8/14/08Davros! Woohoo!
The TARDIS lands on Earth, 1984 near the Thames, but there's something going on. The military is there, and they are investigating the presence of strange cannisters. What are these cannisters? Above Earth aboard a ship, there's a whole army of Dalek sympathizers who wish to re-instate the metal warriors to their former state of glory. To do this, they revive the creator of the Daleks, Davros, to help engineer the Daleks into a more powerful race.
There's a lot to like here. It's the 5th Doctor versus a whole slew of Daleks (for the first and only time of his tenure, barring the appearance of a lone Dalek in the Five Doctors) and there's Davros, the greatest villain of all. Plus, there's enough action to make a whole series of bloody action movies.
This needs to be addressed. I'm not squeamish, and the violence in this episode was fairly clean and always bloodless, but this has the highest body count I've ever seen in a Doctor Who episode. Further viewing may turn up an episode with even more violence, but for now, the record stands at this story. Within the first minute, I counted 7 deaths, and by the time the final credits had rolled, we'd passed the number SIXTY. Some of them are with the simple "bloop bloop" ray guns and Dalek lasers, but a good portion of them were with good old fashioned machine guns and pistols. It's rumored that this story had a higher body count than the first Terminator movie and also as much as the first five Friday the 13th movies combined. But again, it's clean deaths, no blood, no gore.
If I'd attribute a negative to this story, it would be the overacting of Terry Molloy as Davros. I get that you want to go big, but he screams a good third of his lines. That's something that a lot of these Doctor Who villains do. I think they must have been encouraged to do this. Screaming a line is one thing. Screaming for 30 seconds at a time reduces the impact. I'm sure lots of people would disagree with that, but I gotta be me.
This is a good story, lots of action, and it's good to see the 5th Doctor facing off against his oldest foes. I give this story a 7/10
2 comments:
Jeez, how did I not know you've been doing this blog? Really cool stuff mate
Anyway, me and Iz on a bit of a retro Who kick at the moment, mainly Tom Baker ones, but will chip in on the ones we do see.
So this one... yeah, cool stuff. I almost loved it. I almost did. But if not for Rodney frigging Bewes as Stein. He was SOOOOO bad it really dragged the rest of it down. When he was off screen it was really enjoyable then he turned up and stunk up the screen again.
That said, it was good seeing Davidson in his prime and I too was surprised just how many people got wasted in this. Agree Davros was a bit manic, but then he always goes way over the top so it didnt bother me at all.
Davros does always go over the top, but in the next Daleks story, Revelation of the Daleks, he gets to play things very quiet, and man, my ears were thankful. I have no idea who Rodney Bewes is, so I guess that didn't bother me.
Thanks for posting here, buddy.
Post a Comment