DiM: The Perfect Acronym

If you've spent any time in the last two years in the festering cesspool that is 'Doctor Who' fandom, then you'll know there have been two distinct reactions to Russell T Davies' reinvention. One faction believes he's ignored everything that made the series great in the first place - intelligent plotting, a proactive hero who uses his brains and not his fists, science winning the day over ignorance - and replaced it with lazily written stories, populated by soap opera characters in a world in which science is just something to nod at in passing, so long as it all looks terribly shiny and there's lots of bright colours. The other faction doesn't care and forgives anything too dreadful by saying 'that doesn't matter', 'no, neither does that' and 'or that.'

The latter group are, of course, wrong. But if you're one of them, give out a mighty cheer: you'll love the Dalek two parter. It's silly. It doesn't make sense. The monsters are laughable, and the Doctor doesn't do something clever to defeat them.

It's true that the plot is almost ludicrously stupid. The Doctor takes Martha to New York, where it turns out that Depression-era civilization is nearly entirely trapped in poverty. People spend their lives living in a slum camp in the park, working for achingly small amounts of money to feed themselves and apparently never noticing that the massive city around them exists. Occasionally one of them will relieve the monotony by getting captured by some Dalek-created pigmen. With the aid of everyone's favourite form of lighning, Gamma Radiation, the Doctor does some DNA rewiring, opens the human Daleks hearts to 'lurve', and saves the day. That's it.

But to complain about the lack of plot in New Who is akin to complaining that 'Hamlet' ....right, stop there. This is getting too silly. Someone has compared Russell T Davies to Shakespeare. Even in passing and partly tongue in cheek, this is far, far too silly.

So now for something completely different.

The Dalek two-parter is rotten. The acting is frequently sub-standard (the girl playing Tallulah escapes some criticism purely because she was surely told to play the part as an exaggerated carciature - 'top of the woild' and all that). The direction is dreadful (the choreography of Martha's dash across stage, the way that Lazlo is quite clearly the mysterious shadowy pigman but Tallulah can't spot it). The writing is amongst the worst in all of Doctor Who ('Urge...to...kill...too...strong' may be the worst line in the series ever). The design is abominable (why does the Dalek Human hybrid look like Scaroth wearing a penis wig?). The music is bad even by Murray Gold's standards (a Dalek Sec choral?). The plot is non-existent, even according to those who don't think plot matters so long as the show looks nice and sparkly. The science is - as someone remarked - almost a new artform, it's so obviously uncaring bollocks.

Put it this way - if the Dalek two parter (and last week's Gridlock) had been a Big Finish audio would anyone genuinely notice the difference in quality between those stories and {random examples} The Apocalypse Element or Catch-1782? Would anyone other than the maddoes on the OG Forum bother trying to staple and glue this hideous monster of a story into something which you didn't have to keep in a locked airing cupboard and feed on scraps of raw meat?

Daft question.

If you love RTD's 'vision' of Who, you're going to copnvince yourself that you like this. You have no choice. And never mind: it looks like a great big exciting story full of bangs and flashes next week - I'm sure you'll love that even more.


* with apologies to Jonn who wrote the original version of the first half of this review.