The Evil of the Daleks episode 4 discussion:
Sp: The opening in the show would have been much better if the kid next door wasn’t practicing his trumpet.
H: He’s talking about the incidental music.
Sp: Attack of the soundtrack!
R: I don’t know, most pornos have really bad soundtracks.
Sp: It got better after that scene though.
<Dalek porn jokes that I will not type here… because most of them don’t make sense>
P: I actually liked the music in this episode for the most part. The middle of it was good music.
K: The very end… the music… I know that music.
H: You mean the Dalek theme? We talked about that a few weeks ago. It was specifically written to be based on the baseline of the Doctor Who theme.
K: Not just that. I’ve heard that music in later Tom Baker stories.
H: Possibly.
Sp: So the Dalek with the handkerchief.
H: I can explain it.
Sp: I know what he was doing. It was just absurd.
SG: I loved the Dalek with the handkerchief. With the plunger!
R: The idea of what they were doing was fine. It was a execution that was lacking.
H: To be fair, that execution was reconstructed.
SG: I don’t think that Dalek handkerchief bit would have been any better with the original.
M: Dalek planting evidence. INCRIMINATE! INCRIMINATE!
Sp: OOH, OOH! WHAT’S ALL THIS THEN? WHAT’S ALL THIS THEN?!
Sp: Well, it was just weird that the Daleks had to be setting traps to begin with. If it wasn’t for the whole studying Jamie testing thing… it would have just shot him. Plot wise I know what they’re doing. Reconstruction or no, the execution seemed a little silly. Although Jamie befriending the Turk and showing his inner nobility was cool.
R: Although I do have to say, because I can, there was a scene in this episode where Jamie climbs a rope in a kilt while a Turkish wrestler is below watching him. That’s all I have to say about that. I don’t think I’ve seen a more homoerotic episode of Doctor Who, and that includes the ones with Captain Jack Harkness.
P: So it wasn’t just me.
K: Ah. No. Jack is gayer. He kissed the Doctor.
R: Rope climbing. Kilt. Turkish wrestler.
M: Tied up in rope with Turkish wrestler maybe.
Sp: The CGI was well done. Those were good models.
H: And they were able to use background pictures of the actual place. Which brings me to something in the recon that I thought was really, really cool. Where we went from a still telesnap of a detail of the room – the little statue – melded into a newly filmed scene of the statue and the prop Dalek moving into the room. I thought that was really cool.
Sp: It was.
K: I had a hard time telling the difference between prop Daleks and CG Daleks, except when doors were involved. And boy, refilmed Victoria was just wee bit chunky.
Sp: They told her to eat!
H: Did we do that joke last week.
K: I’m just saying it was more apparent this week.
Sp: This was a reconstruction of last week’s joke.
H: As I recall, she’s the wife of one of the people doing the reconstruction. I can’t remember exactly who, but that’s what I remember from the description of the recon.
Sp: So, Maxtible is a lot less noble now.
H: Was he ever?
P: Yes he was.
Sp: Yeah, before this I thought that he at least had some sort of sciency motivation. Increasing man’s knowledge, blah blah blah. Now he just wants GOLD! <prospector voice> Gold! Gold! Heheheheee. Dance dance.
K: Yeah, the gold bit was very silly considering he was talking about time travel two episodes ago. I thought he wanted time travel from the Daleks.
R: No, he wants something much more important that time travel.
H: Remember, it wasn’t the gold that he was emphasizing. It was the power that gold would bring. Which also feeds into the time travel experiments. Which feeds into everything. He wants power.
R: Yeah, because really what kind of power does time travel get you?
M: He wants gold to recharge his staff of resurrection.
<D&D references fly around for a bit>
Sp: And Arthur is a bit of a poopy head.
K: Arthur is being possessed by either Daleks or someone alien working in opposition to the Daleks.
R: Or he’s just off his meds. “I’m sorry dear, my medication just hasn’t been invented yet.”
P: I was pleasantly surprised to see just how much live motion in this episode mixed in with CG, and at times I didn’t know which one it was until careful observation.
Sp: The bits with the Doctor explaining what bit of Jamie he’s putting into the machine had the potential to really talk down the viewer, but it worked for me. Because he wasn’t talking down to the viewer, he was talking down to the Dalek. And setting the scene for when he’s going to sabotage the Daleks by all these human weaknesses he’s putting into them.
R: THE DOCTOR HAS CREATED A DALEK WHO CAN ONLY SPEAK IN GAELIC.
H: If I remember correctly, there’s a reason why the Doctor didn’t interact with anyone else in this episode.
K: He interacted with Daleks.
H: Besides the Dalek.
K: Because Jamie’s mad at him!
H: No!
K: Because the filmed it ahead of time because he was on vacation?
H: Yes!
R: Thanks, Dr. Science!
H: Are we at final thoughts? I’m not sure…
R: I have to say, I found Maxtible delighfully creepy.
Sp: Craven.
R: No, creepy. “I am at your heels, sir.”
Sp: Yeah, craven.
H: I don’t think that’s what craven means.
R: Craven is Shaggy and Scooby. As in craven coward.
K: Ronelyn is right. And Maxtible isn’t Shaggy and Scooby. He’s not sniveling…
H: He’s the guy who takes the mask off at the end.
K: He even told himself not to be scared of them.
H: He thinks he has everything well in hand. I just picture the Daleks talking to each other after talking to Maxtible, doing a Bugs Bunny. “He don’t know me very well, do he?”
P: I thought the plot moved really well. I missed last week, so I viewed the BBC photo novel of it on their web site. I thought this plot, in itself really moved cleanly and evenly throughout the episode. In some episodes nothing happens until the last minute, and this is not one of those.
H: So, did people find the bits with Jamie and Kemal exciting? It was kind of hard to follow because it was mostly captions and stills.
A: There was enough there to get it. I enjoyed it.
K: I’m frustrated by yet another, potentially really cool fight scene that we miss because it’s a recon. Why is the one moving picture episode left one without a ton of action? Pout.
Sp: So, making the Turk a big, stupid mute… not offensive.
K: He wasn’t stupid.
A: I didn’t see him as stupid.
Sp: Simple. A big simple mute.
M: Only if they were implying that all mutes are a little simple.
H: He was a stock character. Definitely Kemal was a stock character. But it’s also taking place in the 1860’s. I don’t know. But I like him. I’ve always thought he was a cool touch.
R: Yeah.
Sp: How did they make that Dalek explode?
SG: Carefully…
H: I saw another reconstruction of this that was a little clearer. As I remember they had the rope stretched across…
SG: They tripped it?
H: Kind of. They clotheslined it and slammed it into a wall. It broke the Dalek.
A: So it’s a Pinto, basically.
R: Dalek bumps are no Dalek bumpers.
P: INCINERATE!
M: IMMOLATE!
H: That’s what I remember seeing in stills. But, it’s also hard to tell.
Sp: I sort of got that impression from this recon. But it didn’t look like they hit it hard enough to make it smoke under it’s collar and fizzle out.
SG: It might be made out of aluminum… because who would ever get that close?
H: So, now are we at final thoughts?
Sp: I think so.
A: I enjoyed the episode. It was a little bit difficult jumping in because of missing last week.
E: I found it a little bit difficult to follow at first because there was a lot of action to follow. I find it difficult to follow action with recons. But I found it rather amusing, specifically the part about the guy talking about the gold. I found it at first amusing, then it started to creep me out a bit.
P: Because his motive was profit?
E: Exactly.
SG: I like the episode. I would have liked it more if I could have watched the fight scene at the beginning, but I understand it’s a reconstruction and they do the best they can. I was a little annoyed at Maxtible’s motive being… not even that it’s gold gold, but that it’s a philosopher’s stone kind of story.
R: “Give me your scientist card! Give me that! <shred shred shred> Good day, sir! I said GOOD DAY!”
SG: Exactly. There’s so many other sci-fi premises they could have gone with that it’s just sort of… meh.
P: I felt the same way. That whatever they were promising to deliver to him… if it was something more like electricity or the atom. And it was just alchemy gold. And that’s sort of why we hate him.
H: Honestly though… 1866… Rich dabbler sort of thing.
SG: It’s not that I didn’t think that didn’t fit into the time period, but I found it an annoying trope. It could have more of an interesting hook. And that other guy…
H: Arthur Terral.
SG: Yes. I can’t decide if I like his contribution or not. I think I’ll have to see where it goes. In some ways I really like his character because it’s so bizarre. In other ways it seems like one plot point too many. So… I’m on the fence.
P: The Turk is my favorite character in this plot.
H: Even more than Jamie?
P: Yeah. It’s nice to see a character evolve, and very few do, that are not companions, on this show. I think 90% of the time the music was really good. At it was so good that I actually forgot at times that we were watching a recon. The CGI and new footage certainly helped too. I think some of the characters are becoming more one dimensional.
K: Like Maxtible?
P: Yes.
M: Wow, wish I’d seen the whole episode. Sad Mr. Mother. 🙁
Sp: So, was it a CGI Dalek or a refilmed Dalek that seemed to have a constant case of droopy eyestalk?
R & H: Refilmed
H: One of the big differences between the CGI Daleks and prop Daleks was how smoothly they moved. The prop ones obviously couldn’t move as smoothly.
R: <Dalek voice> I HOPE YOU CAN FORGIVE ME MR. MCCRIMMON. THIS DRY HEAT HAS GIVEN ME A CASE OF THE VAPORS!
P: No.
Sp: What?
R: Handkerchief joke… they can’t all be gems.
K: I am continuing to like this story. This is definitely one where it’s a serious bummer that it no longer fully exists. I would take this one over many of the others that do. 🙁
H: A couple things I wanted to point out for this week. Something that people might not have noticed in the credits was “Dalek stories created by Terry Nation.” There’s a little story there. At this point Nation was attempting to sell a Dalek series. The BBC had decided not to take him up on it, although they would own half of it. So he was trying to sell it, and came relatively close to sell it to an American network. I think it was ABC. The script exists. It was going to be a lot like the Daleks Master Plan with the space service from that story fighting against the Daleks. And it was going to star Sara Kingdom and her brother. So that credit is actually a big deal. Of course, he failed to sell the series.
R: And each week the show will go to a different jungle planet!
H: Do you like my ascot?
R: Look deep into my ascot!
H: You will buy the show! You will buy the show!
R: <Dalek voice> ASCOTS REIGN SUPREME!
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