Doctor Who - Remembrance of the Daleks (1975)

Classic Who...Possibly The Best Of The McCoy Years

For fans of Doctor Who both old and new, this is a very good title to add to your collection.

The plot and dialog in "Remembrance of the Daleks" are both quite strong. This story takes the Doctor and his new companion Ace back to the very location where Doctor Who started its run in 1963. The Doctor's oldest enemies, the Daleks, make great villains as always. In this case there are two factions of them fighting each other and the Doctor. Basically one faction represents the classic Daleks under their creator Davros whereas the other is a faction of renegade, mutant Daleks. Both are fighting for an artifact the Doctor left on Earth back during the first Doctor Who serial in 1963. It's a fun way to connect the lives of two incarnations of the Doctor though separated by over twenty years. This is classic Who at its best. The commentary track is very good- watch the show and listen to it for interesting tidbits. Was that the Doctor's script sticking out of McCoy's pocket throughout the show? No way!

Compared to some television-to-DVD transfers, this one is nearly flawless. The video and sound go off without a hitch. The special effects, while generally b-grade or thereabouts throughout the run of the classic Doctor Who years, are actually quite good. By the late 1980s, Who had a decent budget and the availability of early computer generated special effects helped some as well. While very wobbly due to the wheels they rolled on, the Daleks for instance manage to go up stairs for the first time ever. They also manage to move about freely for the first time because with their new wheels they didn't have to rely on flat services for movement.

It's interesting that the Sylvester McCoy years (Seventh Doctor) are widely held to be the worst run in the entire history of the series. This is because during that time, the cast and crew decided to show the darker side of the Doctor and played around with a darker wardrobe and darker, more pessimistic dialog for the character. Despite all that, McCoy proves in this serial that he was more than capable in the role. He brings a fair amount of slap stick comedy to the part (he was actually a bit of a comedian by profession anyway). He also nails down the serious side of the Doctor with his harsh conversation with Davros and his dismissal of some of his human companions as intellectual inferiors.

This DVD is a good purchase for any Doctor Who fan. It's fun, true to the spirit of Who and is very possibly the best story arc from the McCoy years. Even new Who fans familiar with the Ninth (Chris Eccleston) and Tenth (David Tennant) Doctors will find something to enjoy here. November 8, 2007

"You can always judge a man by the quality of his enemies!"

By 1988 "Doctor Who" was a show with a long enough history that it could time travel into its own past, and yet a fine enough show that it could do so and still be fresh and engaging rather than musty. "Remembrance of the Daleks" brings the Doctor and his relatively new companion Ace back to the old London junkyard where it all started back in 1963, and countless little continuity references and in-jokes pepper the story throughout its four episodes. Sometimes this can bog a story down and be confusing for new viewers, but here anyway these pitfalls are avoided--though they cleverly add an extra level of significance for the long-time viewer, they are pretty much unobtrusive so that the story flows coherently without an encyclopedic knowledge of "Doctor Who" lore. Except for the biggest continuity reference of all, the Doctor's arch-enemies (also vintage 1963) the remembrance of whom give this storyline its title. They require a little explanation, and that's exactly what the viewer gets in the first episode as the Doctor recaps for Ace more than two decades of Dalek background in a few seconds laced with hilarious comedy while hurtling down the road in a "borrowed" military van. And so a plot device that could've been static, stale, and boring is in fact ingeniously rendered dynamic, fresh, and engaging for old-timer and newbie alike. Just one more example of why the longest-running sci-fi series on our planet just never gets old.

Actually, the Daleks are really at their best here in a way we haven't seen for a long while, and not just because of the revamped special effects making their death rays look more deadly and finally granting them full conquest of the staircase obstacle (which made the poor devils seem so ineffectual back in "Destiny of the Daleks"). In fact, I suspect their recovered evil luster is probably related to the fact that the withering presence of Davros is absent until his disappointing and slightly anti-climatic appearance in the last episode, his last diminishing return in the show's history (knock on wood!). No, for the vast majority of the story the Daleks are the principle villains--two warring factions of them, in fact, which adds a wicked twist to an old tune while picking up the melody where "Revelation of the Daleks" left off. But Imperial or Renegade, the Daleks are again portrayed as ruthless and deadly, manipulating human victims through mechanical implants when not exterminating them dead on sight and without warning, and all according to their own malevolent initiative and according to their own sinister masterplan. Once again the Daleks really feel like a serious menace, and the story is superbly thrilling as a result. The special-weapons Dalek is also a nice touch, though he's a bit heavy-handed--um, well, heavy-turreted rather.

More to the point, this is indubitably a "Dalek" story rather than merely a story featuring the Daleks. What I mean is that the characteristic xenophobia of the Daleks is seriously foregrounded on multiple levels, both as their primary motivation as characters--even their internecine warfare is due to the fact that "they hate each other's chromosomes"--and as the overall theme of the storyline, the point of the tale as it were. Daleks, such sublimely logical creatures and yet their actions are motivated by that most irrational of urges: hatred of those different from themselves. For this they will conquer, enslave, and murder without pity. Kind of sounds like human beings on a bad day, doesn't it, and many aspects of the plotline and script explore the "Dalek" in us all, and yet cleverly within the specific historical context of British society in the 1960's. That such is the overarching theme of "Remembrance" is signaled to the attentive viewer in a rather magnificently subtle fashion by a dramatic pre-title sequence (somewhat unusual for the show's format during its classic run): you see a close-up shot of the Earth in its entirety while hearing 1960's radio waves emanating from our globe into space, the first of which goes "Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, we all breathe the same air, and we all cherish our children's future..." and goes on to Martin Luther King's famous "I have a dream" speech even as a Dalek spacecraft lumbers menacingly into view "Star Destroyer" style, closing in on its blue-green target. Positively chilling. This is one thing great science fiction always does: explore the human through the alien, the familiar through the fantastic, the present through the future. This is also a hallmark of "Doctor Who" throughout the years, one big reason why we can look past lame special effects and minor flaws time and time again and enjoy this show year after year.

Of course another reason the show never gets old is that the Doctor regenerates time and time again, giving the main character a new face and style each time and giving a new actor a chance to craft his own spin on our favorite centuries-old vagabond of a renegade Time Lord. "Remembrance of the Daleks" in fact marks the opening of Sylvester McCoy's second season in the role, but still it's the earliest story of his tenure to make it to DVD thus far. What are we to make of his take on the Doctor? How are we to judge the Doctor in his seventh incarnation? Well, maybe the high quality of his enemies gives him a boost here, but this here seems to be the real...oh never mind, that's a wretchedly predictable pun, but still true in so far as it goes. He has a masterful ("doctorful"?) grasp of the character's underlying personality traits, magnifying many of them while giving them all his own particular imprint: Delightfully eccentric, bumblingly curious, wonderfully arrogant, deeply ethical but not ostentatiously so, sarcastically compassionate, highly irreverent, likeably alien--a goofy mastermind ("doctormind"? okay okay enough) starkly out of place and yet cozily right at home anywhere and anywhen he goes. McCoy's timing and delivery are often spot on, too, convincingly making sudden shifts from comedic to serious mode and back again. At his most deeply serious, there's what I now personally consider a mostly overlooked high point of the show's long history, a deeply reflective scene with him at a late-night cafe chatting with the guy at the register about the course of history and cause & effect and all, meditating (as we realize later) on the enormity and potential consequences of what he's preparing to effect through the most cunningly poker-faced guile: the total and utter extermination of the Daleks along with their entire solar system. I never thought that the fourth Doctor's classic "Have I the right?" scene from "Genesis of the Daleks" might have anything close to a rival, but what that one accomplishes on an dramatically epic scale this one does in a hauntingly quiet register that's almost (almost, I say) as effective and in some ways more moving actually. "Every large decision creates ripples," he comments thoughtfully, and yet this time, this time thank goodness, the Doctor doesn't hesitate! September 3, 2007

It's McCoy, My Boy!

"Remembrance of the Daleks," considered by many to be one of the best McCoy stories, is pretty good. It attempts to make the entire series up to that point come full circle for the twenty-fifth anniversary of Who. No anniversary celebration would be complete without the good Doctor's greatest (and most loved by fans) enemies--the Daleks. In this tale we find the Doctor and Ace back where William Hartnell was so many years before them and the "Professor" has returned to finish what he started. Two warring factions of Daleks have come to Earth to do what they do best: exterminate. They've also come to collect a device to aid them in their time-hopping destruction. The Doctor, Ace, and some well-meaning humans combine forces to stop them. The only problem is that there are a few in their ranks who can't be trusted. Will the Doctor and Ace be able to figure out who's who before one of the Dalek factions grabs hold of the Eye of Omega? "Who" knows?

This particular adventure has plenty of action and mystery in it to keep the viewer interested. McCoy and Sophie Aldred (Ace) have great chemistry on the screen, and that makes the story even more enjoyable. While many see McCoy as one of the worst incarnations of the Doctor around, I like him just fine. He, along with the writers, explores the Doctor's darker side that seems to have originated with Patrick Troughton's Doctor and came through even more with Colin Baker's turn as the Time Lord. Aldred, full of youthful exuberance, steals most of the scenes that she is in. She's given a love interest in this tale that allows us to see Ace go from bat-wielding tomboy to blushing beauty. The rest of the cast gives solid performances as well.

As with all of the original "Who" tales, the show suffers from bad special effects. To many, including myself, these subpar effects actually make the show more enjoyable. In this particular adventure, however, they become annoying at times. This is best highlighted by the wobbly, jittery movements of the Daleks. It's hard to believe that the fiercest enemy of the Doctor suffers from a bad set of shocks.

The DVD, much like all of the DVDs in the original series' catalogue, comes with some great commentary from the Doctor and his companion, a fun blooper reel, a Who's Who feature on the primary actors in the show and multi-angle scenes.

Look beyond the lumbering movements of the Daleks and you've got one of the better Doctor Who adventures in "Remembrance of the Daleks." Fans of the original series will be glad to see the old Doctor in all of his glory. For those of you who only know the Doctor from the new series, you're in for a treat. August 8, 2007

The Same Old McCoy Junk

You used to always be able to count on the Daleks and the Cybermen to liven up an otherwise boring season, but not in this case. The production team went too far in making the Doctor something more special than he was originally intended to be. For most of his time as a renegade Time Lord, the Doctor was just that, an outcast from his society trying to do good in the universe. But the 7th Doctor was put forward as something like a god among the Time Lords. In Remembrance of the Daleks, he tells Davros that he is the Lord President of Gallifrey! How did this happen? Where did that come from? True, the Doctor was elected President in The Invasion of Time, but he abdicated the position. True, he was elected again at the end of The Five Doctors, but he fled from Gallifrey, a de facto abdication confirmed in the Trial of a Time Lord. The production team said that too much had been revealed about the Doctor over time and they wanted to introduce more mystery into the character, but it truly did NOT work! It added an untenable stream of discontinuity into the show. One more gripe: If the writers and producers wanted to pay homage to the early days of the show by going back to Totter's Yard, they should have left Davros out of the script! Davros was so used and abused after Genesis of the Daleks that he totally detracted from the episodes he appeared in after Genesis. No one could play him like Michael Wisher making him an unbelievable character! Remembrance of the Daleks stands as one of the worst examples of Dr. Who, outdone only by the other tripe put out during his tenure as the Doctor.

UPDATE: I recently viewed the "what if" commentary on the DVD release of Survival. I never thought I'd say this, but thank God they canceled the program! The commentary on the Survival DVD explains why the Doctor was made out to be more than he was originally intended to be - it was by design. The Script Editor Andrew Cartmel had decided that the Doctor needed to be more mysterious, that too much of his past and origins had been revealed. To this end, he was basically written as someone involved in the creation of the time travel facility of Gallifrey, someone crucial to Gallifreyan history, as one of three Gallifreyans responsible for the creation of the Time Lords. Obviously not much of this was revealed in the scripts. How ridiculous! None of this works with the series history and it just shows how out of touch the WHO team was by the end of the 1980s and how JNT had lost control of the series. Remembrance of the Daleks is a prime example (though not the best example - see Time and the Rani, Greatest Show in the Galaxy and almost any other McCoy serial) of why the show had to go! March 20, 2007

Great fun for Who Fans!

This is a great addition to your Doctor Who collection. This story opens up differently in that the title sequence comes after a small introduction, the sound effects and graphics are great for the time that they where made. I would recommend to any Doctor Who fan. November 3, 2006

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