Harry -
It has been 11 years since this Doctor Who two-parter was first broadcast. Having just rewatched it, I’m sitting here asking myself — just as I did back then — what on Earth was that supposed to be? The nicest way I can think of putting it is that it felt like being on some kind of “Doctor Who” themed adventure ride at an amusement park. It’s Doctor Who all right, says so on the signage, but they got it all wrong.
Sarah -
It’s terrible. It’s just so, so terrible. Can we just go straight to our final thoughts and spend the rest of the day watching "Timelash" and "Time-Flight" on an endless loop? The stories will look brilliant by comparison and at least we’ll get to watch Captain Stapley.
There are a lot of mediocre episodes of Doctor Who that still manage to be watchable, but this isn’t one of them. Oh wait, I should say these two, because for some reason it’s a bloody two-parter. Why, oh why?
Harry -
Agreed, let's not kill our wills to live by going through the whole story. It's awful in so many ways that I don't think we can even pretend to be Rob and Toby and only see the good things here.
Sarah -
The only good thing I can think of in this story is Martha’s general awesomeness. I was always just waiting for her next scene. That’s all I’ve got. And, speaking of Martha, shouldn’t she have some new clothes by now? It’s like Tegan’s uniform all over again. Why has she not been allowed to raid the TARDIS wardrobe?
Harry -
The burgundy jacket and blue jeans is Martha's signature look, but she's due a change by this point.
Overall, what the story seemed to be attempting was to harken back to classic era favourites that gave us a slow reveal of Daleks hatching nasty plots in the shadows. A nice buildup until the Doctor came along to expose their schemes and wreck everything. Here we have four Daleks -- the Cult of Skaro -- who escaped the battle of Canary Wharf by initiating emergency temporal shift. Landing in 1930s Manhattan, they embark on a new nasty plot to fuse Daleks and humans together into a new lifeform. Okay, kind of intriguing, but the rest of the story is a mess.
Sarah -
It’s like a plot borrowed from the Ainley Master. All that’s missing is a wacky disguise.
Harry -
For some reason, the Daleks create human-pig hybrid slaves. Did we not just have a pig spaceman in "Aliens of London"? Too soon for more of this porcine activity.
Sarah -
Seriously, what is with RTD and pigs?
Harry -
It would have been cooler if they brought back the Robomen from "The Dalek Invasion of Earth".
Key to the plot is the harvesting and preparation of human bodies, who are then zombified in preparation to become human Daleks. Presumably they will all suffer the same fate as Mr. Diagoras, foreman of the Empire State Building construction site. He was forcibly hybridized with Dalek Sec to become the first "human Dalek." I guess this reveal was supposed to be great shock and horror. But it fell horribly flat. Actor Eric Loren failed to sell it at all, maybe because his head was smothered by a prosthetic Dalek thing with a bulbous brain and phallic tentacles that would not stop wiggling. It was just ridiculous.
Sarah -
I’m pretty sure he failed to sell it well before the prosthetic showed up. There were no successful guest actor performance in this story. I guess the whole Dalek identity crisis could have been interesting, but we’ve seen Dalek internecine strife over genetic purity done much better in the 80s.
Harry -
Our friends over at Big Finish have also done much better with this in the War Doctor audios. Anyway, the rest of the story involves the Doctor standing in front of the Daleks for ludicrously long periods of time without a single one of them shooting him. This aggravated to no end, especially after they happily dispatched Solomon in Central Park after his "can't we all just get along?" oration. He failed to sell that too, so maybe he had it coming.
Sarah -
I couldn’t even feel sad about his extermination. It was all one big meh.
Harry -
The characters were having a miserable time, but it looked like the actors were too. There were a couple of moments when David Tennant appeared to be forcing out the dialogue just to get a scene in the can.
I don't know. I tried to accept the cornucopia of American accents, because people come to New York City from everywhere to chase their dreams, right? But what was Tallulah's accent supposed to be? "Roaring 20s Dame?" "Talking Pictures Starlet?" "Peorian?" I just don't know.
Sarah -
My brain still hurts from all the accents. Tallulah -- with 3 ls and an h -- was straight out of central casting at some Poverty Row studio.
Harry -
As for New York City, this was the least-looking-like-New-York-City thing I can remember. "The Chase" offered a more believable Empire State Building.
Sarah -
Where are you when we need you, Morton Dill?
Harry -
No kidding. I don't know where else they blew the budget on this one, since all the live action was shot in the UK. Could they not have come up with some better looking art deco? They should have drowned us with art deco. What a terrible waste, especially since they started shooting Doctor Who all over the world -- including New York City! -- in the seasons to come.
Sarah -
In a desperate attempt to say something nice, I’ll share that Mr. Smith had favorable things to say about how the illusion of movement was handled in the elevator scenes. The Dalek eyestalk design on the elevator door was a nice touch, too.
I do feel badly for Helen Raynor, the writer of this mess. She famously went online after the stories aired to discover that the stories weren’t well-received. And, this being the internet, the negative reviews included vile personal attacks. People are the worst.
Harry -
The story was a mess to begin with, let down by poor production and acting, and then to have to deal with toxic fanhood, yuck.
Sarah -
I’m sure there’s a way to blame this all on Eric Saward, but I haven’t quite sorted that out yet.
Harry -
Let us never watch this one again.
Sarah -
It's a deal!
Best Line:
SEC: You have betrayed me.
DALEK 1: You told us to imagine.
DALEK 3: And we imagined your irrelevance.
That pretty much sums up this story...
Favorite Moment:
Martha mooning over the doctor and Tallulah assuming he doesn’t reciprocate because he’s “into musical theater.” That made me laugh out loud.
Lasting Image: I’d prefer to have every image erased from my memory, but I guess I’ll go with Tallulah in her showgirl finery.
1/10
Harry -
Best Line:
MARTHA: I wonder what year it is, because look, the Empire State Building's not even finished yet.
DOCTOR: Work in progress. Still got a couple floors to go, and if I know my history, that makes the date somewhere around
(Martha picks up a copy of the New York Record which is lying on a bench.)
MARTHA: November first 1930.
DOCTOR: You're getting good at this.
Favourite Moment: two of the Daleks down in the sewer tunnels, gossiping behind Dalek Sec's back.
Lasting Image: the Doctor and Martha with the Statue of Liberty. It was all downhill from there.
1/10
Our marathon continues with Story #183: The Lazarus Experiment...
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