As you probably remember, “Daleks in Manhattan” was a rather tepid affair. Recycling concepts from earlier Who episodes, along with cookie-cutter characters, there really wasn’t a lot to like and even less that could be considered memorably. It did leave open a few interesting possibilities for part two, “Evolution of the Daleks” however. Thankfully, some of those possibilities were followed up on. The result, while certainly not pretty, is an episode that at least has some neat stuff going on at times.
The Cult of Skaro sure has fallen along way since “Doomsday.” Back then, the Cult of Skaro had supreme confidence in their own ability. The leader, Sec, in particular, seemed absolute certain of Dalek superiority. Unfortunately the defeat at the hands of The Doctor seems to have deflated Sec’s ego, forcing him to seek another path. The rest of the Cult, while not suffering from bruised egos, seems to have just descended into general incompetence.
It’s difficult to know exactly what Sec’s plan was before he underwent his transformation. Sec told the Doctor that he planned to create an army of human-Dalek hybrids and overrun the galaxy, but the rest of the Cult of Skaro were there at the time. The hybrid Sec seemed to be a better person than (the human he merged with). It’s not clear whether anything remained of (humans) personality in Sec’s case, but either way, the refined sense of morality had to have come from Sec himself. I’m wondering if Sec knew all along that the hybrid process would change his outlook, or if that was an unplanned by-product of suddenly giving the Dalek the ability to experience human emotions.
It was unclear what exactly Sec was hoping to achieve by introducing a hybrid of Dalek and human DNA into the human shells. You would think, if he was altering their DNA, he would be modifying them into a whole new species. And yet, when the other members of the Cult of Skaro rebelled against Sec and decided to use purely Dalek DNA, said DNA made no apparent physical changes to the shells. Somehow the consciousness of each shell was created from Dalek DNA. Admittedly, I’m no scientitian, but that doesn’t seem to make much sense.
Speaking of things that didn’t make much sense, this episode had an abundance of them. Dalek Sec planned (or at least claimed to have planned) to create an army of hybrids that had the ambition and cunning of humans and the ‘kill everything’ mentality of a Dalek; Hybrid Sec wanted to create essentially a race of quasi-humans, with a bit of Dalek in them, seemingly for the sole purpose of preserving some element of the species. Those plans were fine. The other Daleks, however, decided to create an army of humans that thought like Daleks. As we saw when the shells turned on the Cult of Skaro, Dalek tactics aren’t particularly well suited to human bodies (Dalek tactics tend to center around absorbing enemy fire while attacking the enemy, something that doesn’t work nearly so well for a human). If the Daleks wanted help in conquering the Earth/the galaxy, and didn’t have the means to create more real Daleks, an army of pig slaves would be far more useful than an army of human shells; not only can the pig slaves do complex tasks like taking cover, but their appearance is much more likely to instill fear in the minds of their enemies.
Also, what was with the gamma radiation lightning strike? Gamma radiation, from a solar flare, was supposed to provide the necessary power to animate the army of shells. What does the gamma radiation have to do with a lightning strike? And it’s not like the lightning just happened to strike at the same time; the lightning strike was shown dispersing throughout the shells, providing the energy to animate them. Again, I’m no scientist, but there’s no connection between solar flares and lightning strikes here on Earth. And what the hell was with the Time Lord DNA also being passed through lightning strikes? The whole thing was just bizarre.
Even though the ‘alien leader wants to reform his people only to be betrayed by those people’ plot has been done (many, many times) on [i]Doctor Who[/i] and elsewhere, it was still handled pretty well. Of course, because it was the Daleks that Sec was trying to reform, you knew that his mission was even more doomed than most alien leader reformation attempts, but you still kind of rooted for the guy. Admittedly, had Sec actually succeeded in reforming the Daleks into a benevolent force, it would be really lame (you don’t turn your series most iconic villains into nice guys). But since Sec’s failure was inevitable, it was much easier to support his mission.
There were still a lot of problems with this episode (as I alluded to above), but considering how bland and cookie-cutter the previous episode was, “Evolution of the Daleks” has to be considered something of a success. It still had too many flaws to be considered a great episode, but Sec was an interesting take on your standard ‘leader trying to reform his people’ cliche.
Next week, old people are made young again and surprisingly, it seems that there’s something more sinister going on in the background.
