(613) Resurrection of the Daleks - Part 1

Resurrection of the Daleks is a story that should have gone out as a four part adventure to mark the departure of Tegan, however due to the 1984 Winter Olympics this was reduced to two forty-five minutes episodes which was in effect a trial for what would happen in the next season. Technically this was the first Dalek story since they made a cameo appearance in The Five Doctors but really their last story was Destiny of the Daleks back in 1979.

The opening shot is very grim and dank which is probably how things felt in 1984 (I wasn’t even 1 when this episode aired so I wouldn’t know). The setting of the police shooting innocent people is something that is still quite shocking. It was filmed at Shad Thames and the Doctor comments that it was once bustling with life and Tegan replies with that it might be once again and she is right because if you watch the documentary you will see that it has become quite a trendy place to visit. Lytton comes across in the early stages of the episode as the boss and the one coming up with the plan but once the Daleks appear, he loses a bit of that authority vibe and just goes back to being a slave of the Daleks.

The story is set in two places. 1984 London and a prison space ship. Firstly there is a mystery about the time corridor that the Doctor, Turlough and Tegan encountered in Frontios. It doesn’t take long for the Doctor to realise who is behind it and from that moment the story is off to the races.

The Daleks’ first appearance in the episode comes just fifteen minutes into the story and comes after a huge explosion which shows where the budget was going. It’s not immediately clear why they are there because their invasion plans tend to take place on a planetary scale. It doesn’t take very long for this to be revealed. They have arrived there to free Davros who had been cryogenically frozen in Destiny of the Daleks. I like how Davros is clearly being awkward. Lytton wants Davros to go back onto his ship and yet Davros wont budge. The Daleks want Davros to think that they are working for him but in reality they are going to try and use him for their own ends.

This episode has a great deal of famous faces. Firstly there is Rodney Bewes who plays Stein. Bewes is perhaps most famous for appearing in The Likely Lads (1964-66) and Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads (1973-74). Stein is a character that has a stammer which is something that becomes relevant later on. Rula Lenska has been in a huge number of things including playing Mrs Peacock in the ITV game show Cluedo. She plays a character called Styles who doesn’t really care about the things that are going on around her and the sub-standards that they are working in. Maurice Colbourne had appeared in such things as The Day of the Triffids (1981) and The Onedin Line (1979). Leslie Grantham has a rather supporting supporting role as Kiston. Grantham would go on to play Dirty Den in Eastenders (1985-1989 & 2003-2005).

Mercer is someone who thinks that he can changes things on the space station which is perhaps naïve considering that there is very little evidence that people around him don’t feel the same. It’s a good performance from Jim Findley and he has some good war of words with Lenska’s Styles. Terry Molloy becomes the third actor to play Davros. I think that his performance of the evil genius is perhaps the craziest version that we see. It’s one that immediately captures my attention and it’s a good idea that Molloy hasn’t tried to copy what Michael Wisher had done and just done what a new actor would do in playing the Doctor and that is give the character a new style but still make it seem like the same Davros that David Gooderson played.

Lighting has been one the big problems during the Davison era but the levels of lighting that are used in this story seem to mirror what was seen during Earthshock. There are moments where the lighting is a bit brighter but its not to the level of Warriors of the Deep. The Prison Ship is where the main action takes place and it’s a good group of sets and even the warehouse sets are dark and dirty so it kind of raises the question as to why the sets were so brightly lit for most of the stories.

It’s clear where the cliffhanger was suppose to take place had this been a 25 minute episode. It would have happened when the Dalek appears in the warehouse. As a result that this isn’t a 25 minute episode it means that there is a weird feeling about this particular moment because it clearly looks like a cliffhanger but the resolvement doesn’t really work and then its forgotten in a moment.

Tegan gets a bump on the head and this pretty much renders her incapacitated for most of the story. Considering that this is her final story, I would have thought that they would have had her involved in the story a bit more in this story. Peter Davison spends most of the episode in the warehouse looking around for the contents of the Dalek. It’s a bit disappointing really but on a positive note he does get to fire a gun at it when it is under a blanket. When he does eventually leave he takes Stein with him in the TARDIS but this doesn’t happen until just before the end of the episode. Mark Strickson gets to be the most active when he accidentally ventures onto the prison ship. He ends up joining Mercer and Styles to try and blow up the prison ship.

The proper cliffhanger is quite good because its Stein pointing a gun on the Doctor and reveals that he is a Dalek agent.  It was a good way to end the episode and I think I am going to like the 45 minute format. The issue with the cliffhanger that never was isn’t something that can really be blamed on the production crew cause they didn’t know what would happen so they did the best they could. As a story so far, it is quite good with a vibe to it that has been missing from the show since the last Cyberman story and it looks like one of the strongest Dalek stories since Genesis.