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| The Doctor prepares to venture into the most dangerous place in the universe... |
1 episode. Approx. 49 minutes. Written by: Phil Ford and Steven Moffat. Directed by: Ben Wheatley. Produced by: Nikki Wilson.
THE PLOT
The Doctor uses the TARDIS' transmat to rescue Journey Blue (Zawe Ashton) a soldier whose ship is about to be destroyed by Daleks. He takes her back to her command ship,a converted hospital vessel under the command of Morgan Blue (Michael Smiley), Journey's uncle. The soldiers show the Doctor their patient/prisoner - a Dalek, dying from an unknown malfunction, who insists that its only desire is to destroy all other Daleks!
The Doctor isn't sure what to do, so he makes a short hop to Coal Hill School to pick up Clara. He asks if he's a good man. When she can't answer, he takes her to the ship and shows her this "good" Dalek, whom the Doctor nicknames "Rusty." With Clara's encouragement, he agrees to help - if only to find out how it's possible for there to be a Dalek with any sense of morality. He, Clara, Journey, and two other soldiers are miniaturized and then sent into Rusty's casing to find the malfunction that's killing the Dalek and repair it.
But once the malfunction is repaired, the sense of morality is purged with it. What remains is pure Dalek: Deadly, uncompromising, and determined to destroy all life in its path!
CHARACTERS
The Doctor: The Twelfth Doctor is not only blunt, he's downright callous. When Ross, one of Journey's soldiers, attracts the Dalek's antibodies, the Doctor throws him something to swallow. The man does so, trusting that the Doctor is saving him. He's not - What Ross swallows allows the Doctor to trace his bio-matter after he is killed, to get the rest of the party out of the line of fire. When the others act appalled at this behavior, he spells it out: "(Ross) was already dead. I was saving us!" He reveals to Rusty that when he first ran from Gallifrey, "Doctor" was just a name. It was after his first encounter with the Daleks that he truly realized who he was - a realization that gets turned on him to superb effect in the final scenes.
Clara: Describes herself as the Doctor's "carer." Which earns his response: "She cares so I don't have to." She does fit into that mold in this episode. She's as appalled as the soldiers when the Doctor doesn't even try to save Ross, and she admits to Journey and fellow soldier Gretchen (Laura dos Santos) that while she trusts the Doctor to get them out alive, "the difficult part (will be) not killing him before he can." For all that, she has clearly decided that she trusts this new Doctor, even if she's stuck having to act as both his conscience and his buffer with other people.
Danny: With the Doctor now too old for the kind of flirtatious relationship Clara had with the Eleventh Doctor, the writers introduce Danny Pink (Samuel Anderson) as a new love interest for Clara. He is basically Rory 2.0 at this point - A nice guy, clearly attracted to Clara, completely tongue-tied when attempting to have a conversation with her. Anderson is likable enough in his handful of scenes, and has decent comic timing, which is promising for his ongoing role. Danny's background as a former soldier is utilized here to counterbalance the Doctor's heavy-handed dislike of all soldiers, which should make for some interesting interplay later in the season.
Daleks: Their casing is created not simply as a transport for the mutated being within, but also to "keep it pure." A supplementary electronic brain suppresses any thought or memory that might kindle the slightest hint of kindness, remorse, or compassion. The source of Rusty becoming "good" is a memory, one that hasn't been suppressed because of the malfunction. It saw beauty in the birth of a new star, and realized that the Daleks could never truly extinguish all non-Dalek life. But once the malfunction is fixed, its electronic brain restarts, and that memory is once again suppressed. The morally "good" Dalek, that wants to destroy other Daleks, becomes a functionally "good" Dalek, wanting to destroy everything that isn't a Dalek. In other words, business as usual.
THOUGHTS
Into the Dalek is a very good episode. It is fast-paced without being rushed. It's gorgeous to look at, with a visual flourish that feels like more like a feature film than a television show. The acting is excellent, with Capaldi truly becoming the Doctor here. The Doctor/Dalek relationship gets a reexamination that leaves him questioning at the end of the episode even more than he was at the beginning:
"Am I a good man?"
Rusty the Dalek has an answer for him all too similar to the answer his first post-Time War Dalek gave him. That lone Dalek told the Ninth Doctor: "You would make a good Dalek." This Dalek has even less welcome verdict: "You are a good Dalek." The look on Capaldi's face when this verdict is read can't really be described, save to say that it is perfect.
The story is a direct lift from Fantastic Voyage, which gets a passing reference when the Doctor observes that miniaturization for medical purposes is a "fantastic idea for a movie, terrible one for a proctologist." The biggest danger faced by the Doctor's miniaturized group is the same as in that film too - attacks by antibodies. This being a Dalek, those antibodies are hovering balls of sci-fi death, but the result is the same - certainly for poor Ross.
I'm enjoying the Twelfth Doctor's melancholy. He's casually rude and brusque to those around him, telling the soldiers: "You don't need to be liked; you've got all the guns." But there's no joy in his acidic remarks. When he asks Clara if he's a good man, he does so because he is genuinely uncertain. When Clara calls him on his need for all Daleks to be evil, he admits that she's right. When Rusty looks into his mind and recognizes the hatred he holds for the Daleks, his worst fears about himself seem to be confirmed. He realized who he was when he met the Daleks so long ago... And that identity is seen by Rusty the Dalek as that of "a good Dalek."
The man who dislikes soldiers on principle is identified with the Daleks - killing machines that the Doctor describes as "the perfect soldier." The Dalek is kept pure by engineering that constantly stokes its hatred. And when it looks into the Doctor's mind, it sees hate on a level it envies. Of course, that's only part of who the Doctor is - But that's the part the Daleks always bring out in him, and this time it leaves him even more appalled than usual.
Overall Rating: 9/10.
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