The Power of the Daleks episode 1 discussion:
Special guest this week, J (Jasper).
MS: I noticed the Daleks are back.
H: And the Daleks aren’t the only thing that’s back this week. We have Ben and Polly and who the hell is that?
P: The man in the black hair.
MS: DUN DUN DUN!
A: I like his new hat!
H: I would like a hat like that.
Sp: He’s not going to play the recorder for the next three years, is he?
M: Yes, he is! And I was quite thrilled to see the first time that he played it.
J: Has anyone done something to see if he’s playing the recorder in Morse code?
H: I don’t know.
P: He was clearly messaging through the music. Yes and No and all that.
Sp: It’s like Harpo Marx kind of thing.
M: It’s clown technique.
E: Musical communication.
J: His clown is strong!
Sp: He’s quite the dandy, isn’t he?
K: That’s the next doctor.
Sp: He’s quite the fop isn’t he?
H: No, that’s the next doctor.
M: The recon was good, but I was more missing – because it’s Pat Troughton I wanted to see him moving! I was missing that.
Sp: Yes, this Doctor has a lot more physicality to him. For one thing, he’s not undead.
J: <old man voice> “Damn kids, get out of my TARDIS!”
P: <Yoda voice> “When 900 years old you are!”
J: I bet that chest was full of all the things that he… <old man voice> “I’m keeping this too!”
H: In regards to me seeing Pat Troughton moving, with the new episode that was just discovered, from the Underwater Menace people are looking at it an reevaluating the entire story, which originally was not well thought of, and now they’re really interested in seeing the rest. I wish we could have seen the bit where he was walking around the mercury swamp, because it sounded really funny.
Sp: So Pop-eye and Arm Candy just kind of rolled with it better than I thought they were going to.
H: I don’t think Ben rolled with it very well.
P: I think the Doctor referring to himself in the third person reinforced the erroneous assumptions, which might explain why Ben is so unwilling to accept it.
<big words are thrown around that I am JUST NOT GOING to type.>
Sp: Doc kept his wits about him. Most times the change makes him go all wibbly. But he recovered, excuse me, he smarted quick enough, to be able to fool the alien types that he was the examiner. Which is kind of like a really nosy Doctor, which works.
Sc: I thought they were human.
H: They were human.
J: The assassin’s plan seemed dependent upon the Doctor happening to walk by. It was a little…
Sp: Contrived?
J: Serendipitous.
K: I was waiting for a… just once… Chesterton, given the scientist’s name was Lesterson. Just once.
Sp: But again, this Doctor is not befuddled. In fact, this Doctor is clearer post-regeneration than the first was on a good night’s rest.
P: Other than his identification of himself, yes.
J: Why did they do that?
H: They wanted to make sure the portrayal was very different. They promised to William Hartnell that Patrick Troughton would play the role very differently.
J: But the dramatic nature of the story seemed odd. They already had him playing it very differently, so why did they need the third person part.
M: Maybe they were thinking about giving him a different name. But it does sort of setup the kind of fun they have later on with the different incarnations of the Doctors and how they butt heads against each other.
A: But this is the first time we see a regeneration, so we the audience, is not absolutely certain it’s the same guy.
J: And him referring to himself in the third person is only going to increase the ambiguity.
H: That is, in fact, the very answer. The audience is right along with Ben and Polly – wondering weather if this is the Doctor.
J: So by this time they’d already established the Daleks are little squibbly things?
H: In the first story with the Daleks, actually.
Sc: I thought the recon was good, but I had trouble distinguishing the 4-5 different bureaucrat types, and I think that was the recon.
J: They introduced the subplot with the woman saying “you should come to the meeting. You could use our help someday.”
H: They’ll explain later. Building story. Building plot.
M: Perhaps foreshadowing.
H: As I recall this is one of the earlier Loose Cannon recons. And at the time they had a limited amount of pictures. There has since been more pictures and footage of this story discovered.
Sp: Did I nod off at the point where the piece of metal was in the TARDIS?
J: That jumped out at me too.
H: When he was taking stuff out of the chest there was a caption when he pulls it out and says “extermination” and then puts it in his pocket.
Just about everyone: Oh, I see!
H: And then later he says the Doctor got it from the Daleks. Okay, final thoughts?
E: This kind of threw me off at first a little bit. Suddenly we have a new Doctor, but it was kind of different in a good way. Made it more interesting I guess. But I’m still never going to get over the musical communication thing.
Sp: Never going to give it up…
Cz: This Doctor is never going to let us down.
Sp: Never going to run around.
Cz: But he DID run around. He leap frogged over a rock.
E: But he’s never going to desert you.
J: But he deserted Susan.
E: So clearly Time Lords invented the Rick Roll.
Sp: No, just duchebaggery.
Sc: This conversation is going very 2008-2009.
Cz: I like this Doctor a WHOLE LOT BETTER because he’s not an old coot.
A: I think that the 500 year diary, giving that it’s only so big, must be transdimentional also.
K: Or he updates it as often as I update Facebook.
A: I liked the music. It was very synthersizery different.
P: I think the backstory of the Doctor referring to himself in the third person threw me enough as it was supposed to, to make me view the episode in more than one way at the same time. So what I’m saying is, even thought I know the Doctor regenerated, I was still seeing the story in two possible ways. One, he was not the Doctor, or two, he was the Doctor with memory problems.
Sp: So the first Doctor.
A: Or three, he was being devious.
P: Someone gets murdered directly in front of the Doctor and the first thing he does is go through his pockets.
M: Loot the bodies!
H: It’s continuity man. It just proves it’s the Doctor we know. He’s stealing someone else’s stuff.
P: I feel like I’m playing Skyrim.
M: Never know when you might need this!
P: Here he has the examiner’s badge, and he’s going on as the Examiner, which is a plan fraught with peril.
H: As Ben points out.
K: Which the Doctor has NEVER done before. (Reign of Terror, the Romans, etc.)
H: As, just as in the Reign of Terror, he also has an awesome hat!
M: Wow, Patrick Troughton made a huge impact from the very first episode.
H: Definitely. It’s like it’s the same show but a different show. From one week to the next too, it’s not like there was a season break or anything.
Sc: So this felt way more like a typical Doctor Who story. We’re getting into the Typical Doctor Who stories I guess.
P: You mean the way the plot’s moving?
Sc: Yeah. And I would have liked to have seen the mercury pool effect.
H: Definitely.
Cz: The mercury was very loud.
P: The generation before me used to play with mercury. And I have this grand scheme of playing it before I die.
K: I have “played” with mercury in a chem lab controlled environment. And yes, it’s fun, if dangerous.
J: Being completely ignorant of Patrick Troughton, and just knowing he was the Doctor who put on the false mask of ignorance to give people a false sense of security. This really set that up.
P: The Columbo effect.
J: Exactly, only with music. It also brought me back to being a kid, and as soon as he enters a dangerous situation upon leaving the TARDIS and wondering why he doesn’t just go straight back to the TARDIS.
H: Actually, in this episode Ben says just that.
J: I’m with Ben, except for the fact that Ben came off as kind of a jerk.
P: Chicken.
J: Jerk-Chicken.
Sp: Yum, jerk-chicken. Alright, so he’s got the trunk full of clothing and the 500 year diary, and all kinds of plot appropriate props. So this suggests that he was well prepared for a regeneration, or the concert, or to be a teen girl. I don’t know. The pace and how they introduced the other characters and the other plot threads – it does have a very much “classic” Doctor Who feel that you didn’t get from the first Doctor when they were first figuring out what the classic Doctor Who feel really is.
K: Just to point out that the first Doctor IS the classic Doctor Who. Just saying.
Sp: You know what I mean. The standard Doctor Who. The go to Doctor Who when they don’t know what to go to that week. Daleks, Silurians, blah blah blah.
H: Steven Moffet has actually come out and said that Patrick Troughton is the first Doctor to play the Doctor as we know him. This is the first actor to play the Doctor as we know it, rather than trying to figure out what is going on.
K: Bragen – same guy as the bad guy from Pyramids of Mars?
H: I believe it is!
P: Gold star!
K: Also, what I found really interesting was the comment that it was the TARDIS that allowed him to regenerate. At least three later regenerations happen outside of the TARDIS.
H: But is this a regeneration or a renewal?
K: Whatever. My observation though – every “New” Doctor story HAS regenerated in the TARDIS, and they’ve made a point that the TARDIS was needed for it to properly work. I’m not saying it’s the TARDIS that makes him regenerate, but the TARDIS seems to be involved somehow that I think they’ve emphasized more in the new series.
H: And then you also have Peter Davison in the Zero room, but that’s really getting off topic.
K: Okay. Anyway, I thought it was cool. Like they’re thinking about it and trying to include much earlier continuity. I LOVE that!
H: One thing I’ll observe is that a lot happens in this episode. In the past few years we’ve said that about a bunch of different episodes.
K: Like only all the time!
H: But this time we get all the way from the beginning of the regeneration, going through him recovering, Ben and Polly’s confusion, all the way through a firm setup of the story…
Cz: That’s crazy talk!
H: Quiet you! Compared to a lot of… basically compared to every other regeneration story, this had a lot packed into the first 25 minutes.
J: This one they had to handle the regeneration for the first time, AND do the plot. In future stories they don’t have to explain it.
H: Exactly. And it’s just really well written. And this story is written by David Whitaker, our old friend, the first story editor of Doctor Who. He wrote some really good stories, and it’s pretty evident. It’s interesting that they turned to him to establish the new Doctor just as he worked on establishing the first Doctor. And no, Terry Nation had nothing to do with this story. We have no more Terry Nation for the rest of the project.
Cz: But do we have more jungle episodes?
H: You’ll find out!
Cz: Ah, that just means that you don’t know!
H: Or do I?…
NEARLY EVERYONE: DUN DUN DUN
