Pensamientos Acerca de Televisión
Doctor Who (The First Series): “Remembrance of the Daleks”
Wow! Who ever knew that British schoolgirls could be so creepy? And that they all dress like Catholic schoolgirls? (Or do Catholic schoolgirls dress like them? Inquiring minds, yadda, yadda, yadda.)
Seriously, this episode was best known as being one of the better Doctor Who episodes of the Sylvester McCoy era and definitely the most memorable one since he acquired would-be punk rocker Ace (an Earth-born girl exiled to outer space) as an assistant. Not that the other McCoy episodes were all that bad but most of them were not really my cup of tea and I always felt a bit sorry that an actor as likable as McCoy was stuck playing the Doctor in such episodes. I suspect if he had better scriptwriters, the show would have lasted a lot longer. But, alas, it did not. Anyway, if it had continued, we might never have got the second series.
In any event, the show opened up with the Doctor and Ace landing in 1963 London, just in time to get involved in an alien invasion of Daleks. It turned out that the city of London was not just being invaded by one faction of Daleks, but two -- the second being less racially pure by Dalek standards than the first. The result was a civil war between Dalek factions that just happened to involve the human race.
It was up to the Doctor and Ace to help sort things out -- in part by combining Ace's gift for explosives and the Doctor's gift for troubleshooting into an united front. Along the way, Ace and the Doctor stumbled across the creepy British schoolgirl mentioned above who seemed to know a lot more about the Doctor than one would expect. The Doctor also stumbled across a British military man who was a younger version of the Brigadier, a character who played a key role in the Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker eras. Not much was made of this encounter. Indeed, for all the interaction that occurred between the Doctor and Brigadier, Jr., the writers might as well have named him John Smith. And despite the fact that much of this episode took place on locations used in the show's first episode, there were surprisingly few nostalgic in-jokes in this episode.
One thing that was noticeable in this episode was the use of a racial subtext usually not employed in the first series -- perhaps because most racial conflicts on the show tend to be more of an alien versus terrestrial variety. Not only did the episode have the racial differences between the two Dalek factions play a key role in the plot, but one human Dalek sympathizer in this episode (a bad guy, natch) revealed himself to be a former Nazi sympathizer (and thus, a racist) and yet another revealed himself to be a white supremacist who, unlike Ace, had no problem with the segregated restaurants of 1963 London. Ace and the Doctor, needless to say, were against both racism and both factions of the Daleks and in the end, the Doctor managed to play the two factions off against each other until both were destroyed and the surviving human sympathizers were either killed or vanquished.
Was this a perfect episode? No, and I have seen many episodes in earlier seasons that I liked way better. But it is not bad and if I ever had a chance to see it again, I would.
Doctor Who (The First Series): “Remembrance of the Daleks”
Wow! Who ever knew that British schoolgirls could be so creepy? And that they all dress like Catholic schoolgirls? (Or do Catholic schoolgirls dress like them? Inquiring minds, yadda, yadda, yadda.)
Seriously, this episode was best known as being one of the better Doctor Who episodes of the Sylvester McCoy era and definitely the most memorable one since he acquired would-be punk rocker Ace (an Earth-born girl exiled to outer space) as an assistant. Not that the other McCoy episodes were all that bad but most of them were not really my cup of tea and I always felt a bit sorry that an actor as likable as McCoy was stuck playing the Doctor in such episodes. I suspect if he had better scriptwriters, the show would have lasted a lot longer. But, alas, it did not. Anyway, if it had continued, we might never have got the second series.
In any event, the show opened up with the Doctor and Ace landing in 1963 London, just in time to get involved in an alien invasion of Daleks. It turned out that the city of London was not just being invaded by one faction of Daleks, but two -- the second being less racially pure by Dalek standards than the first. The result was a civil war between Dalek factions that just happened to involve the human race.
It was up to the Doctor and Ace to help sort things out -- in part by combining Ace's gift for explosives and the Doctor's gift for troubleshooting into an united front. Along the way, Ace and the Doctor stumbled across the creepy British schoolgirl mentioned above who seemed to know a lot more about the Doctor than one would expect. The Doctor also stumbled across a British military man who was a younger version of the Brigadier, a character who played a key role in the Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker eras. Not much was made of this encounter. Indeed, for all the interaction that occurred between the Doctor and Brigadier, Jr., the writers might as well have named him John Smith. And despite the fact that much of this episode took place on locations used in the show's first episode, there were surprisingly few nostalgic in-jokes in this episode.
One thing that was noticeable in this episode was the use of a racial subtext usually not employed in the first series -- perhaps because most racial conflicts on the show tend to be more of an alien versus terrestrial variety. Not only did the episode have the racial differences between the two Dalek factions play a key role in the plot, but one human Dalek sympathizer in this episode (a bad guy, natch) revealed himself to be a former Nazi sympathizer (and thus, a racist) and yet another revealed himself to be a white supremacist who, unlike Ace, had no problem with the segregated restaurants of 1963 London. Ace and the Doctor, needless to say, were against both racism and both factions of the Daleks and in the end, the Doctor managed to play the two factions off against each other until both were destroyed and the surviving human sympathizers were either killed or vanquished.
Was this a perfect episode? No, and I have seen many episodes in earlier seasons that I liked way better. But it is not bad and if I ever had a chance to see it again, I would.
Labels: Ace, Doctor Who (Serie Clásica), Pensamientos Acerca de Televisión V, Raza, Series de Televisión de Ciencia Ficción III, Sylvester McCoy
posted by Tonio Kruger at 2:23 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home