Rate "Victory of the Daleks"

Fascinating. Was Victory of the Daleks a victim of unrealistic expectations? In the run up to it, everyone seemed convinced this would be the best Doctor Who evah!

Afterwards, everyone seems to believe it the episode that jumped the shark.

As per usual, the answer lies inbetween. I've finally figured out the style of Moffat's Dr Who: it's very much a comic strip. But while Davies was influenced by growing up with 2000ad and the Simpsons, Moffat seems to be more a melding of Frank Hampson's Dan Dare with Dave Gibbons' era DWM strip. Think Beep the Meep. Even the redesigned Daleks have a Dave Gibbons feel!

Bright, fun, cheerful and totally bonkers, I really can't understand how people can't love spitfire's in space. The new Daleks worked best when they had people to interact with, and on the whole I liked them except for their backs. Smith still seems unsure in the role-- it's no coincidence that his best performance so far is the latest recorded from those shown.I imagine that he'll get better as the series progresses, but part of me dreads the next two parter as it was the first recorded.

While the end with the Professor worked, it could have been better explained, and meant that the story felt strangely anticlimactic. It really should have happened intercut with the Spitfire battle to bring a greater sense of closure to the story.

Nowhere near as bad as many seem to think, probably 3 and a half out of 5.

Yes, Spitfires in space is a cool idea - as is Winston Churchill meeting the Daleks - but the problem was the whole episode seemed to be 'hey, that'll look good', but with no real sense in the story to explain why any of that was happening.

Odd. In the story I watched the spitfire attack was very much explained, both in the mechanics and rationale.

In what way do you mean it wasn't explained, Nick?

John the Vic wrote:Not another thing that Health and Safety have kiboshed surely??

I think it's something to do with paediatric obesity (ie fat kids).

The ratings are falling! The ratings are falling! Moffat must go now! He's killing our beloved show! Put sparacus in charge immediately, he's the only thing that can save Doctor Who!

Loved it, 4/5

3/5 tops. Slightly better than The Idiot's Lantern.

The new Daleks look even worse than in the pictures and it was a non-story. They couldn't even properly explain why Churchill rang the Doctor in the first place. They turned London's lights on during the blitz, yet the Germans forgot to attack. The best design of the Daleks now destroyed.

Does anybody like the sparse design they chose for the Daleks spaceship, evoking the feeling of being trapped in an empty low-ceilinged office?

And the crack - it's getting a bit boring now.

Amy not remembering the Daleks - that's because she's from the 90s.

You know what both The Beast Below and Victory of the Daleks have been missing? Running. There hasn't been any dramatic running to get to the big "stop the bad guys" button.

I have the same complaint that Rich does: Churchill announces that with the Germans already over the channel, they'd be over London in ten minutes. So where did they go when the lights in London went out? You can't tell me that London in the dark ever stopped them. If it had been me writing it, that whole "convince the Professor he's human to stop the bomb" scene would have happened with Air Raid Sirens and bombs going off, debris falling from the ceiling and lights in the war room flickering. Would have added some tension to a script that seemed to lack some tension.

So, we've had the Doctor regenerate, we've had the TARDIS regenerate, and now we've had the Daleks regenerate. Interesting.

As for Amy not remembering the Daleks, I'm convinced it's tied to all the cracks- what was it Prisoner Zero said? "Silence will fall." Something of the open Pandorica has echoed back and forced Amy's forgetfulness. That's an easier explanation for me than one that says Amy is from a 1990s that had laptops with video links, wi-fi and cell phones with cameras widely available.

Good heavens, the ratings/audience share thread at GB has gone off the rails! I check in this morning to see what overnights looked like, and discover that all of the sudden, Keith's FAQ post- a staple of the ratings thread every week- has become a source of irritation for some people who can't be bothered to scroll past it.

Personally, I like seeing Lucy every week.

Who's Lucy?

Patrick wrote:Good heavens, the ratings/audience share thread at GB has gone off the rails! I check in this morning to see what overnights looked like, and discover that all of the sudden, Keith's FAQ post- a staple of the ratings thread every week- has become a source of irritation for some people who can't be bothered to scroll past it.

Personally, I like seeing Lucy every week.

It's been locked now. Some of the posts in there were little more than a joke.

Lucy McGough wrote:Who's Lucy?

In Keith's FAQ post, he has a picture of Lucille Ball, frantically waiving her arms while shrieking "Oh no! The Ratings Are Falling!" It's quite a picture.

Johnstone McGuckian wrote:It's been locked now. Some of the posts in there were little more than a joke.

It seems Lucy-Who has had her say and unlocked it after removing a few offending posts.

Patrick wrote:

Johnstone McGuckian wrote:It's been locked now. Some of the posts in there were little more than a joke.

It seems Lucy-Who has had her say and unlocked it after removing a few offending posts.

Shame it came to that.

So, second viewing. I enjoyed it a lot more this time.

Patrick wrote:

Johnstone McGuckian wrote:It's been locked now. Some of the posts in there were little more than a joke.

It seems Lucy-Who has had her say and unlocked it after removing a few offending posts.

What was said by Lucy needed to be said. I can't believe that so much of a thread was taken up by people arguing the necessity of a single post.

Johnstone McGuckian wrote:What was said by Lucy needed to be said. I can't believe that so much of a thread was taken up by people arguing the necessity of a single post.

I've seen stranger things.

I hope they take Lucy's message to heart. From the sounds of it, the thread had become a real trainwreck.

Zoltar wrote:So, second viewing. I enjoyed it a lot more this time.

You know, it isn't that I didn't enjoy it. I actually found a lot of parts of it quite nice. The problem I had with it was the pacing- it seemed designed to specifically minimize the tension. I have to put that down to the direction. But I'll be curious to see Frank's review.

Lee Carey wrote:Fascinating. Was Victory of the Daleks a victim of unrealistic expectations? In the run up to it, everyone seemed convinced this would be the best Doctor Who evah!

Afterwards, everyone seems to believe it the episode that jumped the shark.

As per usual, the answer lies inbetween. I've finally figured out the style of Moffat's Dr Who: it's very much a comic strip. But while Davies was influenced by growing up with 2000ad and the Simpsons, Moffat seems to be more a melding of Frank Hampson's Dan Dare with Dave Gibbons' era DWM strip. Think Beep the Meep. Even the redesigned Daleks have a Dave Gibbons feel!

Bright, fun, cheerful and totally bonkers, I really can't understand how people can't love spitfire's in space.

Where did the modifications come from, though? I can understand the "gravity well", but I don't get the star wars blasters and the fact that they can still fly in space -- was air transported up with them? Granted, this gets a little pedantic, but I do think that the plot has too many holes in it, even for Doctor Who.

I'm getting more annoyed at the sonic screwdriver, as well. Davies, despite all his criticisms, attempted to have a logic about these things, but the Doctor, although using it a little less regularly, tends to in a more bewildering variety of ways.

The new Daleks worked best when they had people to interact with, and on the whole I liked them except for their backs.

This might sound politically incorrect, but they reminded me of Star Trek's tribbles -- who were born pregnant. They'll make great toys, but the problem is that the old Daleks were bulky enough as it was.

Smith still seems unsure in the role-- it's no coincidence that his best performance so far is the latest recorded from those shown.I imagine that he'll get better as the series progresses, but part of me dreads the next two parter as it was the first recorded.

Aha, people said the same about Ecclestone, but he was actually quite good in his first two parter. I disagree when it comes to Smith, the only episode I found him even a little variable in was the first one. What I like about him is that he never seems to need to try, to enunciate in the same way Tennant seemed to do as a hobby. He won't probably appeal to kids quite as much as Tennant, but his contribution to the character is great so far.

While the end with the Professor worked, it could have been better explained, and meant that the story felt strangely anticlimactic. It really should have happened intercut with the Spitfire battle to bring a greater sense of closure to the story.

Yeah, the episode suffers very much from an A=>B feel. The main problem for me is simply that it's a little too much like a comic strip, and doesn't have any emotional impact, unlike the previous episode. The new Daleks don't really impress me, and Daleks in the series at the moment seem to suffer from terminal failure to multi-task -- how difficult can it be to shoot the Doctor and defend against the spitfires simultaneously?

Nowhere near as bad as many seem to think, probably 3 and a half out of 5.[/quote]

Patrick wrote:You know, it isn't that I didn't enjoy it. I actually found a lot of parts of it quite nice. The problem I had with it was the pacing- it seemed designed to specifically minimize the tension. I have to put that down to the direction. But I'll be curious to see Frank's review.

Indeed. The pacing worked a bit better for me on the second viewing, but it did still feel off.

I'll have to hunt down the Confidential at some point, I've heard it's worth a look.

Lee Carey wrote:Odd. In the story I watched the spitfire attack was very much explained, both in the mechanics and rationale.

In what way do you mean it wasn't explained, Nick?

On a simple note, why did the Daleks give the Professor all that knowledge, when all he was needed for was to pose as the creator of the Ironsides? And how did they manage to get the ability to manufacture all that stuff in seconds? For me, there just wasn't any sense of the milieu of the story being real or these characters having any existence outside of the 40 minutes of the story. As Dingdong said, it felt like a kids' cartoon with no real consequence or meaning to anything that happened.

I think one of my issues with this and TBB is that the Doctor's not meeting any of the little people - compare the range of characters we met in something like Gridlock, to the very few that feature as much more than ciphers in these. They were the ones who told us how the society we were seeing on screen worked, and without that perspective, it's hard to feel any connection.

Having re-watched Victory of the Daleks, it makes a lot more sense, and my original rating of 7/10 is now 9/10.. I think it was brilliant..

Dingdongalistic wrote:

Where did the modifications come from, though? I can understand the "gravity well", but I don't get the star wars blasters and the fact that they can still fly in space -- was air transported up with them? Granted, this gets a little pedantic, but I do think that the plot has too many holes in it, even for Doctor Who.

The gravity bubble was explained as taking a bubble of atmosphere with it. So the Spitfires were able to fly. The star wars blasters...well, he knows how to defy gravity, create an atmosphere shell that supports an entire aircraft...a little directed energy weapon shouldn't be too much of a problem. It was there in the dialogue, although not a great deal of attention was drawn to it.

Dingdongalistic wrote:
I'm getting more annoyed at the sonic screwdriver, as well. Davies, despite all his criticisms, attempted to have a logic about these things, but the Doctor, although using it a little less regularly, tends to in a more bewildering variety of ways.

Moffat is the man who had it mending barbed wire and doing medical scans. Davies used it to open doors and mess with electronics, which is just like a real screwdriver.

Dingdongalistic wrote:What I like about him is that he never seems to need to try, to enunciate in the same way Tennant seemed to do as a hobby. He won't probably appeal to kids quite as much as Tennant, but his contribution to the character is great so far.

David Tennant is Scottish, so it's not his own accent, and in the character's defense his defining language moment is probably "New teeth...that's weird..." - afterwards he takes joy in things that sound fun or allow him to play with the sounds of language, hence his use of "Molto bene!" and "Allons y!", his desire for an opportunity to say "Allons y, Alonso!", his amusement at "Judoon platoon upon the moon". The 10th Doctor plays with sounds and words because he enjoys it. If he relishes dialogue, that's either a character point created by the writers to help explain David Tennant labouring over occasions of accent, or a characterisation by the actor based on what he knows of the writers' intentions.

how difficult can it be to shoot the Doctor and defend against the spitfires simultaneously?

The greater threat is the spitfires, because they're unexpected and because - as the Daleks said - "Extinction is not an option". They can ignore the Doctor because they know him of old - outside of incarnations 7, potentially 8 and metacrisis 10, he doesn't really know how to commit genocide; they're on safer ground ignoring the pacifist Time Lord and killing the spitfires than they are trying to do two things at once.

Plus, their space ship's a bit of a mess. Who says they can defend it and do something else at the same time?

Loved Ian McNeice's performance.

Didn't like the fact that this ended up being just a set up for some future time.

Loved the Where Eagles Dare Nod. And the Evil "Final End" one as well.

Didn't like Smith's lapsing into Tennantisms.

Loved most of the features of the new Daleks.

But didn't like their backs. Or the re-use of the Emperor & Red voice. New Daleks really need a new voice artist.

Ultimately Gatiss scripts never seem to deliver quite what you hope for. The whole Bracewell/Oblivion continuum/deactivation resolution didn't really work for me. And it went on for far too long, in an episode that was in parts under dveleoped. I really expected something very, very special, and although there was much to praise, it fell short of what I thought we would get.

I agree with Dave.

Just rewatched

Still getting a 3 from me - as others have said, some bits went on too long - could have done with more running and less faffing with the android at the end.

Daleks definitely better from the front - don't like the nasty bulge at the back when seen from the side, also as has been said elsewhere - the black grills are definately letting light through from behind.

Still - spitfires in space were good, war rooms well realised, Churchill very believable.

I'm also getting really interested in the way the Tardis keeps being late - I know she was always a tad unreliable, however it's every trip this series and Amy not recognising Daleks paired with the date on her boyfriend's hospital ID makes me think there's something very wrong with the timey wimey stuff.

Lucy McGough wrote:I agree with Dave.

Which one?