It's hard to imagine that, just a year before, the same Terry Nation who wrote Genesis of the Daleks wrote this piece of tripe. Not only is the story complicated and awful, we're treated to Daleks who, for most of the story, can't even exterminate anyone the old fashioned way, having to turn to projectile weapons to do so. Granted, that's the point of the story - that the Daleks without their traditional weapons have to cooperate or at least pretend to in order to get their way. But given how powerful the 2005 series has made the Daleks, it's hard to look back at this story and imagine a time when you could just push a Dalek into a body of water to disable it - without Donna Noble somehow being involved, of course. Then we get the scene in which the Daleks are planning to fool the humans, deliberating amongst themselves in those weird voices - Michael Wisher was wonderful as Davros, but his Dalek voices lack a certain something - and then they turn to address said humans who are standing only a few feet away. Um. Humans can hear, can't they? While the new paint job is kinda nice, but new colours of paint don't do a story a lick of good when you have a Dalek letting a prisoner escape and deciding to self-destruct from the shame of it all. And then there's that music. God, that music. Think all of this can't be that bad? Take a look at this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fd9VwidRb0w These may simply be the edited highlights of the worst this episode has to offer, but there's not much more to the story than this. Sigh. No wonder they all had to go into an asylum afterward.
Tony Whitt has previously written TV, DVD, and comic reviews for CINESCAPE, NOW PLAYING, and iF MAGAZINE. His weekly COMICSCAPE columns from the early 2000s can still be found archived on Mania.com. He has also written a book of gay-themed short stories titled CRESCENT CITY CONNECTIONS, available on Amazon.com in both paperback and Kindle format. Whitt currently lives and works in Chicago, Illinois.
