Tony reveals all.
Revelation of the Daleks
is so distinctive a mix of the vivid and garish and the dark and morbid, it
earns its place as one of the most grand guignol stories in Doctor Who history
– an entertainment so macabre as to be tasteless, but yet entirely compelling,
with a mind-blowing miserablism deep down in its soul and its assessment of the
morality of human beings.
The notes of its
storytelling strands seem to offer a palette of depressives right from the
start – Necros is a world of funeral directors, and therefore a world involved
in the unsentimental business of tending to dead people, to maintain an
illusion of life for their relatives until the bodies can be safely disposed
of. It’s run by professional cynics and grotesques, from the emotionally
desperate Tasambeker, to the have-a-go thugs, Lilt and Takis, to the ultimate
sleazebag from every professional outfit everywhere, the pompous,
self-revolving but never-quite-unintelligent Jobel (played with a particular
knack for nastiness by Clive Swift).
It’s also a world of snow
and ice, lowering the emotional temperature even further – and that’s before we
even meet a disfigured, deeply confused mutant, the product of experiments by
the so-called Great Healer (a title which in and of itself embodies
grotesquerie). Meanwhile, there’s Alexei Sayle as the most annoying DJ in the
universe, playing music to what are probably already-empty caskets; there’s the
spinning head of Davros in a catacomb, like the spider at the heart of this web
of bad taste; there’s the grandly-turbaned Eleanor Bron as Kara with her
waspish secretary, Vogel, planning to assassinate the Great Healer; there’s fatalistic but discredited Knight of the Grand
Order of Oberon, Orcini, played with spectacular restraint by William Gaunt,
and his disgusting squire, Bostock, who might be thought of as the War
Baldrick. There’s not a character in the whole thing that isn’t existing on at
least two levels, their public face sometimes barely hiding the darker reality
underneath. Everything has that note of formal fakery that makes the world of
Necros a polite and brittle lie, from the make-up on the attendants to the DJ’s
‘entertainment’, to people supposedly in suspended animation, to the idea of
some of them being there only until the disease that killed them can be cured,
only to have it revealed that the cure was found decades earlier, to the
polystyrene monument that falls on the Doctor and the fake blood that comes
with it.
And then of course there’s
Natasha Stengos and her drunken doctor-friend, prowling about the catacombs
looking for her father’s dead body.
It’s worth remembering
that Revelation of the Daleks is a two-part, 45-minute-per-episode story, and
the Doctor and Peri spend the entirety of the first part trudging through the
snow, killing rather forgiving mutants, shinnying over walls rather than
finding the front door, breaking pocket watches, glimpsing Daleks and then in
the Doctor’s case having a fake monument fall on him – all before they even GET
to Tranquil Repose. As such, Eric Saward on writing duties ‘pulls a Robert
Holmes’ in making the other players and their stories so fascinating that they
absolutely exist outside of the Doctor’s intervention and hold our interest.
Every character has a story, a personality, an arc here, albeit most of them
end in gruesome, mostly Dalek-powered death. But whereas Holmes’ fascinating
secondary characters had a tendency to fall on the redeemable side of the
spectrum, Saward brings undiluted, positively visceral miserablism to the
screen, making all his characters phonies of some variety (with the possible
exceptions of Bostock and Natasha), giving them masks to hide their real, dark
natures behind, and using the notion of Davros as a corrupting agent to expose
those natures.
Even when they arrive, the
role of the Doctor and Peri in events as they unfold is marginal at best – Peri
goes to see the DJ and helps him destroy a Dalek with ultra-directional rock
and roll, while the Doctor potters about, gets locked up, discovers the actual
Dalek-and-Davros plot in an info-dump from his fellow prisoners, confronts
Davros and then…is responsible for none of the resolution of the story, except
a brief lesson in botany, which could revolutionise the future of Necros. When
you think about it, Kara employs Orcini and Bostock to kill Davros, while
aiming to destroy them too by a bomb in their communicator. Almost everybody
ends up dead, and the Doctor can save none of them, it’s Lilt and Takis who
eventually call in the ‘Supreme’s Daleks’ to come and destroy Davros’ new
recruits and take him back to Skaro – notably, the Daleks don’t level the
planet on their way out, they just take their creator and swan off back to the
stars – and Orcini eventually blows himself and Davros’ new Daleks to death.
It’s a little grim that Lilt and Takis, the thugs-turned-funeral-directors, get
to survive, and the Doctor’s lesson about the weed plant producing protein
reveals to the Necrosians what we learned in Episode 1 – that the Great
Healer’s eradication of famine in this corner of the cosmos needn’t end with
him being rooted out and carted off – protein is abundant on Necros in a
vegetable form, so they needn’t have been eating their processed relatives all
this time.
In a Doctor Who story in
which neither the Doctor nor his companion get to actually do much of any
relevance, it’s mind-blowing how much Saward packs into the story, how many
threads intertwine and how dark and cynical the key Davros plot is, underneath
it all – harvesting human brains (or indeed heads) and turning them into
Daleks, while feeding the rest of their bodies (and those of the less
intellectually endowed) to the populace as concentrated protein. The darkness
of that plot, swirled around as it is by violent, lecherous and desperate
funeral directors, corporate leaders determined to bite the hand that feeds
them, assassins looking for the redemption of their lost honour, ubiquitous
Daleks, and bickering bodysnatchers, is rendered hypnotically on screen by
Graeme Harper, and ultimately it delivers what is many people’s favourite Colin
Baker story, its unique visual style and the spot-on musical sizzles lifting a
plot where no-one is remotely pleasant or telling the truth into a hallmark of
the Baker era. Certainly in the way it’s presented, it’s a defining moment of
that era – the Stengos glass Dalek that feels its mind succumbing to Dalek
conditioning and then begs and screams for death is iconic of the harder, more
gruesome tone the Colin Baker era espoused (after bleeding Cyber-converts,
tortured Varosians, the Doctor quipping at people in acid baths, and the
personal poisoning of an Androgum by this morally crusading Doctor comes this
story in which Saward, as he did in Resurrection of the Daleks and Attack of
the Cybermen, raises the game of the villains of the Doctor Who world, making
them seem more real and dangerous by turning up the body-count). It shows the
body-horror of Dalek-conversion, just as Attack of the Cybermen shows
Cyber-conversion, in a visceral way that had never been seen before, and the
sense it leaves with the reader is that the universe is not only more real and
dangerous than we’d ever previously imagined, but that ordinary people – business
people, grieving people, even people there to provide us a service at our most
vulnerable, like funeral directors, can be dark, deceitful, bullying and
complex, so if our Doctor is harder and more voluble than we’ve been used to,
he still stands for one of those unusual absolutes of goodness in a universe
that’s out to get us.
Revelation of the Daleks,
even today, can be a shocking watch. The pure venality that runs through its characters’
veins can make it a hard, exhausting, depressing watch. But it’s also a
gripping watch that you can rarely turn away from once you’ve started, because
the maelstrom of evil, from the petty, like Jobel, to the greedy, like Kara, to
the utterly corrupting, like Davros in his lair, just grows and grows and
swallows you up, leaving you at the end feeling like you’ve just spent an hour
and half on an epic adventure with real people, but also, strangely, enormously
glad it’s over and you made it out alive.
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