go out when a memory is suppressed? Who did he design this information to be useful to?
“Let’s see if there’s an ‘on’ switch” Clara says, when she’s looking for a way to reactivate the Dalek’s suppressed memories. Who would’ve thought that there would be a literal ‘on’ switch. A tiny little button deep inside the Dalek, which reactivates a suppressed memory. Again, why would Davros design the Daleks with those buttons? Why are they so small? Who was he imagining would ever push the buttons? What happens when a Dalek accrues more memories than buttons?
Why would the Dalek antibodies stop attacking just because the computer was rebooting? Surely a forced reboot of the computer would indicate some sort of attack, which would be a great reason to get the antibodies out and make sure the body is secure?
The Ugly
The Doctor telling Clara she’s “built like a man” isn’t even close to funny. Why does the Doctor leap from sexualising women to defeminising them? Why can’t he just be a friend? Why can’t be he the good man that he wants to be?
“My brother just died!”
“His sister didn’t — you’re very welcome.”
What a jerk! Why didn’t he save her brother? He was sitting literally right next to her — why couldn’t the Doctor save them both? Why doesn’t he show any regret at all for being unable to? Why can’t he show even the smallest bit of compassion, instead of telling her not to be sick, to stop crying, and playing games with her until she says “please”? He treated her like a child with a lost toy, not a woman who’d just lost a member of her family.
“Crying’s for civilians. It’s how we communicate with you lot.”
Way to dump on every soldier who ever cried, Doctor.
Clara isn’t any better with her “teaching [kids] how to shoot people” remark. That’s not even what Danny was doing! There weren’t any guns!
“There’s more to modern soldiering than just shooting people.”
“Oh, you shoot people and then you cry about it afterwards?”
OUCH. So, the Doctor says soldiers aren’t supposed to cry, and Clara says soldiers aren’t supposed to have feelings. Maybe they should look up some war poems before they judge every soldier as a heartless machine.
Actually, forget the research. Forget the poetry. What kind of heartless person would demean a soldier for regretting a kill? In this scene, Danny has more heart than Clara ever will, and I was yelling at my TV for him to flip her the bird and walk away.
“Why did you say the crying thing?”
“I was being funny.”
“Why?”
Finally, we get a good question! “Why?” Why would she make such a hurtful joke?
Of course, she doesn’t show any regret. To her, it’s just a joke, and I’m seething. In fact, when he walks away, she can’t even conceive that he might be uncomfortable and she chases after him, asking him if he’ll come out for a drink later. She doesn’t show any sensitivity at all to whatever he might have gone through as a soldier, and won’t leave him alone after he questioned her joke at his expense.
But you know what? He isn’t offended like most other human beings would be. In fact, he falls in love with her and has an excruciating scene where he talks to himself about wanting to spend time with her. The acting was painful, the awkwardness was unbearable, his feelings for her after such a disastrous encounter are unfathomable.
Why is everyone in this show attracted to horrible people and toxic relationships?!
Finally, when the Doctor says “I just wish you hadn’t been a soldier” to Journey, you know what I thought? How dare he judge her for being a soldier! She’s fighting on behalf of a galactic alliance to save her species from extermination from an alien threat! Would the Doctor prefer her to not fight at all? He’d be the first to admit you can’t negotiate or reason with a Dalek, so what would he have her do? Run away? Or fight? I’d choose to fight, and damn the Doctor for judging me when I choose to save my friends, family and species from extinction!
In Conclusion
…this wasn’t just amongst the worst Doctor Who I’ve seen, but it ranks amongst the worst television I’ve seen.
With the exception of Journey Blue, the characters were horrible and the acting was excruciating. The action scenes were long and boring. There was no sense of wonder or dread. We learned that the Daleks are destructive and that the Doctor hates them, and I knew that already.
Give his episode a miss. Don’t waste your time.
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