Resurrection of the Daleks
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| 134 – Resurrection of the Daleks | |
|---|---|
| Doctor Who serial | |
 The Doctor's memory being copied by the Daleks for one of their duplicates. |
|
| Cast | |
| Doctor | Peter Davison (Fifth Doctor) |
| Companions | Janet Fielding (Tegan Jovanka) |
| Mark Strickson (Vislor Turlough) | |
| Production | |
| Writer | Eric Saward |
| Director | Matthew Robinson |
| Script editor | Eric Saward |
| Producer | John Nathan-Turner |
| Executive producer(s) | None |
| Production code | 6P |
| Series | Season 21 |
| Length | 2 episodes, approx. 46 mins each |
| Originally broadcast | February 8–February 15, 1984 |
| Chronology | |
| ← Preceded by | Followed by → |
| Frontios | Planet of Fire |
Resurrection of the Daleks is a serial in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which was first broadcast in two weekly parts from February 8 to February 15, 1984. This story marks the final regular appearance of Janet Fielding as companion Tegan Jovanka, who leaves the Fifth Doctor for the second time.
Contents |
[edit] Synopsis
Caught in a time corridor, the TARDIS gets dragged to Earth in 1984. But there are mercenaries from the future at work, and at the other end of the corridor, a strike force plans the prison break of the man who created the ultimate evil. The Daleks are back, and they want Davros…
Yet they remain under the threat of the Movellan virus, has Davros got the cure?
[edit] Plot
 |
The plot summary in this article or section is too long or detailed compared to the rest of the article. Please edit the article to focus on discussing the work rather than merely reiterating the plot. |
The year is 1984, and a group of humanoids are running down a London alley. As they attempt to escape, they are gunned down by two policemen led by Commander Lytton. Two of the humanoids, Galloway and Quartermaster Sergeant Stein, escape to a warehouse where a time corridor is situated. Galloway is killed, leaving Stein alone.
Lytton transports back to his battle cruiser and prepares to attack a prison space station whose only prisoner is Davros, the creator of the Daleks.
Meanwhile, the Doctor, Tegan and Turlough are being dragged down a time corridor in the TARDIS (following on from the events at the end of Frontios). When the time machine lands, they find themselves in the London docklands in 1984.
In the meantime, the Daleks try a direct frontal assault on the prison station which yields poor results (and several Dalek casualties, as the station crew led by Dr. Styles, the CMO; and Lt. Mercer, fight back with considerable force). Lytton then persuades the Dalek Supreme to use poisonous gas to get the crew out of the way. The plan proves to be a success and the Daleks have little trouble taking over the ship. Following orders, Watch Officer Osborn attempts to kill Davros, first using an automated system that proves not to work, and then in person. However, Lytton and an engineer break into the cell and kill Osborn before she can complete her mission, instead releasing Davros from his cryogenic imprisonment (into which he was placed following the events of Destiny of the Daleks).
The Doctor and his friends have by now met a traumatised Stein, who joins them in returning to the warehouse to hunt for the end of the time corridor. There they meet a military bomb disposal squad, called in after builders uncovered what they thought to be unexploded bombs (and which the Doctor correctly predicts are in fact alien artifacts). While the others are distracted, Turlough stumbles into the time corridor, ending up on the Dalek ship.
Having learned that the Doctor is in the warehouse, the Supreme Dalek orders a Dalek to be dispatched to detain him. The Dalek travels through the time corridor and appears as if from nowhere. The Doctor yells at everyone to take cover as it prepares to exterminate them. (In the original four-part version of the story, this formed the cliffhanger ending of Part One.) The Dalek kills several of the squad's men before the Doctor advises them to focus their fire on its eyestalk, blinding it. In the resulting struggle, the humans push the Dalek out of the warehouse window and it explodes on hitting the ground; Tegan suffers a head injury and blacks out.
Meanwhile, on the prison station, only Styles, Mercer, and two guards are left alive of the original crew. Disguised in uniforms taken from Lytton's guards, they plan to blow up the station via its self-destruct system.
Speaking to Lytton, Davros explains that his cryogenic sentence lasted for "90 years of mind-numbing boredom." He then vows to take his revenge upon "that meddling Time Lord" — the Doctor. Lytton insists he is in their grasp. While Davros's travel chair is undergoing maintenance by the engineer (Kiston), Lytton explains that the Daleks lost their war against the Movellans due to the development of a virus that specifically attacks Dalek tissue, and have awoken Davros to find a cure. Despite Lytton's reservations, Davros demands that he remain on the prison ship while working on the virus, as it may be necessary for him to be refrozen. When Lytton leaves to discuss this with the Supreme Dalek, Davros uses a hypodermic-like mind control device to take control of Kiston.
Meanwhile, the Doctor and the members of the bomb disposal squad, having brought the remnants of the destroyed Dalek machine back inside, are searching for the Kaled mutant that was housed inside it. They eventually find and kill it but only after it wounds one of the squad's men. While the medical officer of the squad looks after the victim and a recovering Tegan, the Doctor and Stein head into the TARDIS to find out what is happening at the other end of the time corridor.
The TARDIS materialises inside the Dalek ship and, narrowly avoiding being captured by a guard, the Doctor tells Stein that they should find Turlough and make a swift exit. But Stein, suddenly no longer a stuttering coward, points his own weapon at the Doctor, revealing that he himself is an agent of the Daleks.
A squadron of Daleks close in to exterminate the Doctor, but Lytton, entering, informs them that the Supreme Dalek has ordered that the Doctor must not be killed - yet. The Daleks confirm this as the truth. The Daleks and Stien lead the Doctor away.
On the prison ship, Turlough joins forces with the remnants of the crew, informing them of the existence of the time corridor, as a possible way of escaping the effects of the ship's self-destruct.
On Earth, the man attacked by the Dalek creature is behaving very strangely and wanders away mumbling nonsense. The group commander, Colonel Archer, decides to radio for help, although his own radio is dead. He heads outside and finds two policemen (unbeknownst to him, Lytton's associates) and asks for assistance. As he tries the radio, a policeman holds a gun to his head...
The Daleks reveal their plan of cloning the Doctor and his companions, and to use the clones to assassinate the High Council of Time Lords on Gallifrey. Stien begins the mind-copying sequence while the Doctor tries to talk him into resisting his Dalek mind conditioning. While this is going on, Styles and the two station guards are killed when trying to activate the station's self-destruction system.
Back on Earth, Colonel Archer returns to the warehouse, obviously under Dalek control. Tegan makes an escape attempt, but is soon recaptured by the policemen and taken through the time corridor to the Dalek ship. The squad's scientific advisor, Professor Laird, is shot while trying to flee the soldiers.
Meanwhile, in the duplication chamber, Stein is overcome with confusion: the Doctor has realized that Stein's conditioning is unstable and begins challenging his ability to think for himself. Just as Stein's mind-copying sequence nears completion, he breaks his conditioning and stops the process, freeing the Doctor. The Doctor finds Turlough and Tegan, and they return to the TARDIS along with Stein and the last surviving station crew member. Rather than depart, the Doctor decides he must destroy Davros once and for all. With Stein and Lt. Mercer he heads to the station lab, leaving Tegan and Turlough in the TARDIS, which he has surreptitiously programmed on time delay to return them to the warehouse.
The Doctor confronts Davros in the lab, but his chance to kill him is lost when Stein's conditioning re-asserts itself long enough to let Lytton's troops kill Lt. Mercer. Horrified by his actions, Stein refuses to accompany the Doctor back to the time corridor, and runs off into the station.
Davros' army (now including a biochemist, Kiston, a soldier, and two Daleks) is growing and he dispatches his Daleks to Earth. Anticipating resistance from the Daleks not loyal to him, Davros breaks opens a capsule of the Movellan virus. Two Daleks then enter with the intention of exterminating him, but are themselves killed instead by the virus.
Back at the warehouse, a huge battle is taking place between Davros' Daleks and those loyal to the Supreme Dalek. The TARDIS has arrived and the Doctor (having returned through the time corridor) now knows that the alien artifacts discovered earlier on were in fact canisters containing the Movellan virus. He opens a canister that Tegan and Turlough have removed and brought into the TARDIS, and sneaks it behind the Daleks. Soon they all start to die.
Lytton has escaped, and gleefully watches the Daleks' demise. He swaps his Dalek uniform for that of a policeman, and joins his two fellow "bobbies" on their next vigil. Back on the station, Davros prepares to use an escape pod to flee from the station, but the Movellan virus attacks and seemingly kills him.
The Daleks are dead, and Tegan is appalled at the deaths that have taken place. The Dalek Supreme appears on the TARDIS scanner and threatens the Doctor, claiming that the Daleks have duplicates of prominent humans all over Earth, and it is just a matter of time before Earth falls.
Meanwhile, a wounded Stein is trying to activate the self-destruct sequence. Just as he is about to finish, the Daleks enter and exterminate him. With his last ounce of life, he leaps onto the console, completing the sequence and destroying both the station and the Dalek ship.
The Doctor calls for them all to leave, but Tegan says no — this has been one massacre too far. She no longer enjoys her adventures and wants to give it up, so she runs away. The Doctor is saddened by this, and he and Turlough leave. As the TARDIS vanishes, Tegan runs back, remembering the Doctor's old admonishment: "Brave heart, Tegan." She calls out to the empty air that she will miss him.
[edit] Cast
- The Doctor — Peter Davison
- Tegan — Janet Fielding
- Turlough — Mark Strickson
- Davros — Terry Molloy
- Stien — Rodney Bewes
- Styles — Rula Lenska
- Lytton — Maurice Colbourne
- Mercer — Jim Findley
- Osborn — Sneh Gupta
- Galloway — William Sleigh
- Kiston — Leslie Grantham
- Professor Laird — Chloe Ashcroft
- Colonel Archer — Del Henney
- Sergeant Calder — Philip McGough
- Trooper — Roger Davenport
- Crewmembers — John Adam Baker, Linsey Turner
- Dalek Voices — Brian Miller, Royce Mills
- Daleks — John Scott Martin, Cy Town, Tony Starr, Toby Byrne
[edit] Cast notes
- Making guest appearances in this serial are Leslie Grantham, Rula Lenska, and Rodney Bewes. See also Celebrity appearances in Doctor Who.
- This was Leslie Grantham's TV debut; he was offered the roles of both Galloway and Kiston, but chose the latter because it would afford him more screen time.[1] He went on to play the notorious "Dirty" Den Watts in the long-running soap opera EastEnders, again being cast by Matthew Robinson; in a 2004 edition of the show, he addressed another character, a wheelchair-bound Ian Beale, as "Davros", a meta-reference to his Doctor Who appearance.[2]
[edit] Continuity
- No explanation is given for companion Kamelion's absence from this story.
- The sequence where the Doctor shoots a Kaled mutant is a rare instance of the character using a gun to kill (although it is only fired off-screen). In the previous dalek story, Destiny of the Daleks, set during the war with the Movellans, it was implied that the daleks had lost their organic component and become entirely robotic. However, in Resurrection the daleks are clearly living creatures again.
- With the exception of the brief cameo in The Five Doctors (1983), this was the only story to feature the Daleks during the Peter Davison era. Davison has stated[citation needed] that he would have been upset if he had left the show without having faced the Doctor's iconic foes.
- In Part Two of the two-part version of the story, Davros calls the Doctor "a meddling Time Lord", despite never having been told the Doctor's race on screen. Similarly, it is never explained how the Daleks know of Gallifrey, its High Council or the concept of regeneration, all of which Davros seems to understand fully in Revelation of the Daleks).
- During the sequence where the Doctor's brain is scanned, images of all the previous Doctors and many of his former companions appear on a screen.
- In the fan novelisation by Paul Scoones, it is stated that Professor Laird is UNIT's scientific advisor, on attachment to Colonel Archer's bomb disposal squad. This was not derived from any information given in the television version.
- An article by Russell T. Davies in the Doctor Who Annual 2006 suggested that the Dalek Supreme's attempt to assassinate the High Council was one of the initial clashes in the Time War mentioned in the 2005 series.
- The Cloister Bell can be heard ringing when the Doctor is trying to free the TARDIS from the Daleks' time corridor.
- The Daleks' eyepiece is depicted as being vulnerable to conventional small arms fire, with one being disabled by 5.56mm rounds fired from a Steyr AUG. In the revived series, G36 assault rifles firing the same calibre are shown to be similarly effective when fire is concentrated on this weak spot.
[edit] Production
- The working titles of this story were The Warhead, The Return, and The Resurrection.
- The story was originally due to be produced as the climax of Season 20. However due to industrial action, the story was cancelled. With minor rewrites, the serial was resurrected for Season 21.
- This serial was partly shot in Shad Thames.
- Director Matthew Robinson stated on the DVD commentary that, much to his surprise, the aspect of the story that the BBC received the most complaints about was not the graphic violence of the serial, but rather that one of the prison crew is seen to be smoking a cigarette early in the first episode.
[edit] Story format
This story was intended to be four parts of the usual 25-minute length. However due to the BBC's coverage of the Winter Olympics held in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, the series' regular slot was not available. Rather than interrupt transmission, the decision was taken to transmit the story as two double-length episodes (45 and 50 minutes, respectively), on back-to-back Wednesdays rather than the normal Thursday/Friday timeslot of the Fifth Doctor-era stories. It is often asserted that it was directly because of the success of the two-part experiment that the following season was produced in the same format. However, this decision had already been taken.
The first copy of the story to be sold to American PBS stations by the BBC was done in the original four-part serial format, which was then consolidated into a single episode of approximately 90 minutes in length, for those stations that preferred that format. However early edits of Parts Two, Three and Four were included by error, including some extra scenes not used in the final four-part cut, while also some episodes had a raw soundtrack, lacking sound effects and music, and the 90-minute version incorporated the mistake. Some stations who bought the story proceeded to broadcast it in that form anyway.
[edit] Outside references
- The serial has been widely reported to contain a higher body count than The Terminator. Seven people are killed within the first minute of episode one. Estimates have placed the actual bodycount in the range of 60-76, roughly the combined bodycount of the first five Friday the 13th films.
[edit] In print
This is one of five Doctor Who serials that were never novelised by Target Books as they were unable to come to an agreement with Eric Saward and Daleks creator Terry Nation that would have allowed Saward or another writer to adapt the script; although Virgin Books (the successor to Target) did announce plans to publish a novelisation by Saward in the early 1990s, this ultimately did not occur. A fan group in New Zealand did publish an unofficial novelisation of the story in 2000, later republishing it as an online eBook titled Doctor Who: Resurrection of the Daleks.
[edit] Broadcast, VHS and DVD releases
- This story was released on VHS in November of 1993.
- Both the VHS (now out of print) and DVD releases of this story reverted to the four-episode format. The previously unused episode breaks are when the first Dalek comes through the time corridor in the warehouse, and in the second half of the story, when Davros begins preparing the Movellan virus, promising to exact vengeance on the Doctor and set himself up as the leader of a new Dalek race.
- This story was released on DVD in the United Kingdom on November 18, 2002. Special features include deleted scenes, trailer and a 5.1 digital surround sound mix. It was released in 2007 as part of a Box set that contains Genesis of the Daleks, Destiny of the Daleks, Revelation of the Daleks and Remembrance of the Daleks.
[edit] References
[edit] External links
- Resurrection of the Daleks at bbc.co.uk
- Resurrection of the Daleks at Doctor Who: A Brief History Of Time (Travel)
- Resurrection of the Daleks at the Doctor Who Reference Guide
- Missing Scenes Resurrection in Time Space Visualiser
[edit] Reviews
- Resurrection of the Daleks reviews at Outpost Gallifrey
- Resurrection of the Daleks reviews at The Doctor Who Ratings Guide
[edit] Fan novelisation
- Doctor Who: Resurrection of the Daleks ebook
- Doctor Who: Resurrection of the Daleks reviews at Outpost Gallifrey
|
|||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||
