Death to the Daleks v. Village of the Angels
It’s my tenth blog post – a landmark of sorts, although there’s still almost 150 to go before I can claim to have revisited every televised Doctor Who story. By the time I’ve finished, I should have taken in (at least) a couple of new Doctors (David Tennant’s Fourteen and Ncuti Gatwa’s Fifteen). I have yet to rewatch any stories from the eras of the Fifth, Seventh, Eighth or Ninth Doctors. I’ve seen nothing of Vicky, Steven, Dodo, Ben, Polly, Liz, Harry, Romana, Adric, Nyssa, Tegan, Turlough, Mel, Ace or Martha (and only a glimpse of Amy and Rory); there have been no Cybermen, Sontarans Davros or Time Lords, no Key to Time, Trial of a Time Lord, Black Guardian, Crack in the Wall or Impossible Astronaut arcs, only one story from the many years in which the show was run by John Nathan-Turner, no ‘pure historicals’ or ‘Doctor-lite’ stories. So there is much of interest to look forward to, such is the immense variety in style and content of this unique show.
What have I learned so far? Well, I’m gradually coming to accept that – for all my lifelong love of the programme – I don’t like the Doctor very much, in most of their incarnations anyway. They are a fascinating character, no doubt, but not the sort of person I would want to spend a great deal of time with in real life. Which is something to think about, because as a child my deepest wish was for the Doctor to turn up and invite me to join him in the TARDIS. I’ve also realised that some of those old black and white stories, which I really wasn’t too enthusiastic about rewatching, contain much of interest. There’s a benefit in watching all of these old stories with the purpose of reviewing them for this blog in mind; it’s made me think about each of them in a different way, paying closer attention to the dialogue, looking for the underlying themes and possible connections to the story with which the Randomiser has paired it.
Hardly anyone has read the blog so far, but I haven’t found that too dispiriting. There seems to be a lot of this sort of thing out there, as ‘viewing marathons’ have become quite popular in Doctor Who fandom since the start of lockdown. There’s even a section of Gallifrey Base dedicated to the pursuit.
And ultimately, I suppose, who’s going to be interested in what I think? I’m enjoying the challenge though, and writing everything into a blog is quite satisfying as a fannish sort of activity. As it builds it prove to be interesting to other people, especially with the linking of stories by theme that the tag function enables. Who knows? If you do read some, or all, of what I have written so far – thank you, and I hope there’s something of interest here for you.
This week the Randomiser brought me to the planet Exxilon, for the 1974 story Death to the Daleks, written by Terry Nation, and to the English village of Medderton, for 2022’s Village of the Angels, by Chris Chibnall and Maxine Alderton.
Death to the Daleks
This being a Terry Nation script, it’s quite a challenge to mine Death to the Daleks for rich seams of subtext or thematic analysis. That said, Nation was very, very good at producing dynamic, crowd-pleasing storylines. Over the years there has been much documentation of what he wasn’t so good at – script depth and development, and coming up with new ideas among them – but my impression is that he had a gift for knowing what was needed when. He was a showman, a conjurer, and Doctor Who has benefitted hugely from his particular magic. Love his work or hate his work, DTTD is archetypal Terry Nation.
DTTD recorded the highest Appreciation Index ratings of Season 11 of Doctor Who: its episodes recorded an average score of 46, compared to The Time Warrior’s 30, Invasion of the Dinosaurs’ 31, The Monster of Peladon’s 11 and Planet of the Spiders’ 39. The Daleks were clearly still a big audience draw, and the story has several crowd-pleasing moments and set-pieces. So while I find it a little dull to watch now, searching for clever things to say in my grown-up blog nearly fifty years after the story was first broadcast, one have to acknowledge where it did its job well. Doctor Who is first and foremost a children’s programme, and this was probably the best example of the show giving the kids what they wanted: action, danger, scares, muddy quarries, mysterious mazes and exploding Daleks.
In fact, DTTD may be the story that elevates the children-pleasing potential of the Skarovian saltshakers to its highest level: the squeaky guns replaced by rifles, the testing of the same on a miniature TARDIS like Tin Can Alley, the explosions, the battle against the city ‘root’ probe (reminiscent of when the Daleks would meet their match on some alien planet in the old TV Century 21 comic strips of the 1960s) – it’s a great bunch of tricks from the Nation repertoire, and, while not exactly sophisticated, all contribute to making this story a basic indulgent pleasure.
The first episode is my favourite of the four. Sarah and the Doctor have to find their ways around in the dark when the TARDIS is drained of all power, and they land on the planet Exxilon at nighttime. Its evocative of the power cuts we used to have when I was young, the excitement and fear of having to do ordinary things by candlelight, and it must have seemed particularly relevant to audiences watching on 26 February 1974. Since the start of the year, Britain had been operating under the Three-Day Week rationing of electricity – in fact, these restrictions officially ended between episodes 2 and 3 of DTTD, coinciding with less of the story taking place at night or underground.
Adding to the creepy atmosphere of the story is the chanting of the cave-dwelling Exxilons, which was surely inspired by Carl Orff’s opera based on the medieval Carmina Burana poetry. My dad is a big fan of Carmina Burana – he’s even written a book about it – so I heard this haunting music quite a lot in my youth; it adds an additional layer of terror to those torchlit scenes in which Sarah is shoved towards the sacrificial table by ghastly priests with huge glassy eyes.
The soundtrack to the rest of the story is less enchanting. Carey Blyton wrote the ‘music’ to this one, and my god it’s a discordant assault on the ears. Plinky plonky screechy blang blong bling, or something like that. It’s tinny, repetitive and unsteady, rather like the Dalek casings used in this story. I was surprised to see that the incidental music was written by Blyton, as I remembered his name as composer of the Revenge of the Cybermen score from the following season, and I’ve always liked that one. But then he also wrote Bananas in Pyjamas.
In the second half of the story, the Doctor and his new friend, the professorial Bellal, enter the Exxilon’s ancient living city, pursued by two Daleks, and must solve a series of logic and intelligence tests that have clearly baffled great minds and hardy warriors before them. Now … let’s be honest, these weren’t exactly Krypton Factor-level challenges, were they? One fiendish challenge involved having to jump on white squares instead of red, and another required the Doctor to trace his way through a maze that looked as though it belong on the puzzle page of the 1974 Whizzer and Chips Annual. Once again, it’s a reminder that this is a children’s programme, but even seven-year-olds watching by candlelight over their teatime plate of spaghetti hoops must have been rolling their eyes at these tasks.
If there is a message behind the story – what DTTD is really about – then it could be as a sort of reflection on what happens when all the trappings of ‘civilised’ power and authority (light, electricity, weaponry) are stripped away, and all become equal. The Doctor, the crew of the stranded Earth ship, and the band of Daleks, find themselves grouped together at Square One at the beginning of the second episode. There is talk of working together, an uneasy alliance of reluctant equals, but – as predicted by the Doctor – Daleks can’t be trusted and it’s not long before they break ranks to deal instead with the hostile Exxilons. There’s a distinct lack of unity within the human ranks too, as Galloway thinks he ought to be in charge and refuses to accept the leadership of Hamilton when Commander Stewart dies. It’s all quite Lord of the Flies and, as I felt when watching The Sensorites last week, dispiriting but probably realistic that you just can’t trust anyone these days.
Village of the Angels
When I put together a list of all televised Doctor Who stories from which my watching list would be determined at random, I decided to treat the six parts of the ‘Flux’ season (Series 13 of New Doctor Who) as individual stories, which I would watch as standalones in the order determined by the Randomiser. (I made the same decision for the stories that comprise Seasons 17 (The Key to Time) and 23 (The Trial of a Time Lord).) Maybe this will have been a mistake, I’m not sure, but Village of the Angels a.k.a. Flux part four has put the decision to its first test. I remember this, from watching at the time of broadcast, as the Flux episode I enjoyed the most; how well does it stand out of time, as a story in its own right?
Not too well, it turns out. Much as there is to enjoy in this story, it’s definitely a link in the Flux chain rather than an individual unit. My partner Shaz and I were left scratching our heads at much of it, as the attack of the Angels on this isolated little village in 1967 turns out to be part of a plan on behalf of Division, and to be honest we’d completely forgotten what Division were all about (and I’m not sure it was completely clear the first time round). Events in the village are interspersed with the continuing adventures of Bel, searching for Vinder on the planet Puzano. While the Bel-Vinder love story was engaging and easy enough to follow, the encounter with baddie Azure and her ‘Passenger’ living prison relied on knowing and understanding what was going on in the bigger story (which we didn’t).
Still, the main events in Medderton are still a lot of fun. You can’t go far wrong with a spooky village (speaking as someone who grew up in one); this one is full of local weirdos – a troubled priest, a wise old woman, an unearthly child, a nasty great-uncle – it’s all very English gothic, in both its 1967 and 1901 versions. ‘Have you counted the stones?’ is a nice and creepy little scene, and the edge of the village looking out into space is pleasingly nightmarish. I also found Yaz and Dan being caught by the Angel in a pitch-black field at night to be really frightening. Why are villages such great settings for British horror? They are isolated communities, of course (geophysically as well as socially in the case of Medderton), and often have a sense of being stuck in the past, and hostile to outsiders (also attributes realised quite literally in VOTA).
That great-uncle – Gerald is his name – is particularly unlikeable. ‘She's a ten-year-old girl. How much is there to know?’ marks him out as a premier league bastard in a single line of dialogue, so his demise – snagged by an Angel for the second time, despite Peggy calling to him not to walk past it – is extremely satisfying.
VOTA provides our introduction to Professor Jericho, who is to play a reasonably important role in the remainder of the Flux season. He’s a beekeeping parapsychologist who lives alone – a good man, as far as we can tell, who seems to have been cast as a bit of an outsider in life due to his unconventional field of study. This character description makes him sound very much a Chris Chibnall creation; I can imagine him in Broadchurch, the focus of everyone’s suspicion in one episode before we realise he’s one of the good guys.
‘Jericho’ is an interesting choice of name, and I wondered whether there is some meaning behind that. Jericho is one of the oldest surviving cities in the world so there’s a sense of Time about it – fitting for the journey the Professor is about to take. Historically it has had a rough time of it, going through periods of low fortune and strife, political and economic – Jericho says he has seen many challenging things in his lifetime. In the Bible, the city of Jericho is supposed to have fallen when the great wall surrounding it collapsed; Professor Jericho died (in a couple of episodes’ time: The Vanquishers) when the great wall of protection formed by the Lupari fleet collapsed and reformed, leaving the Sontaran ship on which Jericho was trapped to be destroyed by the Flux.
It’s a good episode for the Doctor, if typically (for Thirteen) non-stop and breathless. She’s in non-stop action all the way through as VOTA begins and ends on pretty cool cliff-hanger moments: the Angel appearing inside the TARDIS at the start, and the Doctor herself appearing to turn into an Angel at the end. Throughout she is desperately trying to work out what is going on – we the viewers can sympathise with that – but attempts to see the bigger picture are hampered by a series of immediate perils, fleeing the Angels with the help of her new friends Claire Brown and Jericho.
There will be further episodes of Flux to come, in whatever order the Randomiser chooses for me, but my overriding thought at this stage is that it’s such a shame that we will probably never learn more of so much that this series teases of the Doctor’s past – ‘Division’, and of course the Timeless Children. The general feeling is that Russell T Davies will leave all of this behind, walled off like the Time War in a sort of Chibnall ‘pocket universe’, so it doesn’t bog down his own storytelling in the new seasons to come. I understand the sense in that, but there is so much more that I want to know about this huge expansion of DW mythology of which Thirteen only ever really skimmed the surface. I suppose this is territory for fan fictions, and spin-off media such as books and audios, to explore.
Connections
On the basis of AI figures from the times of their original broadcasts, it could be argued that Death to the Daleks and Village of the Angels are each the most popular story of their respective seasons (although my hunch is that DTTD will have lost that accolade over the course of time). What else connects these two stories?
The opening scenes of DTTD have a few similarities to VOTA. Both play on the basic fear of the dark. I mentioned a few weeks ago (in relation to The Woman Who Lived) how frustrating telly scenes set at night can sometimes be, but I think it’s done well in both these stories as the Doctor and Sarah, on Exxilon, and Yaz and Dan, in Medderton, explore by torchlight.
Both pairs are menaced by a stone angel – well, it looks like an angel in DTTD. Sarah wonders whether it is a statue, but the Doctor describes it as some sort of life form that has become petrified … not only a throwback reference to the petrified beast found in the jungle at the beginning of Terry Nation’s first Dalek story, but a foreshadowing of what happens to the Doctor herself at the end of VOTA.
VOTA opens with an intruder inside the TARDIS – as the lights flash off and on, an Angel closes in on the time travellers trapped next to the ship’s doors. In DTTD there is also an intruder in the TARDIS – as the lights flash off and on, an Exxilon closes in on Sarah trapped next to the ship’s doors.
In a memorable scene from each story, one of the titular baddies explodes into flames: the projection of the Angel formed from Claire’s sketch burning in Jericho’s fireplace, and a Dalek attacked by an Exxilon mob. Actually, several Daleks burst into flames in this story, but that one’s something of an iconic image thanks to Chris Achilleos’ famous Target novelisation cover.
There are some interesting connections between string supporting characters in both stories, DTTD’s Galloway and VOTA’s Jericho. Both are named after a geographical place of great history. Both characters are proud loners – misfits, overlooked and perhaps mistrusted by their superiors and peers. Each character is played by a distinguished character actor (Galloway: Duncan Lamont; Jericho: Kevin McNally) with a long resume of roles in British and American film and TV. Both actors played allies of Ross Poldark (McNally was Drake Carne, Lamont was Thollie Tregirls) in the 1970s adaptation of Winston Graham’s Poldark. McNally’s previous work for Doctor Who was in The Twin Dilemma as Hugo Lang, like Lamont’s Galloway a human military man who becomes an uneasy ally of the Doctor after his spaceship crashes on an alien planet. With a strange symmetry, both Galloway and, ultimately in The Vanquishers, Jericho will die on an exploding spaceship in flight – Jericho on a Sontaran-occupied Lupari vessel, and Galloway on the Dalek ship destroyed by a bomb he brought on board.
Comments