Review: Into the Dalek

A pleasing mess of better things. Into The Dalek has lots of good bits, but we've seen them all done better before.

Capaldi vs Dalek was brilliant. Dalek made that the basis of an entire episode (seriously, how much of a dope do you have to be to go up against Dalek, easily one of the greatest Who episodes of all time?).

The Doctor letting people die while trying to be the better man is always a rewarding plotline, diving into the ethics of intervening (or not) and what pacifism means. But in this episode, it felt rushed, like a shorthand for complexity, compared to the sickening slow pace of Warriors of the Deep to name just one other episode which explores this. WotD's brilliance is in using all 80 horrible minutes to build up to that conclusion. You don't know it's an episode about the moral failure to act until the last five, when the Doctor is standing and looking about at the mounds of corpses, realising he hasn't saved anyone from either side. Into the Dalek tries to tread the same ground, but doesn't have the time - whereas WotD shows a hero making the wrong decisions but trying his damndest, IotD has him pick an appalling time to attempt a moral victory.

Crammed in there is some stuff about the nature of soldiering (the comparison between Blue and Pink) which it never has time to explore, nor to look deeper into why the Doctor objects to them when so much of soldiering overlaps with stuff the Doctor likes (does he seriously believe no planets should have armies? What, then, was his solution for this civilization to get rid of the Daleks? Is it just an anti-authority thing? I would totally watch that episode.)

(presumably-liberal TV writers should not be allowed to write soldier characters; they've clearly never been near an army base all their life. I mean, neither have I, but TV soldiers are always Made Of Feelings and Drama, arguing in combat situations and having a lot of emotions. I don't buy any of these people as professional soldiers.)

Any one of these things would have been a brilliant standalone episode. I imagine Clara's cute teacher friend is the beginning of a new subplot, and I understand they need to introduce that sometime, but this episode desperately needed that extra 10 minutes. I don't even think it had enough worldbuilding time. Why does a civilisation with the technology to shrink humans not also have the technology to analyse/fix a Dalek without going through such a silly process? And what did anyone think was going to happen when they fixed the Dalek - what was the goal?

(no misogyny tho, so that was something)

If you ignore all that, there were plenty of good bits (the only problem with them was they were bits). There was some good dialogue ("She's my carer; she cares so I don't have to". Other Doctors, it would have been a joke; Twelve is more abrasive and far less huggy, and I can easily believe he means it.)

I can already feel there is a Twelth Doctor emerging, even though I can't define it in words. Not not sentimental, but very particular about what he cares about. Six or Seven would have rejoiced in getting a Dalek to blow up its own kind; Five or Ten would have got caught up in the human bloodshed. Twelve's interest here seems far more abstract.  For him, victory would have been a good Dalek and all that represents - he is more interested that than the immediacies of the situation.
He certainly is quite uninvolved in minor things like the deaths of minor characters, stuff which would have tied Ten in knots for the rest of the episode. I'm liking the chilly practicality. 

All in all: a 6/10, with regrets. The good stuff was good, but fell short of all the other brilliant episodes it could have been.

Grab bag of other thoughts:

We loved the bookshelves in the TARDIS console room 


(As far as I can tell, the most common criticism of WotD is the sets are "overlit". This seems an odd complaint in a show which constantly suffered from a small budget; and the WotD seabase seems far more plausible to me as an actual base compared to the shadowy/creepy corridors critics would prefer. Plus, now we live in the future - we can easily imagine the seabase was built by Apple.)