Far from perfect but a helluva blip up.
The first really good ep since Caves of Androzani.
What makes this great?
The direction is ok. Andrew Morgan's previously undistinguished work on Time and the Rani does not hold him back.
There are some magnificent action scenes with actual pace (especially in p1) but my favourite is the final scene payoff in p4. Simple procession, with sonorous dialogue and the closing slam of a church door... wallop.
Rachel and Allison are very good. Chunky Gilmore is going well. Peter Halliday (previously The Invasion, Carnival of Monsters) as the vicar is VG. Sgt Mike has a clumsy character twist that at least gives a semblance of depth. It doesn't seem to matter to the plot. The Daleks are odd looking with their rubber wheels.
Some of the "soldiers" in the early scenes of p1 don't know much about "attention" and "stand at ease".
Effects are just going. Stunts are ambitious. The Dalek shuttle 'prop' is an attempt to make the end of p3 mind blowing but the DW budget is just not up to it. If this ever comes out on BluRay it's gonna look like one coat plywood (cause it is...) Worse it looks *very* dated in 32 years on.
Script is exciting and fresh. Unlike the previous two Dalek stories there's some kind of a plot. The theme of racial purity ("They hate each others' chromosomes") is the thing that distinguishes this. For the first time in 4 series this is a DW story that is **about** something. There is a huge lesson in this.
Incidentally the "No Coloureds" scene is grounded and domestic and illustrates the cosy paradox of fighting Nazis yet while the home grown racists live insidiously amongst us. In the modern 2020 context of Pauline Hanson, Brexit, and Donald Trump that is something that truly resonates today.
The revisionist continuity (The Hand of Omega, the destruction of Skaro, the dark Doctor) was a bit of a strecth for DW fans at the time but it seems less of a problem compared to modern Who. This is something that has grown well with time.
Sophie's great, Sylvester makes some leaps. The devious hidden agenda Doctor is new and provides interest.
ABM Rating 3.10/4.00
LJM Rating 3.70/5.00
SPJ Rating 8.20/10
No. 54 (out of 151)
Link to Cumulative Rankings
Rankings Scoreboard
From http://www.pagefillers.com/dwrg/reme2.htm
"You Have to Protect Your Own" by Jason A. Miller 14/12/18
Some classic Doctor Who stories age very well. Or, at least, the septuagenarian directors who recorded audio commentaries for their stories on DVD, 30 to 40 years later, wanted you to believe that. "It really holds up today," somebody would say, or "That compares very well to a feature film," somebody else would say. Uh... no. No, they don't. Even stories that I love to pieces seem hopelessly outdated today, and "special editions" don't help much; putting new video effects on The Ark in Space doesn't change the fact that the rest of the story is trapped in amber, 1975-vintage.
I was honestly expecting Remembrance of the Daleks to play very poorly here in 2018, thirty years after its production. The cheap OB video look, the Casio-inspired synth-heavy '80s score... this looks, from a distance, like a straight-to-video BBV production, not a miniature feature film like we get now on the Netflix.
But, right there in the Remembrance pre-credits sequence, you hear the voice of the Duke of Edinburgh, as the camera pulls back from the Earth to reveal a Dalek battleship listening in on 1963 radio signals. And, hey, then you realize, 30 years after recording, the Duke of Edinburgh would be played on TV by Matt Smith, the 11th Doctor. That's a pretty remarkable coincidence, the long way around, for a show that aired in the 25th anniversary season, and in the same Part One which would feature Ace nearly missing a broadcast of Doctor Who Season 1 on the Beeb. And later on in Part One, the Doctor is mistaken for an applicant for the position of caretaker at Coal Hill School. He'd come back for that job, later, too...
Almost as nice as the inadvertent future-continuity nods are all the returning players in the first two parts. Michael Sheard and Peter Halliday, beloved guest stars in years past, come back for bit parts; Pamela Salem, so dynamic in The Robots of Death, is back here with an even larger part and a center of gravity for the story as a female scientist (in 1963!). That's John Leeson as the voice of the decoy Davros, and, you know what, you just cannot have a Doctor Who cliffhanger without Roy Skelton screaming into the ring modulator at the end of Part One. As an old fan, I found that the class-reunion feel of this episode kept it fresh.
The passing of the years also doesn't dilute the very careful staging of director Andrew Morgan. It's clever how Morgan hides three major secondary characters in plain sight in the first few scenes of Part One; Rachel Jensen, Mike Smith, and the Girl, are all introduced silently walking through scenes, or sitting/standing in the background, before the story's even five minutes old and before you become aware that those characters are going to be important for the rest of the story. That's remarkably cinematic, for a series which so often employed old-school BBC directors of the "Just keep the camera still, and point and shoot, love" school of filmmaking. Also nifty is the Part Two cliffhanger, in which the camera takes the POV of a crouching Ace, surrounded by Daleks, and looking up fearfully at them -- I can't recall too many cliffhangers that took the time to work in a direct POV shot from an unusual angle like this. The hand-held camera prevalent in the OB-video stories of McCoy's era was often distracting, and mostly looks terrible when you watch the other stories again in 2018, but here's one shot that just plain works.
By the end of the story, I was so conditioned by Morgan's greatness that I began imagining allusions that might not have been intended. Ratcliffe's death running up the metal warehouse stairs seems similar to how Tobias Vaughn died in "The Invasion", but that might not have been something Morgan was aware of back in 1988, several years before that story came out on VHS. And the from-the-ground shot of the Doctor stepping out of the van to confront the Black Dalek in Part Four matches up pretty well to the shot of Robert DeNiro getting out of the car in the Godfather Part II, getting ready for his final confrontation with Don Ciccio in Sicily.
One casting choice from Morgan that seems a bit unusual in retrospect was Joseph Marcell, who has a single scene in Part Two as a cafe attendant (and what a scene). Marcell is best known in the US as the butler Geoffrey on the long-running "Fresh Prince of Bel-Air", a show about as genetically unlike Doctor Who as it is possible to get. He's charming here, more than holding his own against McCoy. The scene has no real relation to the story, but it's remarkably good and highlights Aaronovitch's skills as a writer (of which more later).
Now, Davros. Michael Wisher was the Davros, yes. David Gooderson... well, we don't talk about him. Julian Bleach and Terry Molloy are very, very good Davroses (Davri?). This story has John Leeson tease Davros early on -- he's voicing a character who is later revealed to most decidedly not be Davros. But, from the second that the Ban Roll-On Dalek wheels onto the Imperial Dalek bridge in Part Three, it is so painfully obvious that this is Davros, that the whole John Leeson charade just flies out the window, like Ace flew through the window in Ian Chesterton's Coal Hill School science lab. Any subtlety that Morgan had tried to invest the story with kinda disappears at this point.
Also unsubtle is the musical sting used to highlight Mike's betrayal when it's revealed in Part Three... after his betrayal had already been revealed in Part Two. Perhaps Keff McCullough was just showing off the percussion buttons on his new Casio keyboard? And dang, the hand-claps as the Doctor and Ace flee Ratcliffe's warehouse in Part Three is just totally radical, isn't it? As for the Renegade Daleks' "Time Controller"... you know, The Sharper Image was still an active franchise in 1988, when this story was made. Lots of us teens went and hung out at The Sharper Image, to play with the cool toys (and none of us ever bought anything, which is why The Sharper Image is now out of business). How did they think people wouldn't recognize this prop/toy?
So, Andrew Morgan, genius; the casting, mostly genius; and you can forgive Terry Molloy turning up the dial to 11,000 as Davros because, hey, this is a reunion story, of sorts. But that doesn't even touch on the writing, which is where the greatness of this story really lies.
This is clearly a "first novel" of sorts, with Aaronovitch bringing about five different complete story ideas to the table, and cramming them into one 90-minute feature. The ongoing Dalek civil war storyline is interesting enough, and the Special Weapons Dalek just about papers over the fact that Part Four is one long numbing car chase/death-ray fight. But there's the female empowerment of Rachel and Allison, the two scientists co-opted by the military. There's the cafe scene, with the Marcell's character, a descendant of slaves, imagining a world where he could have stayed in Africa. And the Hand of Omega burial scene, which allows Sylvester McCoy to stretch his acting muscles in a different direction than usual.
And then there's the racism. As one of the Classic Series' few minority writers, Aaronovitch goes all in here with pointed social commentary. Ratcliffe is a white supremacist businessman who's lured an Army Sergeant into his schemes for control of the UK. Sergeant Smith's mother, who seems like such a nice old lady, has the "No Coloureds" sign in her boarding-house window. The Dalek Civil War, Ace tells us, is predicated on the Renegade Daleks being "not pure in their blobbiness". Group Captain Gilmore, who in the '70s would have been the moral center of the story, gets ruthlessly mocked by the Doctor over the first half of the story and is always several steps behind Rachel and Allison. In the novelization, Rachel is revealed to be Jewish and has visions of the Doctor as a Talmudic figure in her childhood synagogue. These kinds of characters are all voices (for good and bad) which the first 24 seasons of Doctor Who typically just didn't include.
What's the final score? Remembrance of the Daleks: great script and great direction, masked by a very dated look and sound. It was a story I didn't quite "get" as a teenager, but watching now from Donald Trump's America in 2018, where a lot of aspiring politicians winning House and Senate primaries around the country look and sound a lot like Ratcliffe and whose campaign slogans and speeches overtly echo Mike's plea to "protect your own people" and "keep the outsiders out"? Well, I write this the week that the story broke about the Trump administration ripping apart refugee families at the border and refusing to reunite them even after the forced-separation policy was rescinded. That makes Aaronovitch's story sting in a way it didn't in 1988, the year that the US tried to elect a "kinder, gentler" President.
In Remembrance, the good guys save the day, the white supremacists are defeated, and the Daleks destroy themselves. That's one other part of the story that, regrettably, is also aging very poorly.
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