Mark Gatiss once said that when Doctor Who works for eight-year-olds, it works for everyone. Looking at Season Seventeen, it’s easy to see why Tom Baker’s clowning hit the mark with that age group, but there’s also plenty of humour targeted at other age groups. Students would have enjoyed the academic references to theoretical physics and art history provided by new script editor Douglas Adams, while parents will have appreciated the flirtatious banter between Baker and incoming companion Lalla Ward. For some people, this is Doctor Who nirvana; it’s no coincidence that the series posted its highest-ever ratings during this period. Yet it’s never been uncontroversially loved in the way Baker’s earlier stories have, and this is largely due to how all this humour works within the show’s reality.
When Tom Baker’s Doctor mocked villains in his early seasons it was funny, but it made sense within a suspense narrative. By the time he’s waving a red rag at the Nimon, the joke lands quite differently. Rather than enjoying the Doctor’s defiance in the face of palpable danger, we’re watching a threat simply being deflated for laughs. It becomes all too easy to imagine Baker coming up with this in rehearsal as they all laugh at the cheap monster costumes, and the show’s sense of reality suffers as a result. The joke about the Daleks being unable to climb in Destiny of the Daleks is hard to credit as a remark someone would make when confronted by a murderous cyborg; it is very familiar as the observation generations of hack comedians have made about the Daleks. It’s a terrible moment, and someone should have thought better of it during the edit.
If we discount an eleventh-hour appearance by the Sontarans in The Invasion of Time, Destiny of the Daleks is the first story to be built around recurring monsters since Revenge of the Cybermen. Comparing the two is a telling exercise, and not just because the final episode’s critique of computer logic suggests the production team have forgotten the key difference between the Daleks and the Cybermen. Both are stories written by their titular monsters’ creators, yet both were heavily rewritten by a new script editor who seemed temperamentally unsuited to grasp said monsters’ appeal. Robert Holmes struggled to write for the Cybermen because he found pure, unemotional logic to be the stuff of comedy, not horror; The Sun Makers is evidence enough of this. Similarly, when faced with the absolute, totalitarian hatefulness of the Daleks, Douglas Adams’s instinct is to jeer at it. He’s still clearly opposed to fascism, but his method of resistance is more George Formby than George Orwell.
it’s a Doctor and Romana story that happens to feature the Daleks, and the change in emphasis is more important than it sounds.
Worth noting, though, that The Chase proves Terry Nation was not above having a laugh at the expense of his most famous creations, and according to this serial’s director Ken Grieve, Adams’s rewrite was necessitated by Nation simply not having turned in enough of a useable script. Given this, we can start to piece together a more redemptive reading of Destiny of the Daleks. It clearly doesn’t work as a sequel to Genesis of the Daleks, but seeing as its only shared personnel are a lead actor and a checked-out writer, maybe we shouldn’t expect it to be. Moreover, the original rationale for making Genesis of the Daleks doesn’t apply here. That story – like Revenge of the Cybermen – was part of a season-long attempt to package the new Doctor in a comfy cushion of comfortingly familiar monsters and allies. Four seasons on and the show is at its most indifferent to nostalgic old monster appearances. The only reason for bringing back Davros and the Daleks is, well, they can.
Rather than reassuring the audience that this is still the same programme, we might interpret Adams as aiming for a kind of iconoclasm; if he can stamp his personality on the show’s most celebrated recurring monster, the rest of the season will be a cakewalk. (It wasn’t, but that’s down to strikes rather than any shortcomings in his talent) The most rewarding way to watch Destiny of the Daleks is as a pilot for a completely new version of Doctor Who: Nick and Norah in Space, with Lalla Ward’s Romana absolutely irresistible from the off. Now we’ve seen the Thirteenth Doctor regenerate into another version of the Tenth, or the Twelfth Doctor decide that he wants to look like some bloke from Pompeii, even the regeneration scene doesn’t seem as preposterous as it once was.
June Hudson designed Romana’s coat and scarf to evoke the Doctor’s outfit, subtly establishing that she’s less a companion and more a female Doctor. She’s certainly proactive enough – when she gets into trouble, it’s because she goes out looking for trouble. It must be said that Nation writes in some of the screaming and panicking he is wont to give female companions, but judged against the remarkable lack of such scenes in Ward’s other serials this can be excused as a sop to the Daleks’ alpha-monster status: if you’re going to scream at one Doctor Who monster, it might as well be this one. The Daleks here aren’t quite formidable enough to justify this, with the props looking as tatty as they did in the Pertwee years, but Grieve shoots them well, thanks to the director getting his hands on the BBC’s first Steadicam. Even the quarry is more impressive than usual.
The key, then, is to appreciate Destiny of the Daleks for what it is, rather than what it isn’t. David Gooderson’s Davros, in particular, tends to be found wanting on these grounds: not as chillingly in-control as Michael Wisher, not as deranged as Terry Molloy, not as slitheringly creepy as Julian Bleach. Yet he is convincing as a Davros caught on the hop, kidnapped by his old enemy as soon as he’s restored to life, exhausted and rapidly running out of patience. You wouldn’t put him in The Stolen Earth – let alone Genesis of the Daleks – but he’s fine in this context. It’s ironic that Terry Nation’s last Dalek story is one that isn’t really a Dalek story at all; it’s a Doctor and Romana story that happens to feature the Daleks, and the change in emphasis is more important than it sounds. But it’s an entertaining Doctor and Romana story, and – barring that one unfortunate joke about climbing – the jokes are good enough to entertain eight-year-olds of all ages.
Next: City of Death (1979)
