As the title would suggest, this episode marked the first appearance in the new series of the old faithful pepper pot robots, and it’s a shame to note that their re-launch hasn’t been anywhere near as successful as that of the Doctor. Like numerous other things in Doctor Who, the initial reintroduction of the Daleks was a thrilling, and even, as Rose took pity on the lone Dalek, an oddly moving event, but they’ve seemed more and more stale with each reappearance.

Following the phone call at the end of the last episode, the Doctor and Amy landed in the Cabinet War Rooms in World War Two, during the middle of the Blitz to be greeted by a jubilant Churchill. Although, as Churchill pointed out to them they were over a month late, which the Doctor put down to having a new model Tardis (as the Doctor being late for things has been mentioned at least three times in as many episodes, I wonder if the teething problems he is having with the new model will turn out to be a major plot point, or if the new-look Tardis is just there because they wanted to freshen things up a bit), Churchill then attempted to steal the Tardis keys, giving the Doctor a chance to explain to him, Amy and any new members of the audience that the ethics of time travel didn’t allow him to offer any easy solutions, and so he couldn’t let Churchill take the technology for his war effort.

It turns out that Churchill was feeling pretty confident with the technology he already had anyway, as he explained to the Doctor and Amy, a brilliant scientist named Dr. Bracewell (who Amy was pleased to note was also a fellow Scot) had provided him with the blue prints for a new type of ‘iron soldier’. Unfortunately, as the Doctor found out they looked and talked just like Daleks, and so he took it upon himself to convince Churchill (as well as Amy, who the Doctor was surprised to find didn’t remember the previous Dalek attack on the earth, which took place at the end of series four) that these iron soldiers were not to be trusted, even though the scientist behind their design claimed that they were his idea. Turns out that they were both sort of right – the creatures were Daleks, who were apparently waiting for the Doctor to confirm this before they took off, and the idea for their design did come from Dr. Bracewell, it just turns out that he was a robot, built by the Daleks with the blueprints for their design mixed in with the various fake human memories they had implanted in him.

This prompted the Doctor to fly off on his own, yet again, to face the Daleks on their ship which seemed to be hiding on the other side of the moon. Meaning that he was just in time to see the construction of a new race of Daleks, each in an attractive range of colours – when the new range of Daleks was wheeled out in a fan formation so that each could display its new paint job, I couldn’t help but think that it looked like a car advert. Even though the Daleks are apparently stronger than ever and have a shiny new look, we’ve definitely been here before in recent years, even down to the whole impure Dalek DNA thing, which was apparently what was stopping the new uber-Daleks from being created earlier (and I’m still struggling to see how a voice recording from the new Doctor would convince the Dalek manufacturing machine to work). Although, the Daleks’ other plan was more fiendish, in that they managed to send a signal from their ship to London, which kept all of the city’ electric lights switched on, making the citizens a sitting target for incoming air raid from the Luftwaffe.

The problem was actually solved by Amy, despite her being stuck down on earth, as she realised that Dr. Bracewell probably had other useful information about Dalek technology implanted in his mind, and she managed to convince the now suicidal robot to start thinking of a solution – placing ‘gravity bubbles’ around fighter planes so that the pilots could fly into space and stop the signal from the Daleks’ ship. However, despite having the opportunity to also blow up the ship and destroy the Daleks for good, the Doctor had to stop them, as it turns out that Dr. Bracewell was also a bomb – if the Daleks were destroyed he would also blow up, creating a worm hole that would destroy the earth. And despite managing to get away, the Daleks decided to set him off anyway, leaving the Doctor to try and save the earth, again. Although again it was actually Amy who actually saved the day – she noticed that the Doctor’s heavy handed methods of getting through to Dr. Bracewell and convincing him to stop the bomb (which apparently would happen if he realised he was effectively human) weren’t working, and so she tried taking a gentler approach, getting him to remember a past love. And so with the day saved, the Doctor and Amy were off on their way, although not before Churchill finally managed to steal the Tardis key, even though he did return it, somewhat reluctantly.

While Victory of the Daleks didn’t sink to the depths of the Daleks in Manhattan two-parter from series three, it still seemed like a bit of a missed opportunity. Once again the storyline felt rather rushed (although I’m grateful that it wasn’t stretched out to two episodes, as at least this way frees up the next one for something more interesting) and the World War Two setting could have been an interesting way to highlight the genocidal nature of the Daleks by comparing them Hitler’s forces, but instead what we got were a few shots of bombers in the distance, and the usual plucky wartime spirit, here embodied by a defiant old Air-Raid Warden shaking his fist at the planes in the distance. The most shocking thing in the episode was the Doctor’s use of a double negative when arguing with the Daleks – it seems that the show’s educational roots have been long forgotten.

To be honest, I might well have missed some of the nuances of the episode as the sound mix came out particularly horribly on my TV – there were whole stretches of the episode where dialogue was rendered unintelligible by background music (probably a sign that I need to invest in a better speaker system). Which might have explained why so many of the characters felt flimsy and weren’t fleshed out (the worst case being the female assistant in the war rooms who did very little apart from look upset at the end when her pilot fiancé was revealed to have been shot down), and mean that the motivations and explanations were pretty hard to follow. Even so, I would say it was the first outright disappointing episode of the new series, and the worst episode written by former League of Gentlemen member Mark Gatiss (whose previous efforts The Unquiet Dead and The Idiot’s Lantern were both rather fun, creepy affairs). And also an indication that the Daleks really need to be given a rest for a while, even if just for one series.
That’s not to say that the episode didn’t have some highlights, the sight of Daleks carrying files and offering cups of tea was rather amusing, and getting an actor of Bill Patterson’s calibre to play the confused robot scientist was a good idea as he managed to imbibe the character with both despair and joy at his newly discovered humanity at the end of the episode, despite the role also being rather undeveloped. I expect that kids enjoyed this episode a lot more than I did, what with both the presence of the Daleks and the Star Wars style space combat as the British fighter pilots attempted to shoot down their ship, as well as the advert for the Doctor Who video game that the BBC rather unclassily stuck on at the end. And I’m grateful that Gatiss didn’t go for an easy laugh and stick a Churchill car insurance reference in somewhere as I was half expecting he would.
Most importantly, this episode revealed the ongoing mystery for this series – apparently Amy’s inability to remember the Dalek’s previous attack was a matter of concern to the Doctor (which means we’ve moved on from the earlier series’ co-opting of the Buffy ‘ordinary people can’t handle the truth, so just tend to forget anything strange ever happened’ plot device) and, thanks to the creepy final reveal, it seems that it has something to do with the mysterious time/space crack that was Amy’s room in episode one. I’m certainly intrigued about finding out more.
And, next week’s looks like a bit of a belter, with the return of the Doctor’s future wife River Song and the stone angels from Blink, which means it’s bound to be a more frightening episode than this one. But anyway, enough from me – what did you think of this episode, and the series so far?